Jul 13, 2007  |  By: PATRICK FOLLIARD  | COMMENTS     

Following last year’s inaugural success, the Capital Fringe Festival is back with scores of new, mainly low-tech, marvels and mishaps from the murkier depths of the worlds of theater, dance, music and puppetry. Like its fringy predecessors in Edinburgh, New York, Philadelphia and other cities, D.C.’s festival dares audiences to give riskier theater a try.

Held from July 19-29, the festival features more than 120 groups presenting 500 performances in more than 30 downtown venues. For many of the artists, Capital Fringe is their first time showing their own work, and because of its affordable ticket prices (ranging from free to $35), the festival attracts many who might ordinarily pass on live theater. The Fringe’s mission is to connect exploratory artists with adventurous audiences by creating an open-access annual performing arts festival. This year’s lineup includes a number of shows that are gay-themed, gay-created and have gay characters, or combinations thereof. 

In proud Fringe fashion, Jonathan Padget, a former theater critic for Metro Weekly and currently a copy editor at the Washington Post, has written the book, music and lyrics for his very own show, “The Blue Lagoon: A Musical,” which he’s also producing, directing and designing especially for the festival.

“It’s one of those fun, iconic things from our youth — campy, compelling and erotic all at once,” explains Padget, before adding that the source material for his 60-minute, six-song musical about young cousins who are shipwrecked on a deserted island and grow up to become lovers is as much the 1911 novel by Henry de Vere Stacpoole as the 1980 film featuring then-nubile hotties Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins.

Inspiration struck about a year or so ago. Padget, an experienced pianist and singer, was killing time at the downtown Grand Hyatt when he became unexpectedly charmed by the massive, tacky lagoon in the hotel’s atrium. With its fountains and an island supporting a grand piano, the water feature struck the gay musical theater fan as an intriguing semi-public performance space for Handel’s “Water Music,” or better yet, his own musical adaptation of the celebrated lagoon story.

Fast forward to the present: Padget has completed what he describes as “a very pretty, lush score,” and opted for a more a conventional theater setting — the Playbill Café’s small raised stage dressed with a sandy-colored drop cloth, a tiny, kiddy pool and keyboardist (him).

While Padget’s set might hint at a low budget, his cast certainly doesn’t. As
the musical’s teenage kissing cousins Matthew McGloin and Kathleen Mason are both, according to Padget, triple threats —  “funny, talented and great looking in their swimsuits.”

“This is theater at its simplest, most enjoyable level,” says Padget, “And though I’m not looking to leave my day job, I would like to get a sense of what, if anything, there is out there for me in terms of making musicals.”(“The Blue Lagoon” plays at 1409 Playbill Café, 1409 14th St., NW, July 21-29.)

A MORE HARDCORE Fringe offering is Sheldon Scott’s multi-character, one-man show titled “Faggot,” a piece about men in therapy struggling with their sexuality. Each of the characters is loosely based on someone whom the gay, black playwright/performer and now producer has at one time encountered. Included among the men portrayed in his premiere work are a transsexual, a pedophile, a hyper-masculine gay black male who is neither out nor closeted, and a secure gay man who demands more than tolerance from everyone involved in his life. 

Formerly a therapist with at risk youth, 30-year-old Scott stopped counseling several years ago to try something else, but he wasn’t certain what that new career was. After traveling around Europe, he returned to D.C. and began waiting tables and studying acting. He started performing with SpeakeasyD.C. (a company of urban storytellers) and playing parts mostly in staged readings. Simultaneously through improvisation and various attempts at writing, he began to cobble together a series of monologues that resulted in his current Fringe piece.

With “Faggot,” Scott uses the device of talking therapy to touch on topics important to him and his friends, particularly other black gay men: vulnerability and exploitation, conditional acceptance and tolerance as opposed to actual respect, familial acceptance and the truth behind the down-low phenomenon. 

“Suppressed sexuality — gay or straight — is nothing new,” says Scott. “Down low is largely the result of black America’s response to homosexuality. Because [a gay black man] is balancing his identity as a black man and a gay man, doesn’t mean necessarily that he is being less ...