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Critic’s Notebook

A Double Dose of Divine, and Other Reports From the Fringe Festival

Mirrored: Ryan Walter, left, and Bobby Goodrich in “Divine/Intervention,” at the New York International Fringe Festival.Credit...Garrett Matthew

On Saturday night, I stood in a basement space in the East Village, holding hands with a man who was attempting to regurgitate a bean, possibly cannellini. The bean, he promised, would have a number on it that matched a slip of paper I’d chosen from a plastic bag. The man was red-faced, groaning and coughing and retching. (I’m still not sure why he had to hold my hand.) Finally, he ejected the numbered bean from an unlikely orifice. Everyone applauded.

Either I was having a very peculiar nightmare or I was back at the New York International Fringe Festival.

The festival, which sprawls across the Village for a couple of weeks in August, is in its 19th iteration. Every year, parents, friends and co-workers help fill the venues. Every year, talent and skill glint amid the amateurism and malfunctioning air-conditioners.

There are arguments to be had over whether New York, with its wealth of performance spaces, really needs a Fringe. But the Fringe participants seem to need New York. Walking the streets around the venues, you sense so much ambition, so much hope, so many maxed-out credit cards. A lot of the offerings aren’t very good, but the total event is wonderful and terrible and heartbreaking.

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A scene from "Fail Better: Beckett Moves UMO."Credit...Jeff Dunnicliff

On the opening weekend, which started Friday, I saw 10 shows, a sampling of the 185 on offer. Until word of mouth starts circulating, there is little to go on, just a title and a few sentences in the program guide that I study intently, trying to pick shows I’ll like. For example, I do like magic shows. Or I used to.

I got off to a disheartening start with “Reading Between the Lies,” by Endangered Artists Sanctuary, a clumsy parody of a 1940s murder mystery set during a reading of a new play. The play within the play is appropriately terrible; the drama that frames it isn’t much better. The line “This wouldn’t get produced at a Florida dinner theater” applies to both. I felt awful for the performers, except for Wende O’Reilly, who enjoys herself thoroughly as a psychotic former child star.

She might also feel right at home in “She-Rantulas From Outer Space in 3-D!,” a spoof chiller, performed mostly in drag, that evokes the 1958 horror-thriller “The Bad Seed” spliced with Ed Wood. As directed by Ruff Yeager (apparently not a pseudonym), it’s a tirelessly performed tale of alien arachnids that subject American males to bodily modification and forced impregnation with spider spawn. The parody of ’50s Americana is often spot on, and the cast switches ably among roles and genders, but speedier, rowdier plotting and less alliteration would give the show legs. Maybe even eight of them.

Sex reassignment is not the stuff of comedy in Christine Howey’s autobiographical show, “Exact Change,” which details how Ms. Howey, an Ohio actor, teacher and drama critic, made the transition to living as a woman. Structured as a series of vignettes and accompanied by a slide show, the piece is scattershot and sometimes overwritten. But Ms. Howey is an engaging and sympathetic performer, and you cheer when she finally gets what she wants, a kind of female anonymity: “that older-woman state of being passed over that drives some to psychotherapy and boxed wine.”

What drove Tucker Delaney-Winn to create “Hamlet, the Hip-Hopera,” an attempt to set that Danish tragedy amid fat beats. Actually, it’s not a bad concept (I have fond memories of “The Bomb-itty of Errors”), but the energy is oddly low (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern happily excepted) and the execution muddled. That said, “To be or not to be” works pretty well as a slow jam, and Hamlet’s death is the ultimate mike drop.

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From left, Jacob Sharf, John Bixler and Jed Alevizos in Split Knuckle Theater’s “The Curious Case of Phineas Gage.”Credit...Jessie Dobrzynski

In preparing “Fail Better: Beckett Moves UMO,” the Seattle group UMO obtained permission to use only two paragraphs of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, “The Unnamable.” This would make for a pretty short play, so the troupe wrote the rest of the piece in his style. This pastiche is thin and uninspiring, but the muscled cast performs it while straddling a giant seesaw and clinging to a rope strung from two pulleys overhanging concrete pavement. Just when you think they can’t go on, they do.

I wish I hadn’t gone on in “This Side of the Impossible,” the mentalist act in which I reluctantly waited for that bean. Sebastian Boswell III presents feats of mental acuity and physical agility, but his style is poised uncertainly between suave man of mystery and angry insult comic, a fruitless combination. For his finale, Mr. Boswell pounds a four-inch spike into his head.

Something similar afflicted Phineas Gage, the real-life medical oddity whose skull was pierced by a tamping iron; he lends his name to “The Curious Case of Phineas Gage,” a steampunk lecture-demonstration from Split Knuckle Theater. The three actors announce themselves as members of the Midtown Manhattan Entirely Factual Historical Re-Enactment Society of Medicine, but by the time Gage is on the moon, waging war against P. T. Barnum and various lizard people, you may question their accuracy. Though rambling and overlong, the play is also loopy and resourceful.

A somewhat more scrupulous approach to history is offered in “The Report,” Martin Cassella’s adaptation of Jessica Francis Kane’s novel about a disaster in which 173 people were crushed while entering a London Underground station during World War II. The story itself is gripping, and the script hops ably between 1943 and 1973. Some of the actors, among them the Broadway veteran Michael Countryman, are excellent. But Alan Muraoka’s direction muddles the plotting, creating confusion where order and clarity are needed.

Competing drives and complicated ethics fuse in Lisa Lewis’s sexy and snarled “Schooled.” Lilli Stein plays Claire, a film student who realizes that her professor (Quentin Maré) will mentor her as long as she keeps flirting with him. Claire’s character is drawn less coherently than those of the professor or her boyfriend. And in a play that is ostensibly about the sexual exploitation of a young woman, however complicit, do we really need to see Ms. Stein change her shirt in full view of the audience quite so often?

There’s wilder costuming in “Divine/Intervention,” E. Dale Smith’s play about Glenn Milstead, who gained fame as John Waters’s muse Divine. In a hotel room on the night of his death, Glenn (Ryan Walter) stares across a makeup mirror at his bewigged alter ego (Bobby Goodrich). He is sick, he says, “of being a prisoner in a sequined tube dress!” But Divine won’t be denied, and Mr. Goodrich deserves some kind of bonus for performing in full fright drag in a nonair-conditioned venue. The play strikes the same arguments and emotional beats too often, and the mirroring could be much better choreographed. But this is the Fringe. To err is human, to applaud divine.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Hope Is a Thing With Spider’s Legs . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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