With more than 200 plays to choose from spread out over two weeks — and a universal $15 ticket price — the NYC Fringe is one of the great summer bargains and theater adventures.
$15 is barely more than the price of a movie ticket in New York City and in past summers I’ve seen some terrific cutting-edge theater. Part of the fun of the Fringe is not knowing what you might see and going to a bunch of stuff hoping for the best.
Yesterday I lost the Fringe crapshoot, however, with a half-baked import from San Francisco, “Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party” by Aaron Loeb.
The show is a hot ticket — even before its first public performance last week, all five shows were sold out and an extra one added due to genuine popular demand.
At the Here Arts Center Sunday there was a sizeable cancellation line before the matinee performance.
The title doesn’t really serve Loeb’s play very well, promising something much zanier and livelier than this rather dour comedy-drama about homophobia in the Heartland. “Abraham Lincoln” follows an Illinois teacher (Lorraine Olsen) who writes and directs an elementary school Christmas pageant that makes a passing reference to Lincoln’s “close” relationship to another man when he was a young lawyer in Menard County.
The first scene promises a Christopher Durang-style satire in the vein of “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” as we observe the about-to-be-controversial holiday pageant. But the play soon bogs down in the teacher’s trial and the attempt of a local politician (Joe Kady) to use the controversy as a launch pad for the governor’s race. The politico has a closeted gay son — Jerry played by Michael Phillis — who is quickly outed by a very bizarre Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter (Mark Anderson Phillips). The Times guy seems more gay activist than journalist and his seduction of the politician’s son is both crude and unbelievable.
Loeb tries to give his three-act dramedy some experimental edge by having an audience member select the order in which the three acts are played — each act presents a different character’s point of view of the trial.
The playwright’s call for gay marriage and the end of Heartland homophobia is admirable — and perhaps would still be considered shocking in some parts of the United States — but the whole thing seemed like a rather redundant exercise for a downtown Manhattan venue in 2009. I don’t think many minds need changing there.
(The New York International Fringe Festival runs through Sunday. Ticket and schedule information are available at www.fringenyc.org)
