Theater/Geek 08/06/2012 9:47pm

Full disclosure: Kelvin Hatle is a friend of mine. I've cast him in many shows, but had nothing to do with his current Fringe show. I do not own stock in Kelvin Hatle, and my 401(k) is independently managed. This post contains no specific plot spoilers, but discusses the structure of his show, which might be mildly spoilery if you're thinking of seeing his show, which you should. "Someone Is Wrong On The Internet is a show that shouldn't work as well as it does," I thought as I was watching it. Within five minutes, you'll get the structure; Stage Right is a rather meek man, temping at a job he hates, trying and failing to connect with people, and on stage left is the Jerk On The Internet who blogs Raw Id about his everyday annoyances as if he were Pacino in And Justice for All, or, for those of you born in the 90s, Gotye when he's saying "SomeBODEEEEEEE!" And yet is does work, because Internet Guy isn't just Griefing—that is, just being a dick on the internet because he gets off on making other people miserable—no, Internet Guy is saying all these things because a) he passionately believes them at the moment he is saying them and b) he has no other outlet for these opinions. Then it clicked: It works because this is a Fringe show about writing a Fringe show. Before there was the Internet, there was theater: a venue for otherwise humble, soft-spoken people to get up in front of other people and say "here is the crazy shit that is in my skull, please applaud and otherwise rate me." They took their myths and rewrote them to produce, in confrontational adaptations, the point they were making about what was wrong about society. Consider Medea to be the first political fan fiction, which continues up to today with a show like Gay Banditos, a show which takes the worst nightmares of small-town right-wingers as its very literal premise. No one posts on the Internet hoping their thoughts will go unshared, and no one does theater out of a sense of humility. We (myself very much included, in both senses) do it because we think our opinions need to be heard. The big, big, big difference is that while Anonymous Guy On The Internet hides behind avatars and callsigns in their tweets, blog posts, or (ahem) show reviews, Fringe artists put their names and faces to their work. In fact, we won't shut up about it. Which I guess is perhaps more egomaniacal, but also more honest, since we have to deal with the fallout of what we do on stage. And it's that ownership that makes the difference. An actor plays a role, a playwright writes lines, but knows that his name is in the program, and strangely, it's that paradox that determines his success: The worst thing about art is when you play it safe. Safe is boring. Hatle's character takes every imagined insult in his life, bottles it up, then releases it online like a cannon-blast, but Hatle the playwright has taken his experiences of online interactions (both those he's seen and, I suspect, created), then filtered them on to the stage with a message of "this is an aspect of myself that is private, and I'm putting it onstage because I think you might find it entertaining because you recognize it in yourself." I know a lot of extremely talented Fringe artists. Go through the top-reviewed shows and I know someone in the majority of them*. They are uniformly sweet, polite, funny, self-effacing people who will get onstage and say the most twisted shit you can imagine with a straight face and you know they're being honest about what they've lived through. It's amazing. It's amazing because they're there, on stage, live, in front of you, saying in essence "this is what I'm like. And I think maybe you are, too." ---- *Ooooh, what a name dropper!