'Mad genius' MacLaughlin brings new creation to the Fringe

Experimental theater director Whit MacLaughlin moves in mysterious ways.

As the master of Philadelphia's New Paradise Laboratories, MacLaughlin and his revolving-door company have created a catalog of memorable interdisciplinary works since its foundation in 1996.

"Whit's a mad genius," says Nick Stuccio, whose Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe has regularly featured New Paradise work as its centerpiece. "He grew as the festival grew. Few artists . . . understand the nature of interdisciplinary theater [as well]."

With sample-rich musical cues as his soundtrack, MacLaughlin over the festival's history has staged the mating rituals of teens in a boxing ring (Prom); turned the Beatles into manic ghosts (The Fab 4 Reach the Pearly Gates); crafted Hugh Hefner's Playboy enterprise into a psychosexual ballet (This Mansion is a Hole); made John Wilkes Booth into an effetely egotistic patsy of the Confederate militia (Freedom Club), and reconfigured the Whole Earth movement into a psychedelic plot to levitate the Liberty Bell (Planetary Enzyme Blues) - all with help from the best fashion designers, visual artists, historians, and architects that no money could buy.

The group's multilayered projects are playfully absurdist critiques of society at large - magnetically visual and metaphor-heavy, with an emphasis on being immersive to the point of submersion.

"If it already exists, we're not interested," MacLaughlin says. "I'm not sure that what we are doing is theater. It ain't film, and multimedia describes nothing. When you think about it, the Greeks were avant-garde and multimedia: Open-air theater, where every little breeze that happens to intrude is meaningful, dancers turning toward the audience to speak directly to them, the gods hovering overhead. They would have killed to have the special-effect tools we have now."

The Greeks might indeed have killed for MacLaughlin's latest theatrical device: Facebook. This year's Live Arts contribution, the three-part Extremely Public Displays of Privacy, takes on personal and public policy regarding the notions of anonymity and privacy at a time when almost every member of the culture is captivated by what MacLaughlin calls "metaphors of interconnectivity, social access, and 'data-veillance.' "

That the better part of the project plays out on the Internet, Facebook, and iTunes is the adventure's most striking component (its staged version begins this week at a still-undisclosed site in Center City).