The Hundreth Monkey
No Limit Productions
Chicago Fringe Festival,
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In the immortal words of Chuck D, don’t believe the hype. Stagebill may be packed with superlatives so hyperbolic they’d make P.T. Barnum blush, but this Fringe is a far cry from the cutting edge. There’s hardly a countercultural impulse within 20 miles of the thing. Many pieces are straightforward theater, and most of the other performances–by comedians, magicians, monologuists, puppeteers, and clowns–owe a greater debt to the century-old tradition of vaudeville than to any 20th-century avant-garde theater movement. (Fittingly, the term “nouveau vaudeville” floats around the festival like a half-forgotten dinner guest trying to find a place at the table.) “Fringe” is really a term of art, sprung from the loins of the renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where anyone can perform just about anything so long as they can find a few feet of empty space. As one Fringe Festival insider explained to me, “fringe” doesn’t describe an approach or a style but rather the production values. This is the fringe of “legitimate” theater, the kind people won’t pay $25 to see. Apparently “poor theater” has once again come to define the theatrical fringe some half a century after Grotowski coined the term.
On a practical level, such bare-bones productions are essential when setting up and breaking down some 200 performances, many of which are separated by only a few minutes. Produced and curated by John T. Mills and James H. Ellis, the festival is a masterpiece of organization; the dozen shows I saw during the opening weekend all started precisely on time. But by turning away from the Broadway insistence that “more is more” in favor of a simple, unadorned aesthetic, the festival does, perhaps unintentionally, give rise to a kind of philosophy, placing a premium on direct human contact. (This is given the clearest expression in Jonathan Kay’s beguiling Fool, in which he simply plays with the audience for as long as they’ll let him.) The Fringe Festival doesn’t promise technical wizardry but instead honest, relatively unmediated theatrical experiences.
Three shows encapsulate the range of work the festival offers. The Polo Brothers’ astonishing The Hundredth Monkey stands at the apex. No Limit Productions’ egregious Short Hair/Real Job lies embarrassingly near the bottom. And Fredric Stone’s pleasant Will and Testament represents the majority of shows: unfinished, uneven, but rich with promise.
