Thaddeus Phillips, man of two Fringes

EDINBURGH, Scotland - Thaddeus Phillips is Fringe-ing out.

A week ago, he was spotted on the streets of this city, where his one-man show, 17 Border Crossings, played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And this week, Phillips - who splits his time between Philadelphia and Bogotá, Colombia - will surface at Philadelphia's Fringe Festival to premiere an entirely different show, Alias Ellis MacKenzie, Friday at the Prince Theater. From Fringe to shining Fringe.

Go get a cup of coffee and settle in, because once we leap into the whirlwind that is Thaddeus Phillips, and the play that is Alias Ellis MacKenzie, well, you'll be glad you did.

Phillips is a TV actor on Spanish-language television. His wife, Tatiana's, family has ties to Colombia's TV industry, and during one of his stays there, Phillips put in for a job. "Nothing. Zip," he says. "But they kept me on file."

Then, "out of nowhere" in 2013, he landed a role in MundoFox's show Alias El Mexicano, about Colombian drug gangster José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha. The drug lord's nickname was, yep, El Mexicano. The name of Phillips' character? Ellis MacKenzie. And that was the alias of . . . Barry Seal.

Phillips' eyes grow wide because Seal is one of his favorite topics. So he talks about Seal for the next 20 minutes.

There's much to say. Barry Seal was an aircraft pilot, a crazily successful drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel and its towering leader, Pablo Escobar, and later an informant for the U.S. Department of Drug Enforcement. He also was a splashy raconteur who left behind - after his movielike 1986 rubout by (supposedly) Colombian hired guns in Baton Rouge, La. - an incredible, as in amazing and as in unbelievable, cache of tall tales. Some of which might be true.

Wait . . . so Phillips played Ellis MacKenzie, meaning Barry Seal, in Alias El Mexicano. (It all gets so meta!) That's how he first heard of this notorious yet little-known figure. (Seal will become a bit better known when the film Mena, starring Tom Cruise, is released in 2017.)

"Barry Seal is, like, at the center of the conspiracy story of conspiracy stories," Phillips says. "People use his name to pull in everything from Watergate to Kennedy to Iran/Contra to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. And all the experts say all the other experts are wrong."

Thus was inspired his wild dramatic epic about Barry Seal. It would be in two parts: a smaller (but maniacal) production, and a large-scale one including actors Phillips worked with in Alias El Mexicano.

In May, Phillips performed the smaller first part, The Incredibly Dangerous Astonishing Lucrative and Potentially TRUE Adventures of Barry Seal at FringeArts. Inquirer drama critic Toby Zinman called it "a work of bizarro genius." She also, narrowing it down, called it "a brilliant, hilarious theater installation/conspiracy theory/telenovela/true-life drama."

That was only the beginning. "Incredibly Dangerous," says Phillips, "is just a prequel." (As Zinman wrote: "Because, in true telenovela style, the story continues. I can't wait.")

In the larger part, Alias Ellis MacKenzie, we are at the end of Seal's life (but he doesn't know that), looking back. Seal is living at the Salvation Army in Baton Rouge, in front of which he will inevitably be gunned down. It unfolds sort of like . . . well, like a Colombian TV show.

Because Ellis MacKenzie is also about Colombian TV shows - making Colombian TV shows.

"Working on these shows, I became drawn to the way South American TV shows are shot," Phillips says, savoring a coffee between Edinburgh gigs. "All the scenes in one location are shot all at once, no matter what the time sequence. It imparts a surreal aspect to the action and characterization."

Inspiration came: a play that tells its story that way, as a film crew filming the story, with booms, cranes, and props. The visual concept owes much to Phillips' collaborator, scenic designer Jeff Becker.

"As the play goes on," Phillips says, "the language of television production becomes the language of the play. The CIA agents become the filmmakers. You're watching the making of the story, but after awhile what's out of place begins to make sense. We found a way we could skip steps but stress relationships, to make the puzzle come together."

Phillips brings to Philadelphia Colombian actors such as Diana Calderón, Victor Rodríguez, and superstar Juan Sebastián Calero, who played Gacha in Alias El Mexicano. Also aboard, as actor and music director, is DJ Mario Cotto of public-radio powerhouse KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, Calif. (He acted in Incredibly Dangerous in May.)

Phillips brought his family with him to Edinburgh for the month-long run of Border Crossings. While wife and son Rafael, 21/2, enjoyed the city in the midst of its madcap festival of 3,000 shows at 300-plus venues, Phillips acted out 17 different stories at frontiers from the former Yugoslavia to Brazil, from Bali to Cuba. In a scrambling tour de force, he used a clever lighting rig to evoke trains, trucks, police stations, dingy offices.

"You get to know a show's rhythms really well," Phillips says. "A festival like this is also a way to get seen by people who might want to put it on someplace else."

That's also the idea with Philadelphia's Fringe Festival and Alias Ellis MacKenzie. "Philly audiences are great, very involved," Phillips says. "They teach you a lot about your show. That's why we open most of our works there."

And then he is gone, to get ready to act.

A footnote: Phillips has a bit part in Narcos, a new show that debuted Aug. 28 on Netflix. His role? That of CIA Agent Owens - the man who finally caught up with Barry Seal.

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Alias Ellis MacKenzie

Friday to Sept. 19 at the Prince Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.

Tickets: $15-$20.

Information: 215-413-1318 or fringearts.com

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215-854-4406@jtimpane