Nothing, Nic Balthazar’s piece about bullying, makes it U.S. premiere as Unity Productions’ Fringe production, presented at Know Theatre. A one-man show, the multimedia play uses video and music to move the story forward. Nothing mixes forms and does it well: one part engrossing stage drama and one part, documentary.   

Love Knots, this year’s Fringe submission from Cincinnati’s Essex Theatre Arts Studio, has good, even sweet, intentions: five 10-minute plays by Phil Paradis, each trying to untangle love. The production’s weak writing and flat, uninspired staging sours the experience of a piece that should have been frothy, warm, and kind of tingly — day-old coffee when you wanted a latte. But an obviously talented cast brings to life a few tender and endearing moments.   

There’s a rift between Joe and Hannah, the couple at the epicenter of New Edgecliff Theatre’s Fringe piece, Quake: A Closet Love Story, by Tyler Olson. Once upon a time, the two were married and in love. But recently, they’ve split.   

Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, now at Covington’s Carnegie Center in a production by the drama program at UC’s College-Conservatory of Music, has a current running through it. The production is warm, bright and slightly shocking.  

  

Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s production of Shakespeare’s tragedy has bursts of chemistry and feeling mingled with drowsy places where the language washes over your brain, and the staging feels perfunctory. Macbeth has been given a contemporary setting, but it’s hard to see what the update adds to the play.  

New Edgecliff Theatre’s contribution to the 2011 Fringe Festival, Catie O’Keefe’s Darker, has an enticing ambiance (at Know Theatre). The sparse set features a number of bare light bulbs that at times are blindingly bright and at others pulsing or dim. The effect is garish and mesmerizing, appropriate for a play with themes like anger, unrequited love and lost memory.  

Serenity Fisher, creator of Sophie’s Dream, the 2010 Audience Pick of the Fringe, has again brought her hyper-personal and very sincere brand creativity to a Fringe stage with Opal Opus: Journey to Alakazoo. (It’s being presented at the “Hanke 2” venue, 1128 Main St.)  

Northern Kentucky University’s Y.E.S Festival is showcasing three new and very different plays through April 17: Karla Jennings’ Monstrous Beauty; Jacqueline T. Lynch’s One Good Turn; and Kelly Kingston Strayer’s Marfa, Texas. A new script is an exciting thing to see, and the young actors all bring a refreshing earnestness to their work that is engaging in itself.   

This simple, steady production is a very successful piece of theatrical storytelling. Brought to life by a highly committed group of actors and an inventive design team, all involved left a fair amount of elbow grease on the floor of the Falcon’s non-traditional and unapologetic space. Jared D. Doren’s creative direction and design made excellent use of the small stage, easily guiding the audience’s imagination from seedy fairground to crowded train station to homey hospital quarters.