The NY Internatonal Fringe Festival is upon us again! Ever August, earnest playwrites get the opportunity to have their works produces and performed all over New York (mostly in The Village) in the hopes that they’ll be seen, enjoyed, and maybe, picked up and launched into an Off-Broadway, or maybe even Broadway run! (Ever heard of Avenue Q? A Fringe Festival Success Story!)

So, as a recovered Boy Scout, I was excited to see a silly looking comedy called Scout’s Honor put on by Cardium Mechanicum and written by Ed Valentine, who according to the press pack has bit of experience and success in his dramatists’ endeavors.

Not that this play was any indication of his previously praised talent or success. The Fringe Festival this year is producing 187 plays. Of these, maybe 5-10 gain a high level of buzz and excitement. That leaves room for quite a few bombs. Scout’s Honor was a two-part production. Part one was about Boy Scouts, called “Snipe Hunt” which was about the common camp-out stunt of sending younger scouts out into the woods to hunt for an elusive creatuer called a “snipe” which doesn’t actually exist. The cast consisted of a nerdy Eagle scout-master, two mock-machismo Boy Scouts (named “Mike” and “other Mike”) A rich, daddy’s-boy cub scout, and a troubled, knife-wielding boy scout, an a sensitive younger scout who saves the day in the end. Most of the desperate humor in this skit derived of gay-jokes and mocking New Jersey.

The second, longer half was the girl scout story called “Becky’s Beaver” about a girl scout troop going Beaver hunting in the New Jersey woods. It starts funny, lying hevily on alliterative phrases (Well Barbara and Betty bopped the biggest and best beaver, Becky!) the obvious “beaver” entendre, being the joke that the company hoped to stretch out for a skit that was ill-advised to be stretched into a full-length play. When things get desperate, they add jokes about girls’ insecurities and social hierarchies, more gay jokes, more Jersey jokes, cripple jokes and magic mushrooms.

The acting was amateur, even if they were relying on a play that seemed like it was written up by pair of a high-school students getting high for the first time, and would have worked a lot better as a five-minute skit at a Boy or Girl scouts’ talent night, not a 75 minute offering at the New York Fringe Festival.

I fear this may be a forboding to the quality of theater we may expect this year. Choose your Fringe Shows wisely, folks.