Review: The Hollywood Fringe Festival in SB

For Proboscis Theatre Company, theatrical production is a ground-up process. The company's most recent efforts, Bloody Beautiful and Strap-On, were created from scratch: both plays were conceptualized, written, directed, and performed by Jeff Mills, Erica Flor, and Madelyn Robinson. These productions, which premiered this June at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, offered audiences intimate, unabashedly twisted characterizations and smart, self-aware narratives.

Strap-On, starring Flor and Robinson, is based on the implausible-yet-true story of Gayle Newland, a woman found guilty of impersonating a man in an online profile to catfish her best friend, "V". Gayle and V had recurrent sexual encounters in which Gayle wore a strap-on and V wore a blindfold (V was allegedly convinced that her beau had suffered a disfiguring accident and refused to be seen). Stranger than fiction, this inexplicable relationship lasted for two years before V took off the blindfold during sex to discover her lover was actually her friend Gayle. Strap-On is stark, a murky story of sexual role-play taken too far.

Everything about this story seems outlandish, which makes for a fascinating character study. The narrative structure of the show exists within the context of a conversation between two characters (named Erica and Madelyn, for the sake of this production) who discuss Gayle and V's relative innocence in the case of their aborted romance. Plot points are revealed through reenactments of events as well as through Gayle and V's court testimonies (much of the dialog for which came from actual court proceedings).

Both viewpoints are utterly unreliable. It's difficult to believe that V was so desperate for a boyfriend that she was willing to adhere to his peculiar and potentially dangerous demands, such as consistently wearing a blindfold to meet him in person; beyond that, it's almost impossible to believe that after several months of sexual encounters, V could be deluded enough to evade realization that her "boyfriend" was actually Gayle with a dildo. While Gayle's version of events, namely that her male persona was a "beard"--a sexual role-playing tool that V used to deflect her discomfort with her own homosexuality--is a more likely story, Gayle is played as unbalanced and conniving, giving her statements a sinister tone with the implication of deceit. Strap-On is a complex maze of taboo, desire, and doubt.

Bloody Beautiful, the one-woman show Flor co-wrote with Mills, also focuses on the idea of indecisive truths born from the struggle of managing an unbalanced personality. Indirectly, Bloody Beautiful tells the legend of historical figure, Erzsébet Báthory, the "blood countess" of Hungary. Báthory is credited as a productive serial killer who abused and murdered hundreds of peasant and servant girls from the villages surrounding her castle. Rumored to be single-minded in her quest to maintain youth and beauty, the countess supposedly bathed in her victims' blood. Legend tells of a woman disassociated from empathy enough to leave exsanguinated corpses rotting throughout her castle. After her conviction in the early 17th century, Báthory was imprisoned in a tower until her death several years later.

Bloody Beautiful is not this story. Instead, it's the internal struggle between Flor, who plays herself, and Báthory, a dissociated personality attempting to take control of her corporeal prison. Flor describes Báthory as a source of constant focus and fascination, a voice of strength and destruction amidst a meandering consciousness. Flor, who was a student actor in UCSB's production of Equivocation, was in the theater the night Elliot Rodger's Isla Vista killing spree left seven dead. Post-show, Flor checked her phone to find messages from concerned friends, some of which illuminated a frightening reality: the gunman had asked for her specifically. This awareness sparked a reflexive internal defense mechanism that manifested, Flor says, as the voice of the countess. A fascinating exploration of internal conflict, Bloody Beautiful follows Flor and Báthory as both vie for control of body and mind. It's a show that simultaneously presents the clash of two women and that of a woman against herself.

Both shows received critical acclaim, and Strap-On was recently reproduced by Proboscis at UCSB. Intricate, daring, and penetrating, these Fringe Festival productions exhibited the impressive creative range of the collaborating artists, and provided innovative, discerning work to the local and Los Angeles theatrical communities.

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