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Topping our picks today: Two history plays, a drama about cults, and yet another nontraditional take on Shakespeare (we’re sensing a theme this Fringe, or maybe that’s every Fringe).
The Movement: 50 Years of Love and Struggle (Flashpoint: Mead Theatre Lab, 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.) — Having personally sat through all of Ron Jones‘ last Fringe effort, 2013’s painfully unfunny The Black/Jew Dialogues, I’m surprised to be in this position now, but: you should go see Jones’s new show. Rachel Manteuffel says it intelligently weaves a half-century of painful history into a compelling lecture/personal narrative hybrid: “The characters express personal reactions that tend to get left out of history books.”
Salvation Road (Atlas Performing Arts Center: Lab II, 6:15 p.m.) — If you saw that Jonestown documentary and can’t get enough weird stories about cults, check out this drama about a young man on a mission to rescue his drifter sister from a sinister preacher. Our Great Leader — err, John Krizel, says the show is “expertly staged and paced.”
The Second Coming of Joan of Arc (Dance Place: Hyman M. Perlo Studio, 8:45 p.m.) — Believe us, Joan of Arc has been waiting a very long time to have her shot at the patriarchy. Lizzie Parmenter‘s one-woman show injects modern feminism into French history, and the result, Sala Levin says, is “affecting” and filled with “anxious energy.”
Twelfth Night: A Musical Remix (Logan Fringe Arts Space: Trinidad Theatre, 9:45 p.m.) — The music itself may be unnecessary, but the madcap energy that Wanderlust Theatre Company and Eastern Mennonite University bring to Shakespeare’s beloved comedy sure isn’t. Our Anne Larimer Hart loves the production’s “charming clownishness.”