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Solos

• Two-time Best In Fringe winner Antonio Sacre returns to, and opens, the Fringe festival with his latest one-man production, "Si La Gente Quiere Comer Carne, Le Damos Carne or If the People Want to Eat Meat, Let Them Eat Meat." Directed by Brian Mendes, the solo show follows the story of Sacre's Cuban-American brother from overweight juvenile delinquent to small-time hood to professional triathlete.
• South African Nick Boraine brings "Sic," his one-man black comedy about an actor deft at dying on stage who must confront his own mortality to this year's event.
• In "A Touch of The Poe," Kevin Mitchell Martin dramatizes the human aspects of mythic literary figure Edgar Allan Poe's life, including his struggles personally, creatively, professionally and romantically.
• Through a series of linked monologues, Erin Keating answers the age-old question, "What do women want," in her show "Ravenous."
• Adding a sis-ka-boom-ba to this year's Fringe is C.C. Seymour, who turns a kitchen and its utensils and appliances into a one-woman exploration of do-it-yourself, at-home percussion in "I'm Bangin' in the Kitchen".
• In "Man at Work," Craig Menteer mixes theater, dance and stand-up in a send-up of travails of being a man.
• What happens when a singer/songwriter suffers from acute Attention Deficit Disorder? Joesph Langham explores that in his piece, "An Evening with Harburg Harrisbrandt."
• Theatrix presents the premiere of Mel England's autobiographical multi-media performance piece, "Navajo Memoirs," which weaves Navajo ceremonies, songs and slides into a chronicle of the historic destruction of his ancestral people, the shattered Hollywood dreams of the Navajo mother that abandoned him, and the return of the lost woman who must battle for a boy she left in the world of the white man. Jill Andre directs.
• While England practices full-disclosure, Mike Daisey enjoys the closure of his non-disclosure agreement with Amazon.com. The world's largest bookstore is the subject of his solo piece, "21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com." Daisey revisits the two tumultuous years he spent at Amazon.com and the rise and fall of the dot.com culture in New York. Incidentally, the New York Times reported that he will keep a seat open for Jeff Bezos (Amazon's CEO) during each performance.
• R.J. Lewis portrays a hapless nightguard possessed by the spirits of old vaudeville theatre in "Vaudeville's Not Dead (I'm Killing It Every Night.)"
• Karaoke provides the unifying element for "People Like Us," Esther Silberstein's look at three lonely, delusional people in the karaoke world.
• Federico Hewson explores expectations for the 21st century in his show "Original Blessing," which drew its source material from interviews with friendsand family as well as new futurist theories of consciousness evolution. The show combines dance, theatre and song.

• Canadian Keir Cutler presents a sequel to his FringeNYC 2000 overall-excellence-solo-award winning "Teaching Shakespeare: A Parody," called "Teaching Detroit." Now the inept teacher is making required study of his failed, unpublished novel titled "Detroit."

• Evading the fires of Hell is no simple matter- particularly when you're the chosen one. For Anthony King's one-man show, "Chosen," the road out of hell is marked by wet undies, the jubilant cries of "monkeymonkeymonkey," even a pack of lip-synching puppets.

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Current Events, Politics, History
A number of this year's shows deal with real world events and issues from today and the past. This group provides some of the most compelling shows in this year's festival.

• For instance, "Fifty Minutes," a new play by Lucas Rockwood dramatizes the death of Jonathon Burton. A 19-year-old man flying home to visit relatives, Burton became deranged on the plane, made a run on the cockpit and on the emergency doors before being restrained andbeaten to death by five other passengers on the plane. A year after the incident, Rockwood's play examines the motivations and rage that led to the death.
• No Pants Theatre Company examines the political consciousness of America through its satiric account of a manic swarm of druglords, secret agents ,eco-terrorists, oil moguls, revolutionaries, rock stars and politco who descend upon the tiny island of El Kornea, vying for control of its solution to the energy crisis. Given the recent energy problems in California, "3-D World", which features a cast of 16, should be very topical.
• If you think a tiny island nation is small, try a nation of one. "Mykronesia" encourages theatregoers to visit "the world’s smallest nation, comprised entirely of one girl." Mykronesia will take on the World Bank, an unscrupulous temp agency and two lovesick U.N. peace keepers.
• Two productions deal with high school massacre s. "Doing Justice," written and performed by Adina Taubman, deals directly with the Columbine High School shooting. Based on actual interviews and accounts of the event, Taubman dramatizes the testimonies of the victims, parents, teachers, and community members of Littleton, Colo.
• Meanwhile, "After Wednesday," spins a coming-of-age yarn about violence, divorce, young love and fear, set against the backdrop of a high school massacre.
• Contributing to a more thorough understanding of recent history is also the goal of "Fever," Robert Clem's adaptation of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" to fit the year 1969. The production's director, Frank Licato, sees the play as an opportunity to return the image of the hippy back to its complex, political as well as sexual roots.
• "A Message in Our Music" explores social responsibility among artists, in particular, style vs. substance in the world of rap. Famed director and writer Woody King, founder of the New Federal Theater, directs this production starring E. Patric.
• "Loader 26" deals with labor issues.
• "A Little Piece of the Sun" juxtaposes two pieces of Russian history, the Chernobyl disaster and the serial killings of Andrei Chikatilo. Invoking the name of one of last year's most watched productions, "Charlie Victor Romeo," Year One Productions considers its piece "A Little Piece..." as an entirely new way of staging history, toying with the theatrical illusion while accepting the discipline of found texts.
• "Scarpette Rosse," written by Tiziana Lucattini paints a dramatic portrait of the unbelievable life Latin-American street kids endure who are chased and often killed by special killer gangs that are hired by rich people of the city.

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New Plays
While some of the solo shows and political/historical shows listed above are new plays, we decided to list them according to their content. For those productions that did not neatly fall into one category or another, we have placed in a separate section dedicated to new plays.

• "Real! Live! America!" ventures into the world of voyeuristic reality television. The new play, written by first-time playwright and Girls Next Door Productions member Marco Jo Clate, depicts a live "broadcast" of five specially chosen contestants (including a family pet) who enter a "typical" American family room to live and compete for the ultimate prize.
• "Wasn't Any Law Could Take Him Alive" is a new dark comedy by Sophie Rand that follows Doreen through a world of white trash and werewolves.
• "Shift of Focus," a new play by Caroline Murphy, has an a "No Exit" quality to its description, that of a restaurant without customers whose staff is immersed in the task of writing a play using a game of chess as their inspiration.
• The latest play by Dan Brooks, "The Child Catcher," is set in a world so despicable the sun has ceased to rise, leaving fifteen-year-old urban urchin Robledo to dart and weave the traps and pitfalls of the city in search of returning the world to the light. This production includes puppetry designed by Marya Sea Kamishi.
• In "A 95 Percent Chance They'll Wind Up Like Larvae," audiences can tune-in to the sensuous voice of radio host Karen Savage, who takes you through a series of vignettes that explore complexities of friendship, true love, and bestiality.
• "Snap Happy," a new play by Linsey Bostwick with original dance choreographed by Sara Jarrett, takes a look at the upside of mental illness.
• Brooklyn's Sideway Theater Company brings "Hustle," a raw comedy exploring the chance meeting of two young hustlers.
• A new gen-Y comedy will also make its way to the festival as Montreal, Canada's Untimely Ripped Entertainment presents "Leaf In the Mailbox," the winner of Best Production at the 1999 Montreal Fringe Festival.
• In the experimental area of theatre, The Beggars Group offers "Stopping the World," a visual, visceral piece from this creator's of this season's "Do It!"

• "B$LL" takes a Chaplin-esque excursion through the digital age's edgy world of power, profit and paranoia, where innovation meets obsolescene highlight by a tour of the "smart home."
• Sketch comedy written and performed by "angry Asian-American underachievers," "Asians Misbehavin'" offers a humorous, thought-provoking collection of performance pieces.
• "Boom Boom..." tells the enchanting stories of four people residing in one brownstone.
• An interactive, black comedy, "Box" features a funky, live band and addresses problems facing a culture lacking a formal rite of passage."

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Adaptations

• One of the most talked about productions due at this year's Fest is Sloe-Eyed Productions' stage adaptation of "Debbie Does Dallas." A show slated for the first week and a half of the event, "Debbie" has generated an enormous amount of buzz for its tongue-in-cheek approach to the legendary pornographical film.
• Chicago's directorless Theater Oobleck returns to the Fringe fest this year with yet another condensed, reworked, stretched classic author or classic text bearing a listing editor’s nightmare of a title. Last year, the company brought "The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in An Envelope (partially burned) In a Dustbin in Paris Labeled 'Never to be performed. Never. Ever. Ever! Or I Will Sue. I Will Sue from the Grave'" This time, the company will perform a new play based on the various flavors of "Faust," written by Chicago's Mickle Maher, titled (inhale deeply before reading) "An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening."
• Speaking of never, one of the more novel adaptations will be staged by the Collection Agency, which performs a modified version of the fourth act of John Webster's "Duchess of Malfi," titled "Never Live Long in Cages." The adaptation puts a schizophrenic, pyschological twist to the text by disembodying one of the main characters and presenting the play from the perspective of a nervous breakdown.
• From Cleveland's Dobama's Night Kitchen comes the premiere of "Angst:84," an adaptation of George Orwell's renown book "1984" set in the actual year 1984 and viewedthrough that era's linguistic and cultural lens.
• Mobius Group Productions' revival of Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine." They will use a new adaptation by Jonathan Silver, who will also direct the Fringe presentation.
• Two Cups and a String Theatre Inc. premieres "The Shrew Sketch," a new play by Robert Cardazone about the writing office of a 1950s television comedy program setting about to rewrite Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" in their own, unique way.
• Straight from the pages of a 1949 "pulp" detective magazine to the stage comes handsome, former Hollywood stuntman-turned-private-detective Nick Ransom in Old School Theatre Company's "Preview of Murder," a murder mystery set to live jazz music.
• Adapted from the second novel of Reinaldo Arenas ("Before Night Falls") pentagonia by Gregg Bellon, "las blanquisimas mofetas," presented by Los Gusanos Repentio, presents a family caught in the seams of the Cuban revolution, between life and death, home and exile.
• From Zurich, Switzerland comes a one-man adaptation of "Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries" the acclaimed novel about a young man playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, and searching for something pure.
• "Mary Stuart" presents an exciting re-working of Schiller's classic tale of obsession, lust, betrayal and religion leading us through the hauntingly erotic and politically volatile power struggle between two of the strongest women in history.

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Religion
Works that touch on, or take on, religious themes are also well represented at this year's festival.

• One of the more compelling depictions is C. Paul Canaday's solo piece, "Word Made Flesh." In it, Canaday follows the two-year struggle of a 15-year-old born-again-Christian who must face his homosexuality and come to terms with his religious beliefs.
• In Nomi Bachar Performance Co.'s "Mary Magdalene," the emphasis is on the transformation process as well, this time Magdalene's growth from prostitute to woman to saint.
• Set up like a cross between a Southern Baptist Revival and an Amway meeting (and backed by a rock n' roll/ gospel band), "The Survival Revival" is a musical comedy that was created in Florida by Brian Rhinehart and Greg Moreno and further developed here in New York.
• While Cecil B. Hollister is preaching disaster and salvation in "The Survival Revival," the East Villagers trapped in an apartment complex waiting for their drug dealer to surface in "Rapture," must face Armageddon head on.
• Promising a story with sex, booze and bad catholics, the Cygnet Theatre Company presents "Snapshot," in which a writer remembers the defiant aunt who inspired her to escape from her implosive blue-collar family. This production, which premiered at the 2000 Toronto International Fringe Festival and ran at the 2000 London Fringe Theatre Festival, makes its New York debut.
• Chicago's Serendipity Theatre Company presents "Chordless" in which two actresses try among other things to explain Starbucks to God.

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Sex
Several productions deal with sex, sexuality and issues related to the sexes.

• "Savage Grace," an Australian contribution to the fest, follows the relationship of two very different men drawn together by sexual passion, but driven apart by professional ethics. The show features "Snag"star Nicholas Papademetriou.
• In the case of "Take; The Very Important Monkey" sex plays an important but secondary role in this dark comedy about a naive woman's life lessons upon arriving in Manhattan. Off-Broadway veteran Susan O'Connor stars.
• Sex is central to E.X. Theater's "Secret Deliriums of a Rented Mind." Presented by veterans of past Fassbinder and Goethe productions, "Secret Deliriums..." employs "furious" song, dance, dialogue and live music to tell its sexually -charged story . In it, three oversexed tenants meet in the hallway of their apartment building and embark on a journey of mutual abuse, but there own destruction is nothing compared to that issued by their mysterious landlord.
• Sex also plays a powerful part in "Life's Call," a 1905 melodrama not performed in the U.S. since 1926 that is being staged this year by Theater Et Al. Written by Arthur Schnitzler, "Life's Call" takes on contemporary social mores as Marie, stifled by the constraints of her conventional existence, surrenders to a fit of passion and experiences a personal awakening marked by murder, adultery, sexual promiscuity and suicide.
• On the lighter side, Lucky Devil Theatre Company serves up loads of drinks, drama queens and a little decapitation in "Chelsea Murder Mystery," a classic madcap whodunit about two men in peril, Nick and Alex; a a woman who secretly despises the term "fag hag" and a half-naked male gigolo.
• Meanwhile, the Actors' Lab production of "Scrape" deals with those caught up in the sex industry, namely a stripper, the lesbian obsessed with her, two hookers, and a drag queen.
• In the Australian play, "Row of Tents," a straight guy takes tips from a dyke on sure-fire seduction techniques with women, but the results are disastrous, especially when his wife leaves him to shack up with two gay men.
• "Befriending Beau" tells the heartbreaking tale of three teenagers struggling with drugs, sexual identity and parental neglect. Note: This show contains nudity, explicit drug use and sexual behavior (adults only).
• Fiona Sprott's "Often I Find That I Am Naked," travels one woman's passionate journey into the arena of contemporary social and sexual politics.

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Multimedia
Roughly 8 percent of this year's Fringe festival is comprised of shows involving multimedia to some extent.

• "Studio," conceived and performed by the three-person NEE Group from Jerusalem asks the question: How is a nude scultpure made? To illustrate the process, "Studio" presents the sculptor designing a sculpture based on the model, the model filming the sculptor at work and the composer mixing real noises of the artists at work with composed music.
• Environmental Theatre da Camara presents "The Colonel's Wife," a new play written by Mario Fratti about a woman in exile who confides her secret fantasies to the audience. The play blends the impromptu technique of Commedia dell'Arte and the shocking awareness of the Theatre of Cruelty to bring audience and performer together. The production includes film veritie by Francois Bernadi, music by Francisco Cantilo, photo-collage by Olga Golanov, and projected backdrops by James Ewan.
• The MW Theatre Company, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to "multi-medium" productions of new works, presents the restaging of its first original production, "Zoo," at this year's festival. Three characters trapped in a New York City subway car are forced to work out their grievances with themselves, each other and society-at-large after a screen appears showing surveillance footage of the most intimate moments in their lives.

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Dance
The second largest contingent of show types in the Fringe this year involve dance.

• "Absolutely Abreast (version 3.0)," Choreographed by Karen Krolak with Nicole Harris, Beth McGuire and Amelia O'Dowd, alliteratively calls itself a combination of quirky costumes and choreography that creates compelling caricatures of contemporary cosmopolitans. Say that three times
• The Eva Dean Dance Company presents "Balls, Balls, Balls" one of the few avowedly all-ages shows, a program of four dances featuring numerous balls, inventive movement, surreal subway stations and a tropical rainforest.
• "Shine Down on Us," choreographed by Joshua Bisset, features explosive intimate outrageous dancing that explores the unique thrills and fears of performance.
• Ines Arrubla, the founder of Flamenco Dance Theater, presents "Son Flamenco," an exploration of the passion, sensuality and rhythm of flamenco.

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Homage
To pay tribute to one's artistic forebearers is a noble pursuit that some of this year's festival entrants have taken up. In these works, one finds a fascinating mix of influences on today's community-at-large.

• Violence and a malevolent vision of pure theatre are Antonin Artaud's stock-in-trade, so when he visits an American nuclear family during the 1950s, somebody has to pay. An early piece by Fuller, "At Home With The Nixons" was first performed by Brazen Act Theatre Company in 1997. Brazen Acts now brings this homage to Artaud and (Grotowski) to this year's FringeNYC. Incidentally, this is the second production to draw its strength from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty.
• In Theatre Vigoda's "Hanged Man's Lover," performer Ann Frenkel inhabits the poems and songs of Polish outlaw poet Rafal Wojaczek, exploring this creative spirit's rebellion and self-destructiveness.
• Tucson, Arizona-based pyrotechnic theater troupe Flam Chen offers "Rites Ov Spring," an homage to Martha Graham, the film Microcosmos and Fellini's Satyricon.
• An homage of a sort, "School for Salomes" depicts the crush vaudeville had on Oscar Wilde's "Salome," which premiered in Paris and, soon after, spawned a circuit full of Salomes thrusting fleshy thighs at papier mache heads of John the Baptist. By 1908, a School for Salomes was opened in New York.
• The New Australian Theatre Company presents "Valentino," in which cabaret sneaks "down under" to the recesses and excesses of Hollywood in the '20s, where tango teases into fascism and creates celebrity.

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Collaborative

Pandoro Productions UK presents the world premiere of Cailin Harrison's one-act, six character contemporary drama, "Time Out." The play is the result of the collaborative efforts of an American and British team of writer, director, choreographer and actors.

What better transition than to move from "Time Out" to "Out of Time," FoolzParadize's first theatre piece, created completely through improvisation, theatre games and viewpoints work in the rehearsal process.

"The Ballad of Larry the Flyer" is a humorous and touching collage of songs, scenes and dance created by the Lexington Group ensemble cast.

From the chaotic bustle on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to tortured souls that inhabit the dark street corners of the village, "The Human Exhibit from the Big Apple Metropolis," the creation of The Cavaliere Players, attempts to capture the city at its most diverse.

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Musicals
Of course, one of the most anticipated categories in the Fringe is the one that hatched the fest's golden egg. This year's crop looks pretty strong.

A presentation of Little Lemonade Productions brings Scott Mebus' new rock musical, "Tarnish" to the Lower East Side. "Tarnish" is the story of a young girl in search of the mysterious illness that haunted her family and wrecked her childhood.

And then there is Paul Jones, Jeff Hylton and Tim Werenko's "The Elephant Man--the Musical," a campy valentine to musical theater dressed up in John Merrick's strange journey from sideshow freak to Broadway musical comedy star.

In "Midnight in Brooklyn," Susan McIntosh inhabits three characters, three genders, and three decades of music in this musical presented by the Film Kitchen.

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Revivals

• The Key Theatre Company presents John Kaufmann's play with music "Two Girls From Vermont," directed by Liesl Tommy.
• New Drama Theater on Pechersk (Ukraine) presents Anton Chekhov's "The Bear." "Never has Chekhov produced such vodka-swilling hilarity as with this Ukrainian theatre interpretation of 'The Bear,'" the company says.

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