By Jennifer Kilbourne

Talk about taking the show on the road. Facing sky-high rents in New York City, actor Leon Pease, 23, decided to take his theater group to the streets and stay there. Last year, the group put on Bertolt Brecht’s The Elephant Calf in the back of a friend’s parents’ SUV. The show was a hit on the streets of Manhattan, filling all (both) available seats for every performance.

The troupe purchased a shortbus, renamed itself Theatre in a Van, and set off on a coast-to-coast tour, which stops in New Orleans on Saturday, July 17.

Interested passersby can pay $5 to see one of three original plays. The back of the van serves as a stage, and the bus can seat between 10 and 12 audience members per performance. Each show runs between 15 and 20 minutes.

In the timely musical The Big Spill, two musicians come up with a crackpot idea to save the Gulf. Musical accompaniment is provided by a guitar, tambourine, toy piano and melodophone. In a Choose Your Own Adventure twist, the audience gets to decide how the play ends.

Lint, which Pease describes as the most standard play in the lineup, is an “adult fairytale” about a dust bunny tired of the constant upheaval in the air duct where she lives. Coming of age, she ventures into the world outside the ventilation system she knows.

The dark comedy A Funeral Song for Duchess D follows two young concertgoers who confront sinister, abstinence-promoting sex symbols of the Disney star variety. Puppets also comprise part of its cast.

Though they haven’t nailed down exactly where they’ll park, Theatre in a Van targets high foot traffic areas. Pease is hoping to find the French Quarter parking.

The troupe’s long-term goal is to modify the bus’s engine to run on vegetable oil. For now, it’s outfitted with a solar panel which helps keep the battery charged and powers the cast’s cooking equipment. (Yes, they’re also living in the van.)

Dita Von Teese is the queen of new burlesque, a former fetish model, former spouse of Marilyn Manson and a representative for Cointreau, which is sponsoring two nights of performances (9 p.m. Monday-Tuesday, June 19-20 at the House of Blues) at Tales of the Cocktail. Dita is expected to do the Opium Den act previewed above (as well as the cocktail glass act after the jump, which is harder to see given all the Cointreau promotional shots.) Dita’s act has become so lavish with sets, costumes and effects that she doesn’t perform very often. The spectacle requires a Las Vegas style treatment and venue — and a sponsor with deep pockets. Dita has performed in New Orleans a couple of times since headlining the Tease-O-Rama burlesque festival nearly 10 years ago. She did a show with the now defunct Shim Sham Revue. Here she is working with Bustout Burlesque but is bringing several performers from Los Angeles (they appear in the video after the jump). She now splits time between Los Angeles and Paris and spends more time promoting lines of lingerie and and liquor than performing. She has a book of beauty tips slated to come out later this year.

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Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre has announced its 95th season this morning, though no word on casting yet. Tickets should be on sale soon. Here’s the rundown on the season, which is, as usual, musical-heavy:

2010

• Hairspray: Sept. 17 - Oct. 3

• Soul Doctor: Nov. 5 - 21

• White Christmas: Dec. 10 - 26

2011

• Frost/Nixon: Jan. 28 - Feb. 13

• The Drowsy Chaperone: Apr. 7 - 24

• Evita: June 10 - 26

• High School Musical on Stage: July 14 - 31

BY JENNIFER KILBOURNE

Antonio Garza is no stranger to adaptation. In his one-man show, Men in Uniform, he tells about his experiences as a young Mexican-American moving between the two countries, which became more difficult with the onset of post-9/11 border anxiety. He has performed the show across the country and in Europe, modifying it for audiences ranging from other border natives to Parisians.

His newest project, taking Men in Uniform on tour across Arizona by bicycle, is currently undergoing its own set of changes. Garza was injured in a car accident earlier this month, but with the support of New Orleans Fringe, his show will go on. Before he sets off, Garza will perform Men in Uniform in the Shadowbox Theatre (2400 St. Claude Ave., 523-7469; www.theshadowboxtheatre.com) at 8 p.m. Friday, June 25.

“The show looks at how the second arrest affected certain aspects of my life, especially my relationship with my mother and friends,” says Garza, who has been wrongfully detained twice by officers who suspected him of being in the United States illegally. Alternately funny and moving, the play explores what shifting political climates mean for immigration regulation, and who gets to decide which people belong where.

The tour originally was set to be finished by August, when Arizona Senate bill 1070 — which orders law enforcement officers to detain anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant — goes into effect in that state. Because of the accident (Garza now wears a neck brace, limps slightly and suffers back pain), he will still be pedaling when it does. Critics have decried the law as racial profiling, but Garza is optimistic he won’t have any more run-ins with police.

“After 9/11, I think there’s a way racial profiling became kind of normative and OK. Half the country tends to think it’s disgusting,” he says. “I also want to perform for people who think the law’s OK. At the same time, I want to quietly observe.”

With average temperatures in July ranging from 81 degrees to 106 degrees in Arizona and a packed schedule of performances and cycling stints, Garza now needs to rest, recover and train. While he waits for doctors’ permission to begin training again, he’s working with a New Orleans shop to build a bike that will accommodate his physical limitations. His injuries are likely to force him to stop more frequently than he originally planned, but Garza says that will give him more opportunities to interact with Arizonans.

“When you come into town with just a bicycle, it kind of sparks conversation, and I expect to have intimate conversations with people,” he says. Garza will document his travel experiences on his blog, www.antoniogarza.blogspot.com.

“That’s so Fringe-y, to take the show out to where it really gets you in the gut,” says Kristen Evans, co-founder of New Orleans Fringe. The Fringe’s relationship with Garza dates back to 2008, when he performed Men in Uniform at the first Fringe Festival, now a yearly celebration of avant-garde art.

As the festival grew in 2009, the founders decided to expand their operation. “We sat down and asked ourselves, ‘How can we nurture the arts in a more powerful way?’” Evans says. Two key projects came out of that brainstorm: a year-round program of performances and workshops called the Fringe Alternative Theater Incubator (FATI), and a commitment to diversifying the face of theater in New Orleans. FATI now offers tickets at reduced prices to underserved communities and holds events all over the city. The Fringe also is taking steps to diversify its lineup by having a panel of 12 artists review each submission to the Fringe Festival with the goal of creating a line up of high-quality pieces and performers who reflect New Orleans’ population. So when Evans found out about Garza’s plan to take his play about discrimination on a road trip to Arizona just as the new law was going into effect, she knew it was something the Fringe could get behind.

FATI is sponsoring Friday’s performance of Men in Uniform, which also will feature jambalaya tacos and Cuba libres. Proceeds from the event will pay for tires and Powerbars during Garza’s trip. He plans to donate any extra money he raises to a charity along his route.

As literary temptation, writing a play about writing a play can be like playing with fire. In The Everlasting Bonfire, running at the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane, Jim Fitzmorris stokes the flames with extra writerly indulgences, having characters deconstruct words and phrases, discuss literary references and even animate a punctuation mark (the suspect intentions of an ellipsis), but he manages to ignite a battle of wits with genuine warmth and crackling banter and lets the creative process bask in the light for 70 minutes.

Imagining the career of Edwin Forrest, a character actor who became famous in New Orleans in the early 1800s, the piece follows the boisterously optimistic and driven Edwin (Shad Willingham) as he rises to fame and consults with a playwright, Jane (Amanda Zirkenbach), who is also trying to establish her career but is struggling. At times, Edwin seems to be Forrest and at times he appears to be talking about Forrest as a historical subject. The piece often seems to jump around in time, especially because it’s full of anachronistic references. The two reenact the opening scene of Macbeth with its brooding witches, talk of Scrooge’s clairvoyant ghosts, sing lyrical bits from The Hobbit and discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Creating a play is like building a monster, they agree, and to truly be brought to life, it must be allowed to do what it wants — even if it wants to work in a reference to German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Ideas and texts are timeless in Bonfire, and a sense of limitless knowledge and awareness seems to inspire Edwin with a romantic notion of the frontier, both artistic and literal, to be found in New Orleans. The city has not been conquered by the “weak and effeminate” influences of the British, who he believes have spoiled theater on their side of the Atlantic as well as in New York and Philadelphia. He gleefully states that Shakespeare was an American, a smug and funny moment typical of the wit and tone Fitzmorris deploys in the piece.

Fitzmorris also has a gift for physically grounding the more cerebral indulgences in his plays. As Edwin works up a lusty image of the great artistic freedom he expects to realize in New Orleans, he fills a couple of large snifters with a generous pour of brown liquor. He cracks a raw egg into each glass and hands one to Jane, who hesitates, transfixed by the bobbing yellow yolk. The audience seemed to wince along with her, unsure of the challenge of handling a little bit of raw material. But damn the salmonella, Edwin quickly downs his, and invokes Gen. Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans. Then he gladly relieves Jane of her glass and tosses back an encore. It’s an offbeat and brilliant toast from a playwright who also found a muse in the Big Easy.

The Everlasting Bonfire

By Jim Fitzmorris

8:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday

Tulane University, Dixon Hall, Lab Theater