How many shows can you see in one day? How about in one weekend? One week? Eleven days? I ask because no matter how many you say, you aren’t likely to exhaust the possibilities that will be available over one 11-day period this month. From July 19 to 29, the Capital Fringe Festival will offer up no fewer than 83 different shows in 12 “fringe venues” plus another half-dozen spaces theater companies found themselves.
Some of the shows are free. Most cost about $15, and there are ways to buy packages that can bring the price even lower – well, not lower than free, but lower than $15. The venues range from tiny 30-seat rooms to larger but still intimate 260-seat facilities.
The whole idea is to have so many options at such an affordable price that you will be tempted to spend a day or a night or both seeing multiple shows and getting to know the richness of the theater community in our town.
What, exactly, is a “fringe festival?” It is a concentration of non-traditional or alternative theater activities featuring productions by companies or artists who either don’t get much of a chance to work in the mainstream of a community’s professional theaters or who have works they’d like to mount that you wouldn’t find at big, commercial venues. As a result, you will find a mix of well-known actors, directors, designers and writers and a host of people you may not have heard of before but who have something interesting to present.
The first fringe festival was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1947 when some of the smaller theaters and a number of artists felt they didn’t have a chance to participate in the city’s major arts festival. They put on their own festival “on the fringe” of the Edinburgh International Festival.
Today Edinburgh is still the big daddy of fringe, with a million and a half tickets sold every year. The movement spread, and while it isn’t always easy to tell a fringe festival from some other types of theater festivals (the massive Avignon Festival in France isn’t called a fringe festival), today some count as many as 76 fringe festivals, 14 of which are in the US.
The Capital Fringe is the brainchild of Julianne Brienza and Damian Sinclair, who came to Washington four and five years ago, respectively, after working together in Philadelphia. Sinclair came here to work at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Brienza at the Mead Theatre Lab Program at Flashpoint. Philadelphia has its own fringe festival. Why, they asked, not Washington?
Last year they managed to mount the first Capital Fringe Festival with just over 400 performances (this year the number will exceed 500) to which almost 18,000 tickets were sold at an average price of $12.35. Forty of those shows were world premieres. Sixty of them were Washington premieres.
This year’s Capital Fringe Festival will have the work of over 100 arts groups. The majority of them will be mounted in fringe venues – theaters where the fringe itself is the operator who rents the space, and then various theater production companies come in to mount their performances. Here’s a look at what will be offered at these venues:
At the north end of the Seventh Street Corridor, across from the new Convention Center, is the Warehouse complex of performance spaces. Four of the spaces in the Warehouse will host performances of a total of 24 shows, including Venus Theatre’s rock take on Aristophanes, “Lysistration,” a blues opera called “Indigo” and a burlesque show with nude puppets, the Beale Street Puppets “BurleyQ.” Not all the theater pieces at the Warehouse will be musicals. There will be a TV-style forensics approach to Shakespeare’s tragedy of star-crossed lovers, “Romeo & Juliet: A Crime Scene Investigation,” as well as solo shows like “My Friend Hitler” and Alan Devalerio’s “An Evening with George Burns.”
Head a few blocks south on Seventh Street, and you get to the Goethe Institute, the Federal Republic of Germany’s facility hosting cultural events year round. During the fringe, their mainstage and gallery will find such varied fare as “The Digital Life: Basic Instructions for Coping with the 21st Century” and an improvisational comedy based on Dickens in which ghosts of past presidents visit George W. Bush.
A block to the west on G Street is the Mead Theatre Lab in Flashpoint which will be home to such fare as the Notorious Woman Productions’ “Ninja Motorcycle Babes” and the Sanctuary Theatre’s “The Fate of a Cockroach.” A block further west, on Ninth Street, is Touchstone Gallery which will host three intriguingly-titled offerings: “The Lesbian and the Flying Pig,” “Love & War: With The Bard’s Broads & Dames” and “From the Cradle to the Grey: Two One Acts and a Chat.”
The Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company just off Seventh on D Street turns both its mainstage and its rehearsal hall over to fringe events. The mainstage has been booked for half-a-dozen shows including dance pieces, a pop-modern tale using Japanese theatrical traditions and a play about saving the elephants in Kenya which envisions just what the elephants think of the effort. Other intriguing shows will be playing in Woolly’s Melton Rehearsal Hall. These will be the work of small but adventurous theater companies like Spooky Action, Nu Visions of Excellence and The Riot Actors of Washington.
Two fringe venues will be further from the Seventh Street Corridor. The Lang Theatre in the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street NE will host seven different productions, but perhaps their most important feature will be the free shuttle they will run from Union Station. Most of the productions will be choreographers’ showcases, but OutOfTheBlackBox Theater Company is mounting Ben Johnson’s “Volpone” and the often bizarre Landless Theatre Company is going to do a “punk-improv” musical titled “Carrie Potter: The Half Blood Prom.”
As part of a return to its former glory as a place where you could collect treasured memories of notable moments of theater, Source Theatre on 14th Street NW will be a fringe venue offering nine different productions over the 11 days of the festival. These include a jazz review staring Bobby Smith, an all-female version of “Much Ado About Nothing” set in World War II, a touch of Gilbert and Sullivan, a pair of mini-musicals and Naomi Jacobson and John Lescault in the play “Abstract Nude.”
The organizers of the fringe have even created their own venue which they call The Scientarium. It will be at Seventh and D streets and will feature such shows as “The Tell Tale Heart and the Mind of Poe” and “Making (Up) History: Searching for Annie Moore” about the first Irish immigrant to enter the United States through Ellis Island.
Not all the shows will be in fringe venues. Many participating production companies have found their own places to mount shows. Some are theaters, some are cafés or restaurants. The Longview Gallery on Ninth Street NW, The Arts Club of Washington on I Street NW, The Riot Act Comedy Club on 14th Street NW and the Red and the Black Tavern on H Street NE will all have fringe shows during the festival.
Some of Washington’s best known theaters will have fringe events as well. Studio Theatre’s Secondstage company is mounting the musical parody of a 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film, “Reefer Madness.” Theater J is doing a whole festival of its own within the fringe. Programs from their Voices from a Changing Middle East series during the run of the festival will include a reprise of their production of David Hare’s monologue piece about Israel and Palestine, “Via Dolorosa.” The fringe even spreads over the river into Shirlington where Signature Theatre will be offering a concert version of a new musical, “Glory Days.”
You won’t be able to see them all. But doesn’t it sound like fun to catch as many as you can?
Tickets to Capital Fringe go on sale on July 9. A six-admission “Six Pack” is also available at $75, and an “All Access Pack” which allows unlimited admissions is $300. You can purchase in person at the fringe box office at 507 Seventh St. NW, order by phone at 866-811-4111 or online at www.capfringe.org which is also a great online source for schedules and show descriptions.
Brad Hathaway is the theater columnist for The Hill Rag/DC North. He is also the editor/reviewer for Potomac Stages, a Web site and e-mail service covering theater in Washington, Maryland and Virginia (www.PotomacStages.com). He has covered theater for Theatre.Com, Musical Stages Online, The Connection Newspapers and such magazines as Show Music, the Sondheim Review and Entertainment Design. He and his wife live on Capitol Hill. He can be reached by e-mail at Brad@PotomacStages.com.