You Win Some, You Lose Some
This Fringe season has been largely underwhelming; where last year presented us with a rather broad swathe of titles that appeared at least worth an hour of our lives and just under ten dollars, this year there has been but a tiny handful that have looked even half-decent. Yesterday we went to the only two Fringe shows we'll be seeing this seasons, Turne Around and Inbetween Places. Our experiences were decidedly mixed.
Turne Around struck my fancy almost immediately. The description talked of a man returning from WWII, a superman, disenchanted with life and beset by protests against him and his very existence as a superman. How interesting, I thought to myself; will this be a take on current military (mis)adventures, or perhaps more of a superhero deconstruction? Sadly, the answer was neither, as it instead seemed content to merely be a jumbled mess. There were fully four different plotlines running, and in a fifty-minute production that is three plots too many. There were the advertised issues faced by Sam Turne, the Unbelievable Radar Man, suffering from PTSSD (the extra 's' is for 'superhero') after the war and finding his relationship with his wife, secretly the superhero Lightning Woman and secretly pregnant with their child, under strain. But there was also a plot in motion to rob the world's heroes of their powers, orchestrated by a frustrated super-housewife who resented her powers and, for no particular reason, therefore those of everyone else. And there was the return of Turne's brother-in-law, the war-criminal superhero Mean Machine who wants to start a new war for superheroes to capitalise on to get the world's respect. And there was The Writer wandering about, making incredibly bland metacommentary on the 'Turne Around' universe, its status as a comic book and his position as its writer, a writer whose characters have taken on lives of their own and need to be put down. And as if these four plots all on their own weren't enough to occupy less than an hour, the play spends much of its time repeating conversations and whole scenes, using the Mean Machine's time-manipulation powers (a terrible idea for a stage show, by the way) to go over things again, and again, and again. The play ultimately ends with Turne and his wife happy, their secrets revealed, the power-draining plot foiled (sort of), The Writer powerless (though why the creator of a living fictionalised universe should lose all power just because he loses his notebook is a question never addressed), and the Mean Machine, with the magic notebook in his possession, off to start WWIII. So, a happy end? Sort of?
This play was a jumbled mess, from start to finish. The period details are grossly off; despite WWII having ended sooner in this timeline, thanks to the assistance of the superheroes, the 60's have apparently started already, with a 'Free Love' demonstration mentioned on the radio, cries of 'baby killer' directed at returning superheroes, and a motivational speaker admonishing a super-housewife that 'it's not the 19th century; get your husband to clean the bathroom'. In the early 1940's. The politics are equally awful, with the Mean Machine accusing Turne of being a hippy/peacenik-Democrat (nevermind that the presiding President of a post-shortened-WWII woudl still be Democrat FDR), and Turn accusing his brother-in-law of being a bloodthirsty imperial-minded Republican in response (nevermind that the Republicans of the time were isolationsists). And the character of The Writer is abominable, a shrieking Marx-inspired caricature who infests scenes and jabbers on metatextually, repeatedly stalling what little action there is in this production. Any one of these plots would have been sufficient to more than fill a Fringe-length show; any two of them would have been an incredibly ambitious undertaking. But the four of them together, combined with tone-deaf lines and subdued actions in the face of Silver Age-style strangeness, combine to utterly sink this production.
By contrast, while Inbetween Places does have its flaws, the excellent dialogue and spot-on delivery by the cast allow it to rise above them quite nicely. A one-room, one-act play, Inbetween Places focuses on a cubicle drone steadily working away his life, quite literally; he promises to stay all night to work in his first few lines, and his attempts to reach out to anyone outside his workplace are stymied when the only person he can think to call is his ex-wife, clearly embittered towards him. Settling in for yet another night of working oblivion, he is instead visitted by his childhood imaginary friend, an anthropomorphic raccoon, and three Liminals, a demi-chorus that alternately explain and mis-interpret pretty much everything around them. The ostensible desire of the raccoon is to rekindle the office worker's literary aspirations, but it becomes apparent that in fact the raccoon is there for no less a reason than to force the man to come to terms with his son's kidnapping and his need to make some kind of life for himself.
The revelation of the kidnapping is the only place this production really falls flat. It's simply thrown out there, admitted utterly from the first, and is never tied into the writing issue. There is no attempt at evasion, no repeated half-truths and distortions that could link the stories he tells himself with the stories he can't tell anyone else, nor is there any point of contact between writing and his son; the boy isn't snatched when his father, frustrated at being interrupted, demands he go outside and leave him alone, he's taken in a park, with the father running pell-mell behind the kidnappers until his legs give out on him. The writing aspect is simply dropped, replaced utterly by the kidnapped son issue, and it does diminish the overall power of the play. Thankfully, however, the raccoon, wry and sly and quite rude at times, and his interactions with the put-upon office worker, are so entertaining as to make this only a minor problem; notable, but not worth dismissing the production entirely for. The high quality of this production should come as no surprise, either, since it carries the name of the writer of last season's excellently comic dystopia, A Modicum of Freedom, one of the best productions mounted that year.
Turne Around struck my fancy almost immediately. The description talked of a man returning from WWII, a superman, disenchanted with life and beset by protests against him and his very existence as a superman. How interesting, I thought to myself; will this be a take on current military (mis)adventures, or perhaps more of a superhero deconstruction? Sadly, the answer was neither, as it instead seemed content to merely be a jumbled mess. There were fully four different plotlines running, and in a fifty-minute production that is three plots too many. There were the advertised issues faced by Sam Turne, the Unbelievable Radar Man, suffering from PTSSD (the extra 's' is for 'superhero') after the war and finding his relationship with his wife, secretly the superhero Lightning Woman and secretly pregnant with their child, under strain. But there was also a plot in motion to rob the world's heroes of their powers, orchestrated by a frustrated super-housewife who resented her powers and, for no particular reason, therefore those of everyone else. And there was the return of Turne's brother-in-law, the war-criminal superhero Mean Machine who wants to start a new war for superheroes to capitalise on to get the world's respect. And there was The Writer wandering about, making incredibly bland metacommentary on the 'Turne Around' universe, its status as a comic book and his position as its writer, a writer whose characters have taken on lives of their own and need to be put down. And as if these four plots all on their own weren't enough to occupy less than an hour, the play spends much of its time repeating conversations and whole scenes, using the Mean Machine's time-manipulation powers (a terrible idea for a stage show, by the way) to go over things again, and again, and again. The play ultimately ends with Turne and his wife happy, their secrets revealed, the power-draining plot foiled (sort of), The Writer powerless (though why the creator of a living fictionalised universe should lose all power just because he loses his notebook is a question never addressed), and the Mean Machine, with the magic notebook in his possession, off to start WWIII. So, a happy end? Sort of?
This play was a jumbled mess, from start to finish. The period details are grossly off; despite WWII having ended sooner in this timeline, thanks to the assistance of the superheroes, the 60's have apparently started already, with a 'Free Love' demonstration mentioned on the radio, cries of 'baby killer' directed at returning superheroes, and a motivational speaker admonishing a super-housewife that 'it's not the 19th century; get your husband to clean the bathroom'. In the early 1940's. The politics are equally awful, with the Mean Machine accusing Turne of being a hippy/peacenik-Democrat (nevermind that the presiding President of a post-shortened-WWII woudl still be Democrat FDR), and Turn accusing his brother-in-law of being a bloodthirsty imperial-minded Republican in response (nevermind that the Republicans of the time were isolationsists). And the character of The Writer is abominable, a shrieking Marx-inspired caricature who infests scenes and jabbers on metatextually, repeatedly stalling what little action there is in this production. Any one of these plots would have been sufficient to more than fill a Fringe-length show; any two of them would have been an incredibly ambitious undertaking. But the four of them together, combined with tone-deaf lines and subdued actions in the face of Silver Age-style strangeness, combine to utterly sink this production.
By contrast, while Inbetween Places does have its flaws, the excellent dialogue and spot-on delivery by the cast allow it to rise above them quite nicely. A one-room, one-act play, Inbetween Places focuses on a cubicle drone steadily working away his life, quite literally; he promises to stay all night to work in his first few lines, and his attempts to reach out to anyone outside his workplace are stymied when the only person he can think to call is his ex-wife, clearly embittered towards him. Settling in for yet another night of working oblivion, he is instead visitted by his childhood imaginary friend, an anthropomorphic raccoon, and three Liminals, a demi-chorus that alternately explain and mis-interpret pretty much everything around them. The ostensible desire of the raccoon is to rekindle the office worker's literary aspirations, but it becomes apparent that in fact the raccoon is there for no less a reason than to force the man to come to terms with his son's kidnapping and his need to make some kind of life for himself.
The revelation of the kidnapping is the only place this production really falls flat. It's simply thrown out there, admitted utterly from the first, and is never tied into the writing issue. There is no attempt at evasion, no repeated half-truths and distortions that could link the stories he tells himself with the stories he can't tell anyone else, nor is there any point of contact between writing and his son; the boy isn't snatched when his father, frustrated at being interrupted, demands he go outside and leave him alone, he's taken in a park, with the father running pell-mell behind the kidnappers until his legs give out on him. The writing aspect is simply dropped, replaced utterly by the kidnapped son issue, and it does diminish the overall power of the play. Thankfully, however, the raccoon, wry and sly and quite rude at times, and his interactions with the put-upon office worker, are so entertaining as to make this only a minor problem; notable, but not worth dismissing the production entirely for. The high quality of this production should come as no surprise, either, since it carries the name of the writer of last season's excellently comic dystopia, A Modicum of Freedom, one of the best productions mounted that year.