Monday’s Arts section contains a Bruce Weber review of some of the outré offerings of the New York City Fringe Festival, and one show offended his sensibilities so much he walked out during Act II.
There are over a hundred shows in the Festival. Which one offended Weber? Was it “Elephant Titus”–“General Titus Adronicus returns to Rome with a hideous disfiguring disease, and he’s just nuts about it.” Or was it “Daddy Kathryn,” “a comedy about a gay son’s wacky relationship with his newly outed transvestite father.”
No, it was “Discordant Duets,” the one avowedly pro-Christian work in the festival. For Weber, a pro-Christian message trumps any number of oddly placed piercings for shock value: “I did get to probably the most anomalous of the festival’s presentations: ‘Discordant Duets,’ a play with an evangelical Christian bent about two young couples that begin in the same unholy place and proceed in different directions. It’s a professional production with a cast of obvious training, directed earnestly by Mark Todd Bruner and written with sincere, or at least fervent, purpose by Mr. Bruner and his wife, Michelle. It is, however, quite a terrible play for a very simple reason: it presumes that life’s problems have one unambiguous solution.”
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