Theatre Review / Frank Episale
The Still Small and Alluring Voice of the Fringe
Betsy Moore in 2 By Sinner at the New York International Fringe Festival.
New York International Fringe Festival (NYIFF)
Every August, a couple hundred theatre companies, some long established, others formed specifically for the event at hand, converge on lower Manhattan for the New York International Fringe Festival (NYIFF). Billed as the “the largest multi-arts festival in North America,” the festival’s organizers claim that it “generates an atmosphere of extreme excitement” and that their “energy is contagious!” Indeed, to be sure they were getting across just how excited they were — and how excited we should be — about about the festival, the homepage of the 2008 festival employed no fewer than seventeen exclamation points. Some sentences had so much excitement bursting out of them that one exclamation wasn’t enough (“Subscribe to the FringeNYC Fans newsletter!!”)
For the first few years of the Fringe — which has now been around for twelve years, more than long enough to make many of us feel old for remembering year one — it was almost possible to share in the excitement, manufactured or not. New York has a sprawling, chaotic, energetic, and vital scene of small, independent theatre companies. Many of these companies come and go in a year or two; most lose money; much of the work is dreadful. Despite, or perhaps even because of, these caveats, many consider this scene the heart of New York theatre. The high-priced, risk-averse, aesthetically conservative, middlebrow, blandly competent work generally produced by the commercial and institutional theatres of Broadway and, increasingly, off-Broadway, certainly doesn’t seem representative of the anarchic energy that seems to fuel so much of the theatre in this city.
Countless theatre artists are referred to as “aspiring” despite the dozens of shows they’ve already been involved in; they bite their tongues when well-meaning aunts and uncles cheer them on by looking forward to seeing them on Broadway. This isn’t entirely bad, of course: “alternative” movements need something to be alternative to. Still, it has long been a common complaint that this “alternative” theatre lacks a sense of community and a coherent identity. While the fragmented nature of the scene means there’s room for everyone, it also means it’s extraordinarily difficult to attract and maintain an audience, and to establish a reputation.
These difficulties are exacerbated by the inadequate terminology that is applied to such theatre. Terms like “off-off-Broadway” and “semi-professional” sound aspirational, as if all practitioners of small theatre in New York are trying to “make it big” but haven’t made it yet. “Downtown theatre” is no longer geographically accurate, if it ever was, since many adventurous, non-commercial shows can be found in storefronts throughout the city, in transformed spaces in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx; and since a fair amount of toothless commercial fare has found its way into the long-since gentrified Village.
None of these objections are meant as assertions that “alternative” artists wouldn’t welcome the paychecks and recognition that a Broadway contract can bring, but that these markers of mainstream success are not their primary goal. “Selling out” would be a welcome opportunity to many of those who consistently struggle to break even on their own shows, who finance their work with the generosity of their relatives, or with money made from day-jobs that demand far too much of their time and energy. The chance to “sell out,” though, is rarely a random occurrence. Most often, you have to seek out and fight for that kind of “big break,” something that practitioners who don’t prioritize that kind of success are often unwilling to do.
The Fringe is, in large part, an attempt to package and market this fragmented scene, to energize downtown audiences, attract curious uptown audiences, and wrap it all up in a single, palatable term. It is also an assertion of New York’s centrality in the theatre world: if countries around the globe — most famously Edinburgh, Scotland — have Fringe Festivals, why doesn’t North America’s most important theatre city?
The NYIFF has been an impressive success by a number of measures. Each year brings new venues, larger audiences, and more sold-out shows. Troupes from around the world come to spend a few days in New York and to take a shot at trying to attract a New York audience and garner a favorable review or two. Because of the festival’s infrastructure, these shows can be produced for a lot less money than they might otherwise have been. The greatest cost in mounting a small show in this city is the rental of performance and rehearsal space; rehearsing out of town and moving into a provided theatre at the last minute, free of charge, has major advantages for cash-strapped companies.
More conventional measures of success have also been apparent. Despite the festival’s ongoing financial struggles, a number of the shows it has produced have gone on to attract larger audiences and higher ticket prices, using the Fringe as a springboard into the mainstream. The most notable of these is Urinetown, the 1999 Fringe musical that transferred off-Broadway and then to Broadway in 2001, where it ran for two-and-a-half years. Touring and regional productions continue to draw audiences around the country.
While Urinetown is the only Broadway story out of the Fringe so far, there have been numerous off-Broadway runs, publications of plays, regional tours, and even a few film adaptations. All of this makes the Fringe a big draw for companies looking to make their first big splash in the continent’s biggest theatre and media market.
There is a downside to this kind of success, however. Urinetown has spawned a seemingly endless series of provocatively titled and excruciatingly executed musicals hoping for commercial runs transfers. Rumors of producers and talent scouts roaming the streets south of Union Square have only exacerbated this trend. Despite some near-misses and modest successes (like 2003’s Slut!), though, it’s unlikely that we will be seeing this year’s Underwear: A Space Musical or Nudists in Love: A New Musical on the Great White Way (though I’ve heard both shows are actually kind of fun.)
Similar copycat trends take up far too much of the annual NYIFF calendar. Burt Royal’s clever Dog Sees God, a gritty coming-of-age spin on Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang might reasonably be blamed for this year’s Gem! A Truly Outrageous Musical Parody. 2002’s Matt and Ben (as in Damon and Affleck), may be responsible in part for this year’s inevitable Becoming Britney. Many shows apparently seek to combine a couple of Fringe success trends into a single package, like Perez Hilton Saves the Universe (or at Least the Greater Los Angeles Area): The Musical or Tim Gun’s Podcast (a reality chamber opera). These shows might very well be brilliant but, reading through the listings, it all starts to feel painfully predictable. Nothing is less fresh, provocative, and irreverent than someone grinning, tap-dancing, and poking your shoulder while yelling “Hey! Look how fresh(!) provocative(!) and irreverent(!) I am!”
This is particularly true in a year when some of the most interesting new musicals have, in fact, come out of the commercial and institutional theatres. Passing Strange, which began at the Public and transferred to Broadway, rocked harder than anything since Hedwig and the Angry Inch (which, of course, never moved up town). Adding Machine: A Musical, which recently finished an award-winning run at the Minetta Lane Theatre, was the rare musical adaptation that outshone its source material (Elmer Rice’s fascinating 1923 experiment in expressionism, The Adding Machine). Diane Paulus’s new production of Hair has been widely praised as one of the most exciting productions ever to grace Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre. (I’m seeing it several hours after I hand in this article, so I can’t weigh in on it here.)
More fundamental a problem than the failure of individual shows, however, is the very idea of making fringe theatre as a means to a more commercial end. I find nothing ignoble in the desire for popular success, but I do object to the idea that shows playing in 49 seat and 99 seat theatres, at $18 a ticket, are inherently “failures,” or that it’s somehow obvious that those involved in such shows would rather be doing something bigger and “better.” The best shows I have been involved in, and many of the best shows I have seen, have been in tiny little shoebox spaces, converted hallways, building courtyards, and parking lots, places where the audience can smell whether or not the costumes have been washed recently, where those in the front row might very well be spilled on, spit on, or sweat on.
Of course, some of the worst theatre I’ve ever seen has been in those spaces too, but that’s part of the excitement. An $18 ticket doesn’t carry the same risk for an audience member as a $75 or $120 ticket. The possibility of seeing something extraordinary (or of seeing something go terribly but entertainingly wrong) balances out the likelihood of seeing something awful, bordering on incompetent. And the raw enthusiasm and joy of the performers in those tiny spaces can outweigh much of the practiced, professional, competence of full-time professionals.
All that being said, I’ll keep checking in on the Fringe festival every August. I was only able to see five shows at this year’s and, out of those five, one was terrible, one was boring, two were pretty good, and one was exceptional. Fringe or not, that’s not such a bad ratio.
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