DUO LOATHED IN THE SUBURBS BRINGS CELEBRATED COMEDY SHE’S NOT WELL TO FRINGENYC

Their sketch show was shut down in New Jersey on charges of obscenity. Their Oedipal comedy drove some of the famously humorless denizens of East Hampton to respond with walkouts and hate mail. And so the award-winning and occasionally loathed theatrical duo of Baus & Troché is pleased to bring their newest comedy to this year’s New York International Fringe Festival. She’s Not Well, written and directed by Ted Baus, is a satirical exploration of the way celebrity sickens, and finds actress Debbie Troché acting six roles, lip-syncing songs, Shakespeare, and beat poetry, and hoofing it like Ann Miller on crack. In its initial workshop at the Montreal Fringe, the comedy was shortlisted for the Centaur Award for outstanding production.

She’s Not Well combines edgily comic character studies with movie-musical choreography and drag-show lip-sync to create a one-of-a-kind one-woman show. When has-been Cherry Stone traps a TV film crew in her home, the stage is set for an uproarious and outrageous recount of Cherry’s very own True Hollywood Story: her meteoric rise, squalid fall, and crippling addictions to over-the-counter cold medicines ...and stardom.

Baus & Troché anticipate that She’s Not Well will provide all the deranged fun of their previous work while continuing to make the moral arbiters squirm. Their last play, the Oedipus-Rex-in-Hollywood comedy Tempting Fate, premiered at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton, New York, and was deemed “a riot...a can’t-miss Off Broadway vehicle” by New York Newsday. The play’s contention — that incest is just another handy skill for climbing the show-biz ladder — vexed conservative Hamptonites and led to the producers receiving hate mail for the first time in years.

Tandems, B&T’s sketch comedy show, won the Backstage Magazine Bistro Award and a Manhattan Association of Cabarets Award, and was hailed as “brilliant” by the New York Post and “unnerving” by the Village Voice. It also led to the duo being shut down in two New Jersey towns on obscenity charges. (The Bayhead shutdown was covered in Variety; the one in Maplewood didn’t get much press, despite the surreal event of a dozen State Troopers arriving to view the “obscene” sketch in question.)

The New York International Fringe Festival, a production of The Present Company, runs from August 10 until August 26, 2007. Tickets are $15, and can be purchased by visiting www.FringeNYC.org, or by calling 212.279.4488 (in New York) or 1.888.FringeNYC (outside New York).

Learn more about She’s Not Well at www.shesnotwell.com, and request industry seats by contacting info@shesnotwell.com.