Snow Fridge
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Pig N’ Whistle (Hollywood Fringe Festival)
Through June 23
RECOMMENDED
Creator/directors Keight Leighn and Karlie Blair’s delightfully childlike confection comes with all the layering, dissolution, blurring and ambiguity usually associated with the liminal spaces of religious rituals or dream states. An audience-participatory immersive performance, Snow Fridge turns out to be a bit of both (think: existentially aware playground game).
The inaugural production of Dr3amlogikk, Leighn and Blair’s new immersive theater company, the 20-minute structured improvisation begins just inside the oak-paneled barroom of Hollywood Boulevard’s Pig N’ Whistle. There, on a reserved table strewn with art markers and sheets of coloring paper, arriving audience members confront a deck of faceless playing cards and a pair of unmarked dice — winking, surreal allusions to the fact that what awaits has little to do with randomness or chance.
In fact, the game has been fixed by the answers each ticket-buyer has already provided to three questions in an emailed questionnaire dealing with the present, the past and the future (hint: the more detailed and personal the answers are, the more satisfying and funnier the experience). Participants are greeted by a guide (Mikie Beatty as a kind of angelic hippie) and taken individually through a maze of hallways that lead off the barroom to a mirrored door. There, the participant is handed off, instructed to close his or her eyes, and backed into a room and spun by unseen hands. In the midst of the darkness, a voice whispers: “An angel once told me that all the people in your dreams are you.”
On being told to open one’s eyes, a similarly angelic-looking gathering is revealed (in addition to Leighn, Blair and Beatty, the impressively versatile cast includes Lena Valentine, Katie Rediger, Katy Foley, Shayne Eastin and Kelly Kelly McMinn). They are all dressed in white and daubed with face paint, and assembled in a dimly lit room that looks like it could be a rehearsal session for a neo-psychedelic rock band.
What ensues is not for the passive of heart; it demands some verbal and physical adlibbing, as well as intimate, nonsexual touching/getting touched on the part of the audience member. And though each experience will widely vary depending on the answers provided, expect a fancifully philosophic, musical encounter in which much of the surprise comes from the invention with which the company weaves the answers to the questionnaire into a hilarious, personally tailored dream narrative. This reviewer’s experience felt like what a visit to the Delphic oracle must have been like (replete with a chilling, climactic cameo by an otherworldly Terence Leclere).
Leighn (who also designed the atmospheric, low key lighting) and Baily seamlessly meld tightly choreographed improvisation with a poetic expressiveness that delivers a sense of spontaneity and an uncanny ambience wholly unlike what is possible with conventional dramatic mise-en-scène. The reason to look beyond the playful whimsy, however, is Snow Fridge’s ulterior seriousness. Dr3amlogikk is part of a wave of emerging immersive theater artists whose experiments with physical intimacy and the extreme subjectivity of “one-on-one” participatory performance is quickly becoming a hallmark of L.A.’s immersive avant-garde.
Pig N’Whistle, 6714 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; performance times vary; through June 23. www.Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/5313?tab=details. Running time: 20 minutes.
