A tradesman in Tinseltown

The spaces in which the shows are done, one after another, often from noon until midnight and even later, are mostly hard to find, and, with a few exceptions, hot and airless when you do get there. The heat and stuffiness aren?t major factors in this cooler-than-usual summer, but, as usual, a few of last years spaces have been demolished or otherwise incapacitated, and one or two have even been condemned by the New York City Fire Department.
The positive side of the venture, as always, is that once in a while a truly original and genuinely valuable item turns up, often where least expected.

ALL THE HELP YOU NEED:
THE ADVENTURES OF A
HOLLYWOOD HANDYMAN
Among the best of this summer?s crop is the Irish-oriented ?All the Help You Need: the Adventures of a Hollywood Handyman,? a one-person show written and performed, wonderfully, by Tim Ryan, a 44-year-old actor who appeared on Broadway in Tina Howe?s oddly neglected ?Coastal Disturbances? on Broadway a couple of decades ago and then decamped for California and a leading role in the successful television series ?China Beach.?
When a prolonged strike put commercial production on hold, Ryan, who had helped to put himself through Rutgers as a carpenter, printed up cards advertising his manual skills, and went to work in homes in Hollywood and nearby environs.
The title of the 60-minute show Ryan is doing in the Fringe replicates the legend the actor had printed on his cards, while the meat of his compelling and richly rendered text, of course, stems from the diverse experiences the resulting jobs let him in for.
Hollywood being Hollywood, the energetic and appealing Ryan found himself awash in mobsters and molls, recluses and revivalists, ?girls? who turn out to be boys, and a varied collection of other human oddities, all of whom he brings to life with swift, vivid strokes and lightning transitions in ?All the Help You Need,? much to the delight of the Fringe audiences which have found their way to the Access Theater at 380 Broadway, a couple of blocks below Canal Street, climbed three rather long flights of stairs and settled in for one of the truly memorable offerings this year?s running of the event has on display.
?All the Help You Need: the Adventures of a Hollywood Handyman,? which Ryan has performed to positive response in California, very much deserves an ongoing New York life.
Ryan?s vivid and amusing show isn?t all gags and gimmicks, with one incident recreating a murder he witnessed and which might easily have cost him his life, had the action gone in another direction. In a sense, the most riveting aspect of Ryan?s show lies in the reflectiveness he brings to the experiences he?s had.
?All the Help You Need: the Adventures of a Hollywood Handyman? has, most regrettably only a single Fringe performance remaining, at 5:45 this Saturday afternoon. Ryan?s wise and sprightly show is definitely worth the climb, and ought to be brought back for the extended run it so very richly merits.

IRISH AUTHORS HELD HOSTAGE
Elsewhere on the ?Fringe 2004? calendar, the situation with regard to Irish and Irish-influenced shows is decidedly less sanguine.
?Irish Authors Held Hostage,? its blatant title pretty much giving the game away, has one performance left to go, this Friday at 4:45 p.m. at the Greenwich Street Theatre.
Bearing the subtitle, ?Variations on a theme,? the show seems to exist primarily if not entirely, to give its author, John Morogiello, the opportunity to portray no fewer than five of Ireland?s major literary figures — W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and J.M. Synge — not to mention a couple of characters from, plays including a participant in Samuel Beckett?s ?Waiting for Godot.?
In this case, it is the author who fails to appear, although the degree to which he is anticipated is open to argument, since a kind of gentle monotony has set in fairly early in this 80-minute burlesque.
The time-bending ?idea,? if there can be said to be one, posits these stellar Celtic scribes in conflict with a series of armed captors and radicals, including a sprinkling of Arabs, plus one North Korean, a Colombian ?Narcoterrorist,? and a Basque ?Separatist,? all of them, played, indistinguishably for the most part, by Terence Heffernan.
The beefy Kevin Carolan contributes a poor Sean O?Casey, and a vastly better Bram Stoker and an acceptable Brendan Behan, in addition to being listed in the program as doing a Beckett, although that particular impersonation never appears, probably having been excised in the interest of shortening the show, which, on the face of available evidence, was probably a good idea.
Lori Boyd, the sole female in the cast, has a go at Maude Gonne, Lady Gregory, and, inexplicably, Emily Bronte, all of whom merge into a single pallid impression.
Boyd does a bit better as a singer when she joins musicians Tina Eck and Matt Shortridge for a couple of numbers bridging the ?variations,? 10 in number, making up ?Irish Authors Held Hostage.?
The ?Irish authors? Morogiello and his colleagues have appropriated for the occasion are, in the end, ?held hostage,? in a way the perpetrators of the event never intended, since the ?idea? once stated, merely lies there on the stage, going nowhere.
The musical sidebar is the best thing in the show, but even there, the venture is a puzzlement. Although the program makes no note of her, an unidentified female sits in, playing the bodhran with a degree of skill. Whoever she is she adds a positive element to the overall drabness of the numbingly listless occasion.

ANOTHER CAT AND ANOTHER MOON
If William Butler Yeats takes his lumps in ?Irish Authors Held Hostage,? he?s subjected to far more serious abuse in something called ?Another Cat and Another Moon,? being given two terminal ?Fringe? performances at Our Lady of Pompeii?s Demo Hall on Carmine Street, one on Friday at 6 p.m. and the other on Saturday at 7 p.m.
As the title might indicate, the production, the work of director Dieter Riesle and a group called the Metro Clowns, is a riff on Yeats?s ?The Cat and the Moon,? a one-act verse play the master writer composed in 1926, about a decade after he?d begun to be influenced by Japanese noh plays, which he?d discovered via a translation by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa and had begun to come up with his own application of the oriental techniques the translators suggested.
Before the Metro Clowns begins its version which the program calls ?a reinterpretation,? a stage manager appears on the Demo stage to tell the audience that the group has been working on what they?re about to see for a year or more.
But a good idea that, particularly if what follows is as rankly amateurish as a Kansas high school production of Strindberg?s ?John Gabriel Borkman? might be.
In the Yeats original, two beggars, one blind and the other lame, unite to ?create? a single ?complete? individual as they make their way to the Holy Well at Saint Colman?s.
For the occasion, Riesle and the Metro Clowns have added a mimetic surrogate for each of Yeats?s characters, and a prologue in which two clowns and two children gaze into the window of a toy shop, admire a black cat named Minnaloushe, steal it and then fight over its ownership.
?Another Cat and Another Moon? provides a printed program that devotes nearly seven pages to ?explaining? this most peculiar venture and its intentions, complete with quotes from Oscar Wilde, Ambrose Bierce and ?a 9-year-old Egyptian Pharaoh.?
?All the Help You Need: the Adventures of a Hollywood Handyman,? on the other hand, stands firmly and steadfastly on its own very considerable excellence, with a simple program composed mainly of thanks and acknowledgements aimed at the people and groups who have helped Tim Ryan in creating his show.
The bare-chested workman on the program cover, standing on a girder and carrying a crowbar in his left hand, is Ryan?s Staten Island-born grandfather, a warm and moving detail not supplied in the fine production?s simple, unpretentious program.