The Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2003
Fringe fever hit New York in recent weeks, but the world’s largest Fringe theater festival may still be found in the place where it all began: Edinburgh has become known as Festival City, and the locals have come to expect a flood of tourists every August. During this month, fireworks explode over the castle every night and, every day, thousands of theater troupes from around the globe bombard the shell-shocked masses with pitches and promises.
How can any single production attract attention in the middle of such a frenzy? One way is for the company members to travel in a pack, dressed in brightly colored jumpsuits while shouting slogans and hawking fliers. Such is the marketing strategy of the children’s theater troupe that I was part of during the recently concluded Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2003. I worked as an actor for Shoestring Players, a New Jersey-based Theater for Young Audiences ensemble, in Witches, Riches and Wedding Cake, an adaptation of folk tales from around the world.
As a theater journalist acting in one of the Fringe shows, I had an interesting perspective on the productions I saw. Labyrinth Theatre’s Don Q was a retelling of Don Quixote in which three British performers used physical theater techniques to enact the Spaniard’s adventures. Movement-based theater proved to be the perfect medium for this look at the Cervantes classic; after all, if three actors can believably represent the shifting Spanish landscape, then Don Quixote doesn’t seem such a fool for believing that a windmill is his awesome enemy.
The Irish company Semper Fi presented a show called Ladies and Gents in the toilets of an old town church, and the genius of it all was that nobody thought of the venue as a gimmick. Ladies and Gents tells the true story of an Irish politician who tried to censor “obscene” Tennessee Williams plays while prostituting his wife and defrauding elections in local bathrooms. A stern Irish troupe of actors took the audience into the dimly lit facilities and advised everyone to remain still for their own safety. This company clearly knew how to establish a tone, and the tension only escalated as the show progressed: Paul Walker’s intelligent and airtight script loaded every line with deep meaning, while the talented actors enlivened the text with a hawk-like focus that amazed the audience members standing inches away from them.
Def Poetry Jam did not rest on its Broadway laurels for its UK debut. This version of the show boasted three new poets and plenty of new material, but the format was basically the same as the New York production: Nine poets slammed hip-hop-infused verses of love, humor, and political dissent while a live DJ spun in the background. The changes gave the show an energy boost, and the international crowd seemed to love it.
At The Paint Show, audience members were asked to smear bucketloads of paint over their fellow theatergoers. The company handed out wafer-thin body suits to protect everyone’s clothes and performed even thinner dance routines to disguise the show’s lack of substance. Although hypnotic rave music and an energetic cast made this an exciting evening, The Paint Show fell short of its mark; the show needs polishing before it can be worthy of comparison with the popular interactive shows created by De La Guarda and the Blue Man Group.
If there had been a prize for “Most Baffling Concept in the Fringe,” the stand-up comedy show Birds would have won it hands-down. Here, the headliner introduced a stutterer, a sex-crazed woman, and a man with a very prominent nose; the stutterer talked like a parrot, the woman actually was a “bird” in the British vernacular, and the guy with the nose looked like a bird. The only funny thing about the show was the fact that it was approved and funded.
A Russian dance troupe made better use of the avian construct in Bird’s Eye View, which began in a smoky room with an audio montage of the JFK Space Race speech cut against a radio transmission from the former Soviet Union. The company created some gorgeous images in a dance that was sometimes humorous, sometimes erotically charged, and always eye catching, yet the cosmonaut themes felt dated and the dance exploration of flight seemed well worn. Fortunately, those chic, vintage aviator suits never go out of style.
David Henry Sterry’s one-man show Chicken: The True Story of a Teenage Gigolo told the story of his life, from his own rape to prostitution to redemption. Calling himself “the Sisyphus of the sex trade,” Sterry carried the audience on his shoulders through his life experiences. We met his first real love, his first real pimp, and a client who made him wear the clothes of her deceased son. The performance was notable for its crackling pace and poetic language, not to mention Sterry’s great timing. Although his formidable gifts as a comedian sometimes distracted from the play’s emotional core, Sterry has turned his experiences on the streets of Hollywood into an inspirational theater piece.
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series has put graphic novels on the shelves of intellectuals like Norman Mailer, changing the way our culture thinks about comic books. The fact that an adaptation of Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors played the Fringe should have been cause for excitement, but the Rascal Vanngang theater company disappointed with a boring presentation. This troupe can thank its costume designer for staying faithful to the author’s gothic tones, but the director should have known better than to use so much voiceover narration in a piece that demands visual engagement.
If nothing else, Androgynous Productions’ brutal staging of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed attested to the power of live theater. Over the course of an hour or so, a self-styled “doctor” cut out a victim’s tongue, shot heroin into a man’s eyeball, severed another man’s hands and feet, and mutilated male and female genitals in two makeshift sex change operations. (Stage directions called for rats to carry off various body parts.) The violence almost seemed to defy explanation and meaning. Was it a baptism of fire without the promise of salvation? Kane’s critics have long argued over interpretation, but one thing’s for sure: The play would not have one-tenth of its vicious, visceral power on the big screen.
The work of Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem served as the basis for the beloved musical Fiddler on the Roof. Now, South African-born actor Saul Reichlin has created a two part, one-man show called Sholom Aleichem: Now You’re Talking! Based on five Aleichem stories, the piece had Reichlin playing the multiple characters of a shtetl as he traveled through Tsarist Russia. If you weren’t in Edinburgh for the show, fear not: Reichlin is bringing it to Manhattan for a limited Off-Broadway run at Daryl Roth’s DR2 Theater this December.
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[For more information on this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, visit www.edfringe.com.]
