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Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Review: Water Bears in Space

By Wendy Rosenfield

PuppeTyranny’s Water Bears in Space, written and directed by Candra Kennedy (writer of the 2009 Fringe Fest hit Rails), may not be the strangest Fringe show I’ve ever seen, but it at least makes the top three. WBIS is based loosely (very loosely) on the 2008 TARDIS experiment, which asked, quite reasonably, “Why should we send dry aquatic invertebrates into space?” 

Kennedy takes that question a few steps farther, asking “What if a trio of tardigrade--or water bear, or moss piglet--siblings set out on a quest to find their lost pet amoeba, and as part of a mad scientist’s revenge plot, they ended up on a space shuttle with a more carnivorous variety of tardigrade, who also happens to have anger issues and some gender confusion?” What if, indeed.

If you’ve let your subscription to Scientific American lapse, tardigrades are microscopic organisms that live on moss, and can survive extreme dessication and fluctuations in temperature. They were guests on the shuttle Endeavor’s final flight, and returned unharmed, but what really happened out there, you know? Assisted by the four-piece live band Upholstery, a no-hold-barred Bette Davis-inspired performance by Kate Black-Regan as unhinged, unthumbed Dr. Felicia Hyde, and a team of seriously committed puppeteers who wiggle those eight-legged dryer vent hose-looking critters so charmingly we forget they’re probably made out of dryer vent hose, we learn the whole, horrible truth, and ultimately, a bit about ourselves. I swear.

Could the show lose about fifteen minutes and survive? Sure. But then they wouldn’t give out “Moss Piglet Rum Punch” at intermission, and you might also lose the bacteria chorus and human-sized thumb dance. Some risks are just too great, even in the name of science, and especially in the name of weird science. 

$10. Sept. 12, 14, 15, 16, 7 p.m. Circle of Hope, 1125 S. Broad St.
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About Philly Stage
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.


Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.


Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.

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