Full-on Fringe

Editorial
6:52 P.M. August 9, 2009 Bedlam, early evening. The place is nearly abandoned, chairs overturned on tables, that echoing sound of last night’s party still ringing in the rafters. I head out onto the roof. There are a few stragglers here beside myself, solitary at their tables, and the sun beating down. The sound of freeway traffic, not much else, a little wind. The Fringe has moved on. There are two more shows tonight, and then the Guthrie shindig, which will doubtless roar on until the wee hours, until the place is littered with empty glasses and bottles and finally even the very last of the nocturnal creatures realizes it’s time to go home. I’ve got that feeling like it’s the last day of summer vacation before school starts again. Now we all go back to the workaday world. Now we put on our regular faces and return to our seats. The regular theater season begins. And it’s another year before the Fringe comes swooping down on us like some many-feathered thing. This rattlingly empty Bedlam is making me think about the sense of community that the Fringe creates, and the way that community provides a badly-needed reminder that theater is a communal thing, a living body of people working toward some semblance of an end. That end can be defined in many ways, but at least one aspect of it is the ongoing development of contemporary performance. The Fringe is a moment where people in the performing arts are reminded that they are not working toward that end alone. All year long, performing artists I know wonder aloud what they’re doing. Why they’re doing it. If there’s really a point in making theater. If there’s an audience for what they do. There is a sense of alienation and isolation, and a sense that their work is always in question, the worth of it, the quality, the relevance. The Fringe should tell them something. I’ve used the phrase “more than the sum of its parts” before in this blog, but I’m using it again—the Fringe is more than the sum of its parts. More than the individual shows, more than the performances or the performers or the crowds, more than Fringe Central, more than the reviews, more than what sold tickets and what went sadly unsung. These are eleven days where people in the arts—several arts—can spend time in close proximity to other people who do what they do, who want to know what they’re doing, who understand why they do it. This isn’t an exercise in reassuring each other yes yes, we do matter, we do—it’s an essential space for the cross-fertilization of ideas, for the exchange of information, for conversation, for debate. It’s a space where people can find rejuvenation, inspiration, and fresh blood. The stage is a lonely place, as is the desk of the person who writes for the stage. The Fringe acts—I hope it does—as a reminder to people in the arts that their work is not frivolous, is not empty, and is not falling on deaf ears. Thousands of people have poured out to see these shows. Some were better and some were not so much—but that isn’t entirely why we came. We came to participate in the raw material of theater, in the process. We came to be part of a community of people like ourselves, who love theater a little or a lot, who believe in any case that theater matters, and matters a great deal. The Fringe is not polished, not fancy, not prettied up, and for that very reason it works. It’s raw and it’s fresh and it’s process writ large. It’s a moving, seething thing, working underneath the surface of traditional theater, forcing evolution where there might otherwise be stasis. The Fringe reminds us that theater is not all about the end product. The end product, while valuable to an audience, is not all there is. There’s a larger project, and that is the growth of theater as a whole. That growth takes place in process, not in completion. Trial and error, conversation and argument, collaboration, curiosity, development, change—these are things that keep theater alive. It’s evolving, always, and the Fringe gives it space where it can morph and become a new thing. And it gives us, the audience, a place to witness a living art as it changes before our eyes. Theater now isn’t the same as it was twenty years ago; the Fringe now isn’t the same as it was when it began. What remains, in both cases, is a community of people who, for the love of theater, gather to immerse themselves in it, to make it and see it, to discuss it, think about it, participate in it in a deeper way than they can at any other time. Bedlam’s nearly empty now. It goes back to being Bedlam, and all of us who’ve crowded into it and into all these theaters for nearly two weeks go back to being our ordinary selves. But performance in the Twin Cities has gone through a sudden, noisy, inelegant, marvelous moment of growth. No telling yet what that growth will look like when it finds expression on stage. But I for one can’t wait to see. 10:56 A.M. August 9, 2009 It’s morning of the last day of the Fringe, and the sky’s heavy with waiting rain. I’m sitting here idly looking out the window, waiting for it to be time to head for the last of my shows, watching a kaleidoscopic montage of the shows I’ve already seen play out on the screen. It’s supposed to rain off and on all day today. Fringers, including myself, will trek out with umbrellas and jackets pulled over our heads, intrepid and determined in our last-chance hunt for the show that will make us sit up and feel that thrill we feel when the work hits us just right. Grabs us by the throat, or slowly seeps into the blood, or sidles up to us and whispers in our ear. What is it we’re waiting for? How do we know when a show works? What is that (here’s a word I rarely get to throw around) frisson when performance meets audience and the two are perfectly matched? We come to the theater hoping, waiting. We arrive with expectations we’re rarely aware of, and wait to see if the show meets them. But the best shows are the ones that go beyond our expectations, or move in a totally different direction, or engage a part of us we didn’t even know was there. More than walking out of the theater satisfied that we’ve gotten what we wanted, we walk out feeling a little bewildered, as if we’ve been given an unexpected gift. That gift comes at a necessary and valuable cost. The best shows require more of us than that we simply wait, more than that we simply arrive and receive. They require that we move toward them as much as they move toward us. It’s a balance: the performer and all the artists responsible for the creation of the show do the bulk of the work required for this meeting between audience and artist to take place. But just as much as the artist is transforming him or herself, the audience must be willing to be transformed. Sometimes this is a matter of being transported to another reality, as is generally the case in a traditional play—we are presented with a different world, and asked to enter in, accepting its premises, suspending disbelief. But in some ways, the function of this alternate reality is to carry us deeper into this reality, this world, and being asked to look more closely, not only at what could be, but also at what actually is. This is sometimes hard art, not always comfortable for the audience, not always easy for the individual who is being confronted with a vision that might not be the one they usually see. Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. —Bertolt Brecht I’ve never been sure if I fully agree with Brecht. Sometimes I feel that the most effective art is in fact a very precise mirror of reality—it shows us who we are and how we live, and in doing that it shapes who we become. Art that tries to act as a hammer can easily be nothing more than polemic, a platform for the artist to have his or her say and try to persuade. Sometimes the best art is more chisel than hammer, working away at us rather than smashing us over the head. But I’m probably just getting tangled in semantics; the point he’s making, I think, is really that the function of art is to ask something of us, to make something of us, to linger with us and effect some kind of change in who we are and how we interpret and act in the world. It’s the question of vision that’s nagging at me as I wrap up this project of being an audience member for eleven solid days. I think that what an audience goes into a theater expecting, waiting for, hoping for, is to see an artist’s vision and feel it resonate in their own bones. The vision that is most stunning is that which is unexpected, never seen before, and gives the viewer the curious and thrilling sense of seeing something for the first time that they have somehow always known. As an audience member, I want to see through your eyes, and I want the vista to be something I have never encountered, and one I can immediately claim as newly my own. I want your vision to shape my reality—not to reassure me that my own reality is sufficient and correct, but to assure me that it is not, and to show me what infinite space exists beyond my tiny world. That space, seen through your eyes, allows and sometimes forces me to expand. It asks me to venture further from what’s familiar and safe. The best art can shape reality simply by broadening its reach, by extending the vision of those who encounter it. An audience shapes and inflects the art it sees, especially when that art is performance. The audience is a living, breathing, perceiving thing, actually present in the same space as the artist, a fact of which the artist is sharply aware. Performance is actually a call and response between performer and audience; each is trying to sense the other’s state of mind, guess at their meaning, interpret their every shift and gesture, read their silences and their words. It is the most intricate dance between artist and viewer of all the arts: it is an art of presence, and the vision the artist is trying to share must be shared immediately, in real time, right now. For me, it’s much easier, and has a less visceral impact—I’m a writer, so when I write I am only imagining an audience I’ll never encounter, hoping that whatever semblance of vision I’m trying to share will be shared by my imagined reader sometime later, in their private world, long after I’ve left the room. I set down this semblance of vision, and then have the luxury of escape. The dance then is between my disembodied, finished/abandoned vision, and an embodied, living, perceiving mind. Once my work is done, it’s done; I have either succeeded or failed at sharing that vision with my reader. The work remains the work, and does not change. The rest of the work is left to the reader, to interpret as they wish and glean what they can and what they want from what I’ve said. The performing artist must play out their vision to an audience that’s in the same room, sitting before them, waiting, watching, expecting, hoping, prepared to disagree or agree, poised to pounce, prepared to fall in love or leave in disgust. The audience is hungrier. It has both a life of its own, en masse—the mood of the audience changes from night to night, and that mood changes the entire performance—and a sea of lives, each individual watcher dragging in with them their dusty bag of opinions and needs and stories and agendas and hopes and demands. The vision of the performing artist is inflected, constantly, by the nature of the audience’s desire. Performing arts are the most immediate of the arts; they are performed and consumed in public, in community. We sit elbow to elbow, watching you. We demand to know what you can give us. We want to see as you see. We want you to make us see it as well. We want our reality reflected, or heightened, or utterly changed. We want, we want, we want. And you give, and you give, and you give. What I’m aware of most of all, as this Fringe comes to a close, is how very much the performing arts give, to me and to all audiences who arrive hungry. It is an exhausting task, sharing vision: the demand that you shape my very reality, whether by hard impact or by clear reflection, is a staggering demand. The great beauty of the Fringe, I think, is this: there is no limit on which vision can be shared, which is the right kind of vision, which is the vision we most want or need. The artists are free to offer their vision, and we are free to see through their eyes if we can. The vistas available to us, in these eleven days, are nearly infinite. This is the broadest, most far-reaching, most multi-faceted world any of us will see for a while. This breadth and variety of visions shows us an infinite reality, and changes who we are. * Last minute note: This year I saw one of those shows that strips performance down to its bones, and in doing so cuts straight to the audience’s heart. Scream Blue Murmur, a group of performance poets from Ireland, offers no sets, no script, no invitation to escape our reality into another one. The show’s intent was to get through to us—not us, an imagining audience, but us, ourselves, as we really are. It digs into collective memory and asks us to examine things we’ve forgotten that we badly need to think about now. Scream Blue Murmur performs twice today—they won the encore slot at 8:30 at Intermedia—so if you didn’t see their show, you have a last chance, and if you did see their show, you should still go see the encore, because they’re doing something different. Don’t miss this show. 1:15 P.M. August 8, 2009 It’s a hot and steamy summer morning, and my friends, I am fried. I’m on Day 10 of too little sleep and too much caffeine, addled by an onslaught of theater and people and theater people, and my head’s a haze of images and ideas and conversations and things overheard and passing thoughts and the general befuddlement brought on by spending all one’s waking hours in the dark, watching an alternate reality take shape before one’s eyes, letting go of one’s familiar bearings and context and drifting instead into a created world where reality shapeshifts according to the whims and of the creators, and where I am nothing more than another heartbeat in the dark— in short, the Fringe has had its way with me. I now eat, sleep, and dream theater. The good, the very good, the brilliant, the ghastly, it doesn’t matter—it has invaded me completely, and I am aware of little else. As I sit here today trying to organize a coherent thesis of what the Fringe is and why it works, I find that I am my own best specimen: I have found that it’s possible to become the perfect audience member. Until your show begins, I barely exist. It’s when the lights go down and you start to move or speak that I come alive. The perfect audience member isn’t necessarily the one who laughs at all your jokes or sighs at all your stunningly crafted lines. She’s the one who is willing to follow you where you’re going, no matter how unlikely or insane or absurd. She’s as willing to shed her skin as you are to shed yours, and when you say Now shed your skin, she says, Ok, and does. She trusts you implicitly, probably foolishly; she should know better by now, but does not, and goes to play after play with the expectation that she will give herself over completely, and be transformed. The Fringe works because there are a lot of us, audience members with enough of a childlike faith in the power of performance to heighten, alter, and transform reality that we will go to one show after another looking for it. It doesn’t have to be a grand, crashing sort of transformation. Just a little transforming will do. But when the lights go down and I take off my skin, I want to feel the power of theater playing on my bare nerves. And I have. The Fringe has worked on me. At this point, I have lost all access to a hyper-critical sensibility. This doesn’t mean I’ve lost my ability to discern what’s good and not so good, what works and what doesn’t; it means I’ve lost that part of myself that feels I should like something or not, that snarky tendency to measure things against my notions of what’s hip/sexy/ironic/flashy enough to get through to me. This is because, I think, if you go to enough shows, your own pretenses toward what performance should be get eroded, and things start getting through to you that ordinarily wouldn’t. Things start getting through to you that you might need. We don’t know what we need from theater, from stories, from comedy, from dance. We don’t know, and so we can’t quite say why we go. But if we want to receive it, we need to be open to any journey when the lights go down. We need to cede power to those on the stage. They may or may not know where they’re going, or what they’re doing. But if they do, they take us places that our day-to-day reality can never reach. Our only road there is through them. To refuse the journey is to stay trapped in our limited selves, telling and retelling the three or four stories we know. To accept is to risk bad actors, boredom, but it is also to risk the grand possibility of seeing more clearly, feeling more deeply, being transformed into more than we are. At the moment, I’m not much to speak of. The full-on Fringe experience, while heavenly, has got me dragging ass in a very significant fashion. But I’m a glutton for punishment, and I’m on my way out into this sultry August day, with every intention of shedding my skin. 1:19 P.M. August 6, 2009 It was always late afternoon, and a little breezy, wasn’t it? —“Winnemucca (Three Days in the Belly)" It was, in fact, afternoon, and a little breezy, a hazy blue August sky. I was sitting on a bench outside a venue, watching a steady stream of chattering Fringers pass me on the sidewalk, mingling with the flotsam and jetsam of the loitering crowd. Four women, wildly overdressed for 5 p.m., tossed their hair and watched themselves in the window as they walked. A young pierced and tattooed couple went by with their three giggling blonde little girls. A family of four arrived, trailing a sullen daughter. The performers huddled by the back door for some kind of animated, arm-waving exchange. Joe Scrimshaw loped by. Sort of wishing I could just sit outside on my bench and watch the world, I finally got up and went in and settled into my seat in the dark. A tall bald man with the shoulders of Shrek settled in right in front of me. I moved back a row. Weirdly, another tall bald man sat down right in front of me again. I moved back a row. Then, I shit you not, a third tall bald man sat down right in front of me, and I moved to the back of the house, practically sitting in the light box, tiny on my perch and peering at the stage. The show began. I watched one untalented performer think he was talented because he had probably been told in high school that he was, a semi-talented performer work his ass off and give a very solid performance, and an extremely talented performer totally phone it in because he was talented and knew he could. I began wondering this: what on earth is talent? Talent and a quarter, kid—that’ll buy you a cup of coffee.—My father Talent is subjective, sort of. It’s a word like ‘brilliant’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘genius’—vague, without criteria, up for debate. We can disagree on who is and who isn’t, who has it and who doesn’t, though there are people who are so obviously talented that we can all agree they are, even if we hate the work they’re doing. And that’s when I get annoyed—when I see talented performers kick back and do half-assed work because they think their talent is enough. I don’t think it is. Call me picky. Call me overly demanding. Maybe I should feel lucky enough that I’m being graced by the presence of a talented person who feels they’re gracing me with their presence. But I don’t. Alan’s post of today, wherein he rightly says that one of the great things about the Fringe is that artists can relax a little , made me think, and made me wonder if I’m asking too much. I agree thoroughly with him that part of the beauty of the Fringe, for artists and audiences alike, is that shows can stop trying so hard. People can stop feeling they have to make something “self-consciously GREAT…that has something BIG to say about SOMETHING BIG,” as he aptly put it. This ability to shake out their hair allows artists to create a vastly broader range of work, with fewer constraints on what it should be or say; and audiences likewise can expect and enjoy a broader range of experience when they sit down in their seats. And I agree with Alan when he says, “I think the performing arts at the Fringe are better than performing arts year round, more accessible, more fun, more creative, more worthwhile.” The only thing that drives me nuts about this increased freedom of range is that it sometimes decreases artists’ demands on themselves as performers. I want every artist in the Fringe to feel that he or she can and should shoot for the moon this time of year, say whatever they want, do any show they can think up, design and perform it with the utmost of individuality. But I don’t think that means they have to throw craft, skill, effort, and attention out the window. To me, relaxing into greater artistic freedom means giving oneself the room to move with artistic freedom, not telling the audience they should expect the lowest common denominator of what you can do. And I don’t think that’s what Alan’s saying. I’m just piping up on the matter of what creative range at the Fringe can be, for better and worse. Last night, I saw a show where an insanely talented performer might as well have been painting his toenails on stage for all the effort he put into his work. That’s what he was willing to give us. That’s all we got. Maybe everyone in the theater was totally blown away by his cleverness. But I’ve seen these performers work before. I know what they can do when they’re giving everything they’ve got. That’s what I came to see. And it wasn’t there. So, unexpectedly, I wound up loving “Winnemucca (Three Days in the Belly).” I wound up loving it, despite a convoluted, probably ill-conceived premise, one really bizarre modern dance sort of moment, one terrible cast member, and one who was only ok, because the third could seriously act. He had talent, and lots of it, whatever that means. So did the playwright, I think; the script disappeared a little bit behind the so-so acting and the bewildering premise, but when that one, talented actor had the language all to himself, it lifted up and soared. He knew his role in a bone-deep way, had absorbed the written character and made it come to life. He knew this character’s gestures, expressions, mannerisms, tones of voice. He knew the character’s history and weaknesses and secrets. The actor was young, uneven, imperfect, but he was also very clearly gifted with an ability to take on a truly strange character and get it under his skin. And so I left the theater renewed in my faith in a good performer’s ability to reach the audience deeply, by doing the brutal work of translating mere talent into craft and skill. And then. And then I saw Allegra Lingo’s “Crecendo,” and my friends, it was a delight. It’s news to no one that the woman is talented, but any performer who can circle an arena stage for an hour and hold an audience totally breathless has my undying admiration. She was funny and touching and her language was gorgeous and the story she told was beautiful and real and gentle without being sentimental, and her ability to weave her show into and around Aaron Copeland’s scores was fantastic—it seems an unlikely thing to attempt, but it worked, and God it was good. The show is, in part, a beautiful, often hilarious soliloquy on the way art gets made and the way the artistic process mirrors life, a subject that can fall totally on its self-referential face in the wrong hands, but one that here is completely absorbing and insightful and inspiring. Lingo takes huge raw talent and turns it to gold in her writing and performance alike, never letting up on craft for a minute, never getting sloppy, never resting on her considerable experience just because she can, and she takes the audience on a marvelous and unexpected trip we never could have imagined taking on our own. In this show, I saw the kind of wonderful artistic freedom to explore and imagine and create that’s allowed by the Fringe. Now it’s another hazy August afternoon, and people, I’m getting a little addled. 25 shows down, 15 to go. And while I’m underslept and overstimulated beyond belief, this full-on Fringe thing is divine. 11:45 A.M. August 4, 2009. “I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.” —Spalding Gray Note: This is about storytelling. I know it sounds sort of arcane and ridiculous, but in fact most one-person shows are storytelling; by my count, there are thirty (30) works in this year’s Fringe that are essentially storytelling. Not talking about one-person dramas. Talking about people getting up and talking about stories of their own. That means that a) a lot of people have stories interesting enough to mount a show and produce at a theater festival, and or/tell their stories in such an interesting way that the content doesn’t matter all that much; and b) a lot of people have neither interesting stories nor interesting ways of telling, but get up there and, God love ’em, expect you to listen anyway. I saw a storyteller at the 2004 Fringe who blew my socks off. I still haven’t forgotten that show, and I doubt I will. And I saw a couple of storytellers at the 2008 Fringe who were so bad I could hardly conceive of their work as the same animal. And I’ve been trying to sort out what the difference was ever since. I decided that the primary difference was this: the first storyteller was out to seduce the audience, and it worked. He was trying to make us fall in love with the story he was telling, the way he was telling it, and the way he made us feel while we basked in his words. He created a persona we could have listened to for hours, and told a story we wanted to hear, one we’d never heard before but suddenly and utterly understood. He was attentive to every shift and sigh from the audience. He was there for us, and for that one hour he gave us everything he had. The other storytellers were listening to themselves talk. They were lazy. They were smug. They found themselves remarkably entertaining. They stood there with their pages and read us stories that they’d written to make us think they were smart and witty and impressive and cute. They were like the guy at the party who finds himself positively fascinating, and assumes you must agree; he seems to have no idea that you exist independently, and believes that your entire function is to be amazed by him so that he can further be amazed by himself. Storytelling’s a tough gig. It’s raw. It’s a weaving of genres—the best storytelling is poetry and memoir and stand-up comedy and playwriting all at once—that takes a very sure hand. There’s no fourth wall between actor and audience. It runs the risk of utter solipsism and total irrelevance. It can easily cross the line from memoir into masturbation. It requires on the part of the teller an exquisite sensitivity to the audience, a constant intuitive sense of whether the story is carrying the listener. It requires a balance between the semi-arrogant faith that there’s an audience out there that will find your story as engaging as we all find our own, and the humility to recognize that you need to work your ass off to give this audience what it needs. It’s not a reading, though a lot of storytellers seem to think their only job is to read you the clever story they wrote and thought was pretty great. And it’s not strictly performance, either—the writing has to be really, really powerful, or the listener starts to shift in their seat and wonder how soon they can get out of there and stop listening to you prattle on. It takes more than a good writer, and more than a strong performance. But the range of what works as storytelling is vast. The common factors in good storytelling, I think, are these, and one or both must be present: 1. You, the teller, need to make me fall in love with the persona you create. If you do this, I will listen to you unquestioningly for as long as you so wish to talk. 2. Your story needs to suck me in and carry me from beginning to end. If it’s a story I know, fine. If it’s utterly foreign to my experience, fine. Either way, I need to be drawn in and carried along. 1. If you choose to make me fall in love with your persona— —which is different than making me fall in love with you, the performer, personally; you may be a fantastic person, certainly, but we are not here to discuss that, we are here to listen to a story, and no matter how cute you are, no matter how witty and sassy and ironic and hip, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you can’t pull me into your world and make me want to be there with you— then you need to know how to perform the part of yourself. Your performance needs to rise above the you-ness of you and become a commanding, seductive force strong enough to pull me along with nothing more than your words and the way that you use them. 2. If you choose to suck me in with your story rather than your persona, then be advised: —getting up there and talking about yourself qua yourself is a waste of my time. Getting up there and somehow, from the stage, speaking to me personally about things you know that I either know and recognize deeply, or about things I have never encountered before in my life and now badly need to hear about—that is good storytelling. The storyteller needs to be more than the sum of his/her parts. Being onstage with yourself and your stories is not enough. You need to be able to perform, write, intuit, carry, guide, and seduce. You need to be there, in the theater, with me. When I walk out, I need to feel that I know you, and that you know me in a way no one else does. You need to make your story my own. I’m not saying it needs to be about me—I’m saying you need to pull me into it so thoroughly that when I emerge, it has become a part of who I am, a part of my lexicon, a story that lives in me for good. Go see “An Intimate Evening with Fotis,” for a study in the near-impossible: a storyteller who literally sits in his chair reading from his pages and makes you fall in love with his character and tells you stories so powerfully and at such a madcap shrieking cackling pace that you are left breathless, laughing, and ready to believe anything that Mike Fotis tells you is true. And go see Loren Niemi’s “Moby Dick Tonight.” Difficult, uneven, in need of an edit, and fascinating, this show has left me mulling it over ever since I left the theater, which is exactly what I want good storytelling to do. I am still caught up in the story of the whale, which becomes the story of the storyteller, which becomes a dark and surreal story of an old lover, which becomes the story of the listener, all told in language so rich and detailed you can smell the blood and sweat on the boat, feel the needle bite the lover’s skin, all spoken in quiet, mild tones by an odd little man in a white linen suit. The two shows are the absolute inverse and converse of each other. They are not perfect. But they are powerhouse storytelling, and if you want to be seduced, go. 11:15 AM. August 3, 2009. There aren’t a lot of women playwrights making much noise these days. Historically, too, the women writing plays were few and far between. Those there were have received little attention, and their work often hasn’t held onto a place in the canon of theatrical lit. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. The easy, and not entirely inaccurate, answer is that women’s writing in general has had to elbow for a little space in that canon, women’s plays more so than their other written work. While I can rattle off a long list of plays I’ve seen, loved, and hated over time, only a handful of those works have been written by women. And so there are few major stage works out there written about women, either. I’m not talking about whether there are parts for women. Obviously there are. I’m talking about plays that try to capture aspects of an essential human condition, as seen through a woman’s eyes. The human condition—this isn’t news—is often understood as a condition felt by men. And while there are many plays that try, and sometimes succeed, at getting to the heart of what make us humans human, few of those plays center on a woman’s life. Women have no “Death of a Salesman,” no Hamlet, no Beckett, no Chekhov, no Lear. We have, most famously and recently, “The Vagina Monologues.” Which is, dammit, a hell of a piece. And it does in fact haul a great many experiences had by women into the light of center stage. It makes the attempt to capture a woman’s life and tell it in a woman’s voice. But it is not “Nine Parts of Desire,” a truly stunning one-woman play written by a woman about a woman’s experience, but a play I fear will not be remembered in twenty years; I could be wrong, and hope I am. But “Nine Parts” is something that “Monologues” is not: it is more than women trying to describe what it is to be a woman. It is textured, deep as a well, complex; it is a play, where “Monologues” is monologues; it is a play about one woman’s life, not about Women’s Lives, in the same way that “Salesman” is about one man’s life; and yet both of those plays, in writing about the singular character, say more about the complexity of men’s and women’s and humans’ vast experience than “Monologues” ever could. As Hemmingway said, don’t write about War; write about a man in war. Or a woman in war. See also “Nine Parts of Desire.” Point is: as strong and really important as “Monologues” is, it falls prey to the most difficult of problems faced by plays by and about women: because there is a paucity of women’s experience in theatrical literature and in theater itself, women’s plays are still catching up. Not in talent, not in quality, not in skill. None of that. But in content. There is a sense of urgency felt in many women’s plays that the playwright is attempting to capture and argue for The Female Experience all at once. When you try to cast your net too wide, try to contain an ocean in a seashell, you will write a bad play. The play will be bad because it will do little more than paint broad and generalized images of its women characters and their experience; rather than creating a sense of universality, it will create a set of stereotypes. There’s an enormous difference. There are experiences which are, if not universal, resonant among and between us; they share nothing with stereotypes, which simply distill experience and character not down to its essential and accurate core, but to its simplistic and superficial shell. Women’s plays are a hard sell; they are assumed to be interesting solely to women, because a woman’s experience is assumed to be other than the human experience. And, at times, a play by a woman is indeed about an experience that is particular to women. And sometimes it succeeds. And sometimes it does not. I think that it succeeds when it goes deeper into its characters and their motives and their lives than many recent plays by women do. Which (finally) brings me to the Fringe. There are a lot of shows by women this year, especially one- and two-woman shows, and some of them are wonderful. I’m not talking about all of them en masse, or which ones work and which don’t, across the board. I’m talking about two. One fails beyond hope; one almost succeeds, but not quite; and it’s the ways in which these two shows cross over and part ways that concern me here. Because both are plays by women, and say they are about women’s lives. “Cherry Cherry Lemon” makes an attempt to be about women, and women’s sexuality, and women’s friendships. It isn’t, though; it’s about men. It’s about women’s relationships with men, and their sex with men, and their friendships with each other which in this play are nothing more than a pretty unkind conversation about men. I have no problem with a play that deals with relationships—they fill and in many ways define our lives. And I certainly have no problem with plays that try to dig into the complexities of sex, or the complexities of men, or the complexities of how men and women have sex or do not. But the play has no complexity at all. It splits itself along flat stereotypes: stereotypes of women and of men; stereotypes of how women think about and have sex; stereotypes of how women “are,” generally speaking—needy/clingy, cold/detached, devouringly sexual/sexually repressed; stereotypes of how women relate to each other, i.e. through an incessant conversation about stereotypes of men. The play tries to be About Women, but the two characters it uses to try to illustrate that Universal Woman resemble no woman I know, or would care to know. These women never break out of the mold in which they’ve been cast to show us any depth of spirit, despite an uneven attempt to deepen the play by tossing in a couple of subplots (a dying father, a divorce). The actors, who had a lot of potential, couldn’t break out of that mold; the mold was the script. The mold was the writing. It was a woman’s play, written by a woman who—my opinion, anyway—felt she had to speak for Women, and failed. I think she thought she could substitute flat, graphic sexual dialogue for erotic exploration of and with language; and I think she thought that if she tacked on a couple of loose threads about friendship and “other” kinds of love, she could give the play a nuance and texture it lacked. It didn’t work. It made the worst of all dramatic missteps: it made the work merely sentimental. And in doing so, it made itself a stereotypical Women’s Play. This is the kind of work we don’t need. “The Most Massive Woman Wins” is another state of affairs. It isn’t a great play; it’s almost entirely monologues, and it doesn’t succeed in many ways. It, too, is after something: it’s a strong and articulate attempt to explore the quagmire of women’s relationships with their bodies, and the world that to some extent shapes that relationship, and shapes the body itself. And there are moments, in this play, where you really feel they nailed it—an unexpectedly sharp line here and there, a difficult and uncomfortable monologue done fearlessly. In this play, the inclusion of details about the four women’s relationships with men was effective and often painful; though it tipped too far toward essentializing men as one mass force against women, the individual scenes where the man/woman/woman’s body triad were gut-hitting and apt. There is a range of women characters, a range of ways the women battle their bodies, strong direction, and strong actors attempting this broad reach. The actors did everything right. But again I find myself confronting a script I feel falls short. As monologue/plays often do, it seemed each character was to represent some category of person or woman or type. That rarely works, and it didn’t here; it made things that were complex simplistic, and that could have been avoided. These actors were capable of going deeper, but there were depths the script wasn’t willing to plumb. One area of depth was this: the play offered up examples of how women’s relationships with their bodies are affected by the men in their lives, and in one case how the woman is affected by her mother, but there was nothing about how women themselves actively perpetuate a culture in which this play’s set-up would occur: four women sitting in a cosmetic surgeon’s office, about to undergo, as one character says, “the ultimate purge." These two plays leave me asking mostly this: Why do we tiptoe along the shores of our experiences—plural—and never quite dive in? What aren’t we exploring in these plays, the ones that stay safely stereotypical and sentimental and shallower than they could be? Because until women’s plays begin claiming the full range of human experience as their own, their plays will not fully succeed, and audiences will never see their most honest, stripped-bare selves on the stage. 1:00 PM. August 2, 2009. Because Matt & Alan have such great blogs on here today, full of lots of meaty stuff to think about, and I do not have any meaty stuff to say today because I'm slightly fried by this Full-on Fringe thing and the fact that I'm still spinning from "An Intimate Evening with Fotis," plus which I'm late for today's six shows, I'll keep this insubstantial.

Meditation on Matinees, and their Relationship to Chekhov:

Frankly, matinees depress me, always have. There is something deeply bleak about going into a dark theater in daytime. It reverses the natural order of things, which is this: plays happen at night. Plays happen after the day has hit the lights and closed the doors and released you into the dark, where anything can happen, and where the nighttime world of theater can envelop you fully. I find it confusing when the play ends and I have to go back outside into the light and stand there blinking like a bat. Matinees remind me of summer days as a kid, when you sort of floated around aimlessly waiting for something to begin. You finish a matinee and have the whole day left to get through, and you spend the rest of it feeling bleak. Also, I do not like the hour of 2 p.m., which is generally when matinees happen. But that's more of a personal weirdness, I agree. My aversion to matinees was not improved yesterday by the showing of "Masha: 3000," which deepened my bleakness considerably because I was hoping it would be, as it promised to be, an adaptation of, or at least something with reference to, Chekhov. I like Chekhov. I sort of love Chekhov, actually, and have a particular fondness for his plays because my parents met during one, and made the bizarre decision not long afterward to name me Marya, which is the Russian formal of Masha, which/who, in Chekhov, is a suicidal alcoholic who always wears black. Who names their kid this? Nevertheless. The matinee I saw yesterday had nothing to do with Chekhov, and was a sort of futuristic sci-fi thing, and it made me very bleak indeed, and on top of it all the person with whom I saw it liked it, and I feel I may have missed the point. Then I saw David Mann's "This Show Will Change Your Life," and let me simply say that David Mann looks snappy in suspenders. Then I emerged from Intermedia, and it was still daytime, and I stood there looking around myself depressively, and had to kill a couple of hours before I could properly go to the theater, and I felt aimless, and wished it would hurry up and be night so I could duck into Mixed Blood and settle into my seat and feel that things were in their natural order again.

Which I Then Did

and saw "Buyer's Remorse," which was just delightful and a treat to watch. Really wonderful and quirky acting, a strange and inventive script, and while the play lost a handle on its subtlety in the last bit and got a little ridiculous, it was solid and well-done and totally worthwhile.

And Then I Saw Fotis

and all was right with the world. I have never seen Fotis before. This has been a grave oversight. The house was packed, and Fotis was wild-eyed and gleeful and practically dancing in his seat and he overturned my usual opinions about storytelling completely.

And So, Today, Continuing My Fotis Ode

I am going to see Ferrari McSpeedy. In a matinee. Despite my paranoid McSpeedy dream of the other night. Despite my terror of improv. And then I am going to ask Mike Fotis how he writes so bloody well. I will report. 12:12 PM. August 1, 2009.

On the Weirdness of Subconsciouses

Actually, I can’t speak to anyone else’s subconscious. But mine has been thoroughly invaded by Fringe. For the last four nights, I’ve dreamed about this whole madhouse 11 day theater thing. Usually it’s a little unclear—a sense of wild panic at trying to get from venue to venue in time, or confusing images of being caught in a crowd, elbowing through it (like I was last night at the Mardi Gras party, where there was a sole figure in a Mardi Gras-variety mask, who seemed to come and go through the crush of bodies on a purposeful mission—there was also a spectacularly drunk man coming and going, sometimes with a dog, sometimes with a massive pack on his back, looking ferocious and more than a little whacked in the head)—anyway, in the dreams I’m usually just generally Fringeing. But last night, I dreamed I was in the audience at the Ferrari McSpeedy show. I was wearing the long white silk dress that I bought at a vintage store some years ago and dumped in the back of my closet like I have dumped every other vintage dress I have ever bought, of which there are quite a few, and anyway, at the McSpeedy show, one of the McSpeedy guys was doing that terrible thing improv guys do, where they accost someone in the audience and cruelly force them to interact—not everyone finds this a petrifying proposition, but I do—and in this case the McSpeedy guy picked me to pick on, and shouted out, “Did you wear that dress to your wedding?” and I shouted out, “Which one?” Oh, clever clever subconscious. I was not, in fact, at the Ferrari McSpeedy show last night. And I did not wear that dress to any of my weddings.

On the Mardi Gras Party and the Tall Woman

It had rained, and so the air on the upstairs patio was close and damp. Everyone was holding a beer and looking terrifically pretty. I am quite short, and found myself in a conversation with a woman who was quite tall, and upon informing her when we were introduced that we had actually met in 2004, she gave me the weird look a tall lovely woman would give you if you had remembered a 2-second introduction made five years ago at an equally crowded loud Fringe party. I skulked away, feeling like a nerd. The bloggers repaired to a corner, where we discussed a variety of things, included but not limited to Matt’s Theory of Everything.

Matt’s Theory of Everything, esp. the Rules

In truth, I don’t remember all the details. Matt is freakishly smart, and his theories are very detailed and insightful and complex, so, being a fairly simple soul myself, I should really be taking notes when he speaks so I can reference them later. We had discussed this theory of everything earlier when we were at Intermedia, and were halfway through an extremely promising evening of shows, which took a header at the 10 p.m. Matt’s theory is exceptional and involves the question of authenticity, and I’m hoping that today he’ll write about this theory himself because I cannot do it justice. Anyway, we were discussing playwriting, and what constitutes a successful play, and why Jeffrey Hatcher’s plays are successful when we two do not ourselves like Jeffrey Hatcher’s plays. Matt pointed out that Hatcher’s plays play by the rules. This is true; the plays are extremely formulaic, as many rule-abiding things are and as almost all rule-abiding writing is, and they are easily watched and swallowed and forgotten as you leave the theater and dump your program in the trash. The forgetting of a play is a sad thing. A play intends, or usually intends, to imprint itself on your brain and live with you and stay with you always in some deep way, like “Waiting for Godot” does; and Matt wondered aloud how a playwright who loves “Godot” is supposed to be successful in the same theatrical world as a play that plays by the rules. Rule: A play should have a plot. Godot does not have a plot. The two characters are waiting; that is what they do; that is the whole plot. Rule: A play should have a beginning, middle, and end. Godot does not begin, middle, or end. It seems to emerge from the dark of the stage without source or clearly defined edges, and then it exists there, hovering, for a period of time which is unclear, and then it recedes back into the stage as if it had never begun, while the two characters go on perpetually waiting in a universe parallel to our own, unresolved and unrelieved of this task. These are probably the two big Rules of Plays, plot and the beginning/middle/end thing, plus a couple of rules about character development, etc. But there are other unspoken rules for a successful play, and I don’t know exactly what they are; I know what sells tickets in this theater market, and those are too often shows that play by the rules. They are easy. They are swallowable. They begin and end neatly. They are edited and finished and clean to the point of sterility. Fringe shows are often not. They have ragged edges, are unfinished, are occasionally sloppy, and do not succeed as plays or even as theater. But some of them do succeed commercially, and some succeed as solid shows; some do both at the same time (“Bard Fiction,” though it needs cutting, is one of these shows). Fringe shows play at the perimeter of good theater, and regularly step over the edge. Very few of these shows play by the rules. And in many cases, that’s how they fail: they lack plot, direction, character development, completion, definition. They are untidy. They sprawl. So I’m asking you: how do we define what theater succeeds, not in terms of ticket sales, but in terms of real shows that imprint themselves on your brain and stay with you always in that deep way? How many of those shows play at the Fringe? Is the Fringe really, as we sometimes suspect, just utterly half-assed attempts at theater by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and worse, don’t seem to care? Does half-assedness raise the level of authenticity, and make things more accessible to audiences, and redeem itself in that way, or is it just trash? Does successful theater try to be accessible? Does it try to be authentic? Does it try to entertain? To make us think? Point being: is there something about the Fringe and its frequent disregard of the rules that allows for truly, deeply affecting theater to come through? Not sure yet. I wish I could remember the rest of Matt’s Theory of Everything. I bet he has it figured out. I have never been able to get the question of what defines success straight in my head. I only know what I love. And I love it when the rules fail and for that very reason, the play succeeds. I love Godot. Still waiting, this Fringe, for my Godot. 10:37 AM. July 31,2009.

Part I: See This Show

5:00—Lines at Rarig are just forming, and people stand looking around with that anxious “is the party here?” look on their faces. I go outside and watch people arrive and worry that no one will come, as if it is my birthday party and I am five. 5:25—Rarig is relatively hopping, in an opening night sort of way. The Ferrari McSpeedy show has a predictably long line, “You/Provoke/Me” has a respectable one, and a dreadlocked and daffy and possibly stoned young man in a hat walks the room offering fair trade chocolates and pointing to the stand in the corner where fair trade iced coffee is being offered for free. The mother and daughter in line ahead of me are so shockingly bleached blonde that I cannot stop staring at their hair. They are not typical Fringe. You do not see a lot of bleached blondes at the Fringe. I do not know why. 5:32—I fall in love with the entire cast of “You./Provoke/Me” and forgive them for putting stupid egregious slashes in their name because they are hot and their first piece knocks me flat despite the curious sport coats worn by the two male dancers. But the troupe is intensely strong and their work is tight and they only indulge in one very silly trope and it is very silly indeed but it distracts me only briefly. The Rest of the Show—I am elated that this is my first show of the Fringe. This is why I come here. These are beautifully athletic dancers, the choreography in three out of the five pieces is wild and unexpected and breath-holdingly good, the dancers are gorgeously well-matched and exceptionally powerful. I am disappointed that they live in Chicago and I can’t watch them all the time, and then I am reminded of how much it bites that there’s so little dance in Minneapolis and then I am reminded of how vastly dance at the Fringe varies, from the truly stupid and amateur-hour and uneven and the worst of all that typifies bad modern dance, to the really insanely good, which this show is. There are a couple of choreographic clichés, one of the pieces merely annoys me, and one simply isn’t up to the quality of the rest, but the final piece is the sexiest, most physically exciting dance work I’ve seen in a very long time. After the Show, Outside—One of the dancers, now in street clothes, wanders in front of Rarig, looking lost. Downstairs, Agamemnon paces, and I try to remember what the story of Agamemnon is, or really any of the Greek plays, and realize I have forgotten not only the Greek plays but my entire education.

Part II, Show II

7:00-7:58—Very bad. I try very hard to like the show and everyone in it, and wind up crushed that so much talent has gone to waste on a bad show, and then admit to myself that there was not so much talent after all, and then I have that sickening guilty feeling that I will discuss in Part III.

Part III: The Sickening Guilty Feeling

I am not a particularly nurturing person. Kittens annoy me and I find children strange. So I don’t know what it is that makes me so insanely protective of performers who in truth should piss me off because they are wasting my time. I feel guilty. I feel it is my fault for not liking them. I feel the same sickening feeling I feel when I watch Olympic skaters fall; for this reason, I do not watch Olympic skaters, because I can’t stand to see the crushed look on their faces and their horrifying need to keep skating even though they know they’ve lost and everyone pities them. It’s the same thing I feel as I scan the Fringe program and tick off all the shows I will not see because they will be bad and give me the sickening feeling as I sink in my seat and listen to the empty house rattle around me and watch their faces as they realize that it was a mistake for them to do a Fringe show in the first place, and yet they have to keep performing bravely and awfully and they probably cry or something because no one came to this show they so carefully built and cared about. The New York habit of closing bad/unattended shows is a mercy killing. Performers are terribly sensitive and take things very personally, and I know this because both of my parents were actors and this whole thing with the sickening feeling is doubtless rooted in some deep childhood neurosis about not wanting my parents to have the equally sickening experience of an empty house and/or the feeling that no one loves them and/or the sense that they are a failure, because performers are awfully dramatic and take a straight shot from empty house—>personal failure. And then I feel it is my fault for failing to prevent them from feeling like they failed. Basically, I spend too much emotional energy worrying about performative intent rather than performance execution. *Here’s the thing, though, esp. w/re: Matt’s excellent blog of yesterday about things that suck. There is a disproportionate amount of stuff in the Fringe that is just fucking awful. There’s no getting around it. And that’s part of the experience of the Fringe, which is what I purport to be writing about: it is a large part of the experience of the Fringe, and so is the sense that a) you have been screwed out of $12 + 1hr/your time, and b) what the hell is the function of theater if it’s going to be so bad? I have an enormous love of art. Which comes along with a pretty virulent hatred of bad art, or that which is bad and purports to be art. I like my art hard and challenging and thought-worthy and really fucking brilliant, if you want to be honest about it, and I don’t like stuff that’s not. When I was faced with the prospect of having to see “Little House on the Prairie,” I nearly wept, and made a couple of really snarky remarks about the women in sweater sets who would attend and like it and cry. And so you’d think I’d be more particular about the Fringe. And in fact I am particular. I like what I like and hate what I don’t. But I’ll give a lot of room to the Fringe, good and bad. The Fringe makes me think about what constitutes theater and what constitutes real performance, as opposed to what constitutes self-important, self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent garbage. I like to be, as I said in my first blog, engaged. I like to get sucked in. And I don’t like the sickening guilty feeling. But the Fringe is, at its very heart, an experimental free-for-all, and anyone who wants to perform in it can, and while I agree that the idea of an unjuried festival does not give license to anyone who thinks they’ve got talent/a story to tell to actually get up there and tell it, people do take that license. I wish they wouldn’t, but they do. And if I go to their show and don’t like it, then I get the opportunity to think again about what constitutes theater/performance, and whether it matters. And I think it still does. In the spirit of finally getting this off my chest, three confessions: a. The second show I saw last night, which I could not previously bring myself to name because I am unbrave and feared causing the performers to feel bad, was “Tech Support: The Musical.” b. The woman who, on Thursday night in her showcase snippet, referred to the audience as “my mirror,” was the whole entire problem with everything about theater and the Fringe and possibly other things as well. c. The Scrimshaw shows bore me to tears. c1. I do think Joe Scrimshaw is an excellent writer. Now I worry that I’ve made the Scrimshaws feel bad, so I’ll shut up.

Part IV—The Afterparty

It will come as no surprise to you that when I arrived at the cast party last night, intending to bravely overcome my fear of people in general, I failed, and quickly fled.

Part V—Day 2

Tonight I’m off to see four more shows, and am currently trying to figure out why I am so looking forward to the really impressive adaptation of a blowjob I saw Thursday night in the preview of “Cherry Cherry Lemon.” I will let you know. 10:00 a.m., July 29, 2009 1. The sunlight is particularly still and piercing this morning, after the crowded, breathing, animate dark of Bedlam last night. 2. Last night: it’s 7 p.m.: there’s a crowd already at the bar, noisy, jostling for beers. The theater’s filling up. The crowd is mostly young and hipish/sexy, with a few pockets of middle-aged couples, random singles, the frequent odd duck. 3. Trends: Beards are big this year, as are curious hats. 4. The house is getting crowded, the noise level rising. Bedlam is itself—lights dangling, a plant for some reason on the stage, a stack of ladders leaning on a wall, a WetVac, a mop in a garbage can. A man with binoculars shambles by. One brave soul sets forth into the crowd with her postcards, then suddenly they’re everywhere. One performer states that her show is “funny? Hopefully? We’ll see?” A young woman named Angie introduces herself to a storyteller and flings herself about like a fine fur coat. There’s an idiot expounding. Fringe regulars from previous years arrive and settle in, looking determined. People have phones out and are texting. There are hoots and hollers. And then we’re up and running— 5. Starts with a bang, followed by something head-beatingly bad. This is pretty much the nature of the night. And this is the strangest, most fantastic Fringe phenomenon: the audience sits totally still, just waiting to be amazed. 6. On things which are disconcerting: The bathrooms at Bedlam are titled “Mostly Seated” and, I think, “Mostly Standing/Urinals.” We are given to understand that we can pick whichever one we want, pretty much. 7. Back to the Fringe audience phenomenon: the cheerfully forgiving, up-for-anything nature of the audience is different than it is in most theaters, where audiences act grumpy and pompous and positively indignant if the play isn’t to their liking; here, the audience seems to sit back and say, Well, here goes a possibly dreadful/ brilliant hour of my life—bring it on. 8. This fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants nature of the gig is giddying and gleeful. By intermission, the audience is roaringly alive. My toes tingle & I have had too much caffeine. 9. Intermission: Outside, a dancer paces and twitches, smoking. Over in the park, a gaggle of little girls in headscarves, pants, and brightly patterned long skirts rolls like puppies up and down the hill behind the highway as the sun sets. 10. Back in our seats: And then there are those shows that are totally out of step with the Fringe, as if their performers had never been to a Fringe, never gotten a taste of what the other shows are like, shows that never should have been shows—the self-indulgent, the five-minute personal story stretched paper-thin to fill an hour, the earnest, desperately sad show where the performer has been waiting their whole life, practicing in front of the mirror, for this moment of audience, this moment when they finally get to say their piece, but their piece is not enough. 11. Which starts getting into the dreaded question of what is the purpose of theater? Of art in the first place? Is “self-expression” alone enough? 12. No. 13. And there are those performers who cannot for the life of them fill the space. The stage yawns around them, they get smaller and smaller on it, fighting to make enough sound, to be big enough to grasp the audience, or at least reach out into it; these performers feel themselves losing their grasp on the room, and their speech speeds up, and they race to catch what faith in them the audience has left, but the audience, by the end of just these five minutes, has let them go, given up on finding that moment of brilliance, and moved on. 14. And then there are the performers whose energy rushes into the space and fills it completely, the performers who capture the audience, envelop and fill it with their voice and words and wildly expressive selves. These are the performers we’ve come for. The ones who make the bones hum, the ones who make the whole body come alive, the ones who break through the surface and gasp, and we gasp with them. They are the lifeblood of the Fringe. 15. Things which are unfortunate: a chap who does 2.5 minutes of his piece, then sighs and petulantly says, “That’s all I feel like doing tonight.” Also, the fact that by intermission, Bedlam had run out of snacks. 16. Things you should see: both of them dance comedies ? which is not a genre I have a thing for, particularly, more than any other, but both of which are awfully good: “Holding Patterns” and “casebolt and smith: Speaking Out.” 16. As the show lets out, some folks bolt for the bar and settle in for the post-game, while some go on the their way. A light rain begins to fall in the dark, Bedlam a glowing orb, its sound fading as you head out into the night. 7/29/09, 11:00 p.m. The mad dash I am and have always been an audience member, pure and simple. I haven’t taken the stage since the 8th grade (“Oklahoma,” Ado Annie). I love theater, but can’t entirely say why; I’ve studied it and written on it and had the presumption to critique it, but those things don’t explain my basic need for it, and it is a need. That need is met, to some extent, all year by shows I see here and elsewhere. But it is best met by the Fringe. The Fringe offers me a critical mass of performance and performers that draw me in and draw me close and hit me hard. What I love about theater—its magic, of course, and its realer-than-real quality as well, its ability to reflect what I know but never knew so sharply or thought so clearly or said so strangely or well. I love theater because it makes me laugh or kicks me in the gut or turns my known world upside down. I am a watcher, a voyeur, but this time I also have a role in the play. All of us do. I want to know what these shows, one by one, do to me, and what they do to us en masse. I’m going to make an attempt to see three to four shows a night, and six to seven on Saturdays and Sundays. Eight of the eleven nights, I’ll hit the parties at Fringe Central (likely hiding under a table, which is my usual habitat at parties), taking in the scene and seeing what there is to see. My goal is 40 shows. I have flat shoes and a GPS. I’m good to go. People like me will come from all over town—all over the country, and a few from across the pond—they’ll come teeming out of their various abodes and take their places in this play—their place on stage or in their seats, preparing to watch or be watched, to affect or be affected, to perform or observe, but in any case to engage. The Fringe allows, if not a deeper, then a very different kind of engagement than traditional theater does. My project here is to figure out what is different about the Fringe—what does it have that traditional theater doesn’t, what draws so many people to it, what is it about the shows we love and hate, what is it about the full or echoingly empty house, or about the parties, where the mishmash of performers and audience becomes one seething amorphous thing? This is a mad stampede of tens of thousands of watchers and people who want to be watched into theaters all over this town, all of them seeking—what? to inspire, be inspired? To say, to hear? To expose, to see? To, I think, engage. The Fringe operates on principles of engagement, access, and critical mass. Performers have unheard-of access to stages and audiences that they couldn’t get within the confines of traditional theater; they can bring their raw material to the stage and present it however they like; they can engage their audience at an up-close and visceral level, from stages often as bare as stripped-down altars, where the performer must fill the space, traverse the stage, in many cases quite alone. Of the 160+ shows, only a few are actually plays as we are used to seeing plays, as Aristotle defined plays; the Fringe has little use for Aristotle, and defines theater instead on its own terms. It has low budgets, few sets, limited costumes, and little marketing capacity beyond the flurry of postcards that will soon hit us all. And the audience has unheard-of access as well—to the sheer quantity of theater, theater in every venue, theater in bars and bowling alleys, theater in parking lots and schools, so much theater it takes a mad dash to get from show to show across town—to theater they can’t find anywhere else in a year of theater in a great theater city—but also to the performers themselves. The Fringe is an enormous backstage pass. The division between watcher and watched dissolves in the parties and lobbies and bars, and the question of who’s watching who gets all muddied up. This is part of the beauty and confusion of the Fringe; in theater that does not conform to traditional theater’s structure, the fourth wall falls, and the audience can rush the stage. This kind of willingness to come out of the dark of the theater and into the light of community is unlike most audiences—typically, we like to take our theater in private, and tiptoe away. But the Fringe brings out something in the audience that’s as raw and real and alive as the shows they see. That critical mass of Fringers becomes a world within a world. I want to know what it’s like deep in that world—who and what I see and hear onstage and off, what threads and trends emerge from this year’s Fringe—what’s strange and wonderful, what’s awful, what’s absurd. This is not your traditional theater; therefore we are no longer your traditional audience. We all, performers and audience alike, have access and voice we didn’t have before. We’ll engage in a new way. The Fringe begins slowly, then surges forward as critical mass gathers force. Tomorrow I’ll put on my running shoes and begin my mad dash deeper into theater than I ever get to go.
Headshot of Marya Hornbacher
Marya Hornbacher
Marya Hornbacher is the Pulizer Prize-nominated author of five books. An award-winning journalist, essayist, and poet, Hornbacher's work has been published in sixteen languages. She teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago. Photo by Mark Trockman