The dirt on the Fringe Festival NYC

New York's annual August Fringe Festival is over on Sunday.  Here's the dirt on the best show in the festival.
I'm so glad I had a chance to see "Absolutely Filthy," written by and starring Brendan Hunt. But I predict we'll be seeing more of this show, which was originally produced by the Sacred Fools Theater Company in Los Angeles.
I went not knowing anything about the show. I was pleasantly surprised to find a well written, well acted, funny and thoroughly engaging piece about what happens to the Peanuts characters when they're all grown up. Even if you didn't like Charlie Brown or watch any of the TV specials, the characters are etched in popular culture and the characters' attributes are familiar territory.
As the playwright explained it in the program, "… a few people asked me if I am a Peanuts 'fan.' When I was a kid, one did not need to play favorites in this way; Peanuts was simply Peanuts and it was everything."
"Absolutely Filthy" is the story of Pigpen, Charlie Brown's perpetually dirty friend, drawn by his creator Charles Schulz's pen as surrounded by a cloud of dust.
The action takes place on Valentine's Day, 2013 in a large city in California, on the day of Charlie Brown's funeral.
The playwright, who plays Pigpen, was not authorized by the Schulz estate to use the characters, and the characters are called by other names i.e., Pigpen is called "The Mess" in the program.
Charlie Brown has died of encephalitis. Pigpen, now a homeless street person, lives outside the church where his funeral is to be held.  One by one Pigpen meets his long lost gang as they are going to the service. They are disgusted, but saddened, by the way Pigpen's life has turned out. 
Schroder is now a gay rockstar. Marci is an ophthalmologist, Linus is an Iraq war vet suffering from PTSD. The pocket square of his suit is now his security blanket.  Sally, Charlie Brown's sister and Pigpen's old love, is distraught to see Pigpen in his degraded state. Lucy is a businesswoman. No one remembers the black guy's name — Franklin.
Hunt's riffs on the Peanuts' characters are hilarious and the story is very nicely woven together. The totally dysfunctional Pigpen character is both charming and poignant. He blames his parents, his dirt "disease" and the bad decisions and negative thought processes in his life for his ending up where he is.
The most ingenious idea in the show is that Hunt keeps a hula hoop rotating throughout the entire play to represent the cloud of dirt around Pigpen. That Hunt could do this for almost two hours is quite a feat.
"Absolutely Filthy" was winner of best show at the 2013 Hollywood Fringe. I hope it takes New York this year.