At 100 minutes, 'Free at Last/Land of Confusion/The Good, The Bad and The Evil: Angels vs. Demons' is at least 60 repetitive, mind-numbing, ear-assaulting minutes too long. It seeks to weld dance, poetry, music, sound and images together into salient social commentary.  

CCM professor of drama k. Jenny Jones and a group of students have created their own modern-day Aesop's fable as a Fringe entertainment and an amusing morality lesson. Much of their production at Know Theatre is exercises in actorly invention, and most of the 45 minutes are very entertaining.  

The Cincy Fringe Festival soon kicks off its sixth annual celebration of offbeat theater and other art forms. Not every city has a Fringe Festival, and occasionally people ask why we have one. The quick response is similar to the one sometimes offered as to why a city needs an alternative newsweekly like CityBeat: A conservative, buttoned-down place needs events and media that shake things up, that give us a new perspective on things.  

You need to strap on a backpack with some snacks and a water bottle and head to Over-the-Rhine for the sixth annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Fringe veterans know that the best way to enjoy this 12-day celebration of things theatrical and artistic is to come back again and again and see as much as possible.  

Some people use work to escape the challenges of their daily grind, but Ed Hamell doesn't have that option. His job as an itinerant guerilla Folksinger entails encapsulating the planet's social, cultural, political and personal ills into bitter musical pills which he jams into his listeners' ears with a black Gibson acoustic.  

In 'Travel,' Jeremy Millsaps' feet never touch the ground. "I just focus on what's in my hand," whether it's a hoop, trapeze or length of silk (fabric burns, not falls, are his chief occupational hazard).  

A mother (Amy Warner) and daughter (Karen Wissel) meet on a Mediterranean cliff and struggle to connect. "The daughter won't speak to the mother. She dances," Warner explains, which means that CCM choreographer Judith Mikita had to create half the play's poetic "dialogue" from scratch.  

What's one day you'll never forget? A person who changed everything? A color you'll carry forever? Cincinnati-based White Beard Productions blends those thoughts via interviews and fiction, text and movement, theater and visual art.  

In this Native American fable retold by Gunstwork Puppet Mask Theatre of Boulder, Colo., four Abenaki tribesmen journey to the island of the great Gluskabe, who grants one wish to each. "It has to do with human desire," says Michael Gunst, the show's creator and solo performer. "We can all relate to that."  

It's a bummer growing up. "We get to an age where we think we have to become adults and put the toys away," says Karim Muasher of Giant Bird, an internationally touring three-man troupe whose members ignored that impulse.