Gimmicks Fly as Playwrights Riff on Literary Masterpieces

Attention all English majors: If you have not yet parlayed your literary proficiency into Capital Fringe Festival offerings, heed the Cautionary Tales of this year's event.

The lineup for the 10-day extravaganza bristles with shows that spoof, re-envision or otherwise gloss over the highlights of a typical Literature 101 syllabus. There's an Aristophanes-inspired rock opera; a "Romeo & Juliet" spun as crime drama; and "A Christmas Carol" set in today's White House, to trot out a few.

The phenomenon is certainly understandable: In the novelty-cluttered landscape of a fringe festival, a connection to a recognizable name such as Shakespeare or Dickens helps a production to stand out. But, alas, as the Capital Fringe's early days have demonstrated, high-culture collages can sound better on paper than in practice.

A prime example of that is local author Callie Kimball's astoundingly misguided "Nutshell," which yokes a tale of conservationists and talking elephants to (gulp!) T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." The 75-minute show (continuing through tonight at Woolly Mammoth) contains some deft physical impressions of African fauna, as well as an enjoyably relaxed comic turn by Woolly company member Kimberly Gilbert (playing herself). But because "Nutshell" (whose title -- go figure -- alludes to "Hamlet") ignores "The Waste Land's" central theme -- the spiritual impoverishment of modern civilization -- its innumerable allusions to and quotations from the poem seem like a capricious parlor trick.

Equally frustrating is "Night of the Living Theatre . . . by Dead Playwrights," a collection of undercooked skits (running through today at the Goethe-Institut) that imagine how Shakespeare, John Milton and other celebrated writers would fare in contemporary Hollywood.

In Lisa Alapick's "Paradise, Lost?," for example, television executives shoehorn Milton's masterpiece into a sitcom format. In RL Nesvet's "The Conjurer Meets the Devil," Christopher Marlowe pitches "Dr. Faustus" to Mel Gibson.

Full of facile jokes and anachronisms played for laughs, these puffball pieces -- the others are by Martin Blank, D.W. Gregory and Mary Watters -- give the impression they were tossed off while Alapick et al. were watching "Saturday Night Live."

"The Pabst and Popcorn Hour Presents an Adaptation of the Tragedy of Doctor Faustus" is just as gimmicky, but at least it has a coherent aesthetic -- and, heck, the producers are giving out free beer. When you arrive at the show (at the Goethe-Institut through Saturday), you display your ID and receive a bag of popcorn and a bottle of brew. The onstage fare, meantime, is actors whizzing through a short version of Marlowe's play, which acquires the agreeably seedy ambiance of a carnival sideshow. By the time the cast breaks out in a rendition of the 1980s hit "Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not)" -- signaling Faustus's sense of euphoria -- the audience is too buzzed to protest.

For a really satisfying cultural riff, however, you'd have had to take in "Low Tide Hotel," an enchantingly whimsical montage of maritime-themed songs and literary excerpts performed three times last weekend. Cast members Mark Jaster, Sabrina Mandell and Scott Sedar lent mystery and humor to a script that sampled songs such as "Moby Dick" and even the Police's "Message in a Bottle." The retro visual aesthetic -- straw boaters, a hatbox, a tray of saltwater taffy -- dovetailed beautifully with Jaster's foley-artist-style sound effects, which included "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" played on a musical saw.

"A Swedish Tiger" -- an intermittently compelling Swedish production imported to the Fringe by Spooky Action Theater -- might seem in a different league from all that literary marginalia. It's a two-hander that argues darkly that Sweden aided the Nazis during World War II. (Performances, in English, run through tomorrow at Woolly Mammoth.)

Writers Goran Gillinger and Jens Ostberg, however, build their historical indictment at least partly from cultural touchstones: The characters known as the Ghost (Gillinger) and the Tiger (Par Malmstrom in a tiger suit) rhapsodize about violent movies and video games, emphasizing the idea of a moral disconnect. And in a climactic sequence, the Ghost makes a shocking discovery in a Swedish household -- a discovery previously hidden by piles and piles of books.