AKIRA SUWA / Staff Photographer
Above, Delante Keys and Alex Bechtel (right) interact with multiple video screens during a rehearsal for "Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time," which brings to life characters from New Paradise Laboratories who have been on Facebook. At near left, EgoPo offers "Company," a version of Samuel Beckett's short story of the same name. It's a typically Beckettian old man's meditationon the way we enter alone, leave alone, and in between have encounters that we may or maynot get much out of. At far left,the Hear Again Radio Projectbrings back to life the pleasuresof the clothes, makeup, andhairdos of the '40s.
Twists on Facebook, old radio, reality TV . . .
Company/Fatebook. Here's an ideal Live Arts/Fringe combo platter: EgoPo's Company paired with New Paradise Laboratories' Fatebook. Both are great examples of nontraditional theater, served up as highly individualized experiences in a group setting. The shows complement each other, even while offering opposing views of human interdependence and emotional connection. And, yes, they're fun, too.
Company, based on Samuel Beckett's short story of the same name, is a typically Beckettian old man's meditation on the way we enter alone, leave alone, and in between have encounters that make our stay bearable, unbearable, or baffling. In EgoPo's version, we in the audience were each given a guiding "angel" who led us - barefoot, blindfolded - to the floor, where a pillow awaited. Our angels gently guided us through story-related movements, none of them weird or intrusive. (Nevertheless, wear clothes suited to bending and kneeling.)
Sound designer Chris Colucci places a number of evocative pieces along the story's peaks, valleys, and plains, including some by Philip Glass, who once scored a Mabou Mines production of Company. Though I doubt Beckett would have approved of angels (and probably would have suggested that something awful be done to them), director Lane Savadove keeps the audience/angel interaction to a minimum, and the story's sense of isolation ultimately prevails.
Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time is New Paradise Laboratories' long-awaited transition from Facebook to life. For those who've followed its characters and interacted with them online for the last few months, it can be slightly jarring to see them lined up before you, breathing, sweating, and smiling.
Those who haven't followed online needn't worry; the only thing you'll miss is the odd familiarity of seeing Facebook "friends" in person and realizing these total strangers know all about your life, too, or at least all you've been willing to reveal in your profile, which, for many Facebookers, is a whole lot.
Fatebook plays out in choose-your-own-adventure style. Follow one character through a circuit assisted by strategically placed video screens, until another sort of guiding angel - an all-seeing blond girl - broadcasts via Webcam to start the process over again. Follow a different character each time and you'll tease out the elements of a murder mystery.
I'm not sure why so many shows about the Internet rely on this most traditional sleuthing device, and I'm not sure it entirely works for director Whit MacLaughlin's purposes. Still, if NPL's goal is to examine the kind of interactive voyeurism enabled by Facebook and other social-media sites, well, then, fair enough. We are in a relationship with people we barely know - if we know them at all - and it's complicated.
- Wendy Rosenfield
"Company." $15. 3, 5, and 7 p.m. today, Saturday, next Sunday, and Sept. 19, 20, and 26, and 7 and 9 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Sept. 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, and 25. The Studio at Filmtech, 2019 S. Juniper St.The Gonzales Cantata. The real-life defense of deposed U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales so ineptly attempted to manipulate reality that you wonder if there's any point to dramatizing it with the surreal dimension afforded by the 18th-century-style cantata. Composer Melissa Dunphy makes an emphatic case for doing so. Her Gonzales Cantata - more PDQ Bach than Nixon in China - uses Handel's formality and symmetry as a starting point, humorously colliding with Gonzales' anything-but-symmetrical train of thought, quoted from the 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.
"Fatebook." $25-$30 (students $15). 8 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sept. 15-17 and 8 and 10:30 p.m. Friday and Sept. 18. 919 N. Fifth St.
Just as Handel arias repeat text over and over, Dunphy hits a high comic pitch in the Gonzales aria "I Don't Recall" - uttered 72 times during the hearings and repeated in the aria just as often, alongside a countdown on the supertitle screen.
Dunphy refracts Gonzales even further by casting women in male roles, in keeping with Handel's practice of casting male characters with treble voices (castratos, etc.). How, then, could you tell who was singing the role of Arlen Specter? The capable 20-member cast, with the excellent Mary Thorne as Gonzales, wore pageant-ready evening gowns and tiaras, plus sashes bearing the names of their characters.
Dressing the music like Handel, however, sets up an expectation of depth. Though Dunphy's fluent, well-judged music had underlying dissonances in the nine-piece chamber orchestra she conducted (with Coplandesque harmonies when characters were being folksy), the satire was confined to the surface events with somewhat smug humor. That significantly limited the piece's scope in exposing this sorry, embarrassing chapter of American justice.
- David Patrick Stearns
$20. 2 p.m. today. The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.Hear Again Radio Project. Aspire Arts, a young company with an eye and ear for the old, brings back to life the pleasures of the clothes, makeup, and hairdos of the '40s - a great look, especially on Aspire Arts' executive director, Jennifer MacMillan, and on David Sanger, he of the smarmy mustache and noirish voice. They are ably abetted by Ryan Walter, Jill Lawrence, Tom Saporito, and the excellent Lauren A. Basler.
The stories vary from show to show, and the ones I saw were two murder mysteries, "Broadway Is My Beat" and "Suspense," with dialogue like: "You're kidding." "If I were kidding, you'd be laughing." These plots are punctuated by little dramas that are commercials for deodorant or soap.
The stories seem wonderfully naive to anyone whose forensic skills have been honed by Law and Order, but the very simplicity of the crimes, the straightforwardness of the motives, and the general speed of solution are what make them so engaging. Visible radio doesn't have the same appeal as real radio drama, whose listeners have to imagine all the action. But it gives us a taste of a lost art form, of a world long gone.
So that's it, Dollface. It's a good show, and it's on only one more day.
Entertainment Videos
today's 
