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"4x4' at Fringe Festival
Tom Purdom
Getting there is half the fun
TOM PURDOM
For me, Todd Holtsberry’s "4x4" opened with two plays about abused young women. It looked like my $7.50 Funsavers bargain had bought me 90 minutes of grim. Then the mood shifted. The third vignette in the series was Brian Grace-Duff's The Opposite of Moths, a light romance in a blacked-out building, played entirely in the dark. The finale was Sam Toll's The Last Dance, an entertaining barroom exchange between a classic pairing: a he who wants to get laid and a she who’s yearning for a long-term commitment.
If you take in "4x4", you’ll probably have a different experience. The four plays are presented in performance spaces scattered through the Plays and Players building, and the audience is divided into four groups that progress from play to play. Each group sees the quartet in a different order.
Each play takes place in a four-by-four-foot area. The first abused woman on my schedule faced a detective and a psychiatrist on a stair landing, with the audience spying on the scene over an upstairs railing. Two pieces take place in the Plays and Players basement. The bar encounter seats the couple at the third floor bar, with the 4x4 area outlined by rows of glasses arranged on the floor in front of the bar.
A captive girl’s body language
The weakest entry was one of the basement pieces, Greg Romero's Shovel. Cherie Roberts added strong, expressive body language to a monologue about a captive girl, but the script never came into focus. I might have felt more attentive, on the other hand, if I hadn’t been worried that all the plays were going to be as dark as the first two.
The Southern accent affected by Cyndi Janzen as the mother in Crumbled Worlds, the stairwell drama, struck a false note. The mother apparently spoke Southern because she was a puritanical, pray-for-purity evangelical. But all the other characters, including her daughter, spoke with the solid standard English of Philadelphians. Southern accents reflect regional origins, not religious affiliations.
The three successes in the foursome all reflected the virtues of good short stories. They picked up their characters at a critical moment and left you feeling you had peered into the essence of their lives. As with all self-imposed limitations, the technical tricks adapted by the writers and the actors added an extra level of interest.
The silenced audience
Holtsberry’s tour de force is a good example of the intriguing, generally inexpensive evenings the Fringe adds to the Philadelphia season. It would probably work best if he applied a lighter touch to the overall concept. The silent march through the backstage areas of the theater, led by mute guides, embedded four miniatures in a heavy, gloomy frame.
If Holtsberry continues to use this format (and he should), he should try to work out a way the audience can chat during the walks without interfering with the plays that are still finishing up. Intermission chatter is part of the interaction between the audience and the performance that separates live theater from the recorded material we watch on screens.
TOM PURDOM
For me, Todd Holtsberry’s "4x4" opened with two plays about abused young women. It looked like my $7.50 Funsavers bargain had bought me 90 minutes of grim. Then the mood shifted. The third vignette in the series was Brian Grace-Duff's The Opposite of Moths, a light romance in a blacked-out building, played entirely in the dark. The finale was Sam Toll's The Last Dance, an entertaining barroom exchange between a classic pairing: a he who wants to get laid and a she who’s yearning for a long-term commitment.
If you take in "4x4", you’ll probably have a different experience. The four plays are presented in performance spaces scattered through the Plays and Players building, and the audience is divided into four groups that progress from play to play. Each group sees the quartet in a different order.
Each play takes place in a four-by-four-foot area. The first abused woman on my schedule faced a detective and a psychiatrist on a stair landing, with the audience spying on the scene over an upstairs railing. Two pieces take place in the Plays and Players basement. The bar encounter seats the couple at the third floor bar, with the 4x4 area outlined by rows of glasses arranged on the floor in front of the bar.
A captive girl’s body language
The weakest entry was one of the basement pieces, Greg Romero's Shovel. Cherie Roberts added strong, expressive body language to a monologue about a captive girl, but the script never came into focus. I might have felt more attentive, on the other hand, if I hadn’t been worried that all the plays were going to be as dark as the first two.
The Southern accent affected by Cyndi Janzen as the mother in Crumbled Worlds, the stairwell drama, struck a false note. The mother apparently spoke Southern because she was a puritanical, pray-for-purity evangelical. But all the other characters, including her daughter, spoke with the solid standard English of Philadelphians. Southern accents reflect regional origins, not religious affiliations.
The three successes in the foursome all reflected the virtues of good short stories. They picked up their characters at a critical moment and left you feeling you had peered into the essence of their lives. As with all self-imposed limitations, the technical tricks adapted by the writers and the actors added an extra level of interest.
The silenced audience
Holtsberry’s tour de force is a good example of the intriguing, generally inexpensive evenings the Fringe adds to the Philadelphia season. It would probably work best if he applied a lighter touch to the overall concept. The silent march through the backstage areas of the theater, led by mute guides, embedded four miniatures in a heavy, gloomy frame.
If Holtsberry continues to use this format (and he should), he should try to work out a way the audience can chat during the walks without interfering with the plays that are still finishing up. Intermission chatter is part of the interaction between the audience and the performance that separates live theater from the recorded material we watch on screens.
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