Welcome to Yuba City. At an isolated edge of the empty desert, in a nowhere town where nothing happens, don't blink. You'll miss too much.

Like the cowpokes who walk into the town diner - Yuba City's main and only attraction - and ease onto counter seats the same way they nestle into saddles. Like the guy who tells you about the winding roads out there, then explains that he means they are roads that wind. Moreover, they turn different ways.

And how about the lovers who fight all the way from their old dead car, abandoned outside the place, to their diner seats, then out again? Or the local guru who cannot stop giving, either his business card or good spirit? Or the guy who straps metal devices to his head, the better to hear the voices inside? And don't forget customers who break into song, eat in orchestral unison, and stress over the transformation of butter they smear on waffles: Alas, it will never be solid again.

Pig Iron Theatre Company's elaborate world premiere at the Live Arts/Philly Fringe festival is not just a hoot, it's a sort of happening - an elaborate cartoon bulging with scenes that weave subtly to form a time and place rather than a plot, with a company of veteran Pig Iron actors so fleet and kinetic you'd think they could only have been drawn and shown at 24 frames per second.

Welcome to Yuba City has a script of dazzling dissonance by Deborah Stein, in which harmony and discord challenge each other throughout, punctuated by Michael Friedman's songs, and studded with Maiko Matsushima's mirage costumes. It has elaborate fight and dance choreography (Christina Zani) and an amusing, expansive set - inside the diner and outside in the desert (Mimi Lien).

But mostly, it has the ability to transport you, whole hog, to a make-believe time and place that has just enough shreds of reality to balance its thick strands of absurdity - what director Quinn Bauriedel calls "the thin membrane between truth and fiction." The truth is, Welcome to Yuba City spurred me to identify fully with the myth of the American West that makes this fiction possible. (A side note: Two weeks ago, as Bauriedel was creating this fake bizarre world, his second child, another son, came into the real bizarre world. Thin membrane, indeed.)

The cast members - Hinako Arao, Charlotte Ford, Sarah Sanford, Geoff Sobelle, James Sugg, Alex Torra, and Dito Van Reigersberg - are as impressive in multiple portrayals as they are in snap-snap costume changes. The actors roam the desert as one character, then pop up at the diner counter in a new costume as another, sometimes within seconds. The entire Western is stamped with Pig Iron's best branding: It's high-concept, bracingly theatrical and altogether seamless. Pig Iron's crew doesn't win the West. They fully appropriate it.

   - Howard Shapiro

$25 and $30. 8 p.m. tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday; 9 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday; 8 p.m. next Tuesday and Sept. 16-17; and 9 p.m. Sept. 18-19, at the Festival Theater at the Hub, the southwest corner of 5th Street and Fairmount Avenue.

Microworld(s) Part #1. Thaddeus Phillips and his Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental are presenting not just a new work but a new festival within the Fringe, called "Off the Grid," all powered fully by renewable energy.

Microworld(s) is the new work - lit by foot-pump generators and solar panels, with a set consisting of a rectangular capsule built from recycled stuff. It also employs an oversized rubber duckie, storm-swept off a cargo ship 17 years ago in the Pacific along with 29,999 others - many still bobbing aimlessly around the planet. This particular duckie is now a character in the show, surely the most unusual acting discovery in modern theater.

The other "Off the Grid" events are the charming Fringe magic card show Digital Effects (solar panel-powered) and, outside the Fringe umbrella, a forthcoming work by Miro Dance Theater (all bike-generated energy) and a band concert by a group called the Mural & the Mint (solar, bike, and foot pedals). Soy-bean candlelight also figures somewhere in this.

Microworld(s), conceived and performed by Phillips and staged by Lucidity's co-artistic director, Tatiana Mallarino, is the first of a two-part play; Phillips will perform the other half in February. It concerns a Serbian scientist who lives in Tokyo's famous Nakagin Capsule Tower - the 1972 building made entirely of prefabricated "capsule" living spaces that jut from girders to which they're attached.

The outdated capsules were meant to be replaceable, one by one. But the residents have asked for a whole new building and the tower is to be demolished within a day. The only tenant left is the scientist, Milo, who with his duckie capsule-mate refuses to go. (In real life, the run-down capsules are slated for demolition, stalled in a Tokyo controversy.)

Phillips, always an inventive story-maker, creates an outsider character who lives by habit. For a set, Phillips uses his rendition of a capsule apartment, a bit tighter than a shower stall in size. He moves it around the stage scene-by-scene, giving the audience different perspectives.

But all that dragging eventually drags down the show, and lays bare a paradox: Phillips may be on the move, but the plot has little action. And its resolution at the end comes so quickly, it's confusing - I can't explain it, even if I wanted to give away the ending, which I wouldn't. Maybe when he picks up Part 2, Phillips will provide a clear recap.

   - Howard Shapiro

$15. 9 p.m. today, tomorrow, Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 9 p.m. Sunday and next Tuesday through Sept. 19, at the Painted Bride, 230 Vine St.

Call Mr. Robeson. The talented Tayo Aluko was born in Nigeria, lives in England, is an architect and concert-hall singer - and here at the Fringe, he channels Paul Robeson. His fine evocation of one of America's great talents and most controversial social activists is backed by Philadelphia musician Jay Fluellen, on keyboards.

Aluko's nicely paced tour through the highlights and lowest points of Robeson's career and life salutes the concept of walking the walk. While his rich baritone doesn't quite have Robeson's range, Aluko does honor to Robeson the performer in renditions of "Ol' Man River" and other songs, and to Robeson the intellectual in the no-nonsense way Aluko plays the actor/singer.

This particular rendition of his show has added meaning here, because Aluko performs at the Community Education Center in West Philadelphia, the same neighborhood where Robeson lived out his last decade, largely away from the limelight, and died in 1976.

   - Howard Shapiro

$15. 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 3 p.m. Sunday at Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Ave.

The Bros. Flanagan. The Bros. Flanagan is about two older brothers (H. Michael Walls and Michael Toner, who look uncannily like brothers) who run an Irish pub near 13th and Chestnut Streets. Where better to stage the play than at Fergie's Pub at 13th & Sansom? The audience sits at tables and watches the action at the bar.

We learn that a serial murderer has been terrorizing Center City for months, and "the killings are killing the business." The bar is empty; the brothers bicker, exchanging platitudes and exposition, until in walks Martin (Jerry Rudasill), a cop desperate to catch the criminal and win his promotion. And then in walks Harry (Chris Fluck), an obnoxious, threatening braggart.

Of course, we want to know whodunit, but more important is that we understand why. This play, by Bill Rolleri, is short on motive and long on repetitious and tedious dialogue. John Bellomo, who directs, has solved the problem of stage violence in close quarters, but hasn't solved basic puzzlements: We wonder, for instance, why only the younger brother has an Irish accent. In Act Two (one too many), he says, "It's for the ambience," briefly dropping the brogue, but then he goes right back to talking with an accent, even though there's nobody there but his brother.

The play's ultimate revelation makes no sense whatsoever.

   - Toby Zinman

$20. 7 p.m. tomorrow; 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday; 7 p.m. next Tuesday; and 6 p.m. Sept. 19, at Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom St.

Hermitage. There's a lot of detritus to sift through in Frederick Andersen's Hermitage: The Strange Story of the Ghost Men of Harlem. Based on the true story of the Collyer Brothers, hoarders Homer and Langley, their tale is very much like a male, Harlem-based version of Grey Gardens. In its day, it might have even been more notorious. The brothers were found dead in their Fifth Avenue home in 1947. Langley had been crushed beneath a pile of books and newspapers by a booby trap of his own devising; Homer, 10 feet away, crippled, blind, and completely dependent on his brother, slowly starved to death. The story has inspired other plays and E.L. Doctorow's latest novel, Homer & Langley.

Strangely, Andersen's script dials down the story's natural drama, to create a remarkably mannered portrait of a family whose eccentricities somehow gradually, inexorably, got the better of them. Andersen's direction is a bit stiff, and his scenes sometimes plod (also, instead of using a bare stage, a good set designer could do wonders to intensify the men's creeping isolation and live burial beneath newspaper tunnels). But his affection and empathy for his subjects, as well as the case's incredible facts - for example, their mother's coffin had to be taken out through a parlor window because the house was so jam-packed no one could open the front door - keep it interesting.

   - Wendy Rosenfield

$15. 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, at Plays and Players Theatre, Third Floor, 1714 Delancey Place.

Everyman So look, here's the thing about the Fringe Festival: There's some good stuff, some bad stuff, some exciting and some boring. Then there's your basic Fringe-y experience. Some kid has a big idea - say, staging Everyman in a church - makes it sound good on paper, and suddenly, here you are, watching a trio of earnest young women in tank tops and jeans writhe around on the floor and screech like demons while a young man - also in a tank top - perches atop the church's pews and yells into a microphone for 20 minutes. Then you follow a flutist into another room to watch some more writhing and screeching.

It's all good. After all, it's not as if Everyman, a 15th-century morality play, is begging for nuance or anything. Hooray for Justin Poole of the Cross Cultural Theatre Initiative for turning his doctoral dissertation into this tour of the First Unitarian Church's sanctuaries and gardens, and using it as an excuse to exercise his inner Iron Maiden as Death. Elliot Simko also appears committed to his role as the titular man. And hey, maybe if you're earnest too, or friends with the cast, or haven't had your basic Fringe-y experience yet, well, here's your chance.

   - Wendy Rosenfield

$15. 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Sunday at First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St.