By Alex Walsh

It’s that time of year again – Fringe Festival is back! The annual smorgasbord of independent theater and art always exposes me to a lot of new things, and this year that’s even more true. The Festival has shifted across the river from the North Side location of the past few years. This year’s venues are in the stretch of Penn Avenue where Bloomfield, Garfield, and Friendship come together in a way that makes a transplant like me extremely unconfident when discussing what neighborhood I’m in.

After last year’s four-show opening night marathon, I had a much more relaxed lineup for the first day with two shows on the docket. First up was Iron in Your Future at METTĀ, a healing arts community specializing in meditation, yoga, and various other practices. Of the new venues I’ve been to so far in the first two days, METTĀ has by far the best waiting area, featuring an extremely comfortable couch.

Iron in Your Future is a one-woman show written and performed by Mindy Pfeffer about her journey in becoming an AOA (Adult Onset Athlete). With the aid of three chairs and some minimal sound effects, Pfeffer’s narrative alternates between her first triathlon, various points in her training, and the climactic Iron Man Triathlon –an endurance race consisting of a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bicycle ride, and a 26.2 mile run. She presents the autobiographical story of her setbacks, several injuries, and lessons learned–either from her own realizations, or the insights of the tough Russian trainer, Viktor, who shepherds her through the process–with one overriding message. Even if sometimes you feel like you can’t continue, you are always moving forward.

My next stop, after a couple drinks at Mixtape down the street, was Artisan Cafe and Tattoo, where I was catching Standup Mindfuck with Andrew Steiner and John Kim, comedians from New York and New Jersey, respectively. Kim opened up with a set featuring bits about his travels in Peru, previous corporate job, and the event itself–the unexpectedly missing microphone and performing a comedy set in a tattoo shop that’s also a coffee shop were both good sources of material. Steiner, the headliner, had an entirely different style of comedy. The billing of a surreal mix of jokes, characters, and improvisation was not wrong. Steiner laced in the story of his love affair with a potato, recovery from a dairy fetish, and getting caught in a granny hold while practicing Brazilian martial arts, capping with a Spotify-assisted 90s Euro dance-pop performance. Both comedians included some audience work in their acts, which I respect, because they did not have a lot to work with. First night Fringe events can be a bit sparse, but in this case… well, there was one other person in the audience who had lived in New York, so along with the performers we outnumbered the native Pittsburghers in the crowd. I told them more people show up later in the weekend. Don’t make me a liar!

Day 2 of Fringe overlapped with Unblurred, the arts event that takes over Penn Ave on the first Friday of every month, so there was a lot going on, and way more people milling around than the previous night. For my first stop, I was headed to another new venue: the Bloomfield Garfield Corporation’s Community Activity Center to see HR For Comedians.  Presented as a standard corporate training seminar delivered by a manager (John Galo), and his bullied mentee (Dana Leahy), HR For Comedians lays out the rules of the standup scene from the perspective of the uncaring behemoth that is Comedy, LLC.  As an audience member, you take on the role of a new hire, and are promptly informed that you are an exchangeable cog in the machine. With contributions from their IT Guy (Justin Wells), a corporate improviser (Kevin O’Brien), and a featured Female Standup (Courtney Francis), Leahy and Galo satirize the dysfunctions, bullying, and discrimination in the comedy community. Going in, I was reaaally worried this was going to be some kind of cringe-y, anti-SJW thing telling everyone to “just lighten up,” but I was happily surprised that that was exactly what they were mocking.

After my HR indoctrination, I headed back to METTĀ for Erase Every Line, written and performed (mostly), by Ian Insect, who also wrote HR For Comedians. It’s a hard show to describe, but it’s good. Erase Every Line is mostly silent, heavily featuring physical humor. Insect is great at this, and the carefully planned costume and prop bits come off with perfect timing. Kevin O’Brien is also great as the less-mute sound guy/musician.

Each bit has a number of possible endings, depending how the show goes. I don’t know if it’s exactly encouraged, but audience participation can change how things go. At one point an audience member (who I thought might be a plant, but was assured was not) was called up for a boop. I didn’t realize I was sitting next to the cast of HR until we had our own personal drama as the overflow from a drip coffee machine on the side of the stage flowed toward a nest of extension cords during one of the times Insect was actually speaking into the mic. One bold actress darted out to move a cord and I’m pretty sure nobody else noticed. (In case anyone from METTĀ is reading this, it was fine. No fire.) I was a huge fan of last year’s It Sounded Like A Good Idea In My Dreams, so I was expecting to enjoy this, and I was not let down.

Between shows, I also stopped in at the opening of Kosmo Vinyl’s art exhibition, Cisco Kid vs. Donald Trump. The British visual artist has created a series of comic strip panels featuring the Cisco Kid –a Western bandit originally created by O’Henry–and his supporting cast commenting critically on Donald Trump and his … well, just everything going on with him. There’s a lot. The pop art style fits in well given Pittsburgh’s association with Warhol, and the quintessential American-ness of the Western frame is a good window for commentary on the current President. All of the images are for sale, so if you want to get some good art and commentary, get on it!

Now, I have to get off to another show, so I’ll fill you all in on Day 3 of Fringe later. Go see some shows!

Categories: Archived Reviews

Tags: Andrew Steiner, Cisco Kid vs. Trump, Courtney Francis, Dana Leahy, Erase Every Line, Fringe, Fringe Festival, HR for Comedians, Ian Insect, Iron in Your Future, John Galo, John Kim, Justin Wells, Kevin O'Brien, Kosmo Vinyl, Mindy Pfeffer, Spring with PITR, Standup Mindf*ck