Rude Mechanicals' 'Now Now Oh Now': Games people play

The devised theater troupe Rude Mechanicals hails from Austin, Texas, but with Now Now Oh Now, it continues integrating itself into Philly's theater ecosystem.

This production marks its third Philly Fringe visit (this time as a guest in the new FringeArts building), and among the show's cast is Dito Van Reigersberg, a founding member of the Pig Iron Theatre Company and no stranger to "devised" (i.e., collaboratively created) work.

The casting is an interesting choice, drawing on the show's own themes. The troupe's 2011 piece, The Method Gun, examined a community formed around a charismatic acting teacher.

Now Now Oh Now is set in a more democratic society, a Dungeons and Dragons-style, six-person, role-play group in which characters control their own actions, hatch tribe-conquering schemes, and choose allegiances.

Ultimately, though, chance - via a roll of the polyhedral dice - determines one's fate.

The audience (limited to 30 per performance) participates in the action, choosing a marked "talisman" upon entering, forming groups based on the talismanic image, solving riddles together, and finally uniting again for one last riddle, after which our friendly Game Master (Robert S. Fisher) announces we won't see him again.

And we don't.

Instead, we visit another room, sit at a long dining table, each place setting topped with items we must arrange while listening to a scientific lecture on natural selection. Its message: "Beauty, survival, chance."

It's fun and humorous and wonderful to ponder the circumstances that brought us together in that room for that event, our commonalities and differences, and the fact that though some of us will leave together or meet again in the future, some of our cohort will disappear from our lives forever.

Director Shawn Sides, working from Hannah Kenah's text, manipulates the audience and our surroundings by charming us into complete consent. The show's structure - that transition from gaming to lecture hall - might not have an organic flow and its narrative still seems unfinished, but there's plenty of food for thought on and around that table.

With the help of natural history museum-style dioramas, our lecturer, Lana Lesley, explains Darwin's "survival of the fittest." It's not a strength competition, she says, but rather a matter of the fittest creature for a particular set of circumstances. Creating fake worlds or real ones, surviving and thriving, all require specific, sometimes beautiful and collaborative, but mostly pragmatic, skills that help us adapt.

Van Reigersberg cries out during the game segment, after the Game Master draws a particularly cruel number on the dice, "Why did we set up schools, hospitals, infrastructure, if we were just going to kill each other?"

And we never see him again.

Through April 25 at FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Blvd. at Race Street.

Tickets: $25 to $36.

Information: 215-413-1318 or FringeArts.comEndText