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Matthew Pillischer talks intimately about Marx's life as the title character in Marx in Soho.

CityBeat is providing ongoing Web-based coverage of performances at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, May 12-23. Come back on a daily basis to read our reviewers' reactions to performances and other dimensions of the first annual event.

MARX IN SOHO (presented by Mad Ellen Theatre Co.) is a one-man rant about the modern world's ills, as seen through the eyes of noted 19th-century social revolutionary Karl Marx. Written by Howard Zinn and originally staged in New York's SoHo neighborhood (hence the play's title), the piece serves both as an introduction to the oft misunderstood man and to his ideologies.

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No Tomorrow? is a breath of funny, fresh air.

Karl Marx is back and he is pissed. And why wouldn't he be? The heavenly powers sent him to 21st-century Cincinnati instead of his beloved apartment in the Soho quarter of London. They plopped him down in Kaldi's, an Over-the-Rhine coffee house, where he need only look out the large front window to see homelessness and poverty, graphic and depressing evidence, he says, of a lopsided capitalistic society.

Local artist-performer Matthew Pillischer plays Marx in this production, directed by Molly Seifert, and his passion for the revolutionary and his ideas are obvious from the start. He seems genuinely unnerved when describing a walk through downtown Cincinnati, passing the poorest of the poor in Over-the-Rhine and the richest of the rich in the Ivory Towers of Procter & Gamble.

Still, the show is at its most effective in those quiet moments, when Pillischer simply pours himself a glass of Newcastle beer and talks intimately about Marx's private life -- what little he had. Those moments contrast to the spitting mad diatribes on corporate greed and unshared wealth.

While only an hour long, Marx in Soho does have a few moments where the momentum stalled irreparably. Blame that mostly on the uneven script, although Pillischer did take a few extra long pauses to regroup during the Friday night performance. Mostly though, the play succeeds with its stated goal -- to allow Marx to clear his own name after 120-years of posthumous bashing. Grade: B. (Additional performances: 5/21, 5/22) -- RODGER PILLE

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(L-R) Brian Andrews-Griffin, Aretta Baumgartner and Michael Bath deliver the spoken word Ur Sonata.

NO TOMORROW? conceived and performed by Shirley Maul (in a double-bill with Ur Sonata at Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival), feels like a 35-minute breath of funny, fresh air in the midst of a Fringe festival full of work that often takes itself very seriously. Maul is a veteran contemporary dance scenester, and her work often has a whimsical, comic bent to it: No Tomorrow? is no exception. Battling against forced choices -- either/or, black/white -- Maul, dressed in a startlingly frilly costume that's, of course black-and-white, keeps asking seemingly unanswerable questions.

Several people from the audience (planted there by Maul) come onstage with answers that are intriguing but basically non sequiturs (I especially liked the stage manager character who tells Maul, "I'm just a tech guy. I'm not into these abstract concepts.")

At several moments three men, separately hidden beneath sheets around the edge of the stage pop up to perform some demented choreography: The aging men, two of them bald and a third hirsute, wear ill-fitting formal prom dresses and dance wearily but flamboyantly in an awkward chorus line, which Maul eventually joins. She looks at them with exasperation and says, "I can't see all this," then follows with a series of comments about the Greeks and their unblinking gaze.

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(L-R) Sam Lewis and Havilah Brewster control wonderful characterizations in Between the Lines.

Maul's monologue is underscored at several points with happy, optimistic songs from musicals -- we hear "Aquarius" from Hair at one moment and the title song from Oklahoma at another -- to further comic effect. Her nonsensical whimsy begins to take on a kind of cockamamie meaning eventually. If you're looking for comic relief in the Fringe, Shirley Maul is the waitress who's serving it up. Grade: B. (Additional performance: 5/22) -- RICK PENDER

UR SONATA, presented by Dada Product (offered as the second half of a program that opens with Shirley Maul's No Tomorrow?), is best described as a spoken word piece that probably had serious roots. The program describes the work of writer Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a painter and writer who hung out with surrealist artists early in the 20th century. (If there had been Fringe Festivals back then, he surely would have been there.) Between 1920 and 1930 he developed his Ur Sonata, a vocal piece for "primitive sounds."

The piece, we're told in the program, sometimes lasts over 40 minutes, but emerging from the rapid-fire mouths of Michael Bath, Aretta Baumgartner and Brian Andrews-Griffin, it takes about half that in this incarnation. It's an intriguing piece as the three repeat various sounds and nonsense phrases -- like "key ay?" or "rack-torin-zigita" -- sometimes in unison, sometimes in sequence. The order and pacing changes, the tempos are varied, and vocal pitches, high and low, are layered on. While they're most sober-faced and dressed in concert attire with their scripts on music stands before them, all three performers (who are in fact very animated actors -- both Bath and Baumgardner have been nominated for Cincinnati Entertainment Awards for their onstage work) occasionally add in wry tone or a raised eyebrow that changes the effect of the words -- usually for comic effect.

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Abiyah professes an introductory course of spoken word, rap and Hip Hop.

The audience at CSF was mostly amused by this: The night I attended, two people started giggling in the first minute or two, and were soon unable to contain themselves. This seemed to be the intended result sought by Dada Product, who maintained their deadpan approach all the way through an about face curtain call. Grade: B+. (Additional performance: 5/22) -- RICK PENDER

BETWEEN THE LINES (presented by New Edgecliff Theatre at Sycamore Place) is a perfectly fringy concept for Cincinnati's inaugural attempt at this kind of festival. It's bold, experimental, enlightening and it requires the creative talents of its actors and directors to pull it off. This production does pull it off -- mostly.

The gist is simple: Four creative teams were given the exact same script. Of course, one could hardly call the collection of odd non-sequiturs a script. It's more like an improv exercise gone wild. Each team was given license to stage their piece however it wished -- any setting, with any kind and number of characters. Where would they go with it? Rather, where would the lines take them?

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You Don't Exist To Me demonstrates how unusual Fringe offerings can be.

The four stagings are as different as can be. A couple of kids huddled around a videogame, eating junk food. A doctor's office where a mysterious surgery is performed. A hay-strewn barn that serves as a hideout for two thugs on the lam. An older couple's living room, messy with the contents of a computer box.

The first piece, "Mystic Dreams," shows how the open-ended scene should work. Without any narrative through-line, the actors throw themselves into characterization -- in this case, a couple a nerdy videogame kids. It's a fun piece. Brisk and light.

"Anima," the second scene, is more about mood. The clipped, nonsensical lines that lead nowhere seem actually to work in this setting. Too bad the scene takes incredibly too long to play out. Its interesting payoff -- what was wrong with the patient? -- is dulled by the amount of time is takes to get there. Mood, after all, only lasts so long.

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Tara Michelle Guilfoil brings raw emotion to Time Outside My Body.

The third piece, "Lost," doesn't really care to answer the many questions it asks. A man and a woman on the run, hiding in a barn. Who are they hiding from? Why the desperate search for the gun? This piece most demonstrates the shortcomings of the open-ended script exercise. Without any plot to hang your hat on, why should the audience care about these two misfits and their plight? Clearly the actors are on board for the challenge, conveying desperation and betrayal without relying on the script to let them say it. Ultimately, the scene fizzles out.

The best and last of the bunch, "Of Mice and Men? Or RAM is Neither Goat nor Dodge," manages to intertwine wonderful characterizations, charming mood and a real sense of humor into its scene.

Two actors, under masks, portray an old married couple assembling a computer. The lines even make some sense in this scene, as the man gets more and more frustrated and the wife gets more and more sauced from her afternoon cocktail. It plays out just long enough to get the laughs but is not too short to handcuff the actors' fun.

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Sean Christopher Lewis explores a white man's role in Hip Hop culture in I Will Make You Orphans.

If Between the Lines is an experiment -- and it certainly is -- then whether it works or not is fairly irrelevant. Seeing the theatrical process play out before you in many ways is good enough. Grade: B-. (Additional performances: 5/19, 5/22) -- RODGER PILLE

BREAK/BEAT (presented at the Contemporary Arts Center) by local free-style poet Abiyah is, in the words of its creator, an introductory course in both the history of spoken word/Rap and Hip Hop music. And while it may be a cursory review at best, what it lacks in depth it makes up for in flair. Abiyah joins with beatbox artist Haiku, drummer Dishon Woody and DJ DQ to blast through a few thousand years of beat-music history in about 40 minutes.

Abiyah lays down the tracks, and her companions lay down the beat. Just as she says when she ends the show, "In the beginning there was the word. It was followed by the beat."

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(L-R) Taren Frazier, Joanna Tyler and Darek Snow review the issues of a three-way relationship in Images of a Beating Heart.

The black box concert doesn't really get into gear until Haiku walks out. His beats are a wonder to behold, especially live. The kid's got skills. DQ's accompaniment is also pretty riveting. And while there is a simple organic flavor to Woody's percussion work with Abiyah, it's pretty low-energy stuff. When all the performers take the stage at show's end for the "convergence finale," it is a fine moment of music and performance. And despite a few vocal stumbles on opening night and really low-end production value, Break/beat is generally worthwhile. Grade: B. (Additional performance: 5/22) -- RODGER PILLE

YOU DON'T EXIST TO ME, presented by Pier Group Theatre, is just the kind of show that's made me long for a Fringe Festival in Cincinnati. The 105-minute puppetry performance pushes me beyond my comfort zone as a theater critic: The three performers ­ Matt Johnson and Chris Guthrie, familiar faces from the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival, and Elizabeth Harris, who has frequented New Edgecliff Theatre productions ­ are all fine actors, but they speak not a word in the piece, which Johnson wrote and directed. Rather they manipulate puppets and projected images to a soundtrack (which does include spoken words) with interesting results.

You Don't Exist To Me does not tell a story. Rather it's an existential exploration: The first act opens in darkness with the work's title repeated over and over with varying intimations and emotion by a designer Jennifer Drake. Beyond that there are no spoken words at all, other than some humming and verbalized sounds; Drake's soundtrack also provides musical sounds to accompany the repetitive actions of a stick figure with a large round head trying out various pieces of junk (small toys, food containers, computer hardware) as possible features. This section, entitled "Acquisition, in which the Figure meets itself and the Other, and they both ward off the Googopus," seemed overlong to me, although its repetition was eventually captivating in a hypnotic manner.

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The Razzmatazz Marionettes are ingenious but only mildly interesting.

The second act, "Deconstruction, in which Meat loses his marbles and Mask does too," is slightly more narrative. The stick figure from Act One is now larger (he looks a bit like Bart Simpson) and ­ via the recorded sound track ­ he speaks (Harris wears the character's large head and a small body suit on her chest) and seeks to overcome an addiction to pop culture (which he has imbibed in excess ­ literally). He meets with a mad scientist/deviant doctor figure (amusingly handled by Johnson), and a Hip Hop Statue of Liberty assembled from trash (presented with manic intensity by Guthrie). Eventually he dwindles and diminishes back to the stick figure in the darkness that opened the piece.

The piece is inventive and visually stimulating, if a tad murky (at least to me) in terms of what we're meant to gather from it. There's a lengthy section about how we choose to use the time that's given to us (which has some odd metaphors about crucifixion), but whenever the work seems to be stretching for profundity, it pulls back with a humorous quip: After "Meat" hears the deviant doctor's hypothetical diagnosis, he says flatly, "You're really freaking me out."

Beginning and ending in darkness, it appears that You Don't Exist to Me is one of those existential nightmares many people have, from which we awake and wonder what was real and what has resulted from watching a manic Robin Williams routine before falling asleep. Regardless of whether you grasp Johnson's philosophical intentions, this work is worth seeing for its visual inventiveness, its energy and the intense sincerity of the three performers, who are frequently fully visible as they manipulate the puppets. This is a great example of how unusual Fringe offerings can truly be. Grade: A- (Additional performances: 5/18, 5/20, 5/22) -- RICK PENDER

Photo By Matt Tonseth

Matthew Pyle and Michael Monks in I Will Love You at 8 P.M. Next Wednesday.

TIME OUTSIDE MY BODY succeeds in bringing raw emotion and well-rounded perspective to a difficult subject without resorting to sensationalism. Video and live action blend and complement each other well. In fact, it's one of the few pieces I've seen so far at the Fringe Festival where the video element actually becomes an integral part of the work.

You don't need to be a feminist scholar to be familiar with the "blame the victim" mentality concerning crimes committed against women or men. This mindset quickly becomes apparent in the opening scene, a close-up of Tara's face on grainy video. A woman interrogates her from off-camera about the events of her birthday night out gone wrong. Heavy black makeup eerily shadows her eyes, making them hardly visible. It gives the impression of a loss of part of herself, of her identity as a person.

The next scene reverts to the fun and excitement Tara and her friends experienced as they prepared for a girls' night out. They enjoyed reveling in their femininity and dressing up in sexy outfits for the hot night of clubbing ahead. Feeling confident and powerful, they dance and speak of the games they'll play in their flirtations. At times, the overloud thumping techno music nearly overpowers the women's voices. In the background, a video collage showing each of the young women in their ordinary, everyday lives offers an effective contrast to the vampy, nightclub personas and escapades they discuss. It also conveys the idea that rape could happen to anyone.

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Jim Stump delivers a powerful performance in A Poster of the Cosmos.

The gritty realities of sexual assault and its aftermath follow. Video shows Tara's awful walk home after the attack, leading seamlessly into her re-appearance onstage. The range of her friends' emotions in reaction to the event seemed very real -- from guilt, anger, and sadness, to the discomfort of not knowing what to say or do.

Tara's final monologue, delivered in the nude from inside a bathtub-like cradle, was at times unsettling, yet incredibly moving. It may not be first date material, but should absolutely be seen. Grade: A- (Additional performance: 5/22) --JULIE MULLINS

In I WILL MAKE YOU ORPHANS, a one-man show by Sean Christopher Lewis, the writer performs a 55-minute monologue about a white teenager who's drawn to the world of Hip Hop. Sean Boogie is alienated from everyone around him ­ his 55-year-old blue-collar dad, his former girlfriend who's pregnant, his African-American creative writing instructor at a local community college, his fellow students who can't fathom why a white kid wants to talk and act black. One of the latter asks, "He can't even hold a pen. How's he gonna hold our attention?"

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Kekoa Keluhiokalani and David Beukema appear in Shopping and Fucking.

But Lewis, morphing easily from one character to another, does a good job of keeping us focused and clear as to who's talking and what's going on. There are moments when more pronounced distinctions might have helped: The anger of the poetry instructor at Sean's annexation of black slang seemed muddy to me, and the emotional evolution of Lisa, Sean's former girlfriend, needs to be more sharply developed. But the belligerent dad and Sean himself ring true: Perhaps they're characters more immediate to Lewis's personal experience.

The actor is an unimposing figure onstage, wearing an oversized Hilfiger long-sleeved T-shirt. (The night I watched he kept sipping from a coffee mug with a teabag string hanging from it, an odd choice for his character -- even if the actor needed to rehydrate his throat during a vocally demanding performance.) Lewis looks a bit like Woody Harrelson, and his energy and convincing presence might remind some of Harrelson's role in the serio-comic 1992 film, White Men Can't Jump. But his purpose is more profound that the cinematic tale of hustling. Sean is seeking his own identity in a world that doesn't offer him many options. He defends his fascination with Hip Hop, saying it's not that he wants to be a person with black skin: "I just think I'm black in a different way," he says.

Lewis's writing uses Hip Hop rhyming effortlessly, even when he's channeling Sean's father or the instructor, who's writes Beat-styled poetry. It works especially well with the central character. Initially Sean is a comic caricature. By the piece's conclusion, it's easy to appreciate his sincerity. "I want to be heard," he says, "That's my word!" Grade: B+ (Additional performances: 5/19, 5/21) -- RICK PENDER

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Dave Mondy delivers a wry tone of self-mockery in his confessional, This Love Train Is Unstoppable and I Am the Conductor.

IMAGES OF A BEATING HEART is co-written by Nathan Singer and Brian Robertson of the Performance Gallery in Columbia-Tusculum. This is a challenging piece that is the collision of two separate works -- "Woke up with the Collar On" and "Straight to the Temple." Images opens to a three-piece live band, Voice in the Cage, playing behind a single mattress on stage. In walks X (Singer), a jailed murderer who delivers a monologue about the boundaries of prison. Waking up with his collar on means he will be allowed to venture outside. But the security of his cell is really where he wants to be. Singer does an excellent job of presenting a deranged psychopath, incapable of venturing much into his own mind before recounting the murder that incarcerated him. He instead ponders on forgetting about taste and eating lunch and his broken radio. Dispersed into his monologue is the second piece, where two men and a woman (Darek Snow, Taren Frazier and Joanna Tyler) review the issues of a three-way relationship. Conflicting imagery and lack of depth in "Straight to the Temple" dilute Singer's performance, but challenge us to figure out what the heck is going on and how it relates to him. Grade C (Additional performances: 5/18, 5/22)-- DAN WOELLERT

RAZZAMATAZZ MARIONETTES are ingenious string puppets involved in a mildly interesting review, probably best viewed by children. The singular puppeteer presents about 20 marionettes to recorded music: Some do "lip-synch" routines to musical numbers ­ ranging from the song "I Can Do That" from A Chorus Line to several disco and Hip Hop numbers, including India.Arie's "Because I am a Queen" and mix tunes like "Shake It Baby." The marionettes are surprisingly articulated, so their movements are startlingly realistic. However, the presentation lacks any kind of pacing and eventually feels very repetitive: Each number requires the operator to step down from his platform and go to the rear of the stage for another marionette, and these pauses become tedious. Razzamatazz offer a diversion, but at 30 minutes long, that was more than enough for me. Grade: C (Additional performances: 5/22) -- RICK PENDER

BEST OF THE BEST: PERFORMANCE TIME ART SERIES. During the Fringe Festival Contemporary Dance Theatre is reprising works previously presented during its Performance Time Art series; each program offers different performers in one-time presentations. (All are presented at the Contemporary Arts Center's black box theater on the below-street level.) I saw Sarah Mann's Drug Dreams and Nancy Kangas and Duncan Campbell's Spring Forward, Fall Back on May 15.

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The cast of InterSexTions explore gender.

Mann's piece, about 20 minutes long, is a nightmarish excursion mingling "two things I'll never do: Get married or stick a needle in my arm." To which she ruefully tells us, "I'm still single." The central character is batting .500, it seems, struggling with and chasing after her heroin addiction. This is a piece about obsession and symbolism: Mann repeatedly steps in and out of the frame of a four-poster bed made of copper pipe draped with nylon mesh; it's decorated with roses, prescription bottles, needles and red balloons. She tells us about her pusher, who drives down the street giving away free drugs (Mann throws bagged candy at the audience). The piece emphasizes the tantalizing juxtaposition of her obsessions with marriage and drugs, both social decisions that make her feel trapped. The sound track accompanying Mann's piece, presented in the Contemporary Arts Center's black box theater, was so loud that it often drowned out her spoken lines. Drug Dreams was visually arresting, but it didn't hold my interest. Grade: C+

Spring Forward, Fall Back is a poetic piece about the change of seasons and the pursuit of growth. It's not literal, although many very concrete images are created by the words spoken by Kangas and Campbell, who co-created the piece. They mention geese flying overhead (and conclude by honking and flying off); they also plant flowers and vegetables. The piece also amusingly references the process of writing creatively: We hear the writers' obsession with phrases (they get repeated), such as "silver, sliver-thin cell phone." And we perceive that Kangas is struggling to write a poem (perhaps the text of this piece) that is slow in coming to her, although she describes quite literally its generic structure -- line, line, line, epiphany, next section, more lines, etc. But mostly it seems we're on an odyssey in search of inspiration -- a shopping trip to Kroger, a visit to a downtown library, and a stroll through a "piney glen." The piece is characterized in the program as a "mini-musical": Kangas picks out a few notes on a minute electronic keyboard and sings tunelessly, while Campbell strums an electrified auto-harp. Evocative and sweetly amusing, the piece -- like good poetry -- would probably take on added resonance with multiple exposures. Grade: B ­ RICK PENDER

I WILL LOVE YOU AT 8 P.M. NEXT WEDNESDAY is a brief play by Cincinnati-based writer Kevin Barry, featuring Know's artistic director, Matthew A. Pyle, and Michael Monks as two men in a disintegrating relationship. (Barry works regularly with the Know Theatre Tribe, which is also staging the world premiere of Barry's A Note on the Type, which runs through May 22. Pyle also plays a central role in that production.) The piece runs its chronology in reverse: Five scenes trace backwards from the final collapse as the two men depart from an overnight stay in a hotel to their first encounter in a locker room. It's a fascinating approach, because we see more clearly the lies that Bobby (Pyle) tells Mitch (Monks).

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BlueForms Theatre Group blends theater, spoken word and dance into cultural commentary.

These revelations require subtle acting skills, which both Pyle and Monks bring to their roles: We learn some of Bobby's secrets in the first scene, so it's intriguing to see him calculate his dodges to Mitch's questions as they plan clandestine meetings. Bobby is an uptight stockbroker who fears his attraction to men will damage his career and his personal life; Mitch, who's married, is pretty amoral and willing to do most anything for the thrill.

The reverse chronology also moves the characters from spiteful accusation back through doubt, then exploration, and to the initial exuberance of attraction. Although Barry's text doesn't delve deeply into their psyches or their inner motivations, Pyle and Monks have straight, clear lines of vision on their immediate actions. Ed Cohen has staged the piece with a steady hand that keeps it understated and all the more powerful. Even when the two are rearranging the simple scenic elements (chairs and black cubes), they eye one another, sizing up the potential for passion. It's a striking, subtle device that works well.

Grade: B+ Additional performances: 5/18 (at CSF); 5/22 (at Gabriel's Corner) -- RICK PENDER

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Tara Michelle Guilfoil (pictured) conceived Time Outside My Body with Natalie Bolan.

A POSTER OF THE COSMOS, a short monologue by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, is the second part of Know Theatre's double-bill with Kevin Barry's one-act play. This one, featuring veteran local actor Jim Stump, is a stunning revelation by a simple man who has become involved in a complicated personal relationship. Unseen police investigators are interrogating Tom (Stump), a stout man in a T-shirt and white pants (he's employed as a baker), regarding the death Johnny. The circumstances are gradually revealed, even as Tom keeps applying the brakes as he describes their relationship.

Tom brooks at being thought of as "the kind of guy who'd do that." He shoots back, "You can't sort out guys like vegetables," and proceeds to talk about his odd, maladjusted friend with whom he's had a three-year relationship. But Stump, in a memorable acting performance that encompasses rage and anger, confusion and loss, makes us believe that, no matter how unlikely it might seem, his connection with Johnny has been sincere and powerful. Wilson's words and images are beautifully chosen and wonderfully evocative: Tom talks about working with yeast, and how Johnny liked the smell of it. "Yeast is a living thing," he says. "People take on the character of their work."

If Wilson had revealed the details of Johnny's death -- and Tom's involvement -- sooner, they would not have made sense. With Cohen's direction, Stump delivers a powerful performance that makes this man's behavior not only believable, but results in a portrait of love and caring that's indelible. Grade: A- Additional performances: 5/18 (at CSF); 5/22 (at Gabriel's Corner) -- RICK PENDER

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Russell Ihrig as Derek and Phillip Webster as Justin in It Pours Out: The Lake Years.

SHOPPING AND FUCKING (Hand-Dog Theatre Company), thanks in no small part to Mark Ravenhill's in-your-face title, has been drawing sizeable audiences to the black box theater at the Contemporary Arts Center. That's too bad: While the script, which has garnered much comment in London and New York productions, must be interesting with the right actors and a strong director, this production offers neither.

The opening scene has Mark (Kekoa Keluhiokalani, who also directed the production) puking and suffering from drug withdrawal, comforted by his friends Lulu (Dana Scurlock) and Robbie (Luke Mess). It's quickly apparent that Mark and Robbie have been lovers. They're all struggling financially; Lulu gets an assignment from Brian (Mike Holmes), a drug dealer, that Robbie totally screws up. Meanwhile Mark, who claims he's trying to move beyond relationships to "transactions" (the shopping analogy is pervasive), has connected with Gary (David Beukema), a teenage prostitute.

Not one of the actors is well-suited to his or her role. Keluhiokalani tends to be frantic and comic when Mark ought to be more controlled and understated; drug-dealing Brian is supposed to be both sentimental (he obsesses over details of The Lion King) and sadistic, but Holmes handles neither emotion with conviction, which makes the dichotomy totally unconvincing. Scurlock and Mess seem to be playing at the level of a TV sitcom through their scenes, until near the 90-minute piece's conclusion when things get more serious. Beukema's character is supposed to be a fragile 16-year-old; instead he comes across as a calloused manipulator with little vulnerability.

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Lindsey Carr takes on the title character in See Kate Run.

The shallow acting makes the nudity and gay sex seem pretty gratuitous. What's more, it totally undermines the horrific scene that should be the show's shocking culmination. How, audiences ought to be asking, could these people possibly do these things? We'll need another production of this script to find out if it any of it makes sense. Grade: D. Additional performances: 5/17, 5/19 -- RICK PENDER

THIS LOVE TRAIN IS UNSTOPPABLE AND I AM THE CONDUCTOR is a one-man show by Dave Mondy, in town from Minneapolis where he works in the box office at the Jungle Theatre. His flamboyant title is an immediate tip-off to Mondy's wry tone of self-mockery. His hour-long, apparently autobiographical monologue, chronicles his sexual development in a series of narrated flashbacks during his visit to a Planned Parenthood Clinic to be tested for a sexually transmitted disease.

From his pre-adolescent fascinations (growing up in a conservative Christian home, he swiped pages from the lingerie sections of Sears catalogs) to a long-term but failed relationship, Monday takes us with casual storytelling through his journey of sexuality. There's some graphic language along the way, but Love Train is really more like listening to an amusing friend in a confessional mode. During his performance on Saturday evening, the clock bells at St. Xavier Church across Sycamore Street rang on the quarter hour; without missing a beat, he twice made humorous references to them in his narrative.

Mondy's skill is so casual you're occasionally caught off guard by writing that's more consciously (and effectively) conceived: For instance, when he's stuck in front of his girlfriend's house with a dead car battery, she sends him on his way (before her angry dad can step in) with a red stocking cap for his trip in a chill Minnesota early morning. He knows he looks silly, and he doesn't really care. It's a charming distilled image.

Mondy doesn't bother to recreate in detail the characters in his story, although he offers a few hints that help us to conjure up several scenes (especially vivid is a trek to a strip club in New Orleans with a mumbling street guy). Mostly he offers a revelatory tale of his personal evolution from feeling like an oddball outsider -- yes, it's the alienation that most teenagers feel -- to accepting himself for who he is. At the end, in a simple observation that speaks volumes, he says, "I felt just like everybody else." This one is worth seeing. Grade: A-. Additional performances: 5/17, 5/20, 5/21, 5/22 -- RICK PENDER

The four women who make up INTERSEXTIONS are part of Verbal Sweatbox Productions, the poetry branch of the Know Theatre Tribe. Their performance offers 24 original spoken-word pieces of poetry, in the tradition of the chorepoem. The poems tackle tough topics like rape, sexism, and racism -- but with such wit, humor, and openness that we are forced to engage our minds and listen. The show opens with a spiritual group piece in which each of the diverse female poets invites us to step into the Verbal Sweatbox. We are given a peek at the sacred feminine that will be shown us for the next roughly hour-and-a-half. Some poems are erotic, like Faith Robinson's "Mental Orgasm," while some are hard to hear, like Nzingha's "1943," which discusses abortion before such procedures were legal. Pieces like Embrya deShango's syncopated "13th and Vine" tackles the tough issue of violence and poverty in Over-the-Rhine and a search to identify with those people. Amanda Monyhan's witty piece, "Bus Stop Blues," makes us laugh from the gut as she recounts her experience with a male suitor on a bus. InterSEXtions is a Fringe Festival Performance not to be missed. (Additional performances: 5/21, 5/22) Grade A -- DAN WOELLERT

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is the second part of an envisioned trilogy entitled "How to Stay Human," conceived by BlueForms Theatre Group, based in Columbus. (The group presented Part One, "A Lonely Crowd: The Isolation Cycle," in Cincinnati last fall at the Performance Gallery.) While the Fringe is billing this piece as theater, it could just as easily be categorized as spoken word or dance: It combines elements of all three disciplines and, in fact, exemplifies how the forms blend and merge in contemporary performance art. The 95-minute piece is essentially an assemblage of cultural commentary, looking at the phenomena that occupy our daily lives -- lots of perspectives on television and shopping, in particular -- and how we tend to move through existence in a mindless manner.

A work like this could easily become propagandistic and tedious, but BlueForms' five performers (Tara Di Lorenzo, Acacia Duncan, Liz Fitts, Brant W. Jones and Geoffrey Martin) keep it energetic and interesting in a frenetic performance directed by Matt Slaybaugh. If anything, the pace could be slowed down a bit, although the cast's frantic chase through monologues, choral pieces, commentaries and confessions is seemingly meant to demonstrate how we become caught up in getting from here to there without paying much attention to the trip itself.

Much of The Pursuit of Happiness uses stylized movement: A section that ironically defines misconceptions of getting ahead is routinely punctuated with the actors punching their right fists into the air simultaneously and shouting "SUCCESS!" Sometimes the actors' movements are carefully choreographed, with stylized motion or counterpointed gestures; other times they step to a stand-up microphone and speak in perfectly natural voices to make confessions about (their own?) personal obsessions -- one watches Seinfeld three hours a day; another carefully tracks news about Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter novels and watches the DVDs of these works. Also interspersed are letters (addressed "Dear BlueForms") from people who talk about how they feel about their jobs.

The program offers a list of more than 50 "sources for their material ­ from Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon character Dilbert, to playwright Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America is cited -- and there are moments when the piece risks overwhelming the audience with a torrent of verbosity. But The Pursuit of Happiness has a joyous, affirmative conclusion that advises listeners to take charge of their lives and feel things more fully -- that's a meaningful advice to find happiness. I might add that watching the work of this group could be a specific component of that emotion. Grade: A. (Additional performances: 5/21) -- RICK PENDER

TIME OUTSIDE MY BODY is a locally written performance piece by Tara Guilfoil and Natalie Bolan. The multimedia collage of spoken word, film, music and dance explores Guilfoil's experience with a sexual assault and the feelings of blame and the aftermath of guilt. The piece opens with film of a female officer interviewing the distraught Sara about the attack. The belligerent off-screen officer asks Guilfoil if she usually "dresses like this" when she goes out. Her drill-sergeant tactic gradually send her down into the guilt of her eve. The close-up of Guilfoil during this ordeal allows the audience to feel intimate and empathetic.

The somberness is then broken by Guilfoil and her friends, congregating on stage for a "birthday shot" of liquor. This is followed by dance interlude and spoken word with Guilfoil and others celebrating her birthday. This portion of the piece celebrates every woman's right to feel beautiful and sexy. The energetic Hip Hop dancing, choreographed by Natalie Bolan, reveals the dancers' varying skill levels.

The live re-enactment of the birthday party is augmented by film shot in hazy night vision color, providing a removed, ethereal vantage of the event. Guilfoil, left behind at the club, meets the man who takes her home and assaults her. The assault is recreated in a sheeted, backlit space off to the side and is shown on the screen.

The film then shows her walk home after the assault, shaken and disoriented, and her breakdown as she tries to cleanse herself. This sequence uses a monologue by Guilfoil onstage as she disrobes and steps into a bathtub.

Time Outside my Body, although very dark, is a tribute to those trying to surface from an assault. It seeks to go deeper into the feelings of an assault. The filmed piece, by Roesing Ape, is well done, giving a hazy impression of the action to fill in details left ambiguous by the dance and spoken word segments. The volume and scope of the film upstage and conflict with the live action and dance throughout the piece. Grade B- (Additional performances 5/14, 5/22) -- DAN WOELLERT

IT POURS OUT: THE LAKE YEARS (Art & Drama) is a tale of teen angst that's delivered in a cryptic manner -- odd phrasing of lines and over-emphasized pronunciations of words. Karie Miller plays Becca, a fickle 17-year-old who wants more attention than Justin (Phillip Webster) is ready to give. But when she's swept away by the oddness of Derek (Russell Ihrig), who's mostly absorbed in his headphones, things get dicey. Justin has his own issues, including being haunted by a Mother Nature figure called the "Lady of the Lake" (Emily Horning), a writhing, sensual blonde babe in a bathing suit. The Lake Years feels a bit more profound than it really is, because writer Aaron Delamatre's script is a bit stilted and poetic -- not to mention caught up in some symbolism (a large dead frog) that I couldn't quite follow. But Webster is an actor worth watching as he vacillates from skepticism to anger and frustration, or as he's caught up in an adolescent sexual fantasy with the Lady. The Lake Years has some funny moments (Derek's riff on soft drinks, for example) that make the overwrought emotions a bit more palatable, and Delamatre has a good sense of structure, as the piece circles back on itself at its conclusion with Becca back on her park bench, pondering relationships. GRADE: B (Rick Pender) Additional performances: 5/14 and 5/16

SEE KATE RUN (WETCo) offers us an insight into the mind of Kate (Lindsey Carr), a twentysomething photographer who's trying to sort our her romantic relationships, feeling she must choose between an attentive but geeky guy (Chris Palazzolo) who keeps trying to propose to her and her former boyfriend (Casey Burns), affectionately known as Mr. Hot Sex, who's charming but feckless. The 60-minute piece is split between scenes in the present, including some amusing moments with Mel (Susan Wismar), Kate's friend who has to cover for her, and the past with Kate as a precocious child (Katie Miller) who watches her older self making mistakes. The scenes with Kate's mother and aunt were especially wooden, and See Kate Run seemed under-rehearsed on the Fringe's opening night. Clunky, black-out scene changes slowed the pace down to a distracting crawl. With no sense of energy, the work came across as a derivative episode of Friends with none of the spark -- the program lists 10 writers, and that's how it feels: Too many pens, not enough editing. The performance is not helped by several gratuitous moments, including a momentary flirtation with a cheesy waiter and dance break to "Superfreak" that did nothing to advance the story. GRADE: D+ (Rick Pender) Additional performances: 5/15 and 5/16