'Between Trains' stuck at the station

Between Trains.

It begins as a promising evening, with the cast of Gas & Electric Arts'

Between Trains

roaming with attitudes around a room in Northern Liberties and the audience spaced here and there on benches.

But Juanita Rockwell's play - modeled, she implies in program notes, after a Buddhist concept - never really takes off after it brings us to a sort of train station of the mind, where the production's excellent cast explores time, space, memory, dark tunnels, amber waves, and more.

This early Fringe entry with music and super sound (Chas Marsh) debuted Wednesday, before Friday's official Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe opening, and goes on through Sept. 19, after its official close. The piece itself goes on long past its due, in a dozen segments that would be more powerful, perhaps, as eight, or even halved.

It has occasional nice ideas, executed by a kinetic cast in Lisa Jo Epstein's inventive staging: At one point, several characters stand in the station and deliver different monologues at once, and you hear the details in the way you sense not-really-your-business interchanges in such places. Mary Tuomanen, the lead player, is particularly fine - her skinned knees attest to the demands of the piece. Still, she's an Alice in a land of too little wonder, too much banality.

- Howard Shapiro

Polaroid Stories.

Here's the thing about the University of the Arts theater department's Fringe entry, Naomi Iizuka's

Polaroid Stories

: It takes an actual Polaroid about a minute to develop. This production clocks in at nearly three hours, and in the end, the image you're left with is roughly as blank as the one with which you started.

Iizuka uses Ovid's Metamorphoses to frame 10 tweaked-out street kids, who are themselves derived from images in Raised by Wolves, Jim Goldberg's photo collection of homeless kids. Sounds like an interesting idea, sure, but Iizuka's dialogue is so trite (Q: "What are you afraid of?" A: "I ain't afraid of nothin' "), its script so nihilistic and repetitive, the production's direction, by Amy Feinberg, so ponderous and pretentious, and the students' performances so labored, that it's a wonder Zeus hasn't thrown down a few thunderbolts just to liven things up.

Orpheus and Eurydice chase each other around Jacob Riley's predictably graffitied, chain-linked, trash-strewn set; Narcissus and Echo bicker like a pair of mismatched Spruce Residence roommates; and, occasionally, someone recites a monologue. There are some fine moments, most notably by Kirschen Wolford's D, whose controlled voice is betrayed by buggy eyes, and Adriana Lopez Villarreal's Persephone, fragile and dangerous as a glass pipe.

Nonetheless, I'd still trade Iizuka's thousand words for one of Goldberg's pictures.

- Wendy Rosenfield