Bill Stiteler does not want to see your play 08/10/2010 9:14am

Editorial

"(i think) the 'vulgarity' festival must also be gov subsidized, otherwise the 5 people who attend wouldn't be able to keep the freak-show afloat!" - Commenter from Stillwater, MN on the Pioneer Press site. Well, he's right, for the most part. First, the shows in the Fringe can be vulgar, coarse, and rude; I don't think anyone is denying that, though of course not all of them are. But still, fair point made. The festival is government subsidized in part, and I bet that Robin were to stand on stage at the closing night party and describe the Fringe as a freak show, she'd be greeted with a roar of approval. The Fringe is a place to do different things, to deviate from the norm, and a lot of people wear that as a point of pride. Obviously the "five people" bit is hyperbole; he's saying the festival isn't popular, which is where the argument stumbles. I think 15,000 people is a lot; it's enough to fill the Guthrie thrust 13 and a half times, and it happens in 11 days, so, you know, not a bad run there. But we do live in a bubble during the Fringe, one where a hell of a lot of people go to see shows every day, and drink and talk theater every night, and it's loud and crazy and sweaty and we can forget how hard it is to do theater when we forget about the community of artists we live in. The Fringe becomes a neighborhood, like you see in those old movies about New York where people are just jammed together, walking around, shouting at each other because everything is so goddamned important. That doesn't exist at any other time of the year. We don't let it exist, and I don't know why. The community is there, but it's harder to feel it, as opposed to the Fringe, where you can literally feel it, pressing against you and spilling your beer. It's a community that's all too easy to shut ourselves off from—and I'm speaking about myself here when I say that artists can be competitive, and jealous, and petty, and filled with fear of failure about their next project, and how it will be judged against the success of others. It becomes very easy to think that the only people at all interested in your work are you, the three friends you see all the time, and your wife. But we have the Fringe. And beyond the work the staff does year round, beyond running this beautiful thing, this piece of clockwork that runs 169 theater companies on time for forty thousand ticket holders, beyond the fact that it is non-juried and anyone of any stage of development has a shot at getting an audience and doing whatever they like as long as it runs under sixty minutes and they don't call the venue beforehand, the true gift of the Fringe is that it exists to draw this community together for 11 days, to remind us that it does exist throughout the year. That there are more than five people who care about theater.
Headshot of Bill Stiteler
Bill Stiteler
Bill Stiteler does not want to see your play: What makes an audience member go to see a show? What is the odd mixture of title, picture, description, preview, and word-of-mouth that convinces someone to take a chance on a Fringe show? Writer/director (and longtime Fringe producer/volunteer) Bill Stiteler examines what made him want to see a show, and how it measured up to its promotion.