Photo By James Czar

Amy Salloway is an awkward teenager in the kick-ass funny and achingly poignant So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz.

We're in the midst of the 2006 Cincinnati Fringe Festival, a bounty of shows and performances that run through Sunday. There's something for just about everyone's artistic taste -- comedy, drama, monologues, multi-character plays, dance performances and more -- at almost a dozen venues downtown and in Over-the-Rhine. CityBeat's team of reviewers has been out watching all the shows and writing their reactions, which are posted at www.citybeat.com/fringe. We excerpt below five of the most interesting shows we'd encountered by press time; the critics' full commentaries are online.

Shows continue to open this week, so new reviews will be posted each day -- check back often. And check in with the Fringe Festival Web site to see which shows are returning Sunday for additional "Best of the Fringe" performances.

Amy Salloway belongs to a rare and crafty class of clowns: She writes comedy as deftly and as perceptively as she performs it. To see SO KISS ME ALREADY, HERSCHEL GERTZ is to wonder which to admire more: her original ideas or her warm, winning revelation of them. To see the show is also to recognize yet again how the heartiest laughter can emerge from heartfelt pain. Which is to say that Herschel Gertz is often both kick-ass funny and achingly poignant. And that's when it's most revealing and most moving.

Teenage Amy is sent off, much against her wishes, for summer camp immersion in conservative Jewish values. She painfully observes and reluctantly envies the "perfect" physicality of her Barbie-esque cabin-mates. She yearns for the sort of hot-breath attention they instantly attract from boys. But she's dismayed when she attracts the notice of Herschel Gertz, a gawky putz. Salloway's Fringe appearances finished up on June 6, but there's a good chance she might earn recognition as one of the "Best of Fringe" performers -- for the second year in a row -- and resurrect this show on Sunday. (Tom McElfresh) Grade: A+

Teresa Willis is attuned to her times -- our times -- with an insight-like perfect pitch, and she has crafted a fine stage presence to tell us about it in EENIE MEANIE. Born in 1960, she first experienced the roil of developing African-American presence in society at large as a white girl born in Kentucky. She's usually the odd one out, which is of course the best way to see what's really going on. She's the child who insists the "eenie meanie" rhyme should use "tiger" instead of "nigger" and gets cut out of the game for her trouble.

Willis is a wonderfully physical actor, changing age and attitude in a mini-second and capable of making the act of putting her hair onto rollers an interesting exercise. She is certainly not the first to explore this material, but her presentation is so fresh and her insights so acute that the audience is with her from the moment she shoots onto the stage, claiming to be 5 years old. Perhaps her most moving vignette is a segment in which she has come home and is driving her parents on "I-75 South" and a very human, deeply ingrained reluctance to accept other cultures saps her parents' long-held liberal views. They want everyone to have the rights but to be "just like us." She lectures them, as self-righteous as they are, and then later, after her father has died, understands something more of the layered difficulties of human interaction. (Jane Durrell) Grade: A

Andrew Dainoff's ALL WE CAN HANDLE is an emotional rollercoaster about David (Adam Standley), a Jazz guitarist from Los Angeles who heads to New York City to pursue a sexual urge after a brief encounter with Sally at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. Once there, he's entranced by the city, then buffeted by the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, when Sally is lost. What follows is an odyssey of emotional descent punctuated with deeply personal encounters with Jez, a spacey Jazz drummer, and John, a supercilious gay man.

Credit director Lazarow for keeping us slightly off-balance as these stories are told and Standley for clearly delineating a cast of characters who are vivid, vibrant and completely real. While all this material is wonderfully written and admirably performed, there seems to be too much of it. But it's never dull: David's story is like the arch of emotion that New York itself must have traveled -- joy, fascination, attraction, grief and recovery. When David says, "I'm a man on auto-pilot," his blank stare and his desperation for direction bring back those painful days of five years ago, and at the same time remind us that life goes on. Dainoff is a writer to be followed; Standley is an actor to be admired. All We Can Handle is a Fringe production to be seen. (Rick Pender) Grade: A-

A lot of Fringe shows are serious and take on hard, important topics. But comedy is also present, and Annie Hendy's two-person play, THE CATHOLIC GIRL'S GUIDE TO LOSING HER VIRGINITY, shines especially brightly. It's apparently based on the religious and moral values instilled in her via a Catholic education right here in Cincinnati. Hendy and fellow CCM grad David Zelina found a theater in Los Angeles for a short run in January, and the show turned into a 10-week hit. Now it's back in Cincinnati.

Lizzie (played with a practical but exasperated modern-girl air by Hendy) is approaching her 25th birthday in New York City. She was raised to be a "good girl," but now she's feeling like it's been a waste of time: no man, no love life, no prospects. Zelina plays all her potential lovers -- a body builder from Brooklyn, a self-absorbed metrosexual, a groom three weeks from his wedding in search of a fling in Vegas. Without him, Hendy's performance might be too much of the same thing, but his inventiveness as an actor coupled with Hendy's finely honed comic writing and her character's persistence keep this piece moving in just the way a good comedy requires. Lizzie says, "I want someone to crack my heart open." She seems on the verge of that happening as the story ends, but there's no doubt she's cracked a few hearts in the audience. (RP) Grade: A

On the Fringe Festival's opening night, STORIES FROM BEHIND THE WHEEL hit a few hidden potholes and detours. Directed by Michael Burnham and created by InkTank director Jeff Syroney, this dramatic piece about bus drivers and passengers is set on a live bus. Three actors (Jen Dalton, Embrya DeShango and Scott Fitzgerald) join the audience during the ride, delivering the text, stories compiled by InkTank writers. When a TANK bus arrives, passengers converse about shopping, pass gum, twirl hair, read or get in the zone, staring out windows. The audience is forced into character without even realizing it.

Near the river, someone requests a stop, and the acting begins. Here, Dalton, sitting in the front seat, begins her role as a passenger, and both DeShango and Fitzgerald board. The bus is turned off so the audience can hear. One problem: The AC is off as well, so it's damn stuffy. If the expectation is to be moving and listening, the performance actually happens at one stop. Then back. Worth seeing to hear fluid InkTank writing, to see talented local actors, to laugh and feel the ambience, but better described as a parked literary performance. So get on, but bring a fan. (C.A. MacConnell) Grade: B-