The latest show to move from the Fringe to off-Broadway is “Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party.”
But Aaron Loeb’s comedy isn’t likely to improve the Fringe’s poor transfer stats. The amiable play overflows with good intentions, but it’s also torn between camp and earnestness.
On the one hand, we get attempts at frothy wackiness, including dancers in stovepipe hats and beards. On the other, the many speeches about tolerance, AIDS, outing and civil rights will make your eyes glaze over.
A sneaking suspicion creeps in: Could this 2½-hour PSA be meant for a student audience?
The show does start, after all, in a school setting.
All hell breaks loose when an Illinois teacher, Harmony Green (Pippa Pearthree), writes a fourth-grade pageant in which Lincoln has a relationship with another man. You don’t mess with Abe, especially in Illinois, and Harmony ends up in court.
A pair of local Republican politicians and a liberal New York journalist descend, hoping to use the case to further their own agendas.
Loeb’s one original device is that a randomly selected audience member picks the order in which we see each of the play’s three segments — it’s Choose Your Own Adventure at the theater.
Tuesday’s show started by focusing on gay-baiting Congressman Tom Hauser (Robert Hogan), followed by journo Anton Renault (Arnie Burton) and finally state Sen. Regina Lincoln (Stephanie Pope Caffey).
The show is constructed so that the sequencing doesn’t matter, but here’s a tip if you happen to do the selection: Go for Anton’s version first. It’s the best and funniest of the three, and then you can split at the first intermission.
elisabeth.vincentelli@nypost.com