All year long, we card-carrying critics sit in judgment of the city’s actors, directors, playwrights, and designers. We watch and write, and watch and write. But what about these artists we review? What might they do, if handed our pens for a while?

For the second summer in a row, the Sun hopes to find out. We have invited some of the outstanding talents of downtown and Off-Broadway to visit the New York International Fringe Festival, and review its shows in our pages.

The contributors weren’t chosen solely on the basis of their talent, though they are among the brightest up-and-comers in town. They are doing singular work, the kind of work a critic is excited to see. And so we’ve encouraged them to choose, from the nearly 200 offerings in this year’s festival, the shows that seem most intriguing to them.

Over the next two weeks, the Sun will publish reviews by today’s contributors, as well as the playwright Brooke Berman; the actors Sean Dugan, Marin Ireland, and Colleen Werthmann; and the designer Louisa Thompson. Though they’ve long since distinguished themselves onstage, almost all of our contributors are here venturing to the dark side of the footlights for the first time.

DOG SEES GOD
SOHO PLAYHOUSE

In our modern world, where teenagers carry guns, the ghetto ethos is adopted by middle-class kids, and sexual orientation carries a sometimes fatal currency, how does the transition between adolescence and adulthood play out? What are its costs? In “Dog Sees God,” Bert V. Royal’s irreverent, at times blisteringly funny new play, the transition is a multi-vehicle car crash.

Mr. Royal uses characters from Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” cartoon to explore the passage from the classic confusions of grammar school life to the savage fare of high school culture today. We meet CB as he narrates a letter to his anonymous pen pal. His subject is the death of his unnamed dog (think Snoopy), who, before his death, mad with rabies, cannibalistically murdered his favorite bird (think Woodstock).

CB, brilliantly played by Michael Gladis, stands before the audience in an attitude reminiscent of the “Peanuts” hero. In his yellow T-shirt (sans the zigzag), he is indignant, existentially confused, and yearning for understanding. What begins as the classic story of a boy losing his dog spirals into a comic nightmare of disillusionment and teenage-mob conformity.

The action hinges on CB’s sexual awakening. The surprising and unexpectedly touching “coming out” scene takes place in a piano rehearsal room, with Beethoven (aka Schroeder, played with honest, confused innocence by Benjamin Shrader). But soon Matt (think Pigpen, here a homo-hating bully) will gay-bash Beethoven, leading him to overdose.

Plenty of narrative winking surrounds Mr. Royal’s “Peanuts” appropriation. Lines like “You’re a homo, Charlie Brown!” walk a tawdry line. But considering this was the classic cartoon gang of many of our youths, how could Mr. Royal help himself?

Other familiar characters turn up, thinly disguised. CB’s precocious, performance-artist sister (think Sally) is played with hilarious over-seriousness by Karen DiConcetto. Van (think Linus) has grown up to become such a stoner that he actually smokes the deified blanket. Van’s Sister (think Lucy) is a pyromaniac who has landed in prison for setting the Little Red-headed Girl’s hair on fire.

The constantly spinning, occasionally wild ride makes only a few wrong turns, including a distended, slightly sentimental conclusion. The play works best when it steers clear of sophomoric moralizing, as is found in lines like, “God is dead.”

Director Susan W. Lovell moves things along briskly and gets strong performances out of a young, inspired cast, anchored by Mr. Gladis’s unflinching, heartbreaking CB. In the wake of Columbine and Matthew Shepard, the show achieves a surprising poignancy, rising above its own comic intentions.

– Adam Rapp, playwright,
‘Stone Cold Dead Serious,’ ‘Blackbird,’ ‘Nocturne’

DIE , DIE , DIANA,
A MUSICAL
MICHAEL SCHIMMEL CENTER FOR THE ARTS

In London’s Hyde Park, the recently opened Princess Diana Memorial Fountain was slightly more recently closed, after people fell on its slippery stones, and used its pool to wash their dogs and discard their babies’ diapers. As fences were unrolled to keep the public at bay, the culture minister expressed disappointment at the general “lack of reverence.” One wonders what her response might be to hope theater’s “Die, Die, Diana, a Musical!”

A self-styled “act of sedition,” Scott Sublett’s and Jeff Labes’s show jams together music-hall banter, horse-fetish bondage, snippets of Shakespeare, celebrity-ghost visitations, fart jokes, Nazi genetics, Muslim-bashing, and anti-corporate rants. Our narrator, Johnny Swift (played by Jack Halpin like a young Benny Hill), tells us this is a “Brechtian” approach – “so don’t go applauding every song, or we’ll be here all night” – to the familiar media-circus saga: A dim but ambitious girl marries the prince, but falls in love with the frog (or “hairy little wog,” as Heather McAllister’s elegantly kinky Queen Elizabeth describes Diana’s Egyptian lover). Then she dies in a conspiracy-ripe accident in Paris.

Diana, “the girl in the zoo,” is played by a chirpily demented Ashley Wren Collins, who belts the show’s 1960s-style songs with a lusty throb. She is introduced in her frothy wedding gown, but quickly strips to a see-through nightie, singing the joys of living “without secrets.” The show’s creators want to extend the transparency to every aspect of the production, like the threadbare design and the onstage band that chuckles at the action. But the approach quickly leaves the cast and director Kelly McAllister with nowhere to go. (More bondage, anyone?)

It also shows the soft center of what’s supposed to be a poison bonbon: a decidedly un-Brechtian sentimentality. So between the rude fun of the goose-stepping choruses and paparazzi slipping their cameras literally beneath Diana’s skirts, we have would-be tender scenes of the abandoned young princes, and the dead ex-princess visiting us from “a place beyond the stars.”

The piece is more bracing, and use fully seditious, when it views everything – including mummy-love – as a control-ploy. The spectacle of celebrities like Diana Spencer, Johnny rants, exists to distract us from the crimes committed by powers that own the media. Hear, hear.

– T. Ryder Smith, actor,
‘King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe,’ ‘She Stoops to Comedy’

CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY
PLAZA CAFE AT PACE UNIVERSITY

Many young actors are surprised to learn that their dreams of “becoming someone else” can stand in the way of their ability to project truth in their work. The great actors get to know themselves before portraying others. In Steven Fales’s autobiographical tell-almost-all “Confessions of a Mormon Boy,” the actor’s usual situation is reversed: Mr. Fales has pretended to be someone else for his whole life, and is only now portraying himself.

Mr. Fales was always interested in singing and performing. He describes his time as a member of BYU’s Mormon Ambassadors, a group dedicated to spreading the Latter Day Saints’ message of smiling discrimination in song and dance. After his first gay romance, he realized that his “gender disorientation” and his religion’s policies are incompatible.

A life of attempted integration follows, including a marriage to a Mormon woman whose mother had been married to a homosexual who died of AIDS. Mr. Fales relates his divorce, excommunication – for homosexuality, which the Mormons say doesn’t exist – move to New York, dip into gay prostitution, and ultimate survival.

Mr. Fales has certainly written himself some winning one-liners. He says that being a gay father in the Church of Latter Day Saints makes him “an oxy-Mormon.” After a life of pretending to be straight (and a lot of harrowing therapy to try to remain so), Mr. Fales has covered some unique, compelling terrain. But his manner is one of someone divorced from his own reality. For a “confession,” there is a strangely presentational air to the proceedings, which were overseen by Broadway vet and Tony-winner Jack Hofsiss.

In exposing the hypocrisy of his church, he hits on some stunning details, like the warning that, if he is excommunicated, he’ll be unable to see his children in the afterlife. But the habits that Mr. Fales has cultivated in a life of pretending impair him here. Even a stunning physical revelation late in the evening can’t quite keep Mr. Fales from explaining his truth rather than revealing it. “I can’t tell you what it cost me to sell my smile,” he admits. It’s fair to wish Mr. Hofsiss had helped him do so.

– Carl Forsman, artistic director, Keen Co.;
director, ‘The Happy Journey to Camden and Trenton’

5,000 NIGHTS
SOHO PLAYHOUSE

5,000 by Nights two Kevin -character ,”written Lawler, and is an about direct hour along, play pair of tramps named Demetri and Pelias. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Demetri (Hughston Walkinshaw) and Pelias (Nils Haaland) inhabit an existential wasteland in which they struggle to remember their pasts (they can’t remember what year it is), reflect on their wasted lives, and long for death. Though I try to refrain from calling artworks derivative, this play is so completely derivative that there’s no other option.

Structured as a series of short scenes, some of them wordless, the play depicts the two squabbling, commiserating, and doing what they can to make it through yet another day. They claim to have been doing the same thing for the past 5,000 nights.

Mr. Lawler’s restrained use of lighting and sound design (borrowing music by Philip Glass) creates a consistent sense of mood and rhythm. He builds a series of compositionally solid images out of very little: a bench, a handful of props, two actors wearing masks and wigs. Two of the wordless scenes are noteworthy. In the first, a build in music culminates in a blackout; later, one of the characters silently performs surgery on the other.

Other choices are less successful. In the cliched opening scene, the actors deliver their first lines while applying makeup and masks. Mr. Lawler’s direction of the actors results in heavy-handed performances. As for the choreography (by the noted downtown artist David Neumann), one hobo does teach the other to slow-dance, and one of them does perform a quick, frantic shuffle. But you would be hard-pressed to detect a choreographer’s hand in either moment.

The dialogue can only be described as bad imitation Beckett. “The past is like an opium to me, waxing poetic,” says a tramp. In one particularly excruciating scene, Godot-esque homoeroticism meets sitcom humor when what appears to be a passionate blowjob is nothing more than the removal of a stubborn splinter. As an admirer of Beckett, I can understand the impulse to reproduce his work, but there is really no excuse for as poor a simulation as this.

– Young Jean Lee, playwright/director,
‘The Appeal’; member, 13P

YOUNG ZOMBIES IN LOVE
PLAYERS THEATER

Writer Damian Hess and composer/lyricist Gaby Alter of San Francisco’s Emerald Rain Productions have crafted a canny pop cultural musical hybrid: “Young Zombies in Love” tries to be both an irreverent satire of teen culture and a sincere exploration of apathy and fear.

Nick (Daniel Zaitchik) and Lu (Erica Ash) are grim but endearing teenagers who find love, and two dead bodies, in the cemetery behind their local bus stop. Their near-fatal run-in with a letter-opener-wielding zombie cheerleader, Slashy Von Slashenburg, leads them to the offices of Sheriff Herbert Nazington (Lawrence Feeney channeling Don Knotts). Like the other denizens of the aptly named Tombtown, he doesn’t believe their story, which is surprising considering the mysterious disappearance of 37 teenagers over the past week. What ensues is mayhem of the musical, corporeal, and metaphysical varieties.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hess’s book is overly concerned with one-liners, which makes it difficult for us to genuinely care about its characters; the targets are too broad, soft, or irrelevant for the show to succeed as satire. Horror comedies are notoriously difficult to pull off. For them to be successful, like Peter Jackson’s Oedipal nightmare “Dead Alive” or Dan O’Bannon’s “Return of the Living Dead,” they must provide a carefully calibrated balance of laughs and shocks. Here, we get some great laughs but no shocks. It results in a genial comedy that has no bite.

Director Jackson Gay finds the right tone for the piece, and the production rarely lags. Ms. Alter’s score, though not always successful at moving the plot forward, is electric and inventive, ranging in style from calypso to trip-hop. Mr. Zaitchik and Ms. Ash have a winning chemistry, and strong support is provided by Kevin Townley as the hyperactive Professor Itsucolt, and Justin R.G. Holcomb, who hams it up perfectly as the S.W.A.T. King.

Especially winning are Jeffrey Doornbos and Graham Stevens: They avoid the obvious pitfalls of this kind of material and take their jock zombie caricatures to sublime heights of imbecility. Production values are minimal but effective, as befits the Fringe. Joshua Carlson’s choreography is silly and joyously slinky.

– Jose Zayas, co-producer, INTAR’s New Works Lab;
director, ‘I’m With Mauricio’