By Robert Avila

THE SURGE IN bohemian types in the vicinity of Taylor and Eddy Streets this week has tipped off Tenderloin residents to the start of the 12th annual San Francisco Fringe Festival. The two-week, low-budget onslaught of one-hour-or-less one-acts features 54 shows, including a core of local productions along with work that originated in far-flung locales like Alaska, Australia, Canada, and England. The lineup has almost any kind of work you could hope to find – along with some you didn't know you wanted, and others you thought you wanted until the lights went down and the show started – a vintage Fringe Festival experience. I offer you some highlights.

Those with a taste for the absurd can find a tasty smorgasbord of New York exotica called Sandwich tucked away in a corner of the Exit Stage Left. The play, created by the same team that served up Gulag Ha Ha, has a set that brings to mind a Lower East Side moving sale. An overly reclusive couple (Jessica Jelliffe and Jason Craig), looking like heavily medicated circus help, prepare lunch and attend to their Sad Cat (Heather Peroni) in a scene of domestic bliss. But the plucky family melodrama soon veers into a treatise – in song and what I'll gingerly describe as "movement" – on the Great Food-Chain of Being (accompanist David Malloy supports the action on piano and horns). Slathered with wily humor, Sandwich is a gruff and fetching investment in absurdist family values and a distorted plea for vegetarianism – or possibly something else entirely. But whatever that may be, this is theater that lets us see ourselves, a phrase I've always thought of as hokey but now find quietly troubling. Highly recommended.

Also at Exit's Stage Left, Los Angeles- and Chicago-based performer Abby Schachner's engaging Shadow Kissers juxtaposes the perspectives of a set of desperate women in, out of, far from, or forever homing in on love. Schachner's deft characterizations are worth checking out – she takes sometimes bleakly funny material and adds a freewheeling, compulsive honesty that wards off the potential monotony that can undermine monologues.

Around the corner at Exit on Taylor, meanwhile, one can hear the true tale of a sort of everyman (of the Upper Haight in the mid '90s anyway) who gave the system a terrific run for somebody's money. Finding out exactly who the loot belonged to is just one part of Patrick Combs's delightful and involving monologue, Man 1, Bank 0. With easy charm, Combs – by day a TV personality, motivational speaker, and genuinely laid-back dude – delivers a well-told, consistently amusing, and actually fascinating account of an adventure that started with a hefty junk-mail check and the local ATM. This now infamous prank bypassed mere local lore to wind up the stuff of serious journalism (as reported in the Wall Street Journal and on Hard Copy).

San Francisco's own Paducah Mining Company unveils a new work, This World Is Not My Home, at the Actors Theatre. The bitterness and sorrow lurking in the title (taken from the classic folk song) are summoned up in the tense, volatile mixture of form and expression in this passionate plea for social justice and solidarity, created by the ensemble and directed by E. Hunter Spreen. Through the production is a somewhat scattered and dissonant collage of stylized movement, audiovisual snippets, and dialogue, several characters catalog the needs of all human beings, from the most basic to the loftiest, in a direct challenge to the tacit assumptions of a capitalist system. Conveying a general sense of high-strung desperation, World at times teeters giddily on the brink of liftoff, but the jagged elements in the production have trouble moving us much further. Still, the disarming anecdotes and memories work well, especially one man's reminiscence of a single idyllic day he spent as a boy with an otherwise aloof grandfather. At its best World is a politically and theatrically bold venture with its ear to the ground.

Fans of the Bay Area's Liebe Wetzel and her found-object puppet troupe extraordinaire Lunatique Fantastique know she's been on a roll, though until now she's resisted incorporating one into a show. But Fixed Boundary's crew of black-garbed, hooded puppeteers breathe such life into toilet paper, yardsticks, and plungers that there's no question the choice was apt. In this poignant and humor-laced allegory of conflict across borders – a fall from grace with biblical overtones and a real-life reference to the Israeli-Palestinian disaster – Fixed Boundary transforms the mundane into a remarkably clever and moving form of visual poetry. It's a beautiful piece of work – and strange and miraculous to think that it takes only a bare suggestion of life for us to so earnestly invest our humanity in these fanciful creatures. And of course there's no escaping the realization of how much more difficult it can be to summon equal compassion for the real thing. But that's why theater has an audience – and why the crowd was out in the Tenderloin searching for signs of life.