ORLANDO – Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
The clock is ticking fast on Fringe applications.
Nov. 21 is the deadline for submitting an application for the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival. Then the Fringe lottery is in December.
Orlando Fringe plans to kick off the holiday season with the third installment of “Merry Fringein’ Xmas,” which is on Monday, Dec. 8. Santa and Mrs. Claus — better known as playwright and actor Michael Wanzie and glamour girl Mitzi Morris — will be the hosts for this holiday kick-off party. Tickets are $15 each, and it’s held at the Margeson Theatre at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center’s, 812 E. Rollins St.
There will be a silent auction at 7 p.m., in the Patron’s Room. The show begins at 8 p.m.
The Fringe lottery is at 6 p.m.
This year, Freeline Productions filed an application for the 2015 Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival. The Orlando-based Freeline is entering playwright Michael W. Freeman’s eerie thriller “Murder Sleep”, a variation of Shakespeare’s classic (and bloody) drama “Macbeth”.
Applications are now available for the 24th annual Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival. There is a $25 application fee.
The 24th annual Orlando Fringe, which will be held in May, is also celebrating a new partnership with the Orlando Museum of Art, which will become the Gold Venue.
“Murder Sleep” is an original play set in an aging hotel in Fort Lauderdale. After two years struggling to find work in a bad economy, R.T. Robeson gets a break and lands a dream job. His new employer even puts him up in a hotel for two weeks of training.
But the nondescript R.T. makes one error in judgment: he decides to bring along a young friend, Ryan, who uses the two weeks to get high on Ecstasy and spend his days looking for alluring women at the pleasure palace’s pool. But Ryan doesn’t sleep at night, and he makes it nearly impossible for R.T. to, either, putting his new job at risk.
The situation gets even more bizarre when Ryan meets the drop-dead gorgeous Francesca at the hotel’s bar and invites her back to the room while the increasingly neurotic R.T. is at work. Francesca makes a strong impression on Ryan – perhaps too strong, since her motives appear to go well beyond orgies in bed. Francesca is obsessed with a rich, older gentleman staying at the hotel who had mistreated her – and she seems intent on motivating Ryan’s Alpha Male side to help her enact revenge. The more Francesca talks, the more she appears to envision a hideously blood revenge. Is Ryan likely to succumb to her naked hostility?
And yet …. is any of this really happening? Do the characters have an impaired sense of reality, or a collapsing depth perception? What exactly is going on in the room within that historic hotel in Fort Lauderdale, where a wet spot mysteriously reappears on the desk, and where shadowy figures move through the room in the pitch darkness of night?
And by the end, is the audience exposed as more than simply voyeurs to the macabre happenings?
Welcome to “Murder Sleep” … a play likely to stab brutally at you in your dreams long after you’ve seen it.
“Murder Sleep” is a product of Freeline Productions, which also produces novels like “Bloody Rabbit”, the Freeline Media online news site, and theatrical productions.
Contact Freeline Media at Freelineorlando@gmail.com..
