Functional Shoes from New York City returns to Cincy Fringe for a second year with an intriguing, if cryptic, show at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Last year they earned a Producer’s Pick of the Fringe for the intriguing Romeo + Juliet + Anybody’s, a post-modern take on a very minor character from the musical West Side Story. This time around, as the title implies, the 60-minute performance is three-part performance about more women who struggle to break out of minor roles.
In Share How You Feel, Marlena Mack is Becky, a beleaguered customer service tech at her home office in Mishiwaka, Indiana, futilely hoping for feedback from Ramona, apparently the only customer to have ordered a “Green Dinosaur Plastic Novelty Watering Can.” Becky repeatedly emails queries, but there’s never a response. She is joined by intrusive fragments of her work environment — a carton (Maribel Martinez) and a roll of bubble wrap (Zak Houston), who sing and dance and open a large box containing what might be a manic green “plastic novelty” (played by Genevieve Simon, who was Anybody’s a year ago and who conceived and wrote Delivery). Mack is a fine singer; she was in Anybody’s in 2017, and she and Houston composed Delivery’s musical numbers.
In Why Do You Have So Many Letters? a mouthy five-year-old named Benny (Simon) peppers his neighbor (Martinez) with random questions that might be about loss — there’s a missing yellow Frisbee, and his parents appear to be absent, if not missing. Houston plays a mischief-making ceramic goose. Martinez’s character is trying to mail wedding invitations, but whether they will really reach anyone seems dubious.
In Everyone Forgets That It Was Raining, Martinez plays Sybil, a 16-year-old in the era immediately after the America Revolution. She tells of riding a horse to alert citizens of Boston that the British were coming — but her heroic deed has been lost in the face of rain and other obstacles, especially an obnoxiously poetic Paul Revere (Simon) and a boozy, hypercritical woman (Houston, decked out in a bright pink dress and rhinestone bling with a carton tethered to her ankle). Mack returns as a feathery pink pony for Sybil to ride.
The three pieces are miscellaneously threaded together by several elements — cardboard cartons, horses, plastic toys, oddball musical numbers and zany, off-kilter performances. But I walked out asking myself what an audience is meant to take away from this show. These are skilled actors and musicians, and their creativity is undeniable. I wish I had been able to glean a sharper message from their performance. Their Delivery didn’t deliver for me.
The Cincinnati Fringe Festival runs through June 10. Find showtimes, tickets and more info here.
