THE TRICKY PART
Heart & Eyes
Red River College (Venue 11), to July 25

American Martin Moran's powerful memoir maps his painful journey after he is sexually molested at age 12 by a male counsellor at a Catholic boys camp. Moran performed The Tricky Part off-Broadway in 2004 but it is South African actor Peter Hayes who is introducing this deeply moving one-man show to the Canadian fringe festival circuit.

Moran chronicles his early upbringing as a Roman Catholic in Denver before proceeding to a candid account of the affair and a confrontation he had 30 years later with his abuser, an ex-seminarian. Although emotionally broken to the point of two suicide attempts, Moran endures to find forgiveness for his victimizer and himself, while at the same time finding a measure of redemption.

BUSTY RHYMES WITH MC HOT PINK
Penash Productions
Ragpickers Theatre (Venue 13), to July 26

There is nothing subtle about Busty Rhymes, who is apparently big in her native New Zealand and everywhere she takes her R-rated fringe act. To prove it, she fits her entire head into one of the G-cups of her bra. Badda-bing, badda-boom.

So it is ironic when Busty has to significantly pad her hour-long performance in Montreal with some lame audience participation, in which a couple of goofs are pulled up on stage to audition for the role of man-hos. Now there were a couple of boobs.

SUPER MUSIKANT
Die Roten Punkte
MTC Backstage at the Mainstage (Venue 1), to July 26

Otto and Astrid Rot, Berlin's prince and princess of punk parody, make another Winnipeg concert stop after sweeping the best production honours at fringe festivals in both Montreal and Ottawa.

Super Musikant (German for Super Musician) offers another sonic barrage and more sibling squabbling from Die Roten Punkte (The Red Dots), a pounding two-piece that sends up the White Stripes. Much of the fun is the improvised interplay between the self-indulgent brother and sister, who are back on tour after taking time off to deal with her excessive drinking. The creepy sexual tension between the randy drummer Astrid (Claire Bartholomew) and the lipstick-smeared guitarist Otto (Daniel Tobias) is deftly maintained.

The pair can play and are firm believers that it takes only three notes to make a great song. Expect to join in on Astrid's drinking song, which boasts the refrain, "Don't be pains in the asses/Let's fill up our glasses/You'll be dead for a very long time." Rock on, Die Roten Punkte.

'BETH
Zero-Sum Games
Playhouse Studio (Venue 2), to July 27

'Beth is advertised as Shakespeare's Macbeth as never seen before, but its limp performance is more of a bloody tragedy.

Written by Montreal's Andrea Rosenfeld, this hour-long drama follows the recently widowed Elizabeth as she discovers her late husband Harold had a secret life and that his hidden fortune has been bequeathed to another woman. She and her son Andrew embark on a bewilderingly dumb spree of vengeance that is neither gripping or entertaining.

The two-person production seen at the Montreal Fringe Festival was slow and ponderous. The only inspiration in evidence was the use of a mirror to reflect Harold's treacherous double life as well as to allow actors Angela Potvin and Vladimir Cara to carry out conversations with their doubles.

Traditionally, there's a lot of bad luck surrounding the Scottish play and Zero-Sum Games is another unfortunate victim.

TELEGRAMS FROM THE CANADIAN CINEMA
North Country Cinema
Son of Warehouse (Venue 5), to July 26

Lost among the almost 139 plays at this year's Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival is Telegrams, a screening of new works by emerging Canadian filmmakers. Each evening a different selection of movies, ranging in length from a 60-second short to a 42-minute work, is presented with live introductions by the filmmakers.

The central movie -- because at 42 minutes, it is by far the longest -- is Alexander Carson's Lucy James Part 1, which focuses on the young revellers at a wedding reception and the late-night game of hide-and-seek they play in a hotel. While the craft is competent, the story is hardly compelling, which doesn't bode well for Part 2.

Some of the briefer pieces, like Daniel Beirne's Beth, work up more interest. Somehow for his first post-graduate film, Beirne landed Cara Pilko (TV's This Is Wonderland) to star in his five-minute character study about a woman who has just found out she's pregnant. It shows promise, as does Telegrams, as a welcome break from all the theatre.

BALLS
Ten Foot Pole Productions
School of Contemporary Dancers (Venue 8), to July 26

Balls is Rob Salerno's theatrical tribute to a close buddy who died of testicular cancer several years ago. He celebrates male testicles with a story about two inseparable boyhood pals who suffer a low blow to their friendship.

The discovery that 19-year-old Paul (played by Salerno) has testicular cancer stuns Bastian, but it does nothing to deter their constant repartee, replete with gallows humour. Bastian (Adam Goldhamer) has a similar health scare but is left to go on by himself to contemplate the nature of masculinity.

What Balls lacks in nuance and subtext is made up for with its heartfelt tone. The image of a saddened Bastian picking up the string-can phone with which he once spoke to Paul as a kid nicely communicates his devastating sense of loss.

TEACHING THE FRINGE
Doctor Keir Co.
Planetarium Auditorium (Venue 10), to July 26

Montreal's Keir Cutler wreaks his theatrical revenge against a Winnipeg fringe-goer who accused him in a letter last year of using his play Teaching As You Like It to promote the seduction of underage girls.

Enraged that he was being defamed and tarnished for the sins of his stage character, Cutler responded with Teaching the Fringe, in which he comically trots out a kooky chorus line of rogue audience members.

While the wide-eyed Cutler appears to be a bit of a nut magnet -- he once chased a guy out of a New York theatre who kept yawning loudly during his show -- he mostly concentrates on the letter sent to then-fringe festival executive producer Nick Kowalchuk and Child Find Manitoba charging him with legitimizing the sexual misconduct of students by their teachers.

In his first autobiographical work, Cutler analyzes each word of the letter to much comedic effect. He has great fun at his accuser's expense and the audience is the grateful beneficiary.

JEM ROLLS
Big Word Performance Poetry
King's Head (Venue 14), to July 26

In his latest power poetry recital, called How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Mall, Jem Rolls takes listeners into what he calls the "rat maze of plenty" that serve as a "laggard-archipelago of lego-ego." This fringe vet's superlative wordplay and image-creation remains impressive, displaying no ill effects of spending his first winter in Winnipeg.

This is the first time that the speed-talking Scotsman focuses on a single subject and the result is that his prose is much more accessible and funny. While the impromptu dashes into the audiences to deliver his words have stopped, he is a more lively action figure on stage.

Rolls does takes time to unexpectedly go off on the Kenny Rogers hit Coward of the County, which he calls the most shameful exploitation of sentiment. His only excuse for the national embarrassment of having the tune last six weeks atop the U.K. record charts is that contempt breeds familiarity.

TOTEM FIGURES
Big Sandwich Productions
PTE Mainstage (Venue 16), to July 27

Raconteur extraordinaire TJ Dawe (The Slipknot, Labrador) spins a new tale about personal mythology and how we all create our own symbolic totem poles out of our heroes, whether they be writers, musicians or parents.

Much of his 90-minute Totem Figures monologue is taken up by the 33-year-old Dawe fast talking about himself and the VIPs worthy of the cover of his personal Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. He makes the case that we look for patterns in other people's lives that can be helpful in finding direction for our own epic journey.

Dawe could cut his Totem Figures down to size -- say, 60 minutes ?-- without sacrificing much impact. There's too much personal information, which is only useful if he hires you to be his official biographer.

His free-flowing delivery is flawless as he darts from subject to subject without a breath -- "I don't do segues," he says, in a moment of understatement. Among fringe performers, he rates top of the totem pole.

CRUDE LOVE
Big Smoke Productions
PTE Colin Jackson Studio (Venue 17), to July 27

Crude Love looks to a future when the American military is occupying Alberta tar sands in the interest of protecting its oil lifeline. It's 2012 when a rogue eco-warrior named Abbie chains himself to a super-sized dump truck driven by former Newfoundlander Phyllis.

The pair are no strangers, having performed in A Streetcar Named Desire together, and they slowly find common ground -- ground that has yet to be destroyed by strip-mining -- to take a chance on love. Just as the tar-sands development is hazardous to the boreal forests and local birdlife, it also proves a romance killer.

While Crude Love is no theatrical gusher, what the plot lacks in sophistication and originality, it makes up for with appealing performances by the Vancouver husband-and-wife acting-writing team of Russell and Gillian Bennett.