Fringe Factor

What constitutes “fringe”? Now in its 13th year, the New York International Fringe Festival has grown and changed a lot since its initial outing in 1997. TheaterMania interviewed eight participants in this year’s festival to find out how they define fringe, and what makes their shows “fringy.”

For Charles Randolph Wright — who has received widespread acclaim for his work in theater, film, and television — the Fringe is about relearning to do things simply. “Everything is so fast and furious,” says Wright, who is directing Victoria and Frederick for President, a new play by Jonathan L. Davidson that looks at the 1872 Presidential campaign launched by female stockbroker Victoria Woodhull, who named former slave Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential running mate. “It takes me back to my days doing shows in theaters that had five seats.You can’t rely on the set and everything else to do your work; it’s about the words.”

The piece — which features Antoinette LaVecchia and Mel Johnson Jr. in the title roles — was commissioned for a summer arts festival in South Carolina during the last election cycle, when it wasn’t even certain whether it would be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to get the Democratic nomination. “People really responded to the play because the issues were so contemporary,” says Wright. “What I love about this piece is the idea of history and theater being entertaining and also didactic, to think about what happened in the past and how it relates to today.”

A Tony Award-nominated musical from 1968 doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice for a fringe festival, but director/adaptor Ben West is convinced that his revisal of How Now, Dow Jones — starring Fred Berman, Cristen Paige, and Colin Hanlon — is a perfect fit. “The Fringe provides an excellent opportunity to test a work,” he states. “I certainly treat the show as a new musical because we’re developing stuff in rehearsal, adding songs, and taking away things.”

West is quick to point out his respect for the original material and in particular, his love for lyricist Carolyn Leigh. “I actually went back to her old papers, and we’ve included lyrics that were not in the original production,” he states. There are three new Elmer Bernstein-Carolyn Leigh songs, cut from the original Broadway mounting, including “Don’t Let a Good Thing Get Away,” “Where You Are,” and “Touch and Go.” (The latter will be familiar to fans of the cast album, as it was recorded prior to the show being frozen and appears on the disc.)

Similarly, West has revisited earlier versions of the libretto. “There are a couple wonderful scenes which Max Shulman wrote in his original draft, which are so telling about the characters,” he states. “I wasn’t there, and I don’t know exactly what happened, but I just think the musical lost something on its way to New York, and I’m hoping we’ve regained what it lost.”

A wacky sense of humor is a hallmark of a number of this year’s shows, and that’s just the kind of writing that Meryl Cohn — who is best known for her syndicated column Ms. Behavior and the best-selling book, Do What I Say: Ms. Behavior’s Guide to Gay and Lesbian Etiquette — specializes in. Her play And Sophie Comes Too promises “some of the same,” according to the playwright, “but it’s also a wry look at life and the things that are bizarre about human behavior.”

The work originally started as a 10-minute play about three sisters and their mother, who Cohn says “is inconveniently in a coma in the oldest sister’s apartment — which doesn’t sound like a comedy, but it definitely is.” Now a full-length work, Cohn’s piece includes a single lesbian, a straight mom, and a transgendered character, and is being presented by TOSOS, which is dedicated to plays about the GLBT community.

The playwright is happy to see her work in the festival but she also states that “In an ideal world, if I got to wave the magic wand and see what would happen, I would like to see my plays produced in a nice, non-profit theater in New York. I mean, I don’t have any delusions that my plays must be produced on Broadway or anything like that. But, a nice, sort of mainstream theater would be great.”

Writer-composer Paul Schultz sees FringeNYC as a launching pad for future success — so much so that he has someone on staff to bring producers to see his show, Eat Drink and Be Merry. “Everyone knows about Urinetown,” he says of the musical which debuted in the 1999 festival, prior to a Broadway run. “There’s also a bunch of Off-Broadway shows that have come out of the Fringe, and so it’s definitely in the back of your mind and the kind of thing that drives you a little bit.”

The show is a musical revue about food that begins in the Garden of Eden with the serpent trying to sell Eve an apple, and continues into our contemporary era. Along the way, it examines Christians being thrown to the lions (“Christians, Yum, Yum, Yummy Christians”), the serf uprising (“Serf’s Up”), and more. “The whole first part of the musical is about scarcity, and the second half is about overabundance of food,” he states. Schultz samples various musical styles, including a bump-and-grind number, a gospel tune, and a caveman song “that sounds like Noel Coward.”

A staple of fringe festivals is the solo show, often autobiographically-based ones. Exiene Lofgren’s Be a Man! examines how as a gay man raised by feminists, he finds his place in “the boys club,” while keeping the trust of women. “It’s a very interesting balance, especially when sex is not involved,” he states.

His journey includes a stint in the military, where Lofgren says “all the men were committing adultery, and me, having been raised by women, disapproved. I found out that they could handle feminine behavior, but feminist behavior they did not like at all.” The writer/performer says that he would eventually like to take the piece to colleges, across Europe, and “as far as it can go.” But for now, his focus is on the current run. “The beauty of the Fringe is that this is your chance to be yourself fully artistically,” he says.

Mike Schlitt, who is presenting his solo show Jesus Ride, expresses a similar sentiment. “What I think is great about the Fringe is that it’s about the work and the artist, and very deliberately staying on one edge of a line, and not trying to become a commercial endeavor.” Schlitt, who appeared in the 2006 FringeNYC with his award-winning Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure, is debuting a new piece that combines the story of working on a motion control ride about the life of Jesus for the Trinity Broadcasting Network 15 years ago, with more recent events in his life and assessments of various films about Jesus Christ. Regarding the title of his show, he says, “I feel like I have to make a disclaimer that I am not a Christian; I’m an agnostic, non-practicing Jew.”

“A lot of the impetus for this play is that I’m in my mid-to-late forties, and have a creeping awareness of mortality,” he continues. “I just lost a parent last year, and by a really weird coincidence a couple of really close friends also passed away. I am a huge movie buff and what connections I was unable to make to spirituality and faith and the life of Jesus, I think the movies were a good window for me to get into some of those questions about belief and about mortality.”

“Fringe is messy, experimental, and sans boundaries,” says Becca Hackett, who is performing in Series 6.2: Paint on Canvas, in which she and co-creator/performer Katherine Randle paint both themselves and a canvas during the course of their performance. “It starts with a blank canvas, though we created an imaginary road map of how to fit all the crazy things we want to paint,” says Hackett. “Each night, the color choices are often made on a whim, the subtleties of the piece change, with texture choices and stroke weights, plus paint does not always behave when splashed, used on our body parts, or poured over one’s head.”

However, Hackett reassures that “there is no splatter zone,” and that the use of paint is confined to the performers and the canvas. The text for the piece — written by the performers along with Linnea Emigh — is also set. “It’s all scripted from things we brought in, worked with on our feet, improvised with, and found really helped us say what we want to say,” says Hackett. “Theater is supposed to be a sort of conversation between audience and artist and I want to make people want to talk to us or to each other.”

“A Shakespeare play may be an unusual inclusion, but I think our production is a true, true Fringe production,” says director Peter Macklin, who is helming an eight-actor version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It’s done bare bones, and for the love of what we do,’ says Macklin, who is working with a group of University of Alabama MFA graduates who originally developed the piece while in residence at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. “It took about a week to define it as a new project,” says Macklin, who was not involved in the previous iteration. “We don’t have a budget, which means we have to be much more creative.”

The director previously appeared as an actor in the 2005 FringeNYC production of The Importance of Marrying Wells, and is excited about his return to the festival. “My memory of the fringe is that it shows the possibilities that are out there, and allows you to encounter them.”