Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe turn tradition on its ear

A similar high-meets-low aesthetic runs through Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental's "¡El Conquistador!," which blends Greek tragedy, Shakespeare (again), and telenovelas in the story of a doorman bent on vengeance.

For director/performer Thaddeus Phillips, borrowing from the classics is a way to lend structure to his own whimsical flights of fancy.

"When you're grabbing onto Shakespeare, one of the world's greatest dramatists, it's a great help to make a dramatic story that has depth and insight and builds to a dramatic finale," Phillips said. "It's a good structure to help build the show, especially since a lot of telenovelas are based on classical sources. The two aesthetics blend well together, bizarrely enough."

Tribe of Fools co-founder Jay Wojnarowski was already working on an adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" when a housemate stopped taking his antipsychotic medications, growing "pretty dangerous and unpredictable over a surprisingly short period of time."

"All of the fear and anxiety of that living situation was enveloping," Wojnarowski said. "So our adaptation became a very deep exploration of fear. I also became preoccupied with what it was to be sane or insane and how fast that line could be crossed."

That experience led Wojnarowski to take a novel approach, one not available to the author while writing, applying the science of fear and the brain to tailor the theatrical experience to be as frightening as possible. He's even asking audience members to sign a waiver before entering.

"Whenever there is any new progress in any of the sciences, I have to find out about it," he said. "Stoker was a huge science fan too. His book is filled with references to the most up-to-date science and technology he had available to him. In a way, the book is a battle between old superstitious thought and new scientific rationalism. Each is horrifying in its own way."

New York's Nature Theater of Oklahoma also dug deep into its audiences' psyches, in this case hoping to dredge faulty memories for more profound truths. Performer/directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper asked a number of people to retell "Romeo and Juliet" from memory, then assembled a text from the surprising, contradictory and often confused responses.

"What I found interesting was just how people's relationship to the story changed," Copper said. "The way you're less inclined to believe Romeo and Juliet were really in love based on your own relationship to love at that particular moment.

"When we're younger, it seems to be true young love, and when we've reached midlife and gone through a few failed relationships, it's just a crush or possibly not even love but just something hormonal that brings the two together. The plot doesn't change as much as we change. It makes me less fascinated with Shakespeare's genius and more fascinated by humanity. . . . It's not plays that are authentic or original. People are."

2010 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe, today through Sept. 18, 215-413-1318, www.livearts-fringe.org.