Seeing It All Hang Out at the Fringe

As it happened, both “Dracula” and “The Waves” also turned up in a very different context: Garry Starr’s bawdy, disarming “Classic Penguins,” a one-man show that is coming to New York this month, at the intimate Studio Seaview. In Edinburgh, at the enormous Pleasance Grand, the audience filed in to find Starr—the alter ego of the Australian performer Damien Warren-Smith—seated and facing the back wall, naked but for a top hat, a huge ruffled collar, a gentleman’s tailcoat, and penguin flippers. He swivelled to face us, smoking a pipe, from which he calmly inhaled, “Masterpiece Theatre” style. Then he stuck the pipe into his asshole and, somehow, expelled smoke both from there and from his mouth. “The Aristocrats”!

The intro functioned as a jovial dare: all bets were off, for his body and for ours. A fit, middle-aged man with a twinkling, louche charisma, Starr swiftly laid out the show’s intent, which was to celebrate each of the Penguin Classics paperbacks, thereby elevating the glory of “literaturaaah.” What followed was a sort of highbrow “Jackass,” an exhilaratingly silly cavalcade of slapstick, dad jokes, and audience participation, as Starr thumped each book on a desk, its cover displayed on a screen, and then performed a goofball gag, the style of which ranged all over the map. For “Dracula,” Starr slurped down “blood”; then, with his abdomen grotesquely distended, he swapped out the book for Sartre’s “Nausea,” then pulled on a white bonnet for “The Handmaid’s Tale.” His “Wuthering Heights” featured aerial gymnastics and an air cannon. These stunts may sound crude, but—hear me out!—the group experience felt liberatory and oddly innocent, a joyful dropping of taboos that erased any easy line between smart and dumb. A lot of the show’s effectiveness had to do with viewers eager to play along. At one point, some enthusiastic geezers embraced our nude m.c., and I teared up at the moment’s intimacy; it felt like a masterly trust game, although I guess that’s true of all well-made theatre, naked or not.

Clowning—the extreme sport of comedy—is deep in the DNA of the Fringe. Still, several of the best things I saw were small, earnest acts, such as the lovely “Jitters,” a scripted two-hander, by Ellen Robertson, about a wedding-day showdown between a wannabe trophy wife (a very funny Charly Clive, all evo-psych self-justification) and her soon-to-be stepdaughter (Robertson, wryly acidic). It was a clash between millennial feminisms that could easily have curdled into polemic but instead felt fresh and surprising. My other favorite was “Lions,” a more madcap but equally heartfelt show about fathers, starring Scott R. Sheppard and Alice Yorke, the artistic directors of the gifted Philadelphia troupe Lightning Rod Special. “Our dads are dead! Thanks for coming,” they announced, as they stood before a table full of paternal detritus: a basketball, a record player. What began as an anarchic vaudeville act performed in dandyish masculinity drag (ascots, wacky mustaches) evolved, in smart, layered stages, into a bittersweet eulogy, as the performers used the props to reënact—and investigate—their fathers’ lives, down to their deepest disappointments, all while dramatizing the disorienting limbo of a family making end-of-life decisions.

I’d hoped to spot the next “Operation Mincemeat,” but instead the first musical I caught was a vapid, if impressively belted, princess tale, “Bliss,” a glittery bummer that resembled “Six,” minus the wit, or “KPop Demon Hunters,” only two notches hollower. Significantly better was “Evita Too,” a more gonzo girl-power celebration that was definitely not for kids. To be fair, Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit, the brassy duo behind Sh!t Theatre, could have booked a black box and still hooked viewers merely by reciting the surreal résumé of Isabel Perón, Juan Perón’s third wife. Instead, the pair wove incendiary themes of sex, fascism, and feminism into a clever meditation on the relationship between shaggy shows like this one and West End blockbusters such as the O.G. “Evita.” Like Garry Starr, they used every tool at hand, jumping merrily from nude roller-skating to investigative documentary, in a production that culminated with the alarming sight of a jumbo-sized Evita puppet corpse whose face bore a suspicious resemblance to Andrew Lloyd Webber.