'Digging through the crazy': Mary McCool solos at the Fringe

Creator/actor/dramaturge Mary McCool cofounded the experimental company New Paradise Laboratories in 1996 and has been part of every one of its performance pieces since. Charismatic and recognizable, McCool is used to challenging audiences with provocative work - as she's set to do once again with her bleakly comic solo debut,

This Info Will Change Your Life

, premiering Sunday at Plays & Players Theatre for Philly Fringe.

"This," McCool says from the upstairs Skinner Studio space at Plays & Players, "will throw people for a loop, I'm pretty sure."

Throwing people for loops is what McCool often does. She has worked with quirky local theater teams such as Pig Iron (Hell Meets Henry Halfway and I Promised Myself to Live Faster) and Brat Productions (Naked Cocktail), and she has costarred in still-talked-about events at the Wilma such as Václav Havel's Leaving with David Strathairn and Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll.

"Give me a second, I have to turn into Bane," she says before ducking backstage to change. During the blackly hilarious but "hopefully inspirational" This Info, McCool will cover herself in dark satin robes, furry fabric, curly brown wigs, and black masking. Her voice will be radically altered by an analog processor ("I started off using GarageBand") to sound not unlike Laurie Anderson impersonating John Huston playing Darth Vader, breathiness and all.

"I think that I've covered myself up and altered my voice so that I could say difficult things through this thing that I might not usually be able to say on my own," McCool says. Dressed as a nameless character of hulking dimension (the Kiss boots borrowed from Brat's Jess Conda turn the diminutive McCool into a giant), she is a mighty marvel. Her creation is neither male nor female, not human or animal ("It could be an . . . alien?"). It took her seven years of workshops at the Kimmel's SEI Innovation Studio and Underground Arts and stand-up slots at Helium Comedy Club to develop.

"Perhaps," she says, "it is me, just digging through the crazy."

This Info is a one-woman - or one-thing - show that touches on what McCool calls "the shadow self." Hers is a self that needs to act out, improvisationally as well as according to script, as she guides audiences toward awareness. "It is me looking for meaning and magic, personally and communally," says McCool, who also promises there will be an interactive, online follow-up to This Info Will Change Your Life available on her colorful website, marymccool.com.

Of her famed past collaborations, McCool says, "There was a lot more compromise working with a group, building upon other peoples' ideas and vice versa." Yet there is always a director's approval to consider, another vision through which to shape a work - and it's just less her than she'd like at this point in her career. She wanted to be director. And performer. And creator. "I have had excellent collaborators," she says, "but I have long wanted all final decisions to rest with me."

By stripping off the layers insulating us from ourselves and one another, we may find, McCool hopes, more weird questions than answers. During This Info Will Change Your Life, she likens the unlayering process to "cutting open a shark to find a man inside, then cutting that man open to find fish inside." Maybe her audience will come to a set of new truths while taking part in This Info Will Change Your Life. "Maybe," she says, "you'll find some new truths for me, as well."

"This Info Will Change Your Life": Sunday through Sept. 23 at Skinner Studio at Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey Place, 3rd floor. Tickets: $15-$10. Information: fringearts.com.