DIY Productions, which last year provided a surprising self-conducted Over-the-Rhine tour with 'Inner: City,' has cooked up a new way to rattle your expectations. The Fringe and the OTR neighborhood itself are part of the package, which you can experience alone or with a friend or two.  

This show was originally mounted in Chicago a year ago by a company called Theo Ubique; it was well received by audiences there. The Cincinnati production is staged by director Lyle Benjamin, under the auspices of his Queen City Off-Broadway company.  

This performance poem, written and delivered by regional bard Richard Hague and supported solidly by Michael Henson on guitar is, even by Fringe standards, a bare-bones affair. And that is as it should be. The two men take the small stage at the Coffee Emporium and, for 75 minutes, trade off in verse and song, evoking what it means to be a man devoted deeply to drink.  

This CCM-based dance theater collective presents stories and physical imagery that reflect what it means to be young and alive in the United States in 2009.  

The program establishes that the cast has developed a series of segments exploring the myth of being a young American in the present century. What's offered are stories you would expect from a collective of attractive college-age performers: the deaths of grandparents, the breakup of young-love relationships, acknowledgment of a parent’s wisdom, being made to look foolish in middle school.  

The Body Language concept is to interview people about how they view their bodies, then turn their insights into a telling pastiche that amuses and informs and hits us where we might not know we hurt. In the current show, they've gone back to high school, when bodies are presumably about at peak, and found a mass of conflicting responses.  

If you could play a guitar with a jackhammer, Ed Hamell would do it. As it is, he comes so close to "Abuse of an Instrument" that the music police would get him if he weren't searingly funny and, treating the language with no more respect than his guitar, profanely eloquent.  

This 80-minute riff on an actual dinner engagement between the cigar-wielding Groucho Marx and the modernist poet T.S. Eliot deserves credit for its promising concept and daunting display of cultural erudition. But it falls short of its intriguing premise.  

I expected this show to be laugh-out-loud funny, and it was funny. But, more than that, it was smart. Like really smart. The company and Cincy Fringe organizers didn't play up that aspect of the show. Might it scare off the masses?  

At 100 minutes, 'Free at Last/Land of Confusion/The Good, The Bad and The Evil: Angels vs. Demons' is at least 60 repetitive, mind-numbing, ear-assaulting minutes too long. It seeks to weld dance, poetry, music, sound and images together into salient social commentary.