We hit up another evening at the Fringe Festival and caught some wildly entertaining shows. There are still many great shows to see and we wish we could see them all! The Fringe continues all weekend so make sure you get to a few.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’ short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” has held the imaginations of readers for more than a century. Regarded as an important milestone in feminist American literature, it addresses women’s mental and physical health in a way that was revolutionary for its times. Annie Thorold plays the protagonist of this psychological horror story and portrays her slow unravelling with great patience. A voiceover reads the story as Thorold moves across a dark stage in pools of light. Her constricting Victorian attire in the beginning gives way, piece by piece, to a flowing yellow dress that represents the yellow wallpaper that is driving her to insanity, but is also allowing her to understand her subconscious. Thorold breaks the voiceover increasingly by uttering her own lines as the play moves along. Her movements become freer, she sprawls atop a dining table and writes with chalk on the floor. Thorold’s performance is strong and strikes the right balance between sorrow, agency and horror.
The show does take some time to gain momentum. At first we thought the show was just going to be the story being fully narrated (as written) by the voiceover, with Thorold moving across the stage wordlessly, but thankfully that is not the case. It would have been better to know this earlier on as it did cause a bit of a panic for us in the beginning. Many members of the audience must have been fans of the short story and were expecting the performance to add more to their experience of reading the story. Thorold does add to this experience by physically recreating its events but we wonder if she could have taken it further by using fantastical exaggerations or even including alternate interpretations of certain details. We catch a glimpse of this towards the end and wished this freedom of interpretation had been applied to the rest of the show. On a personal level, I kept expecting to see the actual yellow wallpaper in the room. Perhaps Thorold could have put up moveable screens of it on stage to add a striking visual detail that appears on a lot of the promotional material for the show.
Thorold’s performance is the star of “The Yellow Wallpaper” but the writing requires a bit more punching up to really do it justice. Fans of the short story however will not be disappointed.
The DK Effect
Fringe darling, DK Reinemar, is back with another side-splitting show. In the DK Effect (read Dick Effect), his focus is on “relatively unskilled persons who suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.” Dicks, if you will. Reinemar plays a researcher interested in studying these overconfident people and as part of his research has put together a stand up night through which to observe his subjects closely.
The researcher is our host for the evening and provides insights on the DK effect whilst also introducing us to a host of stand up comedians who lack self awareness. We meet a comedian who specializes in bad puns, a GI who does safety presentations at elementary schools, a divorced dad who used to be a stripper (a throwback to Reinemar’s hit show “Magic Mike”), a singer songwriter comedian, a mind reading sketch artist and for the big finale, the historical figure who potentially had the unhealthiest amount of hubris, the captain of the Titanic!
Every second of Reinemar’s show is a joy. He squeezes in a one-liner in every breath. His physical comedy is next level and the jokes always land. There is audience participation that never backfires. We cannot recommend this show enough! We’re hoping it wins Pick of the Fringe, as it did in Ottawa in 2019, so that everyone can get a taste of that sweet DK Effect.
Ha Ha da Vinci
Phina Pipia plays a graduate student who accidentally comes across Leonardo da Vinci’s time machine and finds herself in the Italian Renaissance 48 hours before her thesis is due. Through a small red radio she communicates with the great artist himself who urges her to use her creativity to return to the present. The result is a whimsical dream filled with music, magic, and beauty. Pipia plays the tuba and the guitar. She performs magic tricks. Her monologues on our obsession with the past tie all the themes of the play together.
Pipia’s props are gorgeous. We have a life sized version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on a hanging bedsheet, into which she inserts her face at one point and sings opera. A lantern filled with fairy lights hangs atop the tuba and when the lights go out we are only guided by the soothing sound of the tuba and the pretty lights of the lantern. Pipia is a phenomenal singer and her songwriting is original. This show encapsulates the depths of her thoughts and creativity, and for me it was incredibly inspiring to witness. There is so much intelligence and beauty packed into this show that it’s hard to do it justice with words.
“Ha Ha da Vinci” is one of the most creative shows you will see at the Fringe this year. Go see it!
Buy your Fringe tickets here!
– Prachi Kamble