by Bret Fetzer
This year’s Bumbershoot offers things that thrilled your parents (Theater Schmeater’s solid-but-familiar stagings of classic episodes of The Twilight Zone) and things that thrilled your grandparents (Radio Activity, A Theater Under the Influence‘s solid-but-familiar “backstage” staging of episodes of Flash Gordon and other radio serials)–so if you’re craving the Hawkmen of Mongo, here’s your poison.
Fresher material can be found with two new plays by strong local playwrights: Keri Healey’s Parrot Fever (Or, Lies I’ve Told in Chat Rooms) is adult in all senses of the word–the characters engage in some pretty steamy online sex while grappling with crumbling relationships and the loss of a friend. Healey captures lust and grief with the same unflinching eloquence; Brendan Kiley described this production in The Stranger as “simply a solid piece of theater moving, funny, erotic, and repulsive by turns.”
Additionally: Maria Glanz performs See Me Naked. Unexpected Productions presents some long-form improvisation (including instant biographies of audience members and a one-act play made up on the spot), and Wing-It Productions presents Twisted Flicks, in which they take a trashy old film and make up an entirely new soundtrack as the movie unspools. Two relatively new groups, Burnt Studio and Breeders Theater, present Progression and Piglet respectively–the first is “movement theater,” an often disastrous idiom that in this case seems promising, and the second somehow combines Hamlet, Peter Pan, and more into a blender, and then names the whole postmodern goulash after a character from Winnie the Pooh. It’s short; might be worth the chance.
Unexpected Productions appears at the Biringer Farm Charlotte Martin Theatre on Saturday from 7:45 to 9:15 pm, and Sunday and Monday from 1:30 to 3 pm. All other shows are at the Theatre Puget Sound Stage: Twilight Zones (Sun, 7-7:45 pm, and Mon, 3-3:45 pm), Radio Activity (Sat, 3-4 pm), Parrot Fever (Sun, 5-6:15 pm), See Me Naked (Sat, 7-8 pm, and Mon, 6:15-7:15 pm), Twisted Flicks (Sat, 5-6:30 pm), and Progression and Piglet (Sun, 3-4:15 pm).