Twists on Facebook, old radio, reality TV . . .

Company/Fatebook. Here's an ideal Live Arts/Fringe combo platter: EgoPo's Company paired with New Paradise Laboratories' Fatebook. Both are great examples of nontraditional theater, served up as highly individualized experiences in a group setting. The shows complement each other, even while offering opposing views of human interdependence and emotional connection. And, yes, they're fun, too.

Company, based on Samuel Beckett's short story of the same name, is a typically Beckettian old man's meditation on the way we enter alone, leave alone, and in between have encounters that make our stay bearable, unbearable, or baffling. In EgoPo's version, we in the audience were each given a guiding "angel" who led us - barefoot, blindfolded - to the floor, where a pillow awaited. Our angels gently guided us through story-related movements, none of them weird or intrusive. (Nevertheless, wear clothes suited to bending and kneeling.)

Sound designer Chris Colucci places a number of evocative pieces along the story's peaks, valleys, and plains, including some by Philip Glass, who once scored a Mabou Mines production of Company. Though I doubt Beckett would have approved of angels (and probably would have suggested that something awful be done to them), director Lane Savadove keeps the audience/angel interaction to a minimum, and the story's sense of isolation ultimately prevails.

Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time is New Paradise Laboratories' long-awaited transition from Facebook to life. For those who've followed its characters and interacted with them online for the last few months, it can be slightly jarring to see them lined up before you, breathing, sweating, and smiling.

Those who haven't followed online needn't worry; the only thing you'll miss is the odd familiarity of seeing Facebook "friends" in person and realizing these total strangers know all about your life, too, or at least all you've been willing to reveal in your profile, which, for many Facebookers, is a whole lot.

Fatebook plays out in choose-your-own-adventure style. Follow one character through a circuit assisted by strategically placed video screens, until another sort of guiding angel - an all-seeing blond girl - broadcasts via Webcam to start the process over again. Follow a different character each time and you'll tease out the elements of a murder mystery.

I'm not sure why so many shows about the Internet rely on this most traditional sleuthing device, and I'm not sure it entirely works for director Whit MacLaughlin's purposes. Still, if NPL's goal is to examine the kind of interactive voyeurism enabled by Facebook and other social-media sites, well, then, fair enough. We are in a relationship with people we barely know - if we know them at all - and it's complicated.

- Wendy Rosenfield

The Gonzales Cantata.

The real-life defense of deposed U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales so ineptly attempted to manipulate reality that you wonder if there's any point to dramatizing it with the surreal dimension afforded by the 18th-century-style cantata. Composer Melissa Dunphy makes an emphatic case for doing so. Her

Gonzales Cantata

- more PDQ Bach than

Nixon in China

- uses Handel's formality and symmetry as a starting point, humorously colliding with Gonzales' anything-but-symmetrical train of thought, quoted from the 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.

"Fatebook." $25-$30 (students $15). 8 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sept. 15-17 and 8 and 10:30 p.m. Friday and Sept. 18. 919 N. Fifth St.

Just as Handel arias repeat text over and over, Dunphy hits a high comic pitch in the Gonzales aria "I Don't Recall" - uttered 72 times during the hearings and repeated in the aria just as often, alongside a countdown on the supertitle screen.

Dunphy refracts Gonzales even further by casting women in male roles, in keeping with Handel's practice of casting male characters with treble voices (castratos, etc.). How, then, could you tell who was singing the role of Arlen Specter? The capable 20-member cast, with the excellent Mary Thorne as Gonzales, wore pageant-ready evening gowns and tiaras, plus sashes bearing the names of their characters.

Dressing the music like Handel, however, sets up an expectation of depth. Though Dunphy's fluent, well-judged music had underlying dissonances in the nine-piece chamber orchestra she conducted (with Coplandesque harmonies when characters were being folksy), the satire was confined to the surface events with somewhat smug humor. That significantly limited the piece's scope in exposing this sorry, embarrassing chapter of American justice.

- David Patrick Stearns

Hear Again Radio Project.

Aspire Arts, a young company with an eye and ear for the old, brings back to life the pleasures of the clothes, makeup, and hairdos of the '40s - a great look, especially on Aspire Arts' executive director, Jennifer MacMillan, and on David Sanger, he of the smarmy mustache and noirish voice. They are ably abetted by Ryan Walter, Jill Lawrence, Tom Saporito, and the excellent Lauren A. Basler.

The stories vary from show to show, and the ones I saw were two murder mysteries, "Broadway Is My Beat" and "Suspense," with dialogue like: "You're kidding." "If I were kidding, you'd be laughing." These plots are punctuated by little dramas that are commercials for deodorant or soap.

The stories seem wonderfully naive to anyone whose forensic skills have been honed by Law and Order, but the very simplicity of the crimes, the straightforwardness of the motives, and the general speed of solution are what make them so engaging. Visible radio doesn't have the same appeal as real radio drama, whose listeners have to imagine all the action. But it gives us a taste of a lost art form, of a world long gone.

So that's it, Dollface. It's a good show, and it's on only one more day.

- Toby Zinman

Kill Me Now.

In Melanie Stewart's disturbingly funny commentary on the degrading nature of reality dance shows, Catherine Gillard plays creepily sadistic show host Stella Hites, who manipulates the cloyingly pathetic contestants. She echoes

Alice in Wonderland

's Queen of Hearts in her exaggerated attire (by Stephanie Nichols) and her dispatch of the winner.

Stella demeans the audience as well (through Obie winner John Clancy's text), whipping us into a frenzy of Roman-circus-style judgment. Like current TV audiences, we are provoked to rate the talents of the six hopefuls who hilariously dance, vogue, and mug.

Scott McPheeters is an overactive underachiever, Les Rivera a Philly B-Boy, Bethany Formica a Russian Jersey girl. Janet Pilla doubles as a Martha Graham-styled dancer and a "freelance dance critic from New York." Karl Schappell is a potbellied gay guy, and Megan Mazarick pops up as a tart in fishnet stockings.

Kill Me Now's hyper-real atmosphere is intensified by Clifford Greer's lighting. Its difficulty lies in satirizing something that is so cheesy to begin with. You can take it only to its most extreme conclusion. What is the prize? The punch line here is death.

- Merilyn Jackson

Realm of the Unreal: The Vivian Requiem.

The Fringe Festival is best when something new and remarkable hits - in this case a talent and a theater company.

The talent is Jamison Foreman, who this year, as a senior, had his first musical presented at the University of the Arts and who wrote the music, lyrics, and book for Realm of the Unreal.

I'm not sure which is more exciting, his emergence or the debut of a company called Parallax, packed with UArts grads and students presenting a full-scale production of the show at the Fringe, the first in Parallax's inaugural season.

Realm, largely sung through in Foreman's frequently catchy, often delicate music, is a fiction about a real person: Henry Darger, a recluse and laborer - and now among the best-known American "outsider" artists - who left a massive inventory of his own art and writing, discovered after he died in 1973. The writing consists of 15,000-plus pages of a fantasy with an unwieldy title, part of which is The Story of the Vivian Girls, in . . . the Realms of the Unreal.

Foreman's show has Darger hearing voices and seeing spirits - seven little girls called the Vivian sisters who abduct him to be their savior. But the haunted Darger - sung masterfully by Parallax's artistic director, Ryan Touhey - also has a real life and, in an innocent way, a real love (Emma Orelove), and his ghosts and realities collide.

The production is rivetingly staged by Rosey Hay, though it's too bad the audience is not on risers; Hay puts some of the best action at ground level, where more than half the audience can't see it.

The show, performed in one 100-minute act, is not uniformly compelling. Foreman's most beautiful music can't neutralize the ick of cute stuff between Darger and the youngster he falls for. And Foreman scripts the main character without contractions, making him tiresome.

Still, Owen Robbins' vivid piano accompaniment, the singing in general, and the wonderfully surreal delivery - both in song and speech - of the women who play the sisters is engrossing.

- Howard Shapiro

Store. House and Car, the first two installments of Kate Watson-Wallace's American Spaces trilogy, were wonderfully magical, creative, and otherworldly. Could she make it a three-peat? With Store, the answer is no.

An exploration of post-Armageddon American consumption - what would you buy if there was nothing left to buy? - Store is set in an abandoned West Philly Rite Aid littered with clothing, boxes, plastic bags, random stuffed animals, wigs, and junk.

The consumerism starts at the door, where audience members are offered the option of cushier VIP seats in the convenience-foods section for $1.99. During the piece, dancers obsessively cram themselves into more and more clothes, fight over items, and pull bags out of the space under a ceiling tile. All this is reinforced by witty video projected on the walls, ceiling, and several ancient TVs.

Watson-Wallace is a master of creating the dreamlike scenario. Store's begins at the very opening of the piece as we wait for the dancers to appear - and it turns out they've been there all along, under the mounds of clothing piled on the platform that serves as a stage.

But Store, unlike her previous work, doesn't go far enough. It feels one-dimensional and reminds me of the time I saw Car minus the car; something big was missing. In this case, the store wasn't truly used. We might as well have been sitting in any available warehouse.

- Ellen Dunkel

Salesmanship for Life & Limb.

Things are bad at Bleerox Corp., so let's give the sales staff some incentives - and impossible goals that will keep the employees from bonuses forever. Even so, they'll give their proverbial right arms to work here.

Tom Tirney's first play, staged by Tall Grass Productions, is a nicely plotted - really funny at the end - look at workers obsessed, and management obsessed with obsessing them. Sort of a play for our age. ("We had more," says the boss. "Now it is less than more. Looks like the numbers are broken.")

The production's fine cast is supported by clever graphics, but it needs friskier scene changes. As for Tirney, let's watch for a second play. - H.S.

How Theater Failed America.

If ever there's a time when theater feels young and wild and hopeful, with talented people making art in every nook and cranny of the city, it's the weeks of Live Arts/Fringe. So who needs fat, sweaty, self-important Mike Daisey haranguing us for two mortal hours about how theater in America has betrayed its promise, its artists, and us all?

More sermon than story, more diatribe than an entertainment, this monologue offers only the most banal observations about shrinking, aging audiences and sellout nonprofits. He heaps contempt on everyone's head, he moves himself to tears, he wallows in self-pity, all the while shouting as if to emphasize what is already plain as dirt.

Biting the hand that feeds him, he mocks theater companies that build their own new, beautiful theater buildings while performing in Philadelphia Theatre Company's new, beautiful theater. America certainly has not failed Mike Daisey; he has won prizes and, apparently, the admiration of easily amused insider audiences.

- T.Z.