Last year for The Fringe (2021), Cathy (best adventurer and cultural savant) and I saw some performances virtually because it was still openly accepted that there was a pandemic on. We took in two shows from the comfort of her laptop, plus part of a third which seemed to not be quite what it said on the tin. In that particular case I feel fortunate that we didn’t actually spend time in the real world venue but overall something admittedly does get lost when a Fringe show isn’t live.
This year we physically went to The Fringe here in Edmonton. It was my first in several years and Cathy doesn’t even remember the last time she went. Just going, therefore, felt brand new. The performances we encountered as newly re-introduced Fringers made an impact I like to call a healthy culturin’.
Six Chick Flicks -or- a Legally Blonde Pretty Woman Dirty Danced on the Beaches while writing a Notebook on the Titanic
Kerry Ipema and KK Apple
This is a mashup parody of six films famous for appealing to women audiences. At the same time it both embraces a fondness for the six movies and takes them apart with a ruthless eye for ridiculous plot points.
In Six Chick Flicks, Kerry Ipema and KK Apple coin “The Rose Effect”, which is when female characters are written to do things that aren’t plausible because they were created externally to women’s lived experience. It’s named after the scene in Titanic when the character of Rose has sex for the very first time and orgasms dramatically, as if on demand. The Effect draws special focus to the way women characters in popular cinema are created through a male gaze. I suspect most people are aware of the Rose Effect already, you just negotiate it subconsciously whenever you encounter it in a piece of media. You automatically see it everywhere though, once you’re aware of it. Ipema and Apple tap into the Rose Effect’s ubiquity by naming it and making it a running gag; it’s funny because you see it everywhere. The plot details that never made sense because they’re based on a misunderstanding of how women work suddenly become a built-in joke rather than just the architecture of a story.
Never having lived as a woman, I can’t lay claim to any special insight myself but Ipema and Apple’s Rose Effect really illuminates how easy it is to wildly misinterpret the experiences of others. I heard once that it’s notoriously hard to write believable, three-dimensional characters in a gender not one’s own and I’ve noticed that this is definitely true. You have to somehow take yourself completely out of your own mindset and project yourself into a complete recreation of someone else’s. The specific male gaze that Six Chick Flicks points out is likely magnified when the producers and directors a screenwriter works with are historically also men operating within the same framework. In such a creative echo chamber, nobody notices (or perhaps cares) that Rose effortlessly orgasms her first time.
All this is to say that Six Chick Flicks is a clever show. As someone who’s actually only seen one (and a half) of the six movies, I still got the point which explains why Six Chick Flicks sold out repeatedly this year. It was skillfully crafted and really, really knows its way around a running gag!
Juliet: A Revenge Comedy
Monster Theatre
Juliet: A Revenge Comedy is a two-woman play (plus Shakespeare) that did more with body language and a couple of props than I’ve seen entire large scale productions accomplish. This show jumps off from Romeo and Juliet when Juliet realizes she’s stuck in an infinite temporal loop of suicide and finally disrupts the cycle. Breaking the sequence of the original play’s ending, she avoids stabbing herself to death next to Romeo’s corpse and then leaves its narrative altogether. Juliet: A Revenge Comedy illustrates a series of transitions through time, space and story entirely by sound design and the body positioning of its actors. Juliet finds herself entering the play Macbeth where she meets Lady Macbeth and the two discover that they’re both prisoners of a repeating cycle of death laid out for them by some external force.
For the remainder of Juliet: A Revenge Comedy, the same actress plays Lady Macbeth, Ophelia from Hamlet, Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra and Miranda from The Tempest. Somehow you never lose track of who’s who or what’s going on. There are only two people physically on stage most of the time but you see five. That alone is impressive.
Like Six Chick Flicks, this show also deals with a male writer writing female roles, which wasn’t a conscious choice when we chose the two from The Fringe’s listing but was a poignant coincidence. Juliet: A revenge Comedy may not name the Rose Effect but this performance does describe it. Juliet warps through various plays in which Shakespeare has pointedly written major female roles as either disposable, impractically sinister or simply put there just to be insane. The characters finally establish three-dimensionality during her journey and their actions as believable people contrast naturally from the presumptions that originally constructed them.
Shakespeare himself occasionally shows up in Juliet: A Revenge Comedy to counter Juliet’s newfound quest for freedom. He values her and the other women who have broken out of their plays with her but only as narrative fixtures. Again this echoes Six Chick Flicks where all the female leads are lavished with focus, centrality and ostensibly respect, but who are really only showpieces instead of individuals. I guess it’s been rare to write other genders well for centuries.
(Thunder) Cats
Grindstone Comedy Theatre
Pure ridiculousness. I liked it a lot.
To switch tone entirely here, the third show we saw at The Fringe can’t really fit neatly into a narrative summary. In fact (Thunder) Cats tries its damnedest to dodge having a coherent plot entirely. For this one the crew of Grindstone drew together the musical storytelling of the famous Broadway performance Cats and the 80’s Saturday morning cartoon Thundercats into a single mashup piece. This actually kind of makes sense because firstly, both properties are known for their very thin plots. Secondly, the 80’s were a heyday for both and people are suckers for nostalgia. Thirdly, there’s sheer juxtaposition to consider; it’s a scientific fact that the more thematically disparate two things are, the more likely they’ll be crammed into poorly written fan fiction so you might as well beat the unwashed masses to the punch.
If (Thunder) Cats has a takeaway message of any sort it’s to embrace the spirit of shameless innocent fun. A gaggle of people in brightly coloured makeup and leotard outfits with big Thundercats hair belted out modified versions of the Cats lineup for around an hour and I learned two things: that the way cats (the animal) cluelessly stare into space can be replicated uncannily by actors, and that being a (Thunder) Cat is all about inclusivity. Borrowing from the theme of transcendence in (Broadway) Cats, this show continually returns to the question of how to define a (Thunder) Cat and how to be the best one possible. There’s the bloodthirsty cat, the dumb cat with the magical sword, the dancing man-whore cat and the postmenopausal cat to name a handful, some with semi-critical roles to play in the semi-plot. The show runs out of either time or attention span to include introduction songs for everyone so several cats are never really named, but hey the choreography’s flawless!
The show concludes with one particular cat receiving the honour of …some arbitrary honour …as the point returns to shameless fun. Somewhere in there, sort of, is a battle between the (Thunder) Cats on stage and their timeless foe from the cartoon but the true tension is between the characters and themselves. Ultimately to be a (Thunder) Cat is to accept oneself, weirdness and all. On the surface this appears to be the throwaway “moral” of an 80’s themed action drama but it’s less vacuous the more you think about it. Self acceptance is one of the hardest things to achieve in life. Half-jokingly, the show touches on individuality, aging, sex-positivity, community and the meaning of courage. But tongue-in-cheek campiness aside, it does take actual courage when people confront any of those things in their own lives. You can enjoy (Thunder) Cats entirely as a musical romp parodying pop culture and have a great time, however there’s also an implicit offer here. You can be a (Thunder) Cat too. You must live your truest life, which takes courage and is a lifelong process. You must find the strength to transcend shame and define your own identity within the community. There’s danger in it, as well as excitement and all the drama you can handle. Conversely there’s freedom in conceptualizing life like a plotless musical cartoon mashup. To be a (Thunder) Cat is simply to unashamedly be. All the fun stuff will follow.
The Fringe this year felt a little strange after two years of social distancing but I’m glad we went. The further I get from my tumultuous twenties, the easier is seems to find richness in cultural experiences. I don’t think I’ll ever be a hardcore Fringer but I’m impressed at how layered any given performance can be. Perhaps this is why people go to theatre.
What a culturin’!
The Fringe!:
Kerry Ipema and KK Apple
https://kerryipema.wixsite.com/kerryipema/resume
Monster Theatre
The Grindstone:
There's No Going Back 