Theater: Fringe and Purge

You’ve never heard of the New York International Fringe Festival? Don’t worry—I won’t harass you with a “Have you been living under a rock?” joke. Those who’d never ordinarily dip below 14th Street without a passport and booster shots might not know too much about it, anyway.

And the Present Company—the nonprofit group that produces the Fringe—prefers it that way, touting the Fringe as the nation’s largest multi-arts festival. For the past 12 years in August, some 200 plays, musicals, solo performances, puppet pieces and theater works that the dictionary refuses to define play in 20 spaces downtown. Some of them are quite large (“Dude, did they really need that space for that Kabuki King Lear?”), some are quite Liliputian and some are, to be kind, just Fringe-y.

In all, each Fringe festival presents about 1,300 performances, seen by tens of thousands of culture vultures or victims. Multiply that 1,300-performance statistic by 12 years and you’re talking about nearly as many theater productions as Broadway has witnessed in the last 100 years—including the schlock that the Fringe delights in rebelling against.

In 2004, a show I worked on as a director and dramaturge ran five performances in the Fringe. Unlike such hits as Urinetown, which eventually ran on Broadway, or such off-Broadway wonders as Never Swim Alone, Debbie Does Dallas and Bash’d (currently running at the Zipper Factory Theater), my show didn’t go on to glory. However, I did learn a great deal about what makes a Fringe show either good or gag inducing.

For one thing, no matter how high- or low-minded one is, the Fringe is a forum for theater artists to take their frenzied shot at 15 minutes of fame. That doesn’t mean the artists aren’t talented; it means that a Fringe berth, they recognize, is a chance to grab the public by the collar and shake until they say uncle. Kicky titles abound, usually with the name of a famous or infamous person—or a total celebutard—built right in. This year, for example, there’s Be Brave, Anna! (thanks for dying, Anna Nicole); Becoming Britney (thanks for not dying, Ms. Spears) and Perez Hilton Saves the Universe.

My show had a famous person in the title, too, but our group wasn’t as much into whoring; we wanted to be more high-minded. That, actually, is another Fringe trend as well—affixing the name of a cultural icon to the title to attract the black-glasses-wearing, Pina-Bausch-going set. Works fitting that bill this year are: Anais Nin Goes to Hell; Blanche Survives Katrina in a FEMA Trailer Named Desire; The Dershowitz Protocol and See How Beautiful I Am: The Return of Jackie Susann.

Want sex? The Fringe is all about it. Or about why sex isn’t actually worth all that attention, anyway. Things tend to cleave by gender. For women, this year the Fringe has The Vajayjay Monologues, Sex, Cellulite and Large Farm Equipment: One Girls Guide To Living and Dying; and The Pantyhose Grid, which has an awesome description: “A lesbian English professor teams up with an oversexed religion professor in order to examine a lost diary by Jane Austen.” And let’s not forget 52 Man Pickup, about the 52 men that one woman has had sex with, each story chosen by an audience member picking a playing card, if you will, out of a deck.

Not to be outdone, those hungry for homo-fabulousness also have much to pick from: The Chronicles of Steve: The Bossy Bottom (“a sex-quest that fully inflates the biggest sexual organ—the heart”); The Gay No More Telethon (“your generous contribution will help turn every homosexual straight by the Rapture or the 2014 Winter Olympics”); or XY(T) (“Do you have the balls to become a man?”).

What you won’t see, though, is everything that goes into making a show come alive. Maybe you’ll only visit one production in one space, but you should know there are at least four other shows sharing that theater, their props, costumes and set pieces needing to be carefully placed backstage so no one stumbles over it. Not only are there stage managers for every production who have to get along (they don’t, believe me) but also venue managers for each theater whose job is to swoop down and play referee when the inevitable bitch-fights occur. You won’t see the hours of rehearsal in living rooms and basements. We rehearsed in a church basement, competing with scurrying mice for staging ideas.

Two final words of advice: Stripped-down Fringe shows tend to be better than hyped extravaganzas, and attempts at multimedia tend to dissolve into disaster. Still, the Fringe is a haven for artists and audience alike to give the unusual and unspeakable a fair hearing, to try what the rest of the money-grubbing theater world would never pour money into in any other circumstances. That’s why it’s called the Fringe, not finished.

Through Aug. 24. Tickets to all shows are $15. Call 866-468-7619 or visit [www.fringenyc.org](http://www.fringenyc.org) for more information.