An Inconvenient Squirrel

by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low • August 2, 2008 • Much has been made of Joe Scrimshaw’s genre leap this year – from naughty drunken Fringe shows to a kid-friendly fantasy adventure, which is a leap that’s probably much newer to this audience than it is to the writer himself – but what’s striking about this one is how similar the underlying structure is – despite the genre shift, this is a Scrimshaw show, pure and – well, pure, so I guess that that’s the major difference right there. But it’s the same kind of jokes – the same stock characters – the same constant, appalled indignation that drives much of the comedy. And that’s a good thing.

Womb With a View is the blog of Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, one of five bloggers covering the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the Daily Planet.

The script is straightforward enough that there’s not much to add. I do have a few thoughts – it’s surprisingly heavily language- and dialogue-driven, which is emphatically A Good Thing as far as I’m concerned. It gets a bit message-heavy, although it’s never condescending. And the play really is based on a single joke, played out over and over again.

But then, I can’t really complain about the last point – because it never got old, at least for me – I was consistently laughing from beginning to end. The dude’s conquered yet another genre, and built yet another sturdy Fringe hit from unlikely materials.

Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theatre critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theatre troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.