Tough 'Broads' All Over Town

Distaff Talent Abounds Onstage and Off

Rachel Manteuffel, in the tour-de-force solo show "A Most Notorious Woman." (By Dagmara Kalnins -- Wits End Productions.)

Women strong and fierce seem to be emerging as an unsurprising theme in this year's Capital Fringe Festival. Consider the titles alone:

"Cordelia's Fool" and "The Feminazi" (both now closed), "The Trojan Women," "Lysistration," "Love and War With the Bard's Broads and Dames," an all-female "Much Ado About Nothing," "Madness, Menopause and More," "The Lesbian and the Flying Pig" and "Ninja Motorcycle Babes."

Two mothers at odds propel the short-but-sweet "ExFiles" (through tomorrow in Woolly Mammoth's Melton Rehearsal Hall), a 35-minute science-fictiony comedy focusing on a bisexual woman named Emma. She's having custody issues with her tough former lover, Page. Snapping her fingers or waving her hand, the fretful Emma magically summons other exes and a psychic to help her strategize.

Joan Bellsey's brief play has drawn some fine local talent, which might account for the VIP audience it attracted Monday (including a D.C. artistic director, a not-uncommon sight so far at the Fringe). Director Dorothy Neumann gives the production a neat, brisk pace, and the cast features Brilane Bowman as the colorful mystic and Holly Twyford as a gleefully androgynous figure from Emma's past. Twyford's honky-tonk entrance is a delight, and so is the line dance her character inspires.

More swaggering is Rachel Manteuffel in "A Most Notorious Woman" (through Saturday, also in the Woolly/Melton), a solo show by Irish playwright Maggie Cronin that is based -- like Broadway's recently sunken "The Pirate Queen" -- on the life of Grace O'Malley. This is a characteristically flamboyant bit of modern Irish writing, a monologue that zips between the 16th and 20th centuries as the performer dons many guises and eventually learns from them all.

It's a lot for an actress to bite off, and Manteuffel handles it well, from O'Malley's proud Irish accent to the prissy speech of Queen Elizabeth. The staging's a little breathless -- Manteuffel doesn't always have time to compose herself between transitions -- but the play is crammed with incident and wit, as these contemporary Irish monologues usually are.

Distaff clustering can even happen accidentally as you catch benignly titled shows. "Other Plans" (through Saturday in the still-evolving storefront Scientarium) is a collection of four short plays by Stephanie Alice Scarpinato, who writes as if from a time capsule. A white father and son grapple with civil rights issues in 1960s Alabama in "If I Had a Hammer"; a young Italian woman begs her traditional grandparents to come meet the Irish beau in "That's Amore."

Throwback, yes, and often woefully mundane, but these works are not wholly without charm. "That's Amore" is baldly affectionate, with no end of punch lines for the amusingly vain grandfather (and Walt Smith is pretty twinkly in the role).

More promising is Scarpinato's "Hungry No More," a monologue about a naive young woman caught up writing letters in a charity scam. The ethical dilemma is intriguing, but the character chitchats and rambles as the script indulges writerly tics (how about a wise but silent diner waitress?).

You'd think you'd be more firmly in the present with "I Am S.A.A.M. (South Asian American Male)," a limp bit of multimedia anthropology that packed a hearty crowd into the Goethe Institut's Mainstage (where it continues through Sunday). But a very large cast comes to some very familiar conclusions about relationships in this play -- it really is a series of acted vignettes; the multimedia is minimal -- that's written and directed by Arpita Mukherjee.

Cultural barriers aside, maybe "S.A.A.M.'s" women are looking for someone like Slash Coleman, sensitive writer-performer of the unexpectedly devotional "The Neon Man and Me." Coleman's autobiographical solo piece at the Warehouse Arts (through Sunday) is an agreeably subdued, rambling reminiscence, literary but unpretentious as he charts his flight from Virginia while keeping in constant contact with his best buddy, now deceased.

"The Neon Man" has less to do with women -- for more of such fare, see Mara Neimanis's ongoing "Air Heart" or Laura Zams's "Collaterally Damaged" -- but with his brief folksy songs strummed on guitar, Coleman's good offbeat company.