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By Celia Wren
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, July 27, 2007; C02

The Capital Fringe Festival contains a couple of theatrical productions that tug so determinedly at the boundaries of the art form, you almost expect to hear them snap.

Andrew Zox, who conceived, directed and choreographed "My Way Little Girl," terms his edgy 30-minute work an "installation piece." Performed on its opening night at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage -- performances continue through tomorrow outside the Warehouse Arts Complex -- the show is a near-wordless tableau of images evoking the risks of sex, the exploitation of women (through advertising in particular) and the controversy that always surrounds sex education in our society.

To maximize the shock factor, Zox (a Synetic Theater Company member) begins on a lulling note: a banjo player (Dan Mazer) picks his way through the bales of hay that litter the stage. He starts to play bluegrass music, then an eerie group of apparitions infiltrates the rustic landscape:

Hard-eyed women, wearing fur coats over lingerie, vamp in front of two sinister men, dressed in sandwich boards of Burberry-style plaid. (Kristopher Castle is costume designer.) As the sounds of flashbulbs go off, the women in the foreground writhe and freeze, as if posing for a Prada photo shoot in hell. Now and then, the men behind them raise grotesque black hands the size of chainsaws.

The erotic phantasmagoria becomes even more disturbing with the subsequent appearance, among other figures, of a prowling gynecologist in surgical attire, and a knee-sock-wearing schoolgirl whose limbs move jerkily like a puppet's. Graft dialogue onto this stuff and you'd have radical feminist agitprop, but in this form, it has the potency of a nightmare and the dignity of a Renaissance masque.

For fare that's as effectively jarring but a whole lot funnier, you can take in "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes)," a blend of standup comedy and surrealist "happening" that has become a cult hit in Chicago. Written, directed and performed by a group called the Neo-Futurists (founding director Greg Allen is credited as creator), the show runs at Woolly Mammoth through Sunday.

Imagine a no-holds-barred jujitsu squad deconstructing a sheaf of Beckett plays with help from Stephen Colbert, and you'll have a feel for the manic energy and barbed whimsy of this production.

The ferment unfolds according to several rules: An audience handout lists 30 tantalizing titles -- for instance, "One-Minute Competitive Candy Necklace Nibble"; "a green that's hard to describe"; "Human Ventriloquist Act #47: The Audacity of Hype"; and "If the city of Milwaukee went to high school with me, I might have signed her yearbook like this." Audience members call out numbers, and the five knockout writer/performers, dressed work-casual, launch into the piece with the matching title.

A definitive description of the show is not possible, since the lineup of playlets changes daily, with one or more new titles replacing older ones (a die is cast to determine the exact number). On opening night, however, the skits ranged from quirky and dadaist to political and wickedly dark. "Half Naked Ninja Pudding Pie" featured shirtless guys with headbands, whipping up Jell-O pudding with expressions of Shaolin Temple fierceness. "What it's going to be like until the Supreme Court gets its [act] together and sorts this out" was a gleeful satire about gay marriage laws (wind-powered cars were mentioned). The priceless "Afterschool Special Presents: Fake Monologues With Horrible Advice" lived up to its name.

But sometimes the tone grew solemn: At one point, for example, the performers -- Bilal Dardai, Dean Evans, Sharon Greene, Kristie Koehler and Jay Torrence -- held up pages with the names of soldiers severely wounded in Iraq.

No matter what the mood, the clock was always ticking, en route to the 60-minute mark. (Theatergoers trying to sandwich in several Fringe productions should note, however, that with introductory and closing remarks and curtain call, the show's duration is closer to 1:15.)

With audience participation required at regular intervals (that competitive candy necklace nibbling is no spectator sport), "Too Much Light" is not a show for patrons who require the fourth wall. But then again, if you're a stickler for such old-fashioned matters, would you be at the Fringe to begin with?

© 2007 The Washington Post Company

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