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The fringe beyond the fringe
This year’s downtown festival is more outrageous than eve

By Gerard Robinson
Friday, August 12, 2005

Dreaming of an all-gay world (beyond Chelsea, that is)? Then hightail it to this year’s International Fringe Festival. The much-ballyhooed homosexual agenda finally becomes a reality when the small town of Sanctuaryville legalizes same sex marriage and overnight everyone turns gay.

The ironic musical is a take-off of ‘50s Red Scare movies like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “Them” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Watch Billy and Susie fight to stop the homos before it’s too late!

“It’s my intention to lampoon everything the Right Wing fears will happen if gay marriage comes to pass,” said playwright Jonathan Gilbert, adding that he wrote it after “spitting nails” watching the Republican National Convention.

Although the Fringe Festival has been a New York City staple for nine sweltering Augusts and has always been gay-friendly, this year’s line-up of gay productions is particularly impressive. In addition to “The Day the World Went Queer.” fully 30 plays and performance pieces will showcase work by gay and lesbian artists.

“Even though there is a lot of gay content in this year’s plays, I think we’re moved past the label ‘gay play,’ just as we have with the term, ‘women’s play,’” said Elena Holy, director of Fringe Festival NYC. “This play is just a polished, funny piece of work that is immensely enjoyable no matter that you call it.”

The Fringe Festival bills itself as the largest multi-arts festival in North America, featuring programming by 180 emerging theater troupes and dance companies from 22 states and eight countries. Shows will be presented in 20 venues in Lower Manhattan, including P.S. 122, the Players Theater, the Ace of Clubs and the Lucille Lortel. The festival offers theater, performance art, children’s theater, spoken word, puppetry and multimedia. Organizers predict nearly 70,000 people at all events.

“The Festival is a research and development lab and a showcase for Broadway and Off Broadway,” Holy said. “It’s a place for theater people to meet, enjoy themselves and even find work. A Tony winner can walk in or a kid waving his first script in hand. We welcome them all.”

They must do a lot of waving. The Festival gets something like 800 submissions a season.

Of particular interest are the following:
• Fleet Week the Musical A gay salute to the patriotic musicals of yesteryear.
•.The Greatest B-Movie Ever Told A prizefighter writes a Broadway show, hooks up with a couple of dames, gangsters and other colorful characters. If it sounds like “Some Like it Hot,” all the better, but the creators intend it as a parody of Warner Brothers’ 1930s gangster movies. It comes complete with drag divas and scantily clad boys.
• A Lesbian in the Pantry Someone’s hiding a lover in the pantry. This musical fable tells the story of a funny and dysfunctional mother and daughter and, yes, a lesbian who lives in the pantry.
• Little House on the Parody A camp homage to “Little House” that asks: Will the cast go blind, will papa get lost in a blizzard and will the grasshoppers devour the crops”
• The Lizards In this dark comedy by Alan Browne, three hustlers lose 25 grams of heroin in a cluttered Each Village apartment.
• LOL Tony Sportiello looks for love on the Internet. A lonely guy creates an online female version of himself so he can enter the chatrooms.
• The Major Would be Sondheim A comedy of politics. A singing major who idolizes Broadway lyricists fights to get elected to a city plagued by crime, corruption, a sanitation strike and police-community tensions ripped straight from the headlines. I think.
• The New Bohemians Get seduced by the burlesque murder mystery and its free, wild free-spirited cast of bodacious showgirls and the tongue-in-cheek acts.
• Seduction London brings over its interpretation of Arthur Schnitzler’s “La Ronde” (remember a briefly naked Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room”?). In this erotic comedy, we meet a rent boy, a sailor, a handyman, a professor and businessmen and several other gay men with one thing in common, skill in the art of seduction.
• Silence A musical parody of the movie “Silence of the Lambs” features songs with unprintable lyrics, power ballads about decapitated heads, dancing serial killers, a lesbian detective, a transsexual menace and of a singing a Greek chorus of lambs.
• Sunset Bitch Jessica Martin is Veronique Raymond, a self-proclaimed movie star, Vegas Lounge singer and inevitable gay cult figure. This one-women musical comedy featuring over 20 stars sees Veronique preparing her long-awaited comeback — awaited by her, anyway.
• The Last Days of Cleopatra The infamous love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is given a song-and-dance treatment.
• Wedding of Mass Destruction A satirical attack on the state of the union: Iraqis wreak homo-rific havoc Abu Ghraib-style revenge on America.
• As Much as You Can An African-American prodigal son brings his white boyfriend home for a family weeding. Chaos ensues.
• Crossing Currents Traces the relationship between an outspoken man and his fiery gay son and mix it with a community about to explode.
• The Lightening Field A gay couple eager to marry and their divorced parents make a pilgrimage to an art institution in the Mexico desert. The divorced couple falls in the love again and the gay couple comes apart.
• Marlowe Harlan Didrickson’s drama combines Christopher Marlowe’s life as a playwright, spy and lover with scenes from his Elizabethan plays, including “Edward II,” history’s first gay play.
• No Return Who says you can’ t go home anymore? Carolyn Connelly, Heather Daniels and Laura Reyna, for three. From the streets of Flatbush to the mountains of Appalachia to the banks of the Rio Grande, tales of leaving home, losing innocence and holding onto hope.
• Go-Go Kitty, GO A tranvestite’s murder sends two bikers cross-country trailing a presidential candidate.

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