Now in its 21st year of presenting work from Chicago’s fringe theater and performance community, RhinoFest offers both short stands and long runs. Following are my reviews of the shows that opened the first weekend and will continue through the festival’s entire four weeks. All performances take place at Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-508-0666, rhinofest.com, $12 in advance online, $15 or pay what you can at the door.
Action Spectacular I’m still waiting on Idris Goodwin. Going back over my reviews of his plays—across seven years—I find I’m pretty much always saying the same thing: cool idea, tantalizing execution, not there yet. Same with this short two-hander in which Jonathan Putnam plays Porter, a B-level but fanatically dedicated movie stunt coordinator, and Mark Handley plays his partner Blake. As the piece begins, we know that Blake’s had a serious accident in the line of duty; he seems out of it in conversation, yet every time Porter initiates a fight sequence, Blake performs flawlessly, as if the moves were somehow encoded in his DNA. What exactly happened to Blake, and what does Porter have to do with it? Goodwin looks into these questions, offering a Twilight Zone-esque punch-line answer. But there’s so much room for development. In the meantime, Putnam and Handley offer amusing, endearing performances. 
Imposters and Political Suicide Mark Chrisler credits ELIZA and PARRY as his coauthors on Imposters, and their influence is undeniably apparent. ELIZA and PARRY were two “chatterbots”: computer programs, dating from 1966 and 1972, respectively, that could generate primitive forms of conversation. Their idiosyncrasies—including ELIZA’s tendency to turn everything into a question and PARRY’s preoccupation with Mob involvement in horse racing—gradually invade a dialogue between the tragic British computer genius Alan Turing and an interrogator called Nicolas Bourbaki (which is also the nom de plume of a group of mathematicians who specialized in set theory), raising the question of whether Turing and Bourbaki are human. The joke is played out before it’s over. But after a period of tedium, something else takes the joke’s place: a surprisingly vivid sense of anguish as Andrew Schoen’s Turing seems to go off program and, well, raise the question of whether he’s human. The second piece on the bill, by Chrisler alone, imagines a drunken confab between Alexei Kosygin and Lyndon Johnson on the eve of the Six-Day War. Sloppy and derivative in its pseudo-Strangelove satire, it’s not worth much.
Johnny Ten Bones Though the songs and final script of this musical were written by adults, the “characters and concepts” came from the Brain Surgeon Theater ensemble, which includes both grown-ups and children. That may be why this account of strange happenings in a small American town circa 1957 is often incoherent. But it may also be why it’s so compellingly fearless. In my experience, kids aren’t nearly as afraid as adults are of taking a story where it needs to go, and this one goes to the heart of a certain kind of darkness, situated inside a cosmically forlorn boy. It’s a plus that there’s a lot of brightness along the way, but don’t expect polish.
Subject Matter Created and Destroyed and I’m in a Small Space for a Reason I Don’t Understand As a performer, Matt Test has been a big asset to this year’s RhinoFest. His crazed petulance and Eraserhead ‘do play off well against Kate Teichman’s sly, sleepy deadpan in Chris Bower’s Notes to Molly (see above), and he and Teichman make a modified version of the same dynamic work nicely in Subject Matter Created and Destroyed—Matt Rieger’s brief, amusing contribution to this double bill, in which Teichman’s character tells how she wrote and trashed her magnum opus. But Test’s playwrighting is another matter. Designed to defeat audience expectations, his ostentatiously idiosyncratic “historical reenactment” of fictitious events I Am in a Small Space for a Reason I Don’t Understand simply ended up trying my patience instead.