Fringe Day 7, Part 2 - August 12, 2004, 7:00pm

Everything and Nothing All At The Same Time
Theatre Transcendare
Hennepin (Hey City) Stages, upstairs

I've said it before, I'll say it again - I'm just not the audience for this show. And I was clearly very much in the minority, both at the performance I attended and among Fringers at large. People whose opinion I greatly respect, and with whom I agree on much else in regard to the quality of shows in this year's Fringe, love this show. I thought it was dreadful.

(I won't be posting a review on the show page because I can't, quickly and succintly, lay out my reasons for this reaction. Since the show is almost universally beloved and heavily reviewed without my weighing in, and since it's over, I won't bring down their average star rating by giving them one star, or less - which, again, is very unusual for me.)

I'm still trying to piece together why I sat there, stone-faced, while other people were laughing uproariously throughout and leaping to their feet to give the performers a standing ovation.

Part of it could be that my expectations were perhaps too high. I'd heard from so many about the virtues of this show, perhaps it had me expecting more. But I don't think so. I've been going into all kinds of shows with a fairly open mind and low expectations and saw them exceeded beyond my imagining. I really believe I went into this show in the same way, fully ready to cut it a break if it needed one. Even the clunkiest shows at the Fringe can normally elicit my sympathy and constructive criticism.

I honestly felt like these people were wasting my time, and insulting me, and then to top it all off, the show ran long.

Maybe it was the fact that the premise of the show - a group of aliens is sent to earth to experience a whole range of emotions in only an hour - was so plainly laid out, I knew what I was going to have to sit through, so my patience was doubly strained. But I knew how a lot of shows I went to see at the Festival were going to end, and it didn't bother me during them. I wasn't thinking, "Oh for God's sake, just get it over with already" at any of those shows and repeatedly checking my watch.

A friend of mine had an extreme reaction I wasn't expecting to something in Fast Fringe, and it was based in something very personal for her. The short play dealing with a writer tortured by his muse, as if she were his oppressive mother demanding incestuous sex, really got her goat. This was because the "tortured writer" role was something a friend of hers had recently taken upon himself, and as such, couldn't bring himself to be around productive writers, since he himself was blocked and angry about it. So she was denied his company, because he was buying into a ridiculous mythology, one that I don't even believe, that the short "incest" play was perpetuating. What I saw as a harmless joke, she didn't see as harmless at all. And I have to admit she was right. I feel sort of bad for not taking the play and its implications more seriously.

I bring this up by way of example. Something in the "Everything and Nothing..." which the rest of the audience found amusing, just made me stew impatiently all the more. By the time the aliens got around to "love" on their list of things, one of the guy aliens started to reveal an attraction for another of the guy aliens. Because, ya know, nothin's funnier than them gays going after straight men who don't want them.

Jesus.

Thanks for nothing. And everything, all at the same time.

I've seen improv - a lot of it - that was tighter, more engaging and entertaining, and a heck of a lot less insulting to me personally, than this show.

I freely admit I'm having an exaggerated, and out of character, reaction to this one. But in all my 2004 Fringe-going, this for me was the only dud.

(For more of my writing - plays, past blog entries and more - visit www.matthewaeverett.com)