Fort Of Jewels

Annex Theater - 419 E. Oliver St.
2 nights - October 24th and 25th

An idea spontaneously conceived by Evan Moritz.

Several playwrights and directors from different cities will be directing a number of plays based on Hannah Barbara cartoons.

Robbie Bassler from Harrisonburg is directing Wacky Races.

The Gossip Factory is coming down from New York to do a state of the union satire of the Smurfs. http://www.thegossipfactory.org

Evan Moritz of the Annex Theatre in Baltimore is directing Snagglepuss.

Donna Sellinger (Missoula Oblongata) is doing Tom and Jerry with members of Wham City, a Baltimore-based art collective.

Kaitlin Murphy, Grace Bedwell, Owen Gardner, and Kristen Ripley are doing a puppet show of Space Ghost

Also featured will be Video work by Kevin Blackistone and Mark Brown (Wham City).

Members of the band Snacks, a circuit-bending comic noise group will do sound effects live for some of the shows, and they'll cap off the night with a 20 minute set.

As you can see, it's a hodge-podge event. The festival takes place at the Annex Theatre, an arts venue/warehouse space that has supported self-produced plays, traveling plays, huge music shows and festivals.

We're hoping to use this play festival as a nexus or focal point for a lot of the divergent acts we've been putting on.

I have spent the last two years of my college experience living in Baltimore with my best friend. The time spent here has left us both feeling disdain for this city. She, being so disenchanted, transfered to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn this past year. Yet it appears my friend, who has only been away for only one month, already feels nostalgic for Baltimore, with all its flashing blue lights and Believe signs—all the many ironies that make it the experience it is for us undergrads attending the Maryland Institute College of Art. Coincidentally, the weekend I chose to visit her for the first time happened to fall on the date of the recent Baltimore Round Robin Tour. It became an event where we could reflect on our shared memories of the “Greatest City in America.”

The night of the show proved itself to be a series of trials and tribulations. First, I was still in the process of recovering from a three day cold and the show was certainly not the best place to heal. Next, when I got to the venue doors, I was forced to ruse a very large bouncer about a “misplaced” ID. I assuaged his doubts and peaked his curiosity by explaining that the ID in question was “in Baltimore, you know, just the place where I live”. His vision of Baltimore, like so many these days, comes straight via the Wire and just the fact that a girl like me (naive, innocent, and physically weak) lives on Bmore’s “mean streets” was enough to convince him that I was of legal drinking age.

The venue, New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge, was like a dark limestone cave, except hot, covered in puke and full of sweaty people. The special-formula format of the shows, organized and created by Baltimore’s own music maven Dan Deacon unfortunately fell victim to it’s own rules. His ultimate goal was to eliminate any headliner, opener, front or back row. To achieve this, all the bands set up along the perimeter of the room making the audience seemingly stuck in the center. Each band was allotted one song per round without breaks (or introductions), back to back until the show was over. This left the audience perplexed, asking one another who was performing in front of them or simply straining to get any view of the performers at all who decided to play at ground level without the aid of a stage or platform.

The first of the two-night performances, Eyes Night, featured dreamy quasi-ambient folk acts such as Beach House and Teeth Mountain The second night, Feet Night, included loud electronica thrash acts such as Video Hippos, Double Dagger, and Future Islands. At the center of it all, the simultaneous organizer, father figure, and technicolor god himself, Dan Deacon, seemed constantly engulfed by dancing kids—it felt like a Pentecostal revival meeting sponsored by American Apparel. Mid-show I faced my next tribulation by tending to a friend’s 15-year old niece who decided that tonight was a good a time to try out hard liquor. While watching out for her I found safe haven in the bathrooms, they had the feel of a monastic cell—only this cell smelled like piss and was covered in vomit.

The savior of the evening was Lizz King. Her small stature, stuffed inside of a red 80’s prom gown worn over jeans gave way to a shockingly full, sensuous voice. More than ever people around me were asking, “Who is she?” In that moment I was proud to admit that I did, in fact, know who she was. Although I am used to her ukulele yielding acoustic nature, I have fully embraced her newly found glam dance party queen self. Her version of Rhihanna’s “Umbrella” was the silver lining amidst all the noise and general fanatical nature of the evening. Yet her sweet crooning could not dispel the self-indulgent image of Baltimore that Wham City is painting for the rest of America — a neon drenched, fun loving, artist-utopia (especially through the aid of this tour which stretched from Montreal to Detroit.) Alas, Baltimore historically seems overly identified with its artists and their visions, such as those portrayed in John Water’s satiric films, David Simon’s gritty HBO drug and crime dramas, and Edgar Allen Poe’s romantic-horror fiction. Wham City, as a propagator of these visions of grandeur, has left many living in Baltimore skeptical, yet they clearly give others in cities across the country hope of one day joining their own musical and artistic talents together to form a similar romanticized union of disparate elements.

The show ended at around six in the morning. Not for me however. I stayed behind searching high and low with a flashlight for my best friends lost coat, which she would need to brave the low forty-degree weather that awaited us outside. She was yelling about how someone stole it on purpose because “things like this happen to her”, forgetting the fact that her black peacoat looked pretty much like 90% of the females coats that had been there that evening and all had been piled on top of each other. Eventually the lights came on, security pushed the audience out and the employees of the venue came out with large brooms to sweep up the debris, all the lost and found (everything except her coat)—all the Sparks cans and glitter into the center of the floor. I grabbed my coatless friend, the drunk neice—who was passed out at this point and along with various other Baltimore transplants crowded into a small over-priced pizza place across the street. We ate the last very disappointing slices that they had and I gave my coat to my friend right before she decided to take a cab home to Brooklyn. The cab was only big enough for her and the sick girl. I glanced across the street at the fifty some performers who were boarding their veggie oil powered bus and for the first time I wished I could be a part of their Baltimore dream, even if it would only be so that I could hop in with them and go home to Baltimore instead of having to brave the cold, coatless, exhausted, and sick to ride the subway back to Bedstuy.

Baltimore’s Round Robin Tour
http://roundrobinblog.tumblr.com/
Le Poisson Rouge (NYC)
158 Bleeker St.
10.18.08

Fort Of Jewels

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Hannah Barbera Play Festival

Baltimore In NYC

Sunday, September 14, 2008

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