BWW Reviews: Two Inspiring Women Share Their Personal Stories at Capital Fringe Festival

Throughout the next two and a half weeks I will be covering over a dozen shows in DC's Capital Fringe Festival. As with many a Fringe festival around the country - and this one in particular is unjuried - audience members and press alike never really know what they're going to get when they buy tickets to a show. It could be awesome and or it could leave you slightly perplexed (or even really, really, really perplexed). When picking shows to cover, I tried to pick a variety of them although mostly musicals and dramas about important social issues. When perusing the list of over 100 offerings, there were two storytelling pieces that jumped out at me that I knew I absolutely wanted to cover: Ellouise Schoettler's Arlington National Cemetery: My Forever Home and Noa Baum's Impossible to Translate, But I'll Try: True-Life Israeli Stories. Lucky for me, I could catch them back to back at the same venue on the same day. Even more lucky for me, they were both brilliant. Here's why....

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETARY: MY FOREVER HOME

This past winter, I went to my great uncle's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery where he was buried with full military honors. He was a career military man and a veteran of three wars: World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In my own career, I spend my days around many who proudly served our country so I know about the value of ceremony and ritual in the armed forces, but I was particularly struck by just how much of that comes into a play at these celebrations of life and service at our national burial ground.

Longtime storyteller and military wife Ellouise Schoettler captures this to great effect in her simple, but utterly emotional, engaging, personal, and well-constructed recollections of burying not only her toddler Gretchen at Arlington in the 1960s, but also her husband - Dr. James A. Schoettler, who served in the US Air Force - much more recently in one of the older areas of the cemetery (Section 35). It's also the place where she too will be buried one day. We learn not only about the history of these hallowed grounds - through the lens of one family's experience over several decades - but also come to appreciate that it in one sense or another the cemetery is a 'home' for our military heroes and their loved ones.

Schoettler and her family have spent many a day at Arlington to visit their loved ones and Schoettler logically rationalizes that since she too will spend out her days there one day, she might get to know her neighbors. Although her stories of her own family's experience are among the most engaging, her introductions to some of the people buried around her loved ones - those also in the older section 35, but the newer section 60 where many that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are now buried - gives us a greater sense of the shared experiences among those that have loved ones buried there. That is, Schoettler's story transcends her own familial lines.

With nary a script or prop - though a slide presentation of pictures that Schoettler took at Arlington is playing as one enters the theatre - she displays an uncanny ability to capture not only images (funerals, a group of school kids visiting the cemetery, or a group of buddies from the Screaming Eagles visiting one of their fallen friends and enjoying the camaraderie) of the grounds, but also the emotions of those who visit there. It's poignant and well, pretty darn perfect.

Running Time: Approximately 60 minutes.

Arlington Cemetery: My Forever Home plays three more performances at the Goethe Institut as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. Consult the Fringe website for showtimes and ticket information.

IMPOSSIBLE TO TRANSLATE, BUT I'LL TRY: TRUE-LIFE ISRAELI STORIES

Like Schoettler, Noa Baum - a middle-aged creative Israeli who has lived in America since the 1990s - uses nary a prop, but only the power of words to bring her audience to Israel (specifically Jerusalem) at the time of her childhood and young adulthood. She explains that her Israel is not a concept - a place where conflict has been fought over decades or a place that should be held up on a pedestal - but her home. There are stories of going to sleep as a child and fearing evil little creatures live under your bed; stories of a young Noa asking her mother about why she gave her such an uncommon name; stories of innocent boy-girl friendships and later teenage romance woes; stories of well-meaning friends and family trying to 'match' her to a young men from good families (as if that's all that matters); stories of falling in love with an unlikely match; and stories of motherhood and daughterhood. Love, family, identity - all of these things underlay Noa's enthusiastic recollections of her past.

As a non-Israeli and non-Jew (but one who is fascinated by Israeli culture and married to a Jewish man), I was struck by how Ms. Baum was able to weave together stories, using a variety of voices, that gave me a sense of what it was like to grow up in Israel in decades gone by - an Israel I might not read about in the Washington Post - and the values many families place on things like names and finding a proper spouse. Traditional songs and the use of Yiddish and Hebrew also helped establish place. Yet, as Noa found a way to explain things that at first glance may not be completely relatable or even easily translated into English, I appreciated how she was able to demonstrate also the universality of her experiences. Love and family? Those things can easily extend across even the most rigid (or disputed) borders.

Even in the midst of sound troubles and an odd experience involving the venue manager not being on top of his game and trying to cut the show short a few minutes before it ended due to a misunderstanding as to when the show was supposed to end, Ms. Baum - who is making her Fringe debut - was the consummate professional. She was never rattled, but very appreciative of us desiring to enter her world. There are more stories in Ms. Baum and I would love to hear them one day.

Running Time: Approximately 75 minutes.

Impossible to Translate, But I'll Try: True-Life Israeli Stories plays four more performances at the Goethe Institut as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. Consult the Fringe website for showtimes and ticket information.

Photos: Courtesy of the Fringe Artists

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