New York Fringe Festival Report: \'Dogs\'

August 23, 2012, 12:32 pm

By ANITA GATES

Reviews of shows from the New York International Fringe Festival will appear on ArtsBeat through the festival's close on Aug. 26. For more information, go to fringenyc.org.

Aha! The choreography is intentionally clunky. The program notes say so.

That explains why in the first musical number of “Dogs,” at the New Ohio Theater, the cast look so much like those sweet men in “The Full Monty” - everyday guys turned awkward strippers at their first rehearsal.

Not that there is any nudity in this TheaterCan production, written by Ido Bernstein and directed by Shlomo Plessner. But there are a pregnant man, two guys who wear giant garbage bags, a would-be actor who arrives at his audition in hand cuffs, a mysterious but obviously symbolic pyramid of buckets and an all-male Arab-Israeli adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet.” One character believes doing that show together might bridge the gap of hatred and mistrust.

“Dogs” has noble ambitions, to explore the aggressive masculinity that develops (or rather is deliberately instilled, just as one would train a dog to be vicious) in the world in which Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs coexist. Unfortunately the message becomes largely lost in a frequently incoherent production, and the proceedings are sometimes just baffling. Even when the show makes an effort to clarify, the results can be eye-rollingly obvious.

“There's something in the singing, in the togetherness, that helps us get along,” Shahar announces. Yeah, right.

But there are bright spots. Much of Mr. Bernstein's script is written in convincingly colloquial English (“Done deal” is one of the more printable terms used repeatedly). The music - which includes a Zionist folk song, an Arabic ballad and a Eurovision pop number - is melodic and moving, even for those of us who don't understand the  words.

Gili (Lavi Zytner), the gay theater director, has some interesting ideas about adaptation too. When he stages a scene in which Romeo asks Juliet's father for her hand in marriage, someone points out that in Shakespeare's version the two men never meet. Gili just shrugs and says, “Shakespeare was afraid.”

“Dogs” continues through Friday at the New Ohio Theater, 154 Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, (866) 468-7619.