Author Archives: Ephemeral Pleasures

Sia – painful but not unbearable story of the aftermath of war

Currently playing at the ATB Financial Arts Barns’ black-box theatre space PCL Studio Theatre is Pyretic Productions’ Sia, by Matthew Mackenzie. There are about 50 seats arranged in two rows along one long side of the room, and the set visible before the play started included a piece of broken concrete-block wall, some debris, and steps up to a platform covered with some malevolently-twisted welded tube and old metal chairs, formed into shapes suggesting a large tree and some roots or vines. Program notes mentioned a refugee camp in Ghana, Liberian child soldiers, and the Butcher of Liberia’s conviction for multiple war crimes, so I worried for a few minutes that I might find the portrayal too disturbing sitting in the front row. But I didn’t, quite.

The lights then dimmed and I was swept away into the story, starting as Makambe K Simamba, playing a young girl (I first guessed her age between 9 and 15 but she later said she was eleven), recited a folktale about birds arguing over a mango and the snake advisor who betrays them. In the next scene, we saw two young men staggering home together from a party. The white Canadian student Nick Summers (Patrick Lundeen) was very drunk, and his friend Abraham, a black Liberian from the refugee camp where Nick has been volunteering (Thomas Olajide, who played the same part at Factory Theatre in Toronto last year) was helping him home and washing off the magic-marker tattoos he’s been covered with at his departure/birthday party. We saw quickly that Abraham was sober and had some kind of plan that Nick didn’t know about, and even though they seemed to be friends, this was worrying. I wasn’t even surprised when Abraham snapped handcuffs onto his half-conscious friend, and then video-recorded him as must be de rigeur for abductors.

Scenes then alternate between the interactions of Nick and Abraham, and interactions between Abraham and Simamba’s character, his well-loved precocious younger sister who is practising what she will say in a presentation she’ll give to some UN peace monitors expected in their village. She tries out the Liberian Declaration of Independence, the symbolism of a Christian communion service, and a story about Poseidon and Atlantis, while her older brother encourages and teases and critiques her.

Abraham goads Nick about being a typical Canadian refugee-camp tourist, coming to “observe”, and this seems to be a fair accusation. His attempt to do yoga sun salutations while chained up is classic. His later behaviour under the influence is particularly amusing, and slightly reminiscent of the last character I’d seen Patrick Lundeen play, the “mildly retarded but it’s just fetal alcohol syndrome, I’m not stupid, eh?” character in Kill Me Now. I was also reminded of the naive missionaries of last year’s U of A Studio Theatre production The Missionary Position, and the jarring disconnect between their Canadian confidence and the setting they didn’t know they didn’t understand.

It all gradually makes sense, and has a sort of hopeful ending, but not without living through and reliving some horrible events consistent with the bigger story of that place and time. Thomas Olajide’s character is the most developed and complex. His smooth shifts back and forth between the young patriot teasing his sister and the tormented man using his friend in order to get something he needs desperately made me like and feel sorry for his character.

Sia is playing until Sunday, with tickets available through the Fringe box office. It’s not for the squeamish or easily upset, but it’s a good story. I’m glad I saw it.

pool (no water) at the U of A Studio Theatre

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The U of A Drama Studio Theatre season started in September with Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water). This disturbing story of unspoken resentments within a longtime group of artistic collaborators featured Ainsley Hilliard, Vince Forcier, Brett Dahl, Kristi Hansen, and Gianna Vacirca, who I believe are all recent BFA grads of the department.

Much of the story is told by the five unnamed group members in overlapping monologues, interspersed with scenes where they interact as they re-enact the events they’re recounting. They tell a story about their dealings with a sixth person, speaking of her as She and often having one of them play Her role in their re-enactments. It seems that She was originally another participant in their group, but she became more distant as she got more conventionally successful. They mimic her and make fun of her, talking about her boasts about her commissions and swimming pool, but when she invites them to her poolside home for a visit they all accept. None of the locations are identified in the not-quite-real storytelling – I was picturing their home as the “bohemian quarter” of some big city, maybe New York or London or even Toronto or Vancouver, and the place where they visit their old friend as some island warm and full of wealthy expats, maybe in the Caribbean or somewhere like Mallorca or the Canary Islands if they’d travelled from London. The visitors comment on the large beautiful house with several servants, and then describe how they immediately plunge into partying, which leads naturally into all of them getting naked (on stage this was represented with various white undergarments) and preparing to dive into the pool in the dark.

Here I should describe the stage. It was mostly bare, with a cool blue light and some chrome furniture and gallery displays around the sides. But projecting out from the apparent front of the stage were five diving boards, with the space between them and under them and out into the audience being the pool. It was lit with that eerie blue swimming-pool-at-night colour, but when She plunges in, she lands on hard empty concrete and is badly injured. It was one of those shocks that’s almost a relief, since it was clear from the storytelling that something horrible was going to happen.

As She lies unconscious in hospital, the group still resents her, but overlaid on that is a mix of guilt, of relief that it wasn’t them, of enjoying her beach house without her around, and of a fascination with the whole concept of being comatose, which they express freely in front of each other. And they start taking pictures of Her when the hospital staff aren’t looking.

Eventually, she begins to recover, and when she finds out about the photos, she plans an exhibition, assuming ownership of the art. As you can imagine, this makes the group of friends even more resentful. The whole story is really about undercurrents of resentment in nominal friendships, and the heartless reactions and behaviours were entirely too credible for my comfort. It was thought-provoking, disturbing in a good way, and occasionally quite funny. Also, as one could expect from seeing Vince Forcier’s and Ainsley Hillyard’s names in the program, there was some very powerful expressive movement. It was a good start to the Studio Theatre season that left me wondering what would come next.

Ronnie Burkett’s The Daisy Theatre

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Ronnie Burkett’s The Daisy Theatre, playing at the Citadel’s Club cabaret-style space until November 17^th, is a sort of revue show with marionettes. The title is a tribute to a tradition of marionettes in occupied Czechoslovakia during WWII.

I’ve only seen one performance, but I’d love to see it again. Apparently the performances vary quite a bit, with different puppet characters making an appearance, sometimes chosen spontaneously. In the one I saw, there was an old-style English Colonel singing a music-hall song to piano accompaniment, a retired diva, and Edna Rural, a determined farm widow finally travelling after her husband’s death. The puppeteer, Burkett, is completely visible above the puppet stage, but I was surprised at how easily I forgot he was there and just watched the puppets. He also solicited some audience participation, which was fun. There were lots of topical and local jokes about politics, theatre, and other Edmonton issues.

I would have described the overall mood of the performance I saw as affectionate and silly, but a friend who saw the same show was struck by recurring sadness, not just in the character Schnitzel (an odd non-human creature who bore some resemblance to the abused-child-in-the-circus narrator of Robertson Davies’ World of Wonder) but in the aging diva and other stories. Yet others commented that the evening was more light-hearted than some of Burkett’s earlier works.

Tickets are available through the Citadel Box Office for shows until November 17^th (a week today). There’s also a Movember fundraising opportunity to have your picture taken with a character after performances.

“There was no white linen, for my husband.” – People Like Us

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“There was no white linen, for my husband.”

That was one of the repeated lines in People Like Us, Sandi Johnson’s new play. Sarah Louise Turner plays Kate Rourke, wife of a 1991 Gulf War veteran, in an emotionally-evocative solo performance that had me in laughter and in tears.

I saw the first preview of the world premiere last night at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. And if my remaining time in Vancouver wasn’t already booked up with professional commitments, I’d be tempted to see it again.

“He held his cutlery like a prince.” In another repeated line, she shows us a glimpse of Gerry, the gallant man she married, kind, loyal, honoured to be a soldier – a man who once lifted her off her feet on the way home from a Christmas party in Petawawa to carry her across an intersection in her velvet dress in a snow storm.

Her narrative slips among times, the present (2001), the time before Gerry’s posting to Iraq, while he’s away, and how she copes after he returns home physically and mentally damaged. But the story’s easy to follow, due to clear writing and Ms Turner’s shifts in voice and body language. She becomes Gerry’s advocate with the military and the doctors, and gradually she starts helping other veterans conquer their own bureaucratic opponents. “Helping military veterans apply for medical marijuana – that should be a marketable skill?” She becomes known as the “Yarmouth (NS) Bulldog” for her tenacity.

She also maintains her love of belly dance, and a few times during the play she puts on scarves, coin belt, and zils to show how the dancing helps her maintain her power and sensuality during difficult times. The connection between “the Middle East” of the belly-dance culture, and her second-hand experience of Iraq through television and phone calls and Gerry’s flashbacks, is not spelled out at all. The story unfolds in a subtle way not often seen in short theatre pieces. A few times I thought I guessed at a disaster to come, and I was always wrong. The performer carries out various stage business during the narrative (folding laundry, packing a suitcase, making tea and drinking it), but this never distracted me from what she was saying. Instead it just emphasized her get-on-with-things attitude as a determined mother and military wife.

Firehall Arts Centre is an effective medium-size black box performance space. The set (designed by Amanda Larder) was fascinating – at first I saw the re-creation of a clean cozy family living room, with flowered upholstery, baskets of laundry, cups of tea, and wide worn floorboards, but gradually I took in the backdrop and ceiling from a different world. You see, above the white wainscoting, the room had been covered by a military-style canvas tent, only instead of conventional green camouflage or desert camouflage, the dirty stained fabrics included some Laura Ashley style flowered brocades or wallpapers. And partway through the show, I realised that along the walls of the room were little piles of sand, as if the tent/walls were insufficient to keep out the encroaching desert, just as Kate’s attempts to make a safe familiar home for her husband and children were not sufficient to keep the effects of war away from them.

This production continues at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver until November 16^th. I don’t know if there are any plans for it to travel. There should be.

2 Pianos, 4 Hands, lots of characters

Meanwhile, Back on the Couch – enjoyable community theatre comedy with one glaring flaw

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The Camrose Morning News is a small printed folder of announcements, ads, and pastimes. Something interesting caught my eye as I leafed through it at work, an invitation to a play. The Beaverhill Players, based in Holden AB, were putting on Meanwhile, Back on the Couch, by Jack Sharkey, and touring to Ryley and to the Bailey Theatre in Camrose (Nov 16^th) as well as playing in Holden (Nov 2-3).

The tour opened in Ryley last night, as part of a celebration of local businesses. Nearly 200 people attended and enjoyed a delicious overflowing buffet provided by local caterer Grethe’s Kitchen. I don’t usually attend dinner theatre by myself (still haven’t made it to the Mayfield) but I enjoyed sitting at a table full of friendly people from all over the region, and I took moderate advantage of the cheapest theatre bar in Central Alberta. Door prizes, an ice-breaking game, and various business awards added to the fun.

Director Julianne Foster introduced the play, and the traditional stage drapes drew apart to reveal an art-deco-styled office suite with a cleverly-lit New York City skyline out the window. The skyline art was credited to Inez White. The main character, psychoanalyst Victor Karleen (Ernie Rudy) wants to publish a memoir of his cases so he can afford a Caribbean honeymoon with his fiancée (Debbie Perkins). But we soon see that he also wants to be a more successful author than his rival colleague (Ray Leiren). Add in a sassy nurse-receptionist (Laura Rudy), two quirky patients (Dave Maruszeczka and Inez White), a pompous publisher (Gary Kelly), and a college student neighbour on a scavenger hunt (Crystal Hedeman), and madcap hijinks begin to follow, because it’s that kind of farce. Hijinks include an eavesdropper falling into the room, someone undressing while someone else is turned away pouring drinks, and an awful lot of kissing. Jokes about predictable psychotherapists, single people, married people, and Reader’s Digest might have worked a bit better when the play was first performed in the early 1970s, but the audience still enjoyed them. I laughed a lot, as did the people around me.

Dave Maruszeczka was especially good, portraying Albert with an endearing consistent mixture of bewilderment and insistence. The pacing was good except for a few places where the script belabours things a bit. The blocking worked well for the small proscenium stage and everyone was easy to hear. There were three acts (two intermissions), and there was too much information about the plot in the act synopses in the program.

I would be recommending this whole-heartedly to anyone who likes community theatre and comedy, except for one jarring directorial choice. Laura Rudy’s nurse-receptionist character Miss Charlotte Hennebon was played in blackface makeup, with red lips, Afro wig, and eye-rolling, and with the exaggerated gestures of a stereotyped sassy African-American woman over 30. The actor’s impeccable delivery and timing would have made her scenes a lot of fun to watch, except that I was figuratively wincing in embarrassment every time I saw her. The Samuel French website listing casting requirements for each play they own says that this one has colourblind casting, and there is nothing in the text suggesting that a character of unmarked ethnicity or different ethnicity wouldn’t work. I believe that gratuitous blackface is inappropriate in 21^st century Canada. The director and actor should rethink this choice before the remainder of the run.

After that warning and disclaimer, I will tell you that more information about acquiring tickets is at the Beaverhill Players website.

Brad Fraser’s Kill Me Now, at Workshop West

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KILL ME NOW is the kind of play that wins awards. The kind of play that deserves to win awards. I’ve seen it twice so far, because after the first time I saw it I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s written and directed by Brad Fraser (5@50, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love / Love and Human Remains, some episodes of Queer as Folk/North America, etc). If you’ve ever seen or read anything of his, you know to expect blunt, funny, tough, affectionate portrayals of people dealing with hard issues, and possibly naked men.

The Workshop West production of Kill Me Now is the world premiere of the play. It’s playing until September 22^nd at L’UniThéâtre in La Cité Francophone, which is becoming one of my favorite venues in town, with a large flat stage, good acoustics, and comfortable seats on risers and wrap-around balconies.

The main characters are a father and son, played by Dave Horak and Mat Hulshof. I don’t think I’ve seen Dave Horak on stage before, but I’ve seen plays he directed, including Fatboy (the Ubu Roi-inspired farce at Fringe 2012) and Bombitty of Errors (the rap version of Comedy of Errors at Fringe 2013). I saw Mathew Hulshof most recently in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Jake, the dad, seems like an ordinary likeable middle-aged guy, coping as a widowed single parent to Joey, a disabled 17 year old. The other characters are Twyla, Jake’s younger sister (Melissa Thingelstad, who I remember from An Accident and Fatboy), Joey’s school friend Rowdy (Patrick Lundeen), and Robyn (“with a Y”) (Linda Grass) a long-time lover who meets Jake once a week but isn’t otherwise involved with his life.

At the start of the play, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to understand Joey’s slurred speech and I was uncomfortable looking at the actor’s portrayal of his limited mobility and awkward posture. But I don’t know how much of this was very clever acting and directing, and how much of it was that he really wasn’t hard to understand once I got more used to him. I wasn’t even aware of the gradual change until we saw Robyn meeting him for the first time, being embarrassed by failing to understand him. Robyn is so obviously trying to gamely continue the conversation while hiding that she has no idea what he said, and at the same time talking to him like he’s deaf, stupid, and childish. In both performances that I saw, the audience gasped in exasperation with her and sympathy with Joey at that point, so I guess that like me, they were all understanding him just fine and appreciating him too.

I thought that Dave Horak and Mathew Hulshof were both amazing in their roles. Mat Hulshof readily expresses the wide range of a 17-year-old’s emotions within the limited palette of his character’s physical limitations. Dave Horak’s character starts out settled within the fragile balance of the life he’s built for himself and Joey, but unprepared for Joey’s growing need for independence and autonomy, and then everything goes wrong and he has to change his plans and ask for more help.

The two women’s roles were more straightforward, but still not obvious. I didn’t like Robyn at the beginning, but the way she worked to overcome her initial discomfort with Joey and the whole messy house and uncomfortable situation won me over. And I liked Melissa Thingelstad in this play more than I liked her in An Accident, as the young aunt who has always helped out and who is frustrated with her own life and who doesn’t always agree with her brother’s decisions.

Patrick Lundeen’s Rowdy was a charmingly earnest young adult who is “mildly retarded, but I’m not stupid, it’s mostly Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, eh?” He was a valuable comic relief, but I did not feel like his portrayal was mean-spirited or stereotypical.

Parts of the story were excruciatingly intimate. And while they made me squirm, I did not feel like any of them were gratuitous. They brought the audience into acknowledging that people who love each other can do awkward and hard things when they need to take care of each other, which is probably the theme of the play.

In the writer’s notes in the program, Brad Fraser explains that he has a family member who is severely disabled, and that he wanted to portray the complexities of everyday life and emotional response for a disabled person. As far as I can tell, the actors Mathew Hulshof and Patrick Lundeen are not disabled themselves. And I think I should leave it to people with personal experience of living with disability to comment on whether their portrayals are appropriate and respectful.

In his opening-night welcome words, Workshop West artistic director Michael Clark encouraged people to tweet about the show and tell their friends about it, but not to give away any plot points in their tweets, because the show is better when encountered without expectations. I’m not sure that’s completely true because I still found it provocative, moving, amusing, and fascinating the second time through, but I’ve tried to respect the spirit of that request in this post anyway. I liked it as much as I liked Let the Light of Day Through last year, and that one won the 2013 Stirling Award for Outstanding Production of a Play. Tickets for the remainder of the run are available through Tix on the Square and at the door. And you might see me there again.

Eleven solo shows

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I saw eleven one-performer shows at this year’s Fringe. I used to avoid them, preferring to see the interaction among characters rather than watching a single performer tell or recreate a whole story. But the genre has grown on me, first with my admiration for storytellers and then extending to performers who act out their narrative with props and multiple characters.

Ask Aggie – Christine Lesiak’s departure from her clown persona to be an “advice diva”, answering audience questions about romance and sex, interspersed with stories and songs about her experiences with five husbands. Funny, easy to listen to, and actually full of advice I didn’t disagree with.

They Call Me Mister Fry – Jack Fry tells stories about his first year of teaching elementary school, in inner-city Los Angeles. He shows slides of some student work to illustrate some of the stories. Reviewers seemed to like it more than I did. It was well delivered, but it’s a genre of story that I’m very familiar with.

RiderGirl – Colleen Sutton tells about becoming and being a part of RiderNation, the community of Saskatchewan Rough Rider fans, along with other changes in her life, such as leaving a military band appointment to study acting.

Nashville Hurricane – Chase Padgett’s narrative was held over for one show yesterday, which is no surprise. It was one of the best and most polished shows of any kind I saw this year. His characters were very distinct from each other, compelling and not all likeable.

Borderland – Izad Etemadi, from Victoria BC, used first-person narrative and three point-of-view characters to tell a story in tribute to people he’d encountered through a Toronto-based group Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees.

Dykeopolis: Queer Tales and Travels for our Times – Kimberly Dark’s anecdotes, questions, and thought starters were a perfect example of the saying “the personal is political”. Through stories from her own life, starting from the first girl she was attracted to in high school, she illustrated important points about gender and sexuality in ways that the audience connected with.

Zack Adams: Zack to the Future: – Shane Adamczak, from Australia tells a silly story about time travel to the future. Many of the audience seemed familiar with his character from previous shows but it was my first time seeing him.

Canuck Quixote – Colin Godbout plays guitar and sings, and in between talks about the musicians and the songs and how they fit with themes of ethnic minorities and quixotic journeys. I like some of the music and I wasn’t familiar with all of it, and I still didn’t find the show compelling. Maybe his understated stage presence and lack of eye contact were too reminiscent of the title character of Nashville Hurricane.

Roller Derby Saved my Soul– Nancy Kenny recounted how discovering the sport of roller derby had changed her life as a 30-something single woman who “thought I’d have a more interesting job by now” and who struggled to get along with her mother and sister. The stage floor had a bit of derby track taped onto it. During the show she puts on roller skates and derby gear, and then delivers part of her story while skating. This was not as distracting as you might think. I really enjoyed it and found it inspiring.

Bad Guys Finish First – Gavin Williams starts off giving a self-help seminar about how to be successful by not caring about other people. His character is so over-the-top mean that it’s clearly not sincere, but he still made the audience uncomfortable. Of course there is a twist before the end, but it happens a bit too fast for credibility. This show is a fascinating example of, I’m not sure if it’s the literary device of unreliable-narrator or the theatrical device of dramatic irony or something in between, though.

Limbo – Andrew Bailey tells stories about being a teenager and university student with obsessive-compulsive disorder. His director Britt Small also directed Ride the Cyclone.

Death at the Fringe

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Several of the shows I saw at this year’s Fringe examined the theme of death in some unorthodox ways.

Grim and Fischer was a mask show by the Wonderheads, the troupe which presented LOON last year. It’s a repeat of a show that was at Edmonton Fringe a few years ago, but I missed it then. Since I loved LOON, I was excited about seeing the troupe again, and I wasn’t disappointed. The three characters were Mrs Fischer (Kate Braidwood), a determined energetic old widow with a lopsided smile and a sense of humour, Death (Andrew Phoenix) a long-faced persistent figure in a black overcoat, and Doug the Nurse (Andrew Phoenix). Death checks his pocketwatch and attempts to deliver a summons to Mrs Fischer, but she isn’t ready to go yet. Mrs. Fischer’s physicality and posture are very effective in creating the impression of someone who is active but very old. After the show, the performers told us that they are developing a new show and hope to be back next year.

Life After Breath is a clown show I’ve already mentioned, a charming and poignant look at how two characters (Neelam Chattoo as Squee, Amy Chow as Nona) cope after the death of a loved one who used to take care of them, and how they have some underworld adventures in an attempt to re-connect with the person who died.

Into Oblivion is a set of musings, monologues, and mood vignettes on death created by the three young local performers (Isaac Andrew, Graham Mothersill, Jordan Sabo) and their director Nick Eaton. In the program, the director writes that he was moved to think about death after the cyclist died on Whyte Avenue shortly after last year’s Fringe (he’s not named in the program, but it was Isaak Kornelsen). My favourite thing about this show was the ways they used some audience interaction to add to their effectiveness without disrupting the thoughtful somber mood of their presentation. They greeted audience members beforehand as if we were funeral attendees, and finished by welcoming us to stay for refreshments as we shared memories (and the refreshments turned out to be tasty cookies). In other portions of the show, they identified the oldest audience member and asked polite questions about her mortality, used an audience member as prop in reflections on decomposition, and most unnervingly invited an audience member who claimed not to fear death to sit on stage and be blindfolded, after which they handed him a handgun.

You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting at a Play was a bouffon style piece (mockery and physical comedy), performed by Nathaniel Justiniano and Ross Travis of Naked Empire Bouffon Company of San Francisco. It wasn’t exclusively about death; the topics bounced around as much as the performers did, but there was a lot of material about death, culminating in the personification of the play Hamlet in an audience member who lay on the stage and was then carried off by pallbearers. It was funny, it was disturbing, it was fast-paced, and it had the most aggressive interactions with the audience of any show I’ve seen this year. Another audience member told me he’d seen it twice so far, and that people who were too uncomfortable had walked out both times.

And as I’ve mentioned before, Off Book The Musical had a graveyard location the night I went, meaning that one character is a woman who has recently become a ghost (Jocelyn Ahlf), and one storyline involves a grandmother’s (Joleen Ballendine) death and her grandson (Kory Matheson), son (Matt Alden) and other mourners.

Finish your Fringe with God on God

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I’ve seen lots of Fringe shows that I haven’t told you about yet, but the one I want to be sure to mention before it closes is the one that I am too close to to review.

This was my first year being involved with a Fringe production. I’ve been stage managing an original comedy called God on God, written by Dan Moser and Jordan Ward, and performed by Moser, Ward, Kay Schultz, Nate Collins, and Colby Crossley. It’s been fascinating, educational, and a lot more fun than I expected to help the show come together, tinker with details to make it run smoothly and on time, and watch people laugh from my seat in the booth beside our quiet organized sound and light tech Joey Roach.

We’ve been running at Venue 51. Didn’t know there was a Venue 51? It’s the Avenue Theatre, on 118 Avenue (Alberta Ave), between 90 and 91 Streets. And while it would be fun to be closer to the main Fringe site in Old Strathcona and we’d almost certainly get more drop-in playgoers, it’s also been neat to be part of expanding the Fringe to a different part of Edmonton, and handy to have free convenient parking and little traffic nearby. We’re the only show in the venue, which means that we’ve been able to stay set up between shows, which makes my job much easier.

Our last show is tonight at 8 pm. Tickets will be available at the door unless we sell out ($12 cash only) as well as through the Fringe box office and yeglive.ca. Our advertised running time is 50 minutes, so if you want to get to the volunteer wrap party afterwards or just get into bed early before going back to work on the post-Fringe Monday, you should still be able to fit us in.

Cast of God on God relaxing between shows

I’ve watched it 13 times, and it still makes me giggle. I try to do it quietly, but you don’t have to. Finish your Fringe with God on God!