X marks the Fringe

Plus:

• Veteran's day: Festival favorite Susan Louise O'Connor returns in a revival of her first Fringe show.
• Highlights in low places: Zombies, kitchen appliances and musical flatulence lead this year's lineup.

Pictured, clockwise: This Won't Take Long (2006), Dis/Appearing (2006), Letter Purloined (2006), A Small Hole (2006), Your Place...or Mine? (2006), My Penis—In and Out of Trouble (1999)



In the summer of 1998, Antonio Sacre was just another unknown artist when a half-naked go-go dancer entered his life. One hot night he watched her flirt her way through a saucy play, True Confessions of a Go-Go Girl, at the Red Room, the same theater where he had just performed his earnest solo show about racism, Brown, Black and White All Over, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. Guess who sold more tickets. “She got me thinking,” he says. “I needed to sex up my shows.” Standing out among about 200 festival entries isn’t easy and requires careful promotion, starting with the title. “Clowns, sex, pop culture reference: the musical,” says onetime Fringe artist Ian W. Hill, explaining the formula for success. “For example, Blow-Job Clowns Exposed with Tom Cruise: The Musical would be a huge hit.”

Sacre, believe it or not, did even better. The next year he returned with a quiet little show about his eventful sexual history that boasted an unforgettable title: My Penis—In and Out of Trouble. It was an instant sensation. Sacre, who also worked as a storyteller for children’s groups, was suddenly selling out, receiving his first major reviews and causing enough buzz to rival another Fringe hit with a memorable name that opened that year: Urinetown. That his show had an upsetting finale about child abuse (its blurb in the festival menu read “Come and be molested”) didn’t matter at the box office. “My Penis,” Sacre says, “was my breakout.”

It’s easy to forget how difficult it was for an artist such as Sacre to get noticed before the Fringe became an August staple of the theater season. The idea that a playwright-actor with no name recognition could do a show at a black- box theater on East 4th Street and draw an audience (let alone a slew of critics) in its first few performances was preposterous. Now he’s the most produced playwright in Fringe history. Thanks to this festival, any actor with a dream—and a willingness to talk about his penis—has a chance of making it in the big city.

Running from Friday 11 to August 27, the Fringe celebrates its tenth go-round this summer, which in festival years makes it something of a senior citizen. Since it was born out of the depths of the Lower East Side in 1997, it’s become the most significant annual event in downtown theater. “Considering the wide variety of training programs, styles of theater, cliques and companies in the city, there really are few true common denominators among New York theater artists other than the fact that everyone under the age of 40 has done a show at the Fringe,” says Alex Timbers, artistic director of the downtown company Les Freres Corbusier, who once choreographed a show at the festival.

Moreover, it’s a testament to the event’s incredible success over the past decade that almost everyone in the theater world has at least a few bad words to say about it. It’s too big, too small, too safe, too edgy, too avant-garde, too obsessed with pop culture, too frivolous, too amateurish, and on and on. For a while, everybody complained about the boiling-hot hole-in-the-wall theaters. Then the Fringe branched out into new spaces and made sure they all had air-conditioning—but that didn’t stop the grousing. “About two years ago, we started to get complaints that our theaters were cold,” says Elena K. Holy, the producing artistic director of the festival. “That just made me laugh.”

Pictured, clockwise: Aspiration: Housewife (2006), Suicide: The Musical (2006), Anna 3/11 (2006), The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett... (2006), Breakfast for Dinner (2006), Flying on the Wing (2006), Bloodties (2006), The Blue Martini (2006)

Some of the most pointed criticism comes from Fringe alumni. “In the early days, I remember people talking to other artists about their work,” says Sacre, who—after finding the groove with Penis—returned to the festival three more times, mounting six shows in total. “Later, all anyone talked about was getting seen by a producer.” In what he now calls a test, he decided to write a play about this development at the Fringe and put it in the style of an epic poem. “It was sort of like the sack of Troy,” he suggests. Sacre says he wanted to produce a play that could never transfer uptown, sounding a bit like a downtown Max Bialystock looking for a musical that would never succeed. He called it Fuck the Fringe. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t accepted. “It could have been because my idea was bad,” he says. “I don’t know.”

The typical short history of the Fringe Festival goes like this: A handful of avant-garde theater types put together a scrappy counterculture festival, the seventh of its kind in the States. (Roughly a dozen U.S. Fringes now exist, though there’s little or no relationship among them; the events build loosely on a tradition that began in Edinburgh in 1947 and is reflected in scores of similar events in Canada, Europe and beyond.) Then came Urinetown two years later, in 1999; success catapulted it to Broadway and everything changed. Shows became more commercial, audiences filled with mustache-twirling producers, and the festival turned into a soulless Sundance below 14th Street.

There is some truth to this caricature, but only some. The Fringe of today has indeed expanded and become less of a tight-knit community, and you are certainly more likely to sit next to someone in a Ralph Lauren shirt than you were in its early years. The quality and style of work has remained fairly consistent, for better or worse. And the Fringe is basically unchanged in the most important way: its size.

Originally the festival was supposed to feature about 100 shows, but after a meeting, the founders—including Holy, John Clancy, Aaron Beall and Jonathon Harris—decided it was essential for the Fringe to be much too big for any one theatergoer to see everything. “The term I used,” Clancy says, “was intentional overload.”

Unlike most Fringes, New York didn’t accept all applicants, seeking quality and balance instead. While Urinetown brought more producers to Off-Off Broadway, the Fringe was always, in part, a marketing tool to lure audiences downtown. In a New York Times article about the first event, Holy said: “The commercial world is coming down here now.” And that was before anyone started singing about bathroomsThe Fringe has branched out from a block party in a corner of the Lower East Side into the West Village, flexing the kind of marketing muscle even commercial producers envy. The budget has ballooned from $74,000 to $800,000, and ticket sales have gone from about 20,000 in 1997 to 70,000 last year. But the number of shows has stayed roughly the same. As for the question of how the work has changed, the festival’s size makes it difficult to say. How could anyone know for sure?

Pictured, clockwise: Brandon Teena (1998), Cats Talk Back (2004), The Unlucky Man in the Yellow Cap (2006), Uneventful Deaths for Agathon (2006), Park-N-Ride (2006), Vice Girl Confidential (2006), American Muscle (2006), Debbie Does Dallas (2006)

The Fringe’s reputation has been made with jokey musicals (Debbie Does Dallas) and eye-catching titles (Slut), but many important theater artists got their start or received early exposure at the festival. Conor McPherson, Daniel MacIvor and Stephen Belber had some of their first New York plays produced at the Fringe. It was there that the experimental Brooklyn troupe Radiohole produced its first show, Bender, and director Leigh Silverman, who became the youngest female director to ever work on Broadway, with Well, had one of her first local credits with Brandon Teena.

“It’s easy to be cynical and say that the New York Fringe is one of the worst-curated Fringes one can find, that opening the doorway to people who have only a hobbyist’s interest in theater dilutes the strength of the pool as a whole and that the best, Fringiest work happens pretty consistently all year round in a city like New York,” Timbers says. “But overall, its presence is clearly a good and exciting thing.”

What seems missing from today’s Fringe—or at least what’s overshadowed by the hype of the more commercial works—is enough honest attempts at seriousness: the avant-garde work that risks being pretentious, the ambitious literary adaptation, the straight play with weighty themes. But you could make a similar criticism of the entire Off-Off Broadway scene. Holy says she bristles when the Fringe is described as an institution, but that is exactly what it has become—and it’s only becoming more of a stable and influential fixture now that Washington has started its own festival this year, making an Eastern corridor of Fringes in D.C. (July), New York (August) and Philadelphia (September).

“Sometimes I feel like the Dr. Frankenstein who created this monster,” Clancy says by phone from London, where he is working on a new show, Midnight Cowboy. (He left the Fringe in 2001 to pursue writing, producing and directing.) He says the best way to keep the Fringe fresh is to return to the original idea of intentional overload. “Blow it up,” Clancy says. “Make it larger and more out of control, more and more and more. It should be like the New York Marathon spread across the entire city: 1,500 shows in 50 to 70 venues. It should be twice as big as it is.”

It’s an interesting idea—although Holy, who would have to produce the behemoth, might disagree—but it also raises a provocative question: How many shows about blow jobs, clowns and Tom Cruise can one city take?