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| Caricature of Jonathan Slaff | |
THE BACK PAGE
of the New York Theatre Wire
www.nytheatre-wire.com
Edited by Jonathan Slaff
Why is everybody arguing about the New York International Fringe Festival? All of a sudden, everyone seems to be lining up to see who can get in the best dig. Twice last week I found myself pissed off about a different article that some malcontent had written for some magazine. Both pieces blasted the festival, but annoyingly, for very different, even contradictory reasons. Apparently now that FringeNYC is no longer a curiosity, but rather a fact of life in the New York theatre scene, people need to find something, anything, wrong with it. Even if what’s wrong with it is simply that it’s not exactly what they think it should be.
In a letter to the editors of American Theatre magazine, the former president of the board of directors of the Fringe of Toronto Theatre Festival, Brian Beirne claims that it is disingenuous of FringeNYC to call itself a “fringe” festival. As evidence Bierne notes that the festival is juried and has an Artistic Director. From what I can gather, Mr. Beirne alone holds the one true definition of the word “fringe” and in trying to educate the rest of us he explains that a True Fringe Festival must be unjuried, therefore rendering the position of Artistic Director unnecessary.
Apparently Fringe Festivals are about “democracy,” and the only way for a festival’s selections to be truly democratic is for a lottery or first in line approach to filling out the rosters. Now, the last time I checked, Democracy had at least something to do with ability and talent. A quaint cream-rising-to-the-top sort of notion. Whether or not one believes that the festival’s directors have done a very good job of this might be a valid question, but let’s not pretend that a lottery or first-come-first-served selection process would somehow be more democratic.
A lottery system is a random process that merely proves who is the luckiest at any given moment. Coming out ahead in a first-come-first-served system simply depends upon whether or not you can belly up to the bar quickly and aggressively enough. Both systems resemble more closely a state of anarchy than one of democracy. And that is okay, that is absolutely fine. But it is not the only way, and some would argue that it is quite possibly not even the best way to ferret out a cross section of new artistic voices bubbling up out of the underground.
Mr. Beirne also laments the “clique of old-guard fringe artists, too set in their ways to be truly challenged by whomever shows up at the door.” I can’t help wondering too whom he is referring. Old guard? Like that stodgy old Richard Foreman? Or how about those derivative hacks over at the Wooster Group? It is a rather specious notion that young and new artists will, perforce, provide more interesting work. But even if you were to agree with this principle, FringeNYC’s Artistic Director is in his thirties, by theatre standards still relatively new to the scene. He and the rest of the creative team at FringeNYC have added an exciting new venue to the city’s cultural landscape. Their festival is something never before seen in New York, and it has been a rousing success, growing in popularity over each of its three years.
In the Theater section of the September 9th issue of TIME OUT NEW YORK, in an article titled “Views From the Fringe”, Jason Zinoman claims that the Fringe Festival in New York is great, except of course for the actual plays. Mr. Zinoman went to see eight plays. Let me repeat that. Mr. Zinoman went to see eight plays. A quick flip through this years’ Fringe guide reveals that there were one hundred and thirty eight offerings. Yet Mr. Zinoman feels justified in lamenting “if only the plays weren’t so miserable.” Don’t get him wrong, the idea behind the Fringe is “wonderful” and a welcome antidote to theatre’s general “stuffiness,” it’s just that he’s seen enough to write off the Fringe’s quality as sub-par.
Let me repeat. Mr. Zinoman went to see eight plays.
He himself admits that he didn’t see a lot, but this admission is grossly insufficient. As a theatre critic and supposed advocate for good theatre, Mr. Zinoman is wildly irresponsible in writing off one of the most exciting movements New York theatre has seen in ages based upon his attendance at 6% of this event’s productions.
Instead of helping to expand audiences for more adventurous, less “stuffy” theatre he is condemning an entire venue because the few productions he chose to attend were not to his liking, in effect telling people to stay away. Theatre has a difficult enough time as it is maintaining audiences without such glib dismissals from the press. I myself saw a relatively small number of plays at the last two festivals, perhaps fifteen each year, but I came away with a vastly different assessment.
Yes, there were some dreadful moments (Still, how often have you really felt that you got your money’s worth on Broadway?), but there were also moments when my jaw hit the floor. I witnessed innovative and fresh work such as, “Alice’s Evidence”, “Americana Absurdum”, “The Gospel According to Cyrus”, “The Second Hand Circus”, Claire Byrne’s moving choreographic work and Flying Machine’s “The Utopians,” among other quality productions. Where else would I have been able to see such diverse groups of talent at one time and in one place?
The other striking thing about Mr. Zinoman’s problem with the festival –allegedly a basic lack of quality– is that this could probably only be addressed by a more stringent selection process. In other words, just the opposite of what Former-Board-President-of-the-Toronto-Fringe-Festival Brian Beirne advocates. One wonders what Mr. Zinoman would think of Mr. Beirne’s free and open, “democratic” festival.
The point is that everyone seems to have their precious reason why FringeNYC isn’t all that it should be, and most of the reasons spring from our different assumptions of what “Fringe” itself ought to be. One can’t please both Mr. Beirne and Mr. Zinoman. No one approach is going to appease everyone. I’m sick of hearing people argue about this. The New York International Fringe Festival is not a group therapy session, with everyone sitting around holding hands and getting exactly what they ordered. FringeNYC is what it is, an outlet for the myriad performance voices that are on the edges of the mainstream.
The American Heritage Dictionary (okay, so I don’t own an Oxford) defines fringe as: “A marginal or peripheral part” of something, or my favorite: “A decorative border or edging of hanging threads, cords or loops.” What FringeNYC has done, and done admirably, is to focus on and present those marginal and peripheral voices from all over the United States and from an increasing number of countries around the world. Along the way it has begun to provide a funky decorative border to our theatre community here in New York, full of some of the dangling threads that might otherwise have remained obscure.
You are invited to write us with your reactions to Mr. Au Coin's letter. We will also forward emailed letters to him for his reply.
letters to the editor