The New York International Fringe Festival no longer exists, but its spirit lives on in a black box theater on the second floor on the edge of the clothing district. There you’ll find “The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of … Jean Claude Van Damme as aled by a single reading of his Wikipedia Page Months earlier”, a new show whose descriptive title immediately reminds us harks back to the intoxicating days of Fringe goodies like “Theatre of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage” and “Harvey Finkelstein’s Sock Puppet Showgirls.”
While the show announces itself in an elaborate way, it’s a minimalist affair: a cheap approach biography of a former B-movie action star told by just two men, using action figures that came from Amazon and were then rigged by the judges in controllable dolls. Again: very Fringe.
It should come as no surprise to connoisseurs of stage exploitation—a phrase I use fondly—that the writer Timothy Haskell is, “one of the great swindlers of downtown theater,” as DailyExpertNews described him in 2007. . Years after that review, Haskell and the troupe of the Psycho Clan confirmed their status as the emperors of immersive horror theater, most famously with the “Nightmare” series of Halloween haunted houses, which ran every fall for 14 seasons and returns in October after a hiatus. . The Psycho Clan’s exploration of shock tactics peaked with ‘This Is Real’ in 2017, an escape experience in which members of the public were ‘kidnapped’ in Red Hook.
However, with “Rise and Fall,” Haskell has returned to the lighter, goofier pop-subcultural vein that put him on the Off Off Broadway map in the early 2000s; during that period he made productions such as ‘Road House’, a ‘fightsical’ based on the movie in which Patrick Swayze played a bouncer, and ‘Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy’. In this show, the actors Joe Cordaro (Jean-Claude Van Damme, plus a few other roles) and John Harlacher (usually as the narrator, and ending in a painfully ruthless costume) take only an hour to navigate the life and works of the so-called Muscles from Brussels, which were very popular from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
Directed by Haskell, his brother Aaron and Paul Smithyman, the show follows Van Damme from his childhood in Belgium to his early martial arts training and his eventual move to Hollywood, where he used balletic splits and athletic jumping kicks in such classics of the VHS era as ‘ Universal Soldier’, ‘Double Impact’ and ‘Bloodsport’. Cordaro and Harlacher deploy stick puppets to move the story forward and bring out those action figures (adapted by Aaron Haskell) for the fight scenes. Most of these are made up for the show, such as a fight between Van Damme and Steven Seagal that many 13-year-old boys would have loved to see in 1995.
As the show’s title suggests, Haskell has little interest in digging beneath the surface to reveal the man behind the muscles. (For insights — sort of — viewers may want to check out the 2008 meta Van Damme movie “JCVD,” which, we’re told, “didn’t see the author of this play because he was pissed off about it.”) But despite the merry youthful humor, pathos bubbles up, such as when Van Damme’s career falters and he is portrayed as so grateful for a place as a villain named Jean Vilain in “The Expendables 2.” Haskell’s Van Damme recalls childhood trauma and swears, “I would never be a laughing stock again. But I am. Or was.” No time to linger: there’s always another battle on the horizon.
The rise and fall, then a brief and modest rise, followed by a relative fall of… Jean Claude Van Damme as picked up by a single reading of his Wikipedia page months earlier
Through July 17 at the PIT Theater, Manhattan; thepit-nyc.com. Running time: 55 minutes.