After the Fringe

Aftermath

I woke up around noon on Monday feeling like I had been dropped into my bed from about three stories up. It was definitely the day after the closing night party of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. All over the Cities, there were plenty of other theater people feeling it, too. The eleven-day theater party is over, and now it's time to finally sober up and pick up the place.

How did the festival turn out? Judging by the numbers released by the Fringe this year's festival was a winner. Ticket sales were up from last year, once again setting a new record. And I'm pretty sure Bollywood Dance Scene's Spicy Masala Chai has shattered all ticket sale records for an individual show. Heck, there's even a possibility that they may have become the best-selling Fringe show in America. We'll have to let the bean counters at Fringe figure that one out.

What did I miss?

As usual, I've been so immersed in the Fringe Festival for the past week and a half that I haven't been paying attention to what else is going on in the theater scene around here. I know that all the little guys were down in the Fringe trenches with me, but what have those organizations that have their own buildings been doing?

Apparently, Sunday was "Children's Theater Company Day". (They got a plaque from the governor and everything!) The company celebrated its 50th anniversary over the weekend at Target Field, which they filled up with their theater alumni from five decades of work; and, most importantly, CTC Artistic Director Peter Brosius finally got to know what it's like to be on a Jumbotron.

After reflecting on his first five weeks on the job the Guthrie's new Joe, Joseph Haj,took a small step toward correcting some of the past complaints about the big G's programming choices. As the company is in the middle of rolling out yet another production of The Music Man, the Guthrie's new AD quietly rolled out a small series of solo shows and announced that three women directors for shows already announced in the season.

And then there's Bedlam. As suggested by their name, the company has always ridden a wave of controlled chaos and has always seemed like its on the edge of some sort of messy collapse; but the scrappy organization has somehow gone on for 21 years and ended up being asked to run a respectable space as part of St. Paul's push to artify Lowertown. But now things are getting serious. Over the weekend, Bedlam launched a $400,000 capital campaign just to keep the company alive. The building of the Bedlam Lowertown space ran into time and cost overruns, and now that grants and loans are no longer doing the trick, Bedlam is turning to the public for help, not only to keep the Lowertown space, but to keep the entire Bedlam apparatus afloat.

Respect?

When you're working with kids, it's hard to get new material to the stage. There are a number of factors (including whether or not grandma will have that second stroke over the filthy language these kids are using today) that have conspired to keep dusty old chestnuts like Our Town and You Can't Take It With You on the lists of most popular high school plays for literally seven decades. So, when an amateur group that works with kids puts out a call for new work, you might think that playwrights would be happy to see it, and you would be so, so wrong.

Words Players in Rochester, MN, is a little amateur organization that mostly works with junior high and high school students. They recently put out a call for submissions for an original short play festival. Normally, this is the kind of call that would mostly disappear into the ether, and maybe be answered by a few local writers, but Words Players' call ended up in the hands of Donna Hoke, the Western New York Representative for the Dramatists Guild, and she didn't like it one bit. Her entirely cool-headed and even-handed blog post about it ("DISSECTING THE MOST DISGUSTING CALL FOR PLAYS I'VE EVER SEEN" went viral after being discussed on Howard Sherman's blog, and now Words Players has become the punching bag for every playwright with access to the internet.

Eventually, Dramatists Guild got officially involved, sending an angry letter to Words Players, using plenty of choice words like "arrogant" and "cowardly". The director of Words Players, Daved Driscoll sent an apologetic response and has said in an interview that this is all a result of the sloppy way in which he wrote the original call and that he would like to correct it. Despite that, the angry (and downright hateful) messages have continued to fly at Words Players.

Even Donna Hoke, who valiantly led the charge against this tiny, moneyless organization, expressed some regret at how ugly the comments were getting. (Though, she ultimately decided it was OK, because this is a revolution, people!)

So, once again, the theater world is punching down. Just as we did with the cell phone guy at Hand to God a few weeks back, we've dumped all our insecurities onto one powerless individual and decided to beat them to a bloody pulp. Good job. This should fix everything.

In the raw

You know what really will fix everything? A nude public performance art festival. Thanks, Switzerland!