KC Fringe Festival Blog

The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, An Epilogue. A National Staged Reading. Monday Octber 12th, 2009. Spencer Theater, 4949 Cherry St. 5pm – The Laramie Project (the HBO movie) 7pm – (Workshop Presentation) The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, An Epilogue – Directed by Kyle Hatley. General admission Suggested donation $15. All proceeds go to UMKC’s Queer Alliance and Kansas City Anti-Violence Project.

The reason you go to a fringe festival is to see performances you can’t see anywhere else — plays that are too short or too weird to be included in a theater company’s regular season.

On that score, the fifth annual Kansas City Fringe Festival, which wrapped up Sunday, was not a disappointment.

The highlight of the final three days of my festival-going had to be “Money Buckets: The Untold Story of FDR.” This show from the Buran Theatre Company is based in part on a never-filmed screenplay written for the Marx Brothers in which Groucho would be the Depression-era president and Margaret Dumont would play the first lady.

This was a wacky, unpredictable show with a lot of smarts that was anchored by Justin Knudsen’s astonishing impersonation of Groucho.

Other shows:

•“Lingerie Shop,” written by Bryan Colley and directed by Tara Varney, was a clever commentary on sexism that borrowed a page from Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

•“Moon Room 53A621.35” was a sort of absurdist science-fiction exercise in which a young earthling finds himself in an isolated room on the moon surrounded by bizarre characters. There were moments of potent humor, but the show was performed at a fever pitch from beginning to end.

•“The Rise of General Arthur,” a solo piece performed by Minnesota-based playwright/actor Phillip Low, was an ambitious attempt to transpose the Arthurian legend to present-day Iraq. Low is a polished, charismatic performer, but this is essentially a literary work that doesn’t lend itself to performance.

•“S.O.S.” by Kyle J. Smith was a simple but effective piece about a college kid coming to terms with his father’s death. The young actors, who all seem to have a Truman State University connection, delivered clear, economical performances.

The theater offerings at the festival ranged widely in terms of technical quality. The best acting I saw was in Kyle Hatley’s “The Death of Cupid” and Vanessa Severo’s “Advice From a Spider.”

I encountered the most outrageous humor in Stephanie Roberts’ Boom! An International Lost and Found Family Marching Band and “The Screw You Review starring Wayburn Sassy.” The most inventive shows were “The Miniature Housewife” and “Money Buckets.”

By ROBERT TRUSSELL
The Kansas City Star

We in the West can sometimes forget that the East has its own classical music and dance heritage.

Indian ragas, for example, have a history stretching back to ancient Persia. Masters like Ravi Shankar and Shivkumar Sharma are revered as gurus. Eastern classical culture is every bit as deep and profound as the West’s.

If you’re feeling adventurous, the Fringe Festival, that celebration of all things somewhat avant-garde, is presenting performances of several Eastern dance traditions that might open up for audiences a whole new world. You’ll have a chance to sample everything from belly dance to Bollywood to the highly refined classical dance of south India. There will even be a ballet about the last day of Gandhi’s life.

Among the Fringe dance events:

•Belly Dance United presents a fresh take on the shimmery art with “Bellylicious.” It’s a fantasy ballet about a couple who get sucked into a world where belly dance blends with circus performers, vaudeville acts and Gypsies. You can get lost in Bellylicious Land at 6 and 10:30 p.m. July 24, 9 p.m. July 25 and 3:30 p.m. July 26 at Vulcan’s Forge, 3937 Washington St.

•Raghsidad, a Middle Eastern dance troupe based in Lawrence, will present “Cairo on the Kaw XV — the Beat Goes On” at 7 p.m. Tuesday and 7 and 11:30 p.m. July 24 at XS Lighting, 1632 Broadway. This “exploration of rhythm and moves from the Middle East” will feature several styles of music and dance.

•Indian classical music and dance can really provoke an exalted aesthetic experience. Nritya School of Indian Dance and Music offers a taste of the real thing with “Dances of India” at 7:30 p.m. July 23-25 and 2 p.m. July 26 at Vulcan’s Forge.

Nritya, a Kansas City-based dance company, is steeped in the traditions of Bharatha Natyam, a lyrical and rhythmic South Indian dance style that combines stylized movements and facial expressions with incredibly complicated and intricate step sequences and elements of yoga. Although Nritya focuses primarily on Indian classical dance, it also will perform Indian folk dances and Bollywood numbers.

•India’s most inspirational modern figure, Mahatma Gandhi, was a devotee of Indian classical music. He had a special love for the age-old Bhajans, congregational Hindu devotional songs. The JG College of Performing Arts will use those mystical songs and Indian dance to tell the story of Gandhi’s final hours in the ballet “Mahatma Gandhi — Pilgrim of Peace” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday and 9 p.m. July 24 at Vulcan’s Forge.

•For more cutting-edge belly dance, Tempo Duende presents Bellydance Fusion Factory, a spicy curry of “everything from Egyptian cabaret to hip-hop to Bollywood.”

“Raghsidad and Tempo Duende performed at our Mardi Gras party, and people loved them,” said Cheryl Kimmi, director of the Kansas City Fringe Festival.

There’s a mystical side to Tempo Duende, too. Feel the vibe at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, 7 p.m. July 23, 10 p.m. July 24, 8:30 p.m. July 25 and 5:30 p.m. July 26. It all happens at the Arts Incubator, 115 W. 18th St.

You can get passes and tickets to the Fringe Festival at www.kcfringe.org.

Inspiration sprang from a simple observation.

“I was walking last summer and I looked down and there was a grasshopper,” actress Vanessa Severo said. “And he jumped up and these glorious ‘monarch’ wings exploded out of him. And then he jumped down and became a grasshopper again.”

That got her thinking about each creature’s role in life and what it might mean if you miss your chance to be what you were intended to be.

Severo is well-known as an actress in Kansas City — she delivered outstanding performances in “The Clean House” at the Unicorn in February and March and in “Desdemona” for Actors Theatre KC last year — but at the Kansas City Fringe Festival, she makes her debut as a playwright and director.

Her memory of the grasshopper led her to write “Advice From a Spider,” a three-character one-act that she originally envisioned as a children’s book. In it a grasshopper, a spider and a butterfly interact in unpredictable and disturbing ways. The festival has rated the show PG.

“I started thinking about children’s stories and how they used to tell a moral and how Grimm’s stories often ended quite gruesomely,” she said. “The stories we get these days always end happily.”

Last summer, Severo was a key player in “The Coppelia Project,” an inventive European clown show conceived by Heidi Van and developed by Van and her actors. The show was among the best at last year’s Fringe Fest.

So when Van heard Severo’s idea for a children’s story, she immediately insisted that her friend and colleague write it as a play.

“I only think in plays,” Van said. “That’s what I want to make up, plays. I thought it would be beautiful transformed into theater.”

Van was assigned the title role — a manipulative and menacing spider. Severo plays the butterfly, who, aware that her life span will be no more than 40 days, has come to terms with death. And Dan Hillaker is the grasshopper, who has missed his chance to join the locusts and devour corn crops and wonders what is his life purpose. He finds himself torn between the spider and the butterfly, each of whom is hypnotic in her own way.

If that sounds a little like a children’s fable staring into the existential abyss, Severo wouldn’t disagree. As she has developed the piece, it has become something darker than you might normally encounter at a children’s theater. She said she has rewritten the end three times, and each one has been tragic.

“A lot of profanity began creeping in toward the end,” Severo said. “It really happens when things begin deteriorating for these characters. Something about insects cussing struck me as funny.”

Severo said Hillaker and Van have helped shape the dialogue. Van and Severo have worked together in recent years but never with Severo as a director.

“She’s a very supportive and nurturing person and those are nice qualities to have in a director,” Van said. “I’m intimidated. It’s hard wanting to live up to the idea of what she thinks I can do or living up to the idea of the character she has. It’s hard to be involved in somebody’s baby.”

Hillaker said Severo approached him early on about playing the grasshopper and has tailored the part specifically to his talents.

“She kind of wrote the part for me, which I had never experienced,” he said.

Beyond that, it’s really a human story. The costuming will be very simple and non-realistic.

“We’re not playing it like insects,” Hillaker said. “If we never mentioned that we were insects, it might take people several minutes to realize we aren’t human.”

Severo said the play will use music composed by Daniel Quinn and should run less than an hour. Ultimately, she said, the viewers will decide what it all means.

“It doesn’t come from an old story,” she said. “I made it up out of my head. The ending, I want the audience to decide. I’m really leaving it all up to them.”

“Advice From a Spider” premieres at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Off Center Theatre at Crown Center and continues through July 26. See the schedule at www.kcfringe.org.

Kyle Hatley, perpetual motion machine, is preparing to make a big, bold statement at the Kansas City Fringe Festival. Not that there’s anything unusual about that. Making big, bold statements is what Hatley does.

The 28-year-old playwright, director, actor and assistant artistic director of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre has been moving feverishly from one project to the next at least since last September.

Hatley served as the assistant director on every Rep production last season except “The Borderland,” an atmospheric thriller he directed at Copaken Stage.

He also directed an original three-part horror script, an audio-theater production with local actors for his online Chatterbox Theatre. He directed an innovative production of “Hamlet” at UMKC in which the audience was seated on rolling platforms that shifted during the performance.

He co-directed Ron Simonian’s raucous “Desperate Times — Desperate Measures” and will direct another Simonian piece for the Actors Equity Showcase later this summer. And in September, he’ll assist award-winning director Moises Kaufman when he stages Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” for the Rep.

“I’m addicted to momentum,” Hatley said by way of explaining his packed schedule. “And I’m also addicted to meeting new people and making new connections in the city. I’ve met more actors in the last two months than I have in all the months I’ve been here.”

At the moment, Hatley is focused on one project: “The Death of Cupid,” his attempt to transpose Greek myths into Southern vernacular with blues and gospel music.

The two-act play with a cast of 30 could turn out to be the major event of a theater-heavy Fringe Festival, which has scheduled 46 events classified as theater, spoken word, dance, burlesque or improv. “Cupid” performances begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Off Center Theatre in Crown Center and continue through Saturday.

Hatley said the piece began as an adaptation of “Lysistrata,” the ancient comedy by Aristophanes in which the women of Greece withhold sex in order to compel their men to stop warring.

But Hatley has used the basic narrative of “Lysistrata” to build a more complex story involving gods and goddesses — Khaos (Katie Gilchrist), Hera (Cynthia Rider), Cupid (Dina Kirschenbaum), Apollo (Nick Gehlfuss), Athena (Natalie Liccardello) and Aphrodite (Vanessa Severo).

Angela Cristantello plays Lysistrata, and there’s a female chorus led by Jennifer Mays and a male chorus led by Matt Rapport. The score arranged by Hatley and Michael Towle incorporates such traditional tunes as “Balm in Gilead,” “John Henry,” “Eyes on the Prize” and “Jacob’s Ladder.”

Hatley said his intent was to “talk about the death of fate and birth of human divinity. … There are some allusions to Christianity and other religions as well. I’m just asking the question: Why is it so easy for us to accept a god, and not see ourselves as divine?”

“The Death of Cupid” will share the Off Center Theatre with three other productions in the festival: “Advice From a Spider,” written and directed by Vanessa Severo; BOOM! An International Lost and Found Family Marching Band; and “Naughty Knickers — Take II,” the latest edition of Marisa MacKay’s Burlesque Downtown Underground.

The four groups decided to band together to share promotional resources and even held a joint fundraiser two weeks ago.

“They’re doing exactly what we’ve been encouraging people to do,” said festival coordinator Cheryl Kimmi. “Part of the festival’s goal is to bring artists together and create new collaborations. They’re the example I hope everyone would follow.”

One reason the four were booked into the same venue, Kimmi said, is that the shows have so many overlapping cast members.

Hatley and Heidi Van, who is producing and performing in “Advice From a Spider,” shared a performance space at last year’s festival, so it made sense to help each other this year.

“Heidi and I were sort of Fringe buddies last year, and that’s when I first saw BOOM! and Marisa,” Hatley said. “So I called them up, and we met and thought it was a good idea to figure out how to combine resources and collaborate. We jokingly refer to us as the Four Horsemen. All of our shows are about sex, death and disappointment — and maybe a little hope in there, too.”

By ROBERT TRUSSELL

The Kansas City Star

The latest edition of Boom! An International Lost and Found Marching Band is a more refined ensemble than the version I caught a year ago at the 2008 Fringe Festival.

This most unusual music group is back for this year’s festival with a couple of new members and a more coherent narrative. Don’t get me wrong: It’s still a wacky bunch of actor/musicians who serve up a very eccentric brand of deadpan comedy.

The joke – or, if you prefer, concept – is that the band is made up of siblings, each of whom were abandoned in early childhood by their absent-minded parents and raised in far-flung corners of the world.

Founder and director Stephanie Roberts plays Lily, the Germanic ukulele-playing bandleader, the widow of a contortionist. Often she barks “Achtung” to signal a new marching pattern.

Boris (Daniel Eichenbaum), a clarinetist who rarely speaks and never removes his sunglasses, was raised in Romania and detained in Guantanamo by the C.I.A.

Neil (Peter Lawless), a saxophonist who also plays the melodica, was raised in New Zealand by the Maori.

Baloo (Heidi Van) was raised by whales off Nova Scotia. She’s a rapper.

Josie (Carla Noack), an Irish ping-pong champion, pounds the bass drum.

And Vinnie (Grant Prewitt), who was raised in New Jersey and once sold women’s shoes (dress casual only), plays the trombone.

Simply describing what this group does hardly conveys how strange and funny it is because so much of the humor is generated by the precise, idiosyncratic performances.

And if you ask yourself what it all means, you may come up with a very simple answer: Nothing. But this such an odd assortment of performers – each formidably gifted in his or her own way – that they do have a way of working their will on viewers.

Hours or perhaps days after the show you may find that Boom! has embedded itself in your memory banks. Once there, it never leaves.

Boom! performs at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 5 p.m. Friday; 11:30 p.m. Saturday; and 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Off Center Theatre in Crown Center. Tickets are $10 with a $5 festival button. Go to www.kcfringe.org.

By ROBERT TRUSSELL

The Kansas City Star

Think of the Greek gods as an off-the-charts dysfunctional family.

That’s what we get in Kyle Hatley’s “The Death of Cupid,” a wildly ambitious and frequently absorbing theater piece that becomes repetitive and a bit laborious before it’s all said and done.

But this show, being staged as part of the Kansas City Fringe Festival, is unique. Hatley, the assistant artistic director of Kansas City Repertory Theatre, brings together an enormous cast and captures a number of superior performances in what he calls a “whiskey musical.”

Speaking as one who watched it stone cold sober, I was impressed to discover that the show is driven by an actual idea – that the gods (any gods) are really creations of human consciousness and become proportionally less important as humans assume responsibility for their actions.

That idea is expressed fairly early in this two-act play and gets restated and overstated as the narrative runs its course. But the fact that the gods are acutely aware that their days are numbered gives the play an edge. They are, one character says, a dying breed.

Hatley loosely based this play on “Lysistrata,” the comedy by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens cut off sex with their husbands until they stop making war and come home. Some of Hatley’s ribald variations on the original are very funny.

Indeed, this is a play with sex on the brain, from the libidinous antics of the gods to the carnal desires of mortals. When Lysistrata (Angela Cristantello) organizes women to go on a sex strike, it angers Aphrodite (Vanessa Severo), the goddess of love, and puts her on a collision course with Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom (Natalie Liccardello).

Athena ultimately threatens to kill Aphrodite’s son, Cupid (Dina Kirschenbaum), the god of erotic love who determines people’s fate with his magic bow and arrows.

Hera (Cynthia Rider), the matriarch, referees the dispute but ultimately concludes that Cupid must die if mortals are to live by their wits rather than fate.

I’ve just described the tragic through-line of the play, but the comic moments are more likely to linger in the viewer’s mind. Regardless, the heartbeat of the play is in Kirschenbaum’s indelible performance as Cupid. She captures the essence of an adolescent who has reached the limit of his power but doesn’t understand why.

Rider and Severo reiterate their abilities as deft comic actresses, particularly early on, when we first see the incongruous spectacle of goddesses acting like petty humans. And Patrick Dulaney delivers a marvelous show-stopping performance in Act 2 as Hades, depicted here as a sort of decadent philosopher.

Cristantello is very good as Lysistrata and Matt Rapport, who has become one of the city’s best character actors, is funny without seeming to work at it as Hercules and later as the male chorus leader.

Katie Gilchrist is Khaos, our emcee for the evening. She’s a narrator, not a character, and too often is reduced to stating the obvious, but the charismatic Gilchrist does what she can with it.

The music, performed live and adapted from traditional blues and folk tunes by Hatley and Michael Towle, is effective at times, repetitive at others.

The scenery designed by PJ Barnett is minimal and Cat Larrison’s lighting design is a major plus in terms of establishing mood and atmosphere.

Hatley has created a strong piece of theater that would be even more effective if he shortened it and compressed it into a 90-minute one-act.

By ROBERT TRUSSELL

The Kansas City Star

F ilmmaker Rossana Jeran (“Godhead”) has plenty of experience with low-budget moviemaking here in Kansas City. But her latest, “Triptych,” may have set some sort of record for frugality.

“Five hundred dollars,” Jeran reported in a phone call from Los Angeles, where she recently relocated to test the waters of commercial cinema. “I’m not kidding.”

Area audiences can see what that sort of money buys when “Triptych” opens Tuesday as part of the Kansas City Fringe Festival.

How do you make a feature film that cheaply? Well, it helps to count among your friends film professionals like editor Tim DePaepe and director of photography Pat Lamb.

And when the screenplay and your leading man don’t cost a cent, that’s a big plus, too.

“We shot last summer in Kansas City after Jason Turner brought me the script,” Jeran recalled. “At the time it was untitled, but I liked the idea. It’s a love triangle with fantasy elements.”

The plot: Stan and Sarah are struggling actors and best friends. Stan has become disenchanted with the Midwest and is having trouble finding parts. Sarah talks him into auditioning for a play where he meets Raven, a photographer documenting the production.

They begin a relationship, which forces Sarah to admit that she, too, has romantic feelings toward Stan.

“What makes this setup really interesting is the play within the movie,” Jeran said. “It’s a vampire play, and it becomes a metaphor for these characters’ real-life relationships.

“It starts out pretty straightforward and then explodes so that after a while you can’t be sure what is real life and what’s the play they’re rehearsing,” Jeron said. “I call it fantasy with one foot in reality.”

Turner wrote the role of Stan for himself, so it was a given that he’d be the male lead. After auditions Jeran cast local stage actress Shannon Walsh as Sarah and Brynne Copping as Raven. A KC native, Copping attends Marymount College near L.A.

“Brynne’s mom is Claudia Copping, who’s pretty well-known in the local film industry as a former board member for the Independent Filmmakers Coalition,” Jeran said. “That’s how I met her daughter.”

Kansas film auteur Steve Balderson (“Firecracker,” “Watch Out”) took a small role as the director of the play-within-the-movie. And Jeran gave herself a cameo as a succubus.

They filmed it in a month last summer.

“We had lots of serendipity with this film,” Jeran said. “Things opened up for us. The locations we needed fell into our laps. We shot in a downtown loft, at the Swope mausoleum in Swope Park.

“One of the film’s scenes is a fashion show,” she said. “It so happened that the 18th Street Fashion Show was under way while we were in production, and we got permission to shoot it as our backdrop.”

Of her move back to Los Angeles after five years in Kansas City, Jeran said, “It was time for a change. My son is out here at school at Pepperdine. I always sort of knew I’d return. I love the weather and the ocean.”

She also found a gig working for a new film/television production company.

“I’m helping to establish this company from the ground up,” she said. “After years of working as an independent filmmaker it’s interesting to see how the industry works from a more traditional approach.”

Composer and guitarist Kevin Hiatt describes his music as very American, almost “Coplandesque.”

And it’s definitely not the typical dissonant music that most people associate with new tunes.

Hiatt will perform his melodic compositions in concert at 8 p.m. today and Friday at the Kansas City Club, 910 Baltimore, as part of the annual KC Fringe Festival, an eight-day celebration of artists performing live theater, music, dance, performance art, visual art, film, fashion and more that wraps up Sunday at venues throughout the city.

Hiatt, who has an undergraduate degree in composition from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, left town in 1981 to pursue his master’s in composition at the University of Tennessee and a doctorate at the University of Miami.

“I moved back three years ago,” he said, “and was so impressed by the quality of musicians that Kansas City now has.”

One of those fine musicians, Victoria Sofia Botero, will sing “Five Songs From the River,” settings of poetry by Ted Hughes. Hughes is best known as a former British poet laureate and husband of Sylvia Plath. Botero says Hiatt’s compositions are “wonderful because they’re influenced by Joni Mitchell, whom I love. They have a nice bluesy feel, very sophisticated music.”

Hiatt says the poems are “deep as a water well.”

Hiatt also set to music two of Langston Hughes’ most provocative poems — “Daybreak in Alabama” and “The Ballad of Roosevelt.” Baritone Adam Hulstine will give them their world premiere. Hiatt considers the African-American poet a prophet.

“ ‘Daybreak in Alabama’ seems to predestine Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and ‘The Ballad of Roosevelt’ deals with issues still with us today,” Hiatt said.

There also will be non-vocal music on the program. Flutist Deana Wagoner and pianist Joyce Berg will perform an example of Hiatt’s melodic, almost neo-impressionism “One Star in Sight.” “Garuda” for solo bass clarinet is inspired by the vulture-like bird of Tibetan mythology.

“It’s probably the most avant-garde piece on the program,” Hiatt said. “Time can speed up, time can slow down. Time can stand still.”

Hiatt wrote the work for Thomas Aber in 1987, and Aber will perform it at the Fringe Festival. Hiatt will also read three of his poems about returning to Kansas City while Aber performs jazz improvisations. The two concerts of Hiatt’s music will take place in what might seem like an odd venue — the Kansas City Club, which is a wood-paneled chamber with tapestries on the walls, he said, adding it’s the sort of place you’d imagine royalty listening to chamber music.

You can get tickets to all Fringe Festival events at www.kcfringe.org.

By PATRICK NEAS

Special to The Star

The latest edition of Boom! An International Lost and Found Family Marching Band is a more refined ensemble than the version I caught a year ago at the 2008 Fringe Festival.

This most unusual music group is back with a couple of new members and a more coherent narrative. Don’t get me wrong: It’s still a wacky bunch of actor/musicians who serve up a very eccentric brand of deadpan comedy.

The joke — or, if you prefer, concept — is that the band is made up of siblings, each of whom was abandoned in early childhood by absent-minded parents and raised in far-flung corners of the world.

Founder and director Stephanie Roberts plays Lily, the Germanic ukulele-playing bandleader, widow of a contortionist. Often she barks “Achtung” to signal a new marching pattern.

Boris (Daniel Eichenbaum), a clarinetist who rarely speaks and never removes his sunglasses, was raised in Romania and detained in Guantanamo by the CIA.

Neil (Peter Lawless), a saxophonist who also plays the melodica, was raised in New Zealand by the Maori. Baloo (Heidi Van) was raised by whales off Nova Scotia. She’s a rapper. Josie (Carla Noack), an Irish pingpong champion, pounds the bass drum. And Vinnie (Grant Prewitt), who was raised in New Jersey and once sold women’s shoes, plays the trombone.

Simply describing what this group does hardly conveys how strange and funny it is, because so much of the humor is generated by the precise, idiosyncratic performances.

And if you ask yourself what it all means, you may come up with a very simple answer: Nothing. But this is such an odd assortment of performers — each formidably gifted in his or her own way — that they do have a way of working their will on viewers.

•••

Think of the Greek gods as an off-the-charts dysfunctional family.

That’s what we get in Kyle Hatley’s “The Death of Cupid,” a wildly ambitious and frequently absorbing theater piece that becomes repetitive and a bit laborious before it’s all said and done.

But this show, staged as part of the Fringe Festival, is unique. Hatley, assistant artistic director of Kansas City Repertory Theatre, brings together an enormous cast and captures several superior performances in what he calls a “whiskey musical.”

Speaking as one who watched it stone-cold sober, I was impressed to discover that the show is driven by an actual idea — that the gods (any gods) are really creations of human consciousness and become proportionally less important as humans assume responsibility for their actions.

That idea is expressed fairly early in this two-act play and gets restated and overstated as the narrative runs its course. But the fact that the gods are acutely aware that their days are numbered gives the play an edge. They are, one character says, a dying breed.

Hatley loosely based this play on “Lysistrata,” the comedy by Aristophanes in which the women of Athens cut off sex with their husbands until they stop making war. Some of Hatley’s ribald variations on the original are very funny.

Indeed, this is a play with sex on the brain, from the libidinous antics of the gods to the carnal desires of mortals. When Lysistrata (Angela Cristantello) organizes women to go on a sex strike, it angers Aphrodite (Vanessa Severo), the goddess of love, and puts her on a collision course with Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom (Natalie Liccardello).

Athena ultimately threatens to kill Aphrodite’s son, Cupid (Dina Kirschenbaum), the god of erotic love who determines people’s fate with his magic bow and arrows.

Hera (Cynthia Rider), the matriarch, referees the dispute but ultimately concludes that Cupid must die if mortals are to live by their wits rather than fate.

I’ve just described the tragic through-line of the play, but the comic moments are more likely to linger in the viewer’s mind. Regardless, the heartbeat of the play is in Kirschenbaum’s indelible performance as Cupid. She captures the essence of an adolescent who has reached the limit of his power but doesn’t understand why.

Hatley has created a strong piece of theater that would be even more effective if he shortened it and compressed it into a 90-minute one-act.

ROBERT TRUSSELL RTRUSSELL@KCSTAR.COM