Inventive Local Theater Shines in Sixth Louisville Fringe Festival

BY SYDNEY MEYER

The sixth annual Louisville Fringe Festival returned last week showcasing inventive Louisville performers. The festival succeeded at bringing a range of performance groups and styles to represent many ends of Louisville's tight-knit but sprawling theater web. At the helm were artistic and creative director, Allie Fireel, and Nick Hulstine, director of theatrical development and engagement. Fireel defines theater as “ANYTHING you do with live people for live people.” They curated a lineup of acts that reflected this.

Louisville Fringe Festival artists poured onto the stage after the last performance by That Bridge Theatre. Photo courtesy Louisville Fringe Festival.

The local scene’s diversity was showcased in a ten-minute play festival, slam poetry, Shakespeare, performance art, and even a one-man show. Fringe Fest packed all this into four evenings at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Victor Jory Theater that celebrated inventive community theater.

THURSDAY: SHOTZ! • This Bridge Theatre Theatre’s SHOTZ! has a simple concept: A writing prompt starts, and the clock starts ticking. Six teams are given two weeks to write, two weeks to rehearse, two hours of technical staging and a single night to perform original work. The result is 60 minutes worth of 10-minute plays presented with the energy of a caffeine-charged college improv troupe. Though the process is executed at a neck-breaking pace, the result is evidence of an experienced creative team. This Bridge Theatre has been at it since it started in 2022. But this is the second time producers Megan Massie Ware and Zac Campbell-Hoogandyk have brought SHOTZ! to the Louisville Fringe Fest.

Actors Caroline Cox, Ryan Lash and Em De Zafra in Michelle Lori’s “Every Little Thing,” part of the festival’s SHOTZ!.

The prompt for this Finge Fest was as follows: A character must use some form of PPE (personal protective equipment), and the play must include the phrase, “lookout” and an explosion sound effect. The plays that emerged were sprawling in nature. They included a woman whose toxic positivity drives her to Unabomber-like impulses, a post-apocalyptic world where moose people are hunted for sport, and a science lab where two quarantined researchers question whether to trust the other. The high point was the play “Every Little Thing,” by Michelle Lori and directed by Riley Anna. It followed a couple on a date at Chuck-E-Cheese. Both parties had ulterior motives for the outing and enlisted the help of two eclectic employees to help them execute their plans. The physical comedic performances from the supporting cast stole the show.

Ultimately SHOTZ! embodies what Lousiville Fringe Fest is all about accessibility, creativity, and overall just being a little weird. The SHOTZ! format supercharges the performance experience and gives the audience an hour where just about anything is possible. It was the perfect kick-off to Fringe Fest 2024.

THURSDAY* + SATURDAY: three witches shakespeare • In the constantly changing age of AI and social media, it’s nice to be reminded that some truths about humanity have and will always remain the same. three witches shakespeare — a new company established in January of 2023 by Tory Parker, Clarity Hagan and Allie Fireel — knows this and pushes this philosophy further by reframing the classical canon to center queer experiences. This phenomenon isn’t new, historically speaking, Shakespeare’s original casts were completely male, meaning the most iconic love stories ever written were first acted between two men. In recontextualizing Shakespeare to reflect queer experiences, directors Brooke Morrison and Fallon Crowley bring these beloved plays closer to the original iterations than modern audiences may realize.

The logo for three witches shakespeare, which was part of the Louisville Fringe Festival.

In “The Tragedy of Mercutio,” the “Romeo and Juliet” sidekick takes center stage. While Romeo is off seducing Juliet, Mercutio and Benvolio are involved in a blossoming romance of their own. Adaptions have explored the idea of Mercutio being gay (Lulu Klebanoff’s “Tybalt and Mercutio Are Dead”), but here three witches shakespeare curates scenes using the original text to support their interpretation. With lines that suggest the pain of a secret love affair like, “Alas, that love, so gentle in his view, Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!” (1.1.169-170), it’s hard to imagine Shakespeare intending this relationship to be represented any other way.

In “Dueling Hamlets,” everyone’s favorite existentialist splits to become the To-Be-Hamlet and Not-To-Be Hamlet. The two Hamlets use the most famous soliloquies to argue about life, death, and everything in between. Through this piece, three witches shakespeare removes romance and uses queer framework to explore Hamlet’s sense of self.

Both plays maintained the integrity of the original text while fulfilling the company’s mission of “exploring the classical cannon through a queer lens.” The performances felt like the final presentation of a college theater scene study class. However, the laser focus on the actors impressively showcased three witches shakespeare’s knowledge of the text. Although this was their first Fringe Fest appearance, the ceiling for future projects is high. (* This review refers to the Thursday performance.)

FRIDAY: Mr. SpreadLove Poetry Slam • A slam poetry contest goes something like this: A poet stands alone on an empty stage. They are given three minutes to recite original writing to a panel of judges. Audience feedback is immediate and active. It’s performance art meets poetry meets theater meets hip-hop. It’s designed to hold big statements and big emotions, and Friday night’s slam in the Victor Jory Theater was no exception. Four performers' work touched on everything from depression, suicide, race, identity, and everything in between. But even the heaviest subject matter becomes accessible with a syncopated rhyme — especially with an even-keeled host.

Mr. Spreadlove, aka, Lance Newman II, hosted the poetry slam. Photo by Isa Gonzalez-Wilkerson.

That host, Lance Newman II, aka Mr. Spreadlove, is a Louisville-based artist, educator, and slam-community staple. His levity and briskness make weighty topics feel as commonplace as the weather. After each piece, Mr. Spreadlove returns to the mic and, within seconds, the energy shifts. “Wine or beer?” he asks. “Coke or Pepsi?” His buoyancy extends to both performers and himself. While tallying up scores in round two, Mr. Spreadlove shared that he suffered a cardiac arrest some months ago. He explained that the near-death experience led him to Buddhism. Then, after reading the performer’s score, he asked, “Batman or Iron Man?”

Slam is so affecting because it serves as both competition and confessional. We hear performers recite letters they never sent, purge feelings of abandonment, recount pain around their racial identity, and then we watch as judges rate them on a one to ten scale. Before you begin to think the process is harsh, Mr. Spreadlove repeats the Slam mantra like a resounding battle cry, “The point isn’t the points; the point is the poetry.”

After three rounds, points are tallied up and $400 is divided between the first, second, and third-place poets. The winner, who goes by Quan Solo, jumps into the splits after his name is announced.

Throughout the slam, I wondered how these performers were able to share such intimate parts of themselves with a group of strangers. Didn’t they feel overexposed? But once the dollar bills were handed over, the theater dispersed. I rode the elevator down with some of the judges and walked back to my car. I’m not sure the next time I’ll see Quan Solo. No matter what I think I know about him, he’s still a stranger.

SATURDAY: “Don’t Do It! With Hannah Dewitt” • Performance art and traditional theater have maintained a distance from one another, but in “Don’t Do It! With Hannah Dewitt.” The Louisville artist challenged these boundaries by curating an evening centering on the avant-garde. Six performance artists took the stage Saturday night for perhaps the fringiest night of the four-day festival. As the title suggests, our host curated the taboo, uncouth, and flat-out freaky. What happens when we platform the things deemed too much by those around us? What if, every time someone says, “Don’t do it,” we jump in with even greater commitment? The result was a nothing’s-off-limits night that consisted of egg-laying, full frontal nudity, and milk. Lots of milk.

Performance artist Amy Davis in a segment of "Don’t Do It! With Hannah Dewitt," part of the 2024 Louisville Fringe Festival. Photo by Nick Hulstine.

I like to think about performance art as a game, where the first person to ask “...What’s the point?” loses. Sure, sometimes there is a greater meaning, but more often the “why” is less relevant than the fact that it’s simply happening. The real question is, how do you feel about it? You’ll likely never get why performer Gunnar Goshorn would chug an entire gallon of milk to the point of vomiting four times mid-performance. But you sure as hell are going to react.

While shock value heightens the experience of watching a piece, certain taboos, like nudity, will only feel shocking for a minute or two. The energy was tense when Nathaniel Hendrickson walked onstage completely nude. It became more tense when they asked audience members to get nude with them onstage while they tried on all their clothes. But once clothes were volunteered, the energy shifted. What’s more juvenile or youthful than playing dress up? Nudity was desexualized to plain nakedness. Ultimately, my takeaway was the flexibility of gender expression and the transformative nature of clothes in general. Maybe the point was all of this. Or none of it

At its most effective, performance art forces us to reckon with the ways we organize and regulate ourselves. It’s an extremely personal experience. “The Don’t-Do-It-With-Hannah-DeWitt” performers seemed acutely aware of that.

SUNDAY: Keith McGill’s “Over My Dead Husband” • “For a year, Jim watched me sleep.” This is just one of the small revelations Keith McGill, a well-known Louisville actor, comedian, writer and educator, shared in his autobiographical “Over My Dead Husband.” McGill, an expert storyteller, created a haven of intimacy by recounting the blossoming of his 30-year relationship with Jim, who died in 2022. But long before then, McGill realized that Jim had been watching him every night for nearly a month to make sure he was OK after McGill’s unexplained seizure. The revelation was one of many capturing loving and unexpected acts over their decades together.

Keith McGill in "Over My Dead Husband," part of the 2024 Louisville Fringe Festival. Photo by Nick Hulstine.

It started with their 1992 meeting at a bookstore and soon after at the University of Louisville. Here and beyond the description of this event, McGill builds intimacy with a temperate and careful telling — dropping in details and painting pictures of venues and experiences, both thrilling and challenging. He walks the stage to face audience members and speaks directly to them. He tells them about other health problems and learning to negotiate conflict. There are funny and touching moments like watching movies. During these, McGill flashes his beguiling smile.

He renders a story of them together and of Jim as a person, his predispositions and quirks, including his love of 1960s Japanese films.

The storytelling on the sparse stage engenders trust in the room when McGill shares his thoughts and feelings. One is his belief “in fate, kismet, luck, chance,” which came long before they set rules in their relationship and grew into an “old married couple.” That trust deepens as he describes ideas of fidelity, Jim’s last months, the evolution of his relationship post-mortem with Jim, and phases — “all these phases” — of grief that are too many to name. In less than an hour, McGill also reveals discoveries and riches of life remembered and lived in the moment. — Elizabeth Kramer

SUNDAY: Double SHOTZ! • Fringe Fest Louisville knows its customers. When one is pleased with the first order, serve a double. So, after Thursday’s significant turnout for SHOTZ!, the festival closed its run with Double SHOTZ! when This Bridge Theatre served up an extravaganza of ten short plays from its library of 43 short plays.

Today, people might equate these skits with those seen on comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live,” but many had qualities that harkened to 1970s variety shows like “The Carol Burnett Show” or “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”

The cast of Alex Biscardi’s “The Power Puff Girls Fanfiction Play for Tommy Biscardi, part of the festival’s DOUBLE SHOTZ!

Among the standouts was the cunning social satire, “Mother’s Day” by Betsy Huggins where a mother of a newborn shopping for formula encounters a wealthy woman. Under Vidalia Unwin’s direction, small talk only heightens tension and brings laughs as the wealthy woman sneers at childbirth using medical intervention or rearing her kids without nannies. The new mother’s desperation grows as she tries to find the right formula from a hapless store clerk before the scene explodes into a gruesome but hilarious cartoonish catastrophe. It gets the laughs with a cast that plays it all straight.

In “Peekaboo,” a more serious work by Zac Campbell-Hoogendyk, Bailey Preston sits cross-legged in a chair talking with an unseen person. Slowly, it’s evident that the words are thoughts of a baby playing peek-a-boo with her father. This person ages and stands from the chair — from four years to fifth grade to a “grown-ass woman.” At each stage, she shares intimate details of her life with her father. A first kiss. The first time having sex. “I’m getting married,” she says. But before the end, she shares the real secret: “There is so much I want to tell you.“

In some pieces DOUBLE SHOTZ! goes holiday. Brian Walker’s “Three for the Price of One” recasts Charles Dicken’s ghosts of present, past and future into the snappy marketable entity of The Three-Ghosts-Change-Your-Life Experience In their commercial Future is a rebellious youngster ready to spill the spoils of what dark destiny lies. Others want to keep the promotion going. “Call now,” they plead. They beckon, “Even ghosts have needs,” to prospective patrons. Of course, the Future cannot wait and ushers the ultimate conclusion.

As a festival closer, DOUBLE SHOTZ! erupted into a crowd-pleasing celebration with dozens of actors, directors and playwrights on the floor for the final curtain. — Elizabeth Kramer

* Additional reporting by Elizabeth Kramer

Sydney Meyer, a Louisville-based writer, holds an undergraduate degree in Theatre Arts from Boston University. After building affordable housing in Colorado with AmeriCorps, Sydney recently returned to her hometown. In addition to her work as a writer, she freelances as a social media manager.