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Play room: Live arts/Fringe Fest benefits from city's real estate slump

ON A RECENT Monday, inside the raw and sprawling Northern Liberties warehouse that will play host to "FATEBOOK," the air-conditioning was still not working. Director Whit Mac-Laughlin, too excited to care about the rising temperature, paced back and forth between the 10 screens suspended from exposed ceiling rafters and paused for a moment to reflect on what the audience experience might be like when show opens on Sept. 4.

ON A RECENT Monday, inside the raw and sprawling Northern Liberties warehouse that will play host to "FATEBOOK," the air-conditioning was still not working. Director Whit Mac-Laughlin, too excited to care about the rising temperature, paced back and forth between the 10 screens suspended from exposed ceiling rafters and paused for a moment to reflect on what the audience experience might be like when show opens on Sept. 4.

"It will be like walking into the maelstrom of the Internet," he suggested, explaining that the live actors will interact with the audience and with on-screen videos of themselves, the other characters and their status updates. In developing the multimedia piece, MacLaughlin set out to answer one core question: "How would you slam real space against cyberspace?"

"FATEBOOK," a theatrical exploration of virtual identities and relationships that is being performed both in the flesh and online, is one of 16 shows in the city's 13th annual Live Arts Festival, which opens next Friday. Live Arts performances include theater, music and dance, with several artists - like Mac-Laughlin - using empty urban spaces that have sat fallow during the economic downturn.

"That is one thing that was easier for us this year," said Nick Stuccio, the festival's producing director. "In the past, when the economy was great, commercial leases were hard to find.

"Now, when I ask for a warehouse for a month, they say sure - this building's been sitting here for a year and a half on the market."

The bright and airy offices of the Live Arts staff, directly adjacent to the "FATEBOOK" space, were made possible, Stuccio said, by the very willing and sympathetic developer.

Just a few blocks away, Pig Iron Theatre Company will present "Welcome to Yuba City" in an expansive industrial building at the corner of 5th Street and Fairmount Avenue.

"We knew we wanted a space that was really long and wide and big," said director Quinn Bauriedel. "The set is just this space that goes on forever - it's a long extended metaphor."

Establishing the environment of the mythical "Yuba City" - a forgotten place along an archetypal desert highway - was crucial to Bauriedel's vision for the show.

"The themes that come out of the space are the themes of our play, which are: this mystery, this endless nothingness that turns into something, and the idea of a tumbleweed that rolls through and rolls away," he explained. "In some ways, the characters do the same thing: They are on a search but never rooted, struggling to survive and yet surviving."

The development of "Welcome to Yuba City" incorporated clown, vaudeville and intricate choreography, with the cast of seven testing out as many as 48 different characters. Ultimately though, Bauriedel explained, Pig Iron wanted to use the lens of the West to capture something essential about the American experience.

"We hope the audience gets taken on a journey into a tiny little corner of humanity and . . . that somehow there's a resonance with their own little corner," he said.

Across town from "Welcome to Yuba City," "FATEBOOK" and the Live Arts offices, Kate Watson-Wallace's West Philadelphia space for "STORE" may be the strangest of all.

"STORE" - the third dance piece in Watson-Wallace's "American Spaces" trilogy - is set inside a dusty, abandoned Rite Aid on Chestnut Street: Insulation falls from holes in the water-stained ceiling, spidery cracks cover half-blacked-out windows, and signs pointing to "Prescriptions" and "Convenience Foods" hang incongruously over the massive, empty room.

Watson-Wallace described the space as "postapocalyptic," and the dancers use piles of discarded clothes and empty plastic shopping bags to engage further with the themes of consumerism, consumption and waste that pervade the store itself.

"I wanted to ask some questions about consumerism without being didactic," Watson-Wallace said. "This piece is a big what if: It imagines an extreme future where there is nothing new, and consumer culture is gone."

Finding an empty, big-box store was crucial to the success of the piece, and Stuccio remains committed to securing nontraditional venues for artists - even though the challenges of such spaces can be considerable.

"We've had to deal with air-conditioning, licenses and inspections, bathrooms, rainwater, homeless people, garbage, rats, bugs and raccoons," he said.

"But we still love to work in these kinds of fun places."

IF YOU GO

FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time, by New Paradise Laboratories, 919 N. 5th St., 8 p.m. Sept. 4-5, 8-9, 12, 15-17, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Sept. 11, 18, $25-$30.

Welcome to Yuba City, by Pig Iron Theatre Company, Festival Theater at The Hub, 626 N. 5th St., previews 8 p.m. Sept. 2, 4; 3 p.m. Sept. 6, 8 p.m. Sept. 9-11, 9 p.m. Sept. 12, 3 p.m. Sept. 13, 8 p.m. Sept. 15-17; 9 p.m. Sept. 18-19, $20-$30.

STORE, by Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies, former Rite Aid, 4237 Walnut St., 9 p.m. Sept. 4-5, 1 and 3 p.m. Sept. 6-7, 7 p.m. Sept. 8-9, $25-$30.

For tickets and more info, visit www.livearts-fringe.org or call 215-413-1318.