Friday Night Rat Catchers is disgusting and impeccable. The piece gets freakier and freakier, as if asking us, amidst our non-stop bombardment of media, how big must the leak be before we notice the ship’s sinking? Tonight, our game show host Meridith, played by Marianne Rendón, shoves a snickers bar in his mouth and spreads it round till his teeth are poop brown. Meridith’s stiff and angry like Buddy’s dad in Elf, but unlike Walter Hobbs who’s transformed by Christmas spirit, Meredith only gets more caffeinated, coked up, and deep in a self important, doomsday spiral.
I call my favorite dance of the night “the rock dance.” Lena Engelstein, who plays a cast of changing characters, enters in a trench coat. The light is too dark for us to see what’s in her crooked-like-a-chicken-wing arm and crumbled fist. She stares down the audience, collecting our anticipation. A single pebble drops. She moves an inch. Plunk. Another inch. Plunk. She extends her arm. Thud. When her fists are empty, she juts out her chin. Clonk. A small streambed of stones behind her, she steps forward, paralleling her pigeon-toed feet. Crash. A cement block lands between her legs. She throws handfuls of pebbles from her pockets, dives into more precarious positions, balances a single stone on her foot from upside down. I think the rock dance is over, but then she returns in a purple blazer, taking a call from the cement block, and pulling her pet rock, or I should say pet boulder, on a leash. Shaking out a poop bag, she bends and scoops a few pebbles.
I commend Engelstein and Fagan for making dance theater in which the dancing is not extraneous but essential. The next day I attend their workshop Going Out on A Limb (shoutout to FringeArts for making this accessible to artists!). We make dances in ten minutes. It’s flying by the seat of your pants, trusting your instincts, not stopping to ask why, kinda making. In the warm up, they keep telling us, find someone across the room, impress them with your moves! I leave thinking about this ethos; putting on self assuredness and attempting ruthlessly to be something you maybe don’t believe yourself to be.
If this is the style in which they made Friday Night Rat Catchers, is it meaningless? They max out the absurdity, but hit nothing on the nose. They make us laugh continuously, but don’t ask us to think hard. Yet I grapple with the eeriness. A repeated motif sticks in my mind: the revolving cast of characters Fagan and Engelstein play fall sideways, quick and hard, to a splayed fetal, apocalyptic sound crossfading into show tunes. I mean, there’s something symbolic about the HVAC titty cocks running out as they desperately attempt to keep pumping/ejaculating the tubes.
Friday Night Rat Catchers, Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein, Fringe Arts, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, September 17-19, 2026.
