First Person Festival, a singular sensation

During the nine years of its existence, this week's First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art - with its lectures, film screenings, gallery exhibitions, and now even a First Person Museum of treasured objects - has seen the form take on a life of its own. From the personal philosophies of Jersey juiceheads to your friends' Facebook status updates, it's all me, all the time, everywhere you look.

So why pay for the privilege of hearing even more about someone else in person? Robin Gelfenbien of My Salvation Has a First Name: A Wienermobile Journey - a "multimedia extravaganza" about her year driving Oscar Mayer's ubiquitous mobile hot dog - makes a good case. "It's a lot easier to share (and overshare) a story online than face to face." However, she continues, "We're surrounded by so much pointless entertainment that when someone stands on stage and is honest about his or her life, people find it refreshing and genuinely connect to it."

New Yorker Gelfenbien is one of two theater artists highlighting the festival (which began Monday and ends Sunday with a celebration of poet Sonia Sanchez) as part of First Person Raw, a new series featuring emerging artists. She performs Friday and Saturday at the festival's headquarters, Painted Bride Art Center, as does the other, Philadelphian Justin Jain.

Jain is a Philly Fringe favorite whose shiFt/transFer also breaks from the festival's typical podium-and-monologue setup, using an experimental, nonlinear format and four well-known area actors (James Ijames, Leah Walton, Scott McPheeters and Genevieve Perrier) to ask, "What does it mean to be an American?" A first-generation Filipino American, he stages the piece in the round, asking the audience "to constantly shift perspective, adjust to new rules, and assimilate to the moment at hand," challenges, he says, that are "staples" of life in the United States.

Jain and Gelfenbien represent this year's move toward more theater-based performance for the festival, a change Vicki Solot, First Person Arts' executive director, says she's always hoped for. "It's costly," she explains. "We're not in a position at all to mount a Laramie Project" - Moises Kaufman's documentary drama about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard - "so that puts us in presentation of solo theater, and frankly, a lot of it isn't that good."

But First Person Raw asks artists to submit work to be judged in competition, allowing quality festival-appropriate pieces to rise to the top. And, says Solot, "it happened to be that two of the pieces chosen were theater pieces." (A third, Voices of Afghanistan, is a Saturday film screening and lecture about the lives of Afghan women.)

Along with First Person Raw, the festival hosts four other live performances.

Wednesday night's Fall Grand Slam is the culmination of bimonthly open-mike StorySlam events at which audience members competed in telling stories on the evening's chosen theme. Now the year's biggest winners duke it out on the Painted Bride Art Center's stage, with the winner getting bragging rights and the honorary title "Best Storyteller in Philadelphia."

This American Life contributor Elna Baker hosts the Grand Slam and appears Thursday and Friday in her own comic solo performance, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, about big-city life as a single Mexican American Mormon.

Baker's show, and the remaining two - Dan Hoyle's The Real Americans (Thursday-Saturday), a road trip into flyover country, and Prison 101, a Saturday theater piece written by Graterford inmates as part of Villanova University's prison-based bachelor of arts program - also (if unintentionally) share with the Raw entries the theme of American identity. Solot says that while early First Person Festivals were themed, "in recent years we've felt constrained by that. Really, what we're going for is diversity and variety of the way stories are told - the tone, the content."

There's variety in the way stories arrive at the festival, as well. On the recommendation of Pig Iron Theatre Company's Geoff Sobelle, Solot flew to San Francisco where Hoyle's show has been running since January. It's the farthest she's gone to seek out festival work, but she's pleased with both the result and its post-election timing.

Hoyle, who says he was "drowning" among his native San Francisco's yuppies and hipsters, drove right into the eye of the teapot's tempest seeking "tough country wisdom." Instead, he found a rural America roiling with "populist anger." Following in the tradition of solo performers Anna Deveare Smith and Danny Hoch, both of whom Hoyle credits as influences, he brought back a nation's worth of characters, and performs them all.

While Hoyle came to the festival as an outside success, Prison 101 director Beverly Redman approached Solot with an inside - deep inside - failure. The show is part of a prison-themed evening, alongside the documentary film Girls on the Wall, about an Illinois juvenile women's facility, and a lecture on art's role in rehabilitation by Mural Arts Program founder Jane Golden. But it almost remained behind bars: An administrative shuffle discarded the theater project Redford had been working on for two years with inmates as part of Villanova's jailhouse degree program. One of the prisoners had participated in a First Person Arts workshop at Graterford, and suggested she contact Solot. The result is a series of monologues in the men's own words, performed by professional actors, including Barrymore Award nominee Johnnie Hobbs Jr.

Redman says the show isn't therapy. "The goal was always to make theater. But there is something powerful about performing what you decide are significant moments in your life."

Expanding on that, she teased out the thread uniting each First Person event, theatrical or otherwise, whatever its theme: "There was something about reclaiming the past and reflecting upon it that appears to be a key ingredient in redemption and transformation."

If that's not sufficient reason to put down the remote and connect with someone new, well then, perhaps you've got the situation (or Situation) you deserve.

The festival runs through Sunday, with lectures, gallery talks, workshops, performances, films, and other events. Unless otherwise noted, all events take place at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St.

For a schedule, details, and to purchase tickets, call 267-402-2055 or go to www.firstpersonfestival.org. EndText