On the Fringe - really

This is the month of the fringe festival in Washington, D.C. I have to say I wish I could be there. There appear to be some interesting conceptual pieces being done, and I would love to be able to see them. The descriptions suggest they are playful and challenge assumptions about the nature of theater, or at least about the seriousness of the art form itself. They suggest an openness to the theatrical experience and above all, they provide a stimulus for discussion about theater and what theater is.

The biggest and best international fringe began in 1947 and runs in Edinburgh, Scotland every August, but many other cities host their own fringes. New York, of course, as well as New Orleans, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Hollywood, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Orlando - all periodically have a festival for odd and innovative theater performance.

I had to look around a little to find out about the New England Fringe Festival in Burlington. It does come at a busy time - September 17 to October 2 - and it seems to be out of the way, certainly from south of the city. But now that I have my attention drawn to it, I hope to take in some of the work. The titles of past award winners look intriguing, although I hope it isn't dominated by solo artists. I also hope they can get some information out to the world about what is going on. The internet is great, but real promotion has to appear in your path.

I have to wonder why I have been unaware of the festival before, which has been going on since 2007. The Washington Post website is all over the festival there on a daily basis, but I don't remember reading anything about the New England festival in the Globe.

One problem with a Fringe Festival necessarily is venues. Theater art requires a certain amount of overhead - and for whatever reasons, not much of the fringe seems to occur in the city here. Maybe it is more cost effective to concentrate the festival in Burlington, but it's not getting the kind of visibility from Boston papers that the Washington festival is getting. I can't help feeling that attention to a fringe festival would inject some life into the world of Boston theater and challenge some conceptions about what theater can be.

Boston tries to maintain a sense of itself as a theater town. It does have a richer legacy of theater history than Washington and some of the other cities with festivals, but I wonder if it isn't weighing us down. I think there may be some things going on in the Boston area that rise to fringe kind of experiences, but there's no critical mass or media focus to project their influence and freshness into the art form at large. We hardly ever hear much about them in southeastern Mass.

I have a clipping I use of a group that did a play in a working, operating laundromat a few years ago. The patrons were the audience. It was a consciously scripted and intentional work, not just a "happening." Few such challenges to traditional presentation rise to media consciousness with a byline story and a picture. Some experiments may be occurring but there's little collective influence.

I have fond memories of some remarkable theater events that were created by Mobius members in their studios in the Fort Point district back in the 80s and early 90s. Some of the pieces were thoughtful and prompted real reflection, others were joyful and raucous, and still others were just odd. Nobody ever tried to define it all for you, but let you meet the work on your own, making whatever sense of it you might. Those events did have a certain amount of thoughtfulness to them and they did intend to shape an experience to a purpose. The organization gave it a focus of energy and critical perspective. It is notable that these generally were created by performance and media artists, not theater people.

I think audiences have the capacity to embrace the new. My students today are no longer surprised much by weirdness, because it has emerged as a kind of pop meme. From internet sites to cartoons to high school antics and youth oriented media in general. Given the intensity of feature filmmaking, there's little that can shock my students anymore. I think they can see silliness for its own sake and make some astute judgements. They seem to be a bit more ready to find meaning in an experience, and will apply a critical perspective if they are led to it a little.

One of the more important aspects of a fringe festival is that it de-institutionalizes the art form. Few major art forms have the institutional overhead of theater, but we keep pretending it can be be done on a trestle and board. A fringe festival reminds us that something interesting can be done with less. And new ideas can happen with minimum investment.

Under the best of circumstances, in a festival there is a critical mass of new experiences that allow audiences to explore and compare. The artists themselves are influenced by what goes on about them, and can work more thoughtfully in the context of the stream of current activity. It's all good for everybody.

But we have to know about it. Boston still pretends to be a theater town. It really needs to game up and the media should help. It's not like it costs them a lot. But of course it means less time and space for the latest outrage or sports win. On TV there's no longer time even for Joyce Kulhawik, who only reported on the most mainstream theater.

July 17, 2011
Scenemaker