Fringe 2014

Our previews of 15 must-see Fringe shows

"100% Philadelphia"

"Deep Blue Sleep"

"99 Breakups"

Sept. 5-21 Box office: 140 N. Columbus Blvd. (at Race Street), 215-413-1318. For more info, tickets and showtimes, visit fringearts.com.

Still not enough? We'll be marathon-reviewing most of the shows on this year's lineup over the next few weeks. Check out the blog at citypaper.net/nakedcity for the latest Fringe reviews.

Antigone Sr.
Have you guys seen that “Voguing Train” video of the guys voguing on the Broad Street Line? Can we just talk about that for a second? OK, fine. Second over. Antigone Sr. is an all-male, drag interpretation of the Greek drama that alludes to New York’s postmodern dance scene of the 1960s and Harlem’s voguing scene of the 1980s. Antigone Sr. has been performed at New York Live Arts and its tagline is “Antigone is in the house, bitch,” so it’s probably going to be great. But seriously, that video. How did they do that? Sept. 12-13, $15-$29, FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Blvd. —Julie Zeglen

99 Breakups
No one does site-specific theater like Pig Iron. Last summer’s restaged hit Pay Up! — a trippy, buy-your-own-adventure experience — is followed by a journey through one of life’s inevitable rites of passage, the breakup. A cast of 22, including Sarah Sanford, Corinna Burns and Scott Sheppard, share nearly 100 intimate moments in a very public setting: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Director and Pig Iron co-founder Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel chose a museum because “we behave in a particular way … everything is hushed.” He says he hopes that the audience can’t help but place themselves in the action, “almost as fellow participants as well as viewers” — and why not? Breakups: we’ve all been there. Sept. 4-16, $29, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St. —Mark Cofta

The Adults
Fringe darling New Paradise Laboratories has been around long enough that this new show mixes members of its original ensemble with a next generation. Rather than the cosmic themes of 2012’s afterlife adventures 27 or The Fab 4 Reach the Pearly Gates (2000), The Adults introduces eight characters in two families behaving badly while on vacation. Director Whit MacLaughlin cites influences ranging from Russian playwright Anton Chekhov to American visual artist Eric Fischl, with experimental music by Bhob Rainey, all framing NPL’s signature abstract choreography and emotional insight. Sept. 3-14, $29, Painted Bride Arts Center, 230 Vine St. —Mark Cofta

Morir Sonyando
“You spelled it wrong!” says Gabriela Sanchez, founder of Power Street Theatre, of the title of this show. “That’s what our families say,” she says with a laugh. Morir Sonyando, written by Power Street’s Erlina Ortiz, “should have an ñ, but that was a way to make it ours, a little bit of Spanglish.” Spell it either way, as there are many interpretations: “Die dreaming” is what the dictionary says. As far as this Fringe work: The protagonist is a young, striving Latina of deliberately vague nationality. She’s a dreamer and an Ivy Leaguer, with a mama about to be released from prison. Power Street exists to provide work for minorities in theater, and with Morir, it shows how much we all have in common. Sept. 5-13, $10, Taller Puertorriqueño, 2557 N. Fifth St. —Mary Armstrong

Fando y Lis
It’s become hip this year to familiarize oneself (or pretend to be familiar) with the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which should mean in a just world — yeah right — one would also stumble onto the work of the legendary Fernando Arrabal, modernist master, visionary prankster, pals with the likes of  Tzara and Breton, and co-equal with the likes of Beckett. Jodorowsky’s first feature was an adaptation of Arrabal’s Fando y Lis (caused a riot, they say), a play in which a man carries/drags his crippled girlfriend across a ruined landscape that is a fantasia of sadism and absurdity where the transcendence of love is a bad joke, the body a curse and progress a mirage. Sept. 20-22, $10, Shubin Theatre, 407 Bainbridge St. —Dotun Akintoye

Safe Space
Set inside a house in post-apocalyptic Philadelphia, Safe Space, if it’s shallow, will at least give you the experience of being inside an episode of  Doomsday Preppers. But if it’s funny (I mean both frivolous and deadly serious) and urgent (I mean both crackpot and suffused with genuine foreboding about the ecological doom we skirt) then it may tell us something about why in a land of plenty, we can’t stop fantasizing about the end of the world. May have something to do with our unease about all that plenty. Sept. 10-19, $15, Doug’s House, 19th and Latona streets. —Dotun Akintoye

“‘…the rags of time’: J. Robert Oppenheimer”
There is a 53-second black-and-white video of J. Robert Oppenheimer on YouTube describing his reaction to the Trinity detonation. His face gaunt, eyes haunted, he utters perhaps the strangest phrase to enter the American lexicon, a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is who A.S. Ruch’s one-man play imagines, a luminary in the twilight of his life, outcast by McCarthyism, bearing the unfathomable weight of his atomic legacy. Sept. 5-14, $10-$12, Stage One, 101 Plush Mill Rd., Wallingford, Pa. —Dotun Akintoye

What Good Has Come Out of Camden?
The soft-spoken Robert ‘Rocky’ Wilson, a poet, performer and the puppet laureate of Camden, returns to Fringe after two years with What Good Has Come Out of Camden? It’s a performance he wrote, directed and most impressively, survived. Wilson grew up in Haddonfield, but moved to Camden in 1975. He explores his own racism throughout the show as appliances are thieved and edifices torched. “Some people just pay their toll and never bother to look,” said Wilson. “I hope this performance changes their mind.” Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m., $20, IDEA Performing Arts Center, 1 Harbor Blvd., Camden, N.J. —SJ Punderson

# (hashtag)
First things first: For those of us who haven’t looked at the Inter-net in eight years, we are pronouncing the title of this play as “hashtag,” not “pound sign.” King of Prussia’s ETC Theater is a little mum on the details, but know this: About a third of all written language online is now encoded and taggable, equal parts trend-ing and trendy, thanks to this little char-acter. Maybe we don’t stop to think how much trending topics, hashtags and tweets have affected our actual, non-elec-tric lives. # aims the microscope on what’s behind it all. Sept. 5-12, $10-$15, Shubin Theatre, 407 Bainbridge St. —Marc Snitzer

100% Philadelphia
A German artist collective teaching us about Philadelphia? Sounds strange, but set aside your jingoism for a second. It works like this: A hundred non-thespian Philadelphians, representing a statistically proportional cross section of the city’s demographic profile, collectively tell the story of Philadelphia that pie charts and political posturing inevitably miss. Will they get your story right? Sept. 19-21, pay what you wish starting at $1, Lew Klein Hall, Temple Performing Arts Center, 1837 N. Broad St. —Sameer Rao

The Body Lautrec
Real life couple Aaron Cromie and Mary Tuomanen have been touting their mix of physical and puppet theater exploration since initial previews of The Body Lautrec were held at the Mütter Museum in 2013. Makes sense. This look at art, magic, medicine, clowning and exhibitionism sounds like a Mütter exhibition. Vertically challenged French painter Toulouse-Lautrec was often a medical subject — of scorn and amazement — whose view of the grotesque was intertwined with his ideal of beauty. Sept. 12-21, $20-$25, Caplan Studio Theatre, University of the Arts, 211 S. Broad St. —A.D. Amorosi

The Four Seasons Restaurant
Romeo Castellucci’s Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Company leaps from subjects such as the aged, the infirm and Jesus’ sadness to an artist’s rights of refusal at a time when fiduciary gains rule the roost in this opulent but loud-ass production. Based on the 1958 event where painter Mark Rothko withdrew several large scale works originally meant for a Manhattan hotel’s décor and placed them in storage, Castellucci pokes fun at the bourgeois, the materialistic and the artistic classes. Oh, and women cut off their tongues. Sept. 11-13, $15-$39, 23rd Street Armory, 22 S. 23rd St. —A.D. Amorosi

Philly Song Shuffle
For those who need a crash course about Philadelphia’s robust folk music world , the boundary-pushing Xtreme Folk Scene’s Philly Song Shuffle was made for you. Nearly 55 artists take the WCL main stage for “four-minute sets, four-second set changes … and a Philly-sized dose of complete mayhem.” If that doesn’t entice you, then a grade-A lineup of scene stalwarts pushing their rigorous professionalism to its time-delineated extremes should. Never has folk been so, dare we say, punk rock? Sept. 10, $26, World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St. —Sameer Rao

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
What’s fascinating about White Rabbit, Red Rabbit isn’t so much that it’s essentially a one-man show performed by a rotating crew of actors, including David Morse on opening night. It’s playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s phantom hands puppeteering the entire performance from Tehran, Iran, where he is legally forbidden from leaving his country for refusing military service. Soleimanpour’s play is, while not directly a work of protest, a response to his experience with the Iranian government, but also serves as an exercise in artistic control. Yes, a new actor performs Soleimanpour’s script each night, but, as per his instructions, this is the actor’s first and last time they will read from White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. Sept. 6-21, $15-$29, FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Blvd. —Marc Snitzer

Deep Blue Sleep
Dreams. It’s common to have strange ones about the sea, where everything is washed away in a slow moving haze. (Google tells us that the sea in dreams represents anything from “the unlimited power of intuition” to “you are currently thinking about sex,” so …) Deep Blue Sleep is here for enigmatic nautical dreamers far and wide. Performed by the Found Theater Company, this experimental performance takes the audience on a dream journey of two sleeping characters from the vantage point of their bed. The stories and legends are tangled together like seaweed, to create a wondrous look at the waves inside our heads. Sept. 6-20, $10-$15, Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. —Cynthia Schemmer