Focus on the Fringe

“Our goal in coming to the Fringe is to do the Urinetown thing,” says Mark Savage, adapter/director of Pinafore! Like many of the artists heading into the Big Apple for the increasingly commercial theater venture known as the New York International Fringe Festival, Savage hopes to find New York producers interested in the work that he’s presenting. The Broadway success of Urinetown — which got its start at the 1999 festival — has made FringeNYC an event that attracts both media and industry.

A queer retelling of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Pinafore! opened to rave reviews in Los Angeles last year under Savage’s direction. The musical updates the action of H.M.S. Pinafore to our modern-day era when, as a result of the gays in the military controversy, the vessel has become the flagship of a “separate but equal” gay navy. According to Savage, the process of adapting the work was challenging. “I took it very seriously,” he says. “I know all the rules for lyricists and have been training at it for years. I followed Gilbert’s rhyme scheme exactly and made sure that everything scanned. I really tried to be as rigorous and clever as Gilbert himself.”

Also looking to make a splash at the festival is Slut, which sold out its entire run less than four days after tickets went on sale — a new record, according to FringeNYC publicist Ron Lasko. The musical, written by Stephen Sislen and Ben Winters, features Urinetown‘s Victor Hawks in one of the roles; that hard-working actor will be doing double-duty as he’s still in the Broadway show, playing Robbie the Stockfish. “They’ve given me the Fringe performance days off,” says Hawks. “I welcome new things and I’d rather be in a new Off-Broadway thing than some revival of a Broadway show. I mean, there’s the paycheck, of course. But creating new things — that’s why we do what we do.”

Slut follows the story of Adam Patterson (played by Stephen Bienskie), a man who claims to have slept with every girl in New York City. Now, for the first time, he’s fallen in love. “The script has a lot of heart and a lot of comedy at the same time,” says Hawks. “I think that’s necessary for anything to succeed. People have to be invested in the characters, and this script allows them to do that.”

“We definitely have had more musicals apply to the festival in the last few years,” says Elena Holy, producing artistic director of The Present Company, which produces FringeNYC. But Holy cautions that it would be a mistake to think that the festival is all about finding a New York producer for a show or helping it move the next step up to an extended Off-Broadway or Broadway run. “When people see Urinetown and hear about its relationship to the festival, it’s easy for them to assume we’re the place that does musicals with commercial potential,” says Holy. “That is us, but we also do avant-garde, pushing-the-envelope, downtown kind of work.”

One project of that type is Wax & Wayne, by the Chicago-based Local Infinities Visual Theater. In the production, a woman emerges from a waxen statue as her doppelgänger plunges into a vat of molten wax. “We’ve done a lot of research to figure out how to do that safely,” says Meghan Strell, artistic director of Local Infinities and one of the show’s writers and performers. “We’re still on our first actor, so we haven’t hurt anybody in the process!”

Strell emphasizes that the show is readily accessible. “Dipping people into a vat of wax could easily fall under the category of abstract performance art,” she notes. “We’ve developed it into a story, and these characters are really comical. We’re going for striking imagery and using humor to make sure the audience comes along.”

Another show that’s a bit off the beaten path is DEEP STORIES: From the Notebooks of Richard Foreman. This comic meditation on the creative process is adapted from two scripts (Deep Stories and Deep Stories 2) by Foreman, an avant-garde auteur. “Creating a theater piece from a Richard Foreman text has its own built-in challenges,” acknowledges director/adapter John Issendorf, an employee of TheaterMania. “The texts are blueprints as opposed to typical standard playscripts. There aren’t even character or scene divisions.”

Issendorf notes that his production differs from many other entries in this year’s festival. “There seem to be a lot of musicals and light-hearted comedies,” he says. “Our show is a little darker. I think people see the Fringe as an opportunity to launch something commercially, which is certainly not our intention at all with a Richard Foreman play. I don’t see the Broadway production of DEEP STORIES any time soon.”

FringeNYC also attracts artists who aim to make political — as well as artistic — statements. A prime example is Andrea Assaf, whose multimedia solo performance piece Globalicities is an anti-capitalist critique. “I was really searching for connections between domestic violence and global violence,” says Assaf. “The piece has become increasingly about global

capitalism, and I guess that’s my hammer to grind at this moment in my life.”

Globalicities is playful in structure, interweaving a tale of Maid Marian contemplating the question “How did Robin Hood become an activist?” with people-on-the-street interviews on the subject of capitalism. “One of the goals of the project is to get certain conversations on the table,” Assaf relates. “It’s not to do a finger shaking ‘Capitalism is wrong’ but to break the taboo against talking about capitalism and its links to power.”

According to Elena Holy, “It’s incredibly important to us at the Present Company that FringeNYC reflects what we want to do as opposed to how others define the festival. We always look for innovation, vibrancy, and diversity. The first festival was really a miracle from a managerial and producing standpoint. Since then, I feel like we’ve been holding a tiger by the tail. We went from ‘Look what those crazy kids are doing downtown’ to being a New York institution.”