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.
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 6, 2018.
