The Best of the Blizzard at the Phoenix Basile Theatre

Sitting in the front and center-most table at the Phoenix Basile Theatre for last night's viewing of The Best of the Blizzard there is no way I could have live-blogged the show for the Indy Fringe Festival/Smaller Indiana crossover even if I'd remembered to bring the lappy, which I didn't. I also didn't bring a notepad to take notes. Not that it would have mattered. "Blizzard" is a misnomer of grand proportion. The Best of the Blizzard is comedy blitzkrieg and taking notes an absolute impossibility.

Starring only four actors (Michael Carey, Abby Dillon, Gabe Gloden, and Erin Sullivan from the Bloomington Playwrights Project) Blizzard is a fast paced tear through eighteen very short vignettes by Hoosier playwrights. (Ignore all the IndyFringe literature that says there are only 16 plays. They are liars. But that's OK; two more is just more for the money. I could have taken another 30 minutes or more.)

Director Holly Holbrooke deserves a substantial amount of credit for the success of the show, and it is indeed successful. I don't know if she alone orchestrated the order of the pieces but even that is masterful. The show starts strong with "Eve's Garden" which is a good piece in its own right, but Holbrooke's direction makes it clear to the audience that what they will be watching for the next 50 minutes won't be standard, traditional fare. In an age of theatre where "tearing down the fourth wall" is a commonplace, BBP found a way to threaten the convention that threatened theatre--by tearing down a fourth wall that only existed on stage. This type of meta-theatre was a theme throughout the show.

The plays each have their own pacing and Holbrooke, or whoever was in charge of ordering the plays, does a great job in using the individual tempos to create an overall tempo for the show. I don't think I realized how well the show was put together until "Bedford," "Pork, Which is...," "That First Kiss," and "Click on It"--four frantically paced and hilarious vignettes--culminated in "In My Absence" which starts off frantic and funny but ends with a strange, poignant silence that was all the stranger and more silent for the preceding bits. It was probably the best moment of the play, although it received no applause.

It's good when an audience that has spent an evening having its expectations defied is finally and wholly shocked.

And, again without giving anything away, the final play, Jim Poyser's "Fred" is an outstanding finale relying equally on Poyser's playcraft, Holbrookess direction, and the spot-on performances of all four actors.

An exemplary part of the IndyFringe, no doubt.