Bette Bourne, David Grieg, Mark Ravenhill, et al. Part of Kennedy Center’s On the Fringe Festival

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has announced the seven productions that will be presented as part of On the Fringe: Eye on Edinburgh, to run October 28 – November 13 in locations throughout the center. The pieces included in this three-week event all come to the Kennedy Center from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Three pieces will be presented in the Terrace Theater, including Bette Bourne’s autobiographical A Life in Three Acts (October 28 – 30), which has been directed by Mark Ravenhill. This space will also see performances of Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters’ Nine Years (November 4-5), which has been developed based on the theatrical presentations they have given as gifts to the people they have met on their nine year journey across the world; and the Traverse Theatre Company’s production of David Grieg’s Midsummer [a play with songs] (November 11-13), which tells the story of two strangers whose one-night stand turns into a long weekend, filled with excitement and regret.

For family audiences, the series will include One Small Step (November 6-7, Family Theatre), which explores the space race, from Sputnik in 1957 to Apollo 11 in 1969. In this production, from the Oxford Playhouse, two actors play dozens of characters.

Alongside these four productions will be three that will be offered free-of-charge including Susurrus (October 28 – November 7), David Leddy’s audio narrative loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which pulls theatergoers into a private play; Cartoon de Salvo’s Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories (October 30, Millennium Stage), in which the company creates a new theater piece based on an audience-suggested title and several randomly-chosen songs; and Of All the People In All the World (November 1-7, Hall of States/Nations Stan’s Café), where tons of rice, each grain representing one person in the U.S., will be weighed out into an array of human statistics.