Let's Put on a Show! Capital Fringe brings variety of theater to nation's capital

Karl Marx returns from the dead. A beatboxer with astonishing vocal dexterity raps a complex story about Jews and Palestinians. One playwright takes on the question of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, while another creates a well made play about a painting... a play that avoids most of the clichés inherent in that subject.

A young company powers through Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury and invites the audience to join in a sing-along encore of G&S favorites.

And in Christmas in Bakersfield, an African American performer goes home to meet the family of his boyfriend, and finds out why this sleepy California town is the breeding ground for the local Ku Klux Klan.

That's just a tiny selection based on one viewer's frenzied play going during the ten day mid-July marathon. The festival concluded last week after starting on July 19th with a fire breathing, horn blowing parade. The Fringe featured more than 500 individual performances involving over 200 companies in 30 venues, located in three distinct Washington neighborhoods: downtown's Penn Quarter, the 14th Street/U Street area, and H Street NE.

The Fringe is modeled on similar efforts in Edinburgh, Scotland and New York City. It's a sprint for lovers of performance art and the kind of theater that can be done on a bare stage, with minimal technical requirements, but lots of spirit and grit.

The Karl Marx show (Marx in Soho) featured actor Bob Weick (pictured above, photo by John Doyle) as the iconic philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary. Despite the fact that his German accent came and went, the concept and execution were illuminating. The one man show, performed in a tiny venue that seats 20, allows Marx to come back to life and insist that Marxism is not, in fact, dead. Written by historian Howard Zinn, the monologue makes the case that capitalism, not Marxism, is the failed solution for modern society.

While much of the show is predictable -- we'd expect Karl to tell us that uneven outcomes for rich and poor are the greatest failing of our capitalist system -- it still tickles the imagination to hear the old guy stand up for himself.

At the other end of the spectrum of soliloquies, From Tel Aviv to Ramallah: A Beatbox Journey explores the commonalities and divides between young Israelis and Palestinians. The play came about after Yuri Lane and his wife Rachel Havrelock traveled through Israel and the West Bank together in 1999. Four years later, they created a play from their experiences that Lane performs in a dizzying verbal symphony of percussion and words.

The show revolves around a day in the life of Amir, a Tel Aviv dj and delivery boy, and Khalid, a Ramallah internet café owner whose parallel lives are separated by physical and political divides. This performance filled DC's hippest venue, the café/bookstore Busboys and Poets, and the audience listened in awe at Lane's skill and participated directly in the emotional power of the experience.

Too much to talk about in this short space. Bottom line: plan a trip to Washington, D.C. next summer for the third annual Fringe Festival. It's likely to be even bigger and better.