San Diego Fringe: Embers and I Got Guns

Embers At one point during Lighthouse Circus Theatre’s often breathtaking performance, as two women did an aerial stunt one should not try at home, the young woman next to me muttered, “Oh my g…” and the one next to her made an almost silent, high-pitched “eek.”

Then it dawned: they actually knew how hard it was for one person to balance another on an apparatus — on her neck — a good ten feet in the air.

Embers came from pain. Members of the company have suffered loss: to death, but also to forms of mental illness and drug use that have taken a loved one away. Each feels, as one says, “that bullet through my heart.”

The bare stage is often dark, or quarter-lit, since the performers are also lost, trapped in a nether-zone and trying to find a way out. Often the way is through the air.

They hang and contort on suspended fabrics, do rollovers on a swing made of chains, pull themselves up a thick rope and almost fall. In each, they appear not just to be climbing up, but also trying to climb out of a “war against myself I don’t know how to win.”

They struggle against false ways, like escapism (“to escape to any world where my brother won’t be dying”). Even contemplate the quickest exit of all. Somewhere amid impressive strength exercises, they find strength to move forward. In the end, when they fall, waiting arms will catch them.

I Got Guns Among other things, the Fringe serves as a live update of relevant concerns. Here is what artists, local and international, have on their minds right now. For Sanctuary Stage, from Albany, Oregon, it’s gun control. Their satirical piece, done in the style of Commedia dell’Arte, asks, “Why is it easier to buy a gun than rent a car?”

The stock characters come from the old Italian comedy: Arlechino (Harlequin), sometimes magical servant of Pantalone (richest man in town); Isabella, daughter of Pantalone, and apple of many an eye. And Flavio, the favorite son, though in this case he’s a dreamy-eyed liberal, while Pantalone sounds like Charles Koch.

Pantalone runs a gun factory. Actually they don’t make the guns, they ship them from China. But lately sales are slow. “What we need,” says a lip-smacking Pantalone, “is a good old-fashioned panic.”

After all, “we get profits when crazy people get guns.”

Commedia combines physical shtick and improvisation. Though there were occasional lulls with the improv, Sanctuary Stage performers were well-versed in the signature moves of their characters. Bryan Smith’s always funny Arlechino, for example, was adept with the double-wooded batocchio — the “slap-stick.”

The company often couches its message in silly humor. A handout makes the point more directly: “Confucius says, ‘a man who hunts a deer with an AR-15 is a man with no skill.”