Fringe and Fringe Ability
Written and performed by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez
Directed by Steve Bailey
Thursday, October 13 - Sunday, October 16
In 1992, Paul Bonin-Rodriguez premiered
Talk of the Town, the first play about the life of John Roy Hobson, a small-town, sissy boy and Dairy Queen worker coming-of-age and coming out in the fictional Texas town of Cedar Springs, TX. Over the next two years, he created two more installments,
The Bible Belt and Other Accessories (in which our hero creates a literal fashion weapon of gospel truth) and
Love in the Time of College (in which our hero finds himself hunting and hunted in the wilds of Austin). For the next decade, Bonin-Rodriguez played to packed houses across the nation, wowing audiences with the lightning-fast character changes and an ironic comic voice that often veered into poignancy then ricocheted back to the laughs again. Bonin-Rodriguez’s John Roy Hobson was considered a unique voice, a “gay Huck Finn” who provided comic relief for a conservative age.
In
Fringe and Fringe Ability and an age no less conservative, Bonin-Rodriguez continues this sprawling and hilarious saga. John Hobson is much older and more sophisticated flight attendant and part-time custom home accessory designer who sees his itinerant life among demanding shams and shades of all stripes brought to an immediate halt by his mother’s needs. Taking place in the wake of the 2004 elections,
Fringe finds John discovering just how easily the ties that bind can fray and reconciling himself with the fact that sometimes one must go back home – if only for a time – to become a vocal and indispensable citizen of the hometown he left behind.
Fringe finds John reunited with favorite characters of past shows and meeting new ones and all of them working together to put the down low on the uptight citizens of the President’s home state.
This performance marks Bonin-Rodriguez third appearance for The Theater Offensive since 1993 when he wowed Boston audiences with The Bible and Other Accessories, later returning with Love in the Time of College. In 1999, he premiered Memory’s Caretaker at the Out on the Edge Festival. All three shows played to rave reviews and packed houses.
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez is an acclaimed writer-performer-dancer based in San Antonio, TX, where he is a member of Jump-Start Performance Co. Since 1992, he has toured nationally and in Canada, first with the three installments of his solo trilogy, The Texas Trinity and more recently with Quinceañera, a multidisciplinary performance ritual and celebration of survival for the first 15 years of the pandemic AIDS crisis, co-created with Beto Araiza and Michael Marinez. Twice he has been named the Tennessee Williams Fellow at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN; currently he is a doctoral candidate in the Performance as a Public Practice Program at the University of Texas-Austin. He has written and co-written thirteen plays. His writings have been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Jump-Start Playworks, The Color of Theater (Continuum), as well as Theater Topics, Friends and Lovers (Dutton), and Men on Men, 5 (Plume).
Steve Bailey (Director/Lighting Designer) is a founder and Executive Director of Jump-Start Performance Co. in San Antonio, TX. He has designed lights for over 40 shows during the past twenty years. During that same time, he has directed and/or created at least 30 productions in Texas, New York and South America.