The Prague Fringe Festival: Day 2 (May 23)

Katharine Two qualities spare this show from being considered in the same breath as Katatonika: the earnestness of its pretensions and its brevity. Other than that, there is nothing to recommend in this 45-minute limbo of surface scholarship and vanity. Writer/director Logan Hillier's Katharine is one act (or cobbled-together excerpts) from a larger work that is neither sufficient nor promising. That which is being foisted upon us here (surely in first draft, and performed by students of Mr. Hillier) is a confused tale of a 13th-century Cathar colliding with the modern day. It's a love story, of sorts, though no passion is generated onstage by the hapless student players. The writing is risible, including an inept telephone exchange, where the audience is treated to a series of monotone "uh-huhs," and a level of philosophizing that's primarily associated with bongs and roach clips. It all begins with a loud CD disc shuffle that obviously has meaning for Mr. Hillier, as one of his students listlessly wanders the stage or has a rummage in her make-up kit. From there, it's all downhill. Strictly for friends and family. Divadlo Inspirace 

Backward Glance The great Etienne Decroux defined the perfect stage performer as one with "the body of a gymnast, the mind of an actor, and the heart of a poet." In other words, Decroux was defining Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson. In their second visit to the Fringe, the Devon-based couple presents their latest work, which is the antithesis of Katharine, and something that Mr. Hillier's students might profit by studying. Backward Glance is a complex tale centered on the death of a famous woman writer, whose husband, another writer, is left trying to explain the events surrounding her death and his mysterious disappearance afterward. With its fluid, nonlinear narrative (think of it as a spacial collage), the husband (played by Mr. Buffery) is confronted by a journalist, an interrogator and his wife's mother, all played skillfully by Ms. Nathanson. In their short play's marvelous juxtaposing of the physical and metaphysical realms, there's even a harrowing hunt for the dead writer in the underworld. The writing is crisp, often grimly humorous, and offers many opportunities for associative leaps - from the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to Orpheus' descent in search of Eurydice. The performances are first-rate, with every word and gesture clothed with meaning, and Ms. Nathanson's physical plasticity is a marvel. Highly recommended. Divadlo Inspirace  

Canarsie Suite: At the Edge of Vaudeville Ah, the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd. Meet the LeRoy sisters, Gladys and Birdie. One's a corn-fed hoofer with a tinsel-bright smile, the other a tired traveler exhausted by their scrounge-and-scratch existence and the easy lie of better times ahead. Performers Aimee German (Gladys) and Jenny Sargent (Birdie) generate enough energy onstage to light the festival, and their Canarsie Suite is, so far, the best comedy show I've seen at the Fringe. Yet it's not all laughs - "carnage" and "carnival" share the same root, after all. In a series of sketches, the two actors shed and don an astonishing assortment of costumes and characters. But it's the philosophical struggle between the anything-for-a-smile Gladys and the existentially troubled Birdie that makes this piece such a rich experience. Ms. German, a sassy Golddigger's chorine, has a tendency toward malapropisms (human "decoration" rather than "degredation"), and is often left cheerfully vamping in the shadow of her sister's angst. While her Gladys seems never happier than when the two sisters are dancing, Ms. Sargent's Birdie looks as if she's being forced into a perilous tap dance in a minefield. Birdie is also given to making bleak (and oblique) asides about "the mockery" and "the suffocation" pressing in on her. Structurally, the piece has one major flaw. From the outset we're told that the Canarsie Suite is a revue of the sisters' lives on the road, and the first part of the piece is just that. But then suddenly the two launch into a rather lengthy melodrama, and, no matter how entertaining, it disrupts the narrative flow, making it difficult to pick up the threads that have been dropped. Still, with all its wonderfully gaudy aestheticism and complex characters, there's plenty within German and Sargent's show to cheer, or, in Vaudevillian parlance, enough to "gas the slobs." Divadlo Inspirace

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com