John Ulman
The Nexus Project is the closest thing to a fringe festival Seattle
has seen since its actual fringe festival went down in a blaze of
ignominy and finger-pointing five years ago.
In 12 short plays by 12 Seattle writers—with the exception of
N.Y.-based Mike
Daisey—the regulars have reported for duty:
Stephanie Timm, Paul Mullin, Scot Augustson, Marya Sea Kaminski,
Elizabeth Heffron, and so on. The results, for a festival, are
surprisingly entertaining.
Normally, the very idea of a fringe festival inspires a special
terror: interminable performances inflicted on friends, theater
critics, and other suckers who—for love or for duty—have
been swindled into watching hours of half-baked crap. To its credit,
the Nexus Project (produced by a new company called Next Stage)
inspires nostalgia for what’s good about a fringe festival: a
soup of new work, a pastiche of the city’s zeitgeist, and the happy
surprises writers dig out of themselves when they’re pressed against a
deadline.
The plays are a grab bag, from dour liberal bromides (Seattle
Weekly columnist John Longenbaugh on waterboarding) to farces of
ghost stories (Augustson, in top form, lampooning the old
phantom-hitchhiker trope) to burlesque (Waxie Moon re-creating famous
striptease scenes from All About Eve and The
Graduate).
This Loamy Excellence, written by Daisey,
begins with two
bourgeois bohemians in inflatable kiddie pools, slathering themselves
with some brown sticky substance. The woman (Angie Manning Goodwill)
says to the man (Alex Samuels): “I’ve hired Mexicans before, as one
does, so I thought: ‘Why not have a conscience?'” She’s hired Mexicans
to protest the war for her. And she’s fucking one of them, “because
he’s exotic.” The man is aroused by her politics, her lust, and her
French bulldog named Social Responsibility. Though he’s moved to NYC,
Daisey clearly has the sins of Seattle stuck in his nostrils.
Slumber, by Heffron, is a comical cycle of microplays about
people sleeping on couches in increasingly improbable situations. It
begins with a husband asking his wife about the stranger sleeping on
their couch: “I told you I took a lover!” she shouts, exasperated.
(He’s Russian, drunk, and passed out while waiting for his vodka.)
Slumber progresses through two creepy men lurking over a woman
sleeping on their couch, trying to figure out whether one of them hit
her with his car while he was blacked-out drunk, to a merry Irishman
who’s dragged his embalmed wife from the mortuary to live on his couch
(she won’t ever decompose, he explains, because “she’s mostly plastic
now”) and back to the drunken Russian lover.
Like the best of The Nexus Project, it’s fast, funny, and
delightfully fucked up. 
