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San Francisco Fringe Festival
SF Weekly September 4, 2001 (Michael Scott Moore)
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Bizarre Bazaar
The Fringe Festival's 10th anniversary finds the
Exit expanding its empire
By Michael Scott Moore

The weeklong anarchy of
50-minute plays known as the
San Francisco Fringe Festival
tends to scare up bizarre,
inventive material, but Elisa
DeCarlo distinguishes herself this
year by telling a freakish story
that isn't even fiction. DeCarlo is
a comedienne from New York
who impressed local audiences
four years ago with jokes about
man-okapi sex and dominatrix
homemaking in Cervix With a
Smile. This week -- after a
two-year Fringe hiatus -- she'll
present the grim, true story of a
man who murdered his daughter
in an arson fire, then confessed it,
years later, to a crowd of
strangers online. DeCarlo was
one of them; she and two others
turned him in, and he's now
serving 40 years. There was a brief media blitz about the arrest in
1998, after the New York Times ran a story on its front page. "I
got to be Monica Lewinsky for a day," DeCarlo says. "It was
horrible. I mean, here I am, a performer, busting my ass, I always
wanted to be famous, and then suddenly I'm famous in the absolute
worst possible way."

The show's title, Toasted, seems to refer to everyone involved,
including DeCarlo. By helping to turn in the man in '98, she became
persona non grata within her online support group for alcoholics.
The group was, of course, confidential. But after dropping hints
about having "murdered" his daughter, DeCarlo says, "he wrote
this long, explicit, detailed confession of how he burned her to
death. He burned the house, and he trapped the daughter inside."
The man, Larry Froistad, would still be free if he hadn't confessed.
The fire had been ruled accidental in 1995. DeCarlo and another
online member discussed the confession privately and called the
police; a third member called the FBI. No one else went to the
authorities. The group had 200 members, and after Froistad's
arrest there were howls of betrayal. "One guy," says DeCarlo,
"who I knew personally -- he didn't know he was referring to me
-- called me "a meddlesome, tight-ass, rat-fink minimus of an
oozing worm-turd.'"

DeCarlo examines every side of the story in her one-woman,
30-character show. She explores the limits of confidentiality and
wonders if she's as vulturelike, now, performing this play, as the
network journalists who swarmed her for three days in New York.
DeCarlo hasn't done much solo performance since a few months
after Froistad's confession. ("Ninety-eight was just a terrible year,"
she says.) Lately, in Manhattan, she's been managing a series for
women called "Broads" at Performance Space NBC. But it's fitting
for her to make a comeback at the Exit Theater, because the Exit
produced her first full comedy show in 1988, and in the '90s she
was a fixture at the San Francisco Fringe. "Doing this stuff is like
coming home," she says. "That's the only way I can describe it."

 

 

The Exit has organized the San Francisco Fringe since 1991; this is
its 10th anniversary. The point of every festival is to give space to
offbeat or experimental shows, and for the Exit's artistic director,
Christina Arguello, this means no curating. The New York Fringe
Festival chooses its acts from a pool of submissions, but in
Arguello's mind such selectivity excuses it from being honest
Fringe. She gives space to 50-odd projects chosen in a blind
public lottery, and she likes the grab-bag quality of the resulting
fest.

The Exit as an organization can offer more space this year because
early in the summer Arguello and her managing director, Richard
Livingston, opened a spanking-new stage called the Exit on Taylor.
A new theater anywhere in San Francisco is something of a
miracle, and the details of how this one came about are worth a
brief digression. Livingston has been working on the project for
four years. In 1997 he found a low-income housing developer,
Mercy Charities Housing, willing to include a theater in its plans for
a new retirement home. Mercy Charities' regional president, Jane
Graf, agreed with Livingston that a theater in the complex would
help revive the neighborhood. "It's much simpler and easier just to
do the housing," Livingston says, "but then you normally end up
with a [blank] wall that in this case is half a block long, where there
would have been no activity at all." The Exit on Taylor brings
"positive nighttime activity," in developers' parlance, to a stretch of
the Tenderloin that might otherwise have been a dead, and maybe
dangerous, street.

The city's late-'90s real estate bubble was bad for the performing
arts, and Livingston thinks deals like his -- with a nonprofit
developer -- are the best way for theater companies to survive a
bloody rental market. But Berkeley will finish 2001 with no fewer
than three new theaters in its impacted downtown. The reason for
this discrepancy is simple: The city of Berkeley goes easy on
developers who offer space to viable arts outfits. "We give them a
density bonus," says Berkeley Mayor Shirley Dean. "It usually
gives [developers] an extra floor; it translates into a somewhat
bigger building." Two out of Berkeley's three new stages will owe
their existence to this enlightened policy. The Aurora Theater and
the Shotgun Players (opening a space in December) have both
signed with the same for-profit developer, who wants to earn that
density bonus.

This kind of provision is rare. San Francisco, like most cities, gives
a bonus only to developers of low-income housing. A source I
spoke to in the San Francisco Planning Department, who wished
to remain anonymous, had never heard of the idea, and our
conversation was typical:

"If somebody's putting up a new building and they include a
theater," I said, "do they get any sort of break from the city in
terms of zoning?"

[Long pause.]

"N-n-no. They wouldn't get, like, a bigger FAR or anything. And
they would still have to have the required parking."

FAR stands for Floor Area Ratio limit. It refers to building size.

 

 

Anyway, the Exit Theater is thriving -- against long odds. And the
Fringe Fest still serves as a bazaar where artists can swap ideas.
It's also the only regular opportunity for local audiences to see
underground work from other countries. Jonathan Rice brings his
one-man show about anti-gay violence, Charlie's Angel, to San
Francisco after five years of roaming Britain. The play has become
a showpiece in the British movement to overturn Clause 28, which
forbids schoolteachers in England from discussing homosexuality.
Charlie takes place in Brighton, where Rice was born. Several
years ago, walking home at night with a friend, Rice was assaulted
by two thugs who assumed he was gay. Brighton is a gay mecca,
sure enough, but Rice is straight. Charlie's Angel tells the story of
two fictional brothers -- one gay, one homophobic -- whose
relationship changes after the homophobic one gets gay-bashed.

This year's Fringe also features at least two projects with origins in
earlier San Francisco fests. John Sowle and Steven Patterson got
to know Dan Carbone at the 1998 Fringe, when they saw his
alarming, hilarious play Up From the Ground. Carbone was
unknown around here, but Sowle and Patterson were well
established as a partnership called Kaliyuga Arts; now Carbone
works regularly with Kaliyuga. They've collaborated on an
experimental play called The Pilgrim Project, based on Sowle's
pilgrim ancestor George Sowle. Carbone wrote the script, and
Sowle has incorporated movement techniques he learned in master
classes with the late theorist Jerzy Grotowski. "If everything
coalesces, it will be jaw-dropping," says Patterson. "If it doesn't,
well, then it'll be -- another Fringe show."

A play called The Family Tree was written by an ex-punk
drummer and slam poet who decided to turn playwright after
seeing the 1999 Fringe. Denise Dee, who also directs, developed
her semisurreal show in a local playwriting course. "Most of the
people in the class already had, like, M.B.A.s, or whatever it's
called," she says. "I was the only person starting only from scratch,
[and] it took a lot of struggle against everybody sort of telling you
what to do." She rebelled, in particular, against the notion of
dramatic arc. "There's no big conflict in the play," she says,
dismissively, "and there's definitely no arc." But there are three
Equity actors in the cast. From Dee's enthusiasm as a spectator in
the '99 Fringe to her creative role in the current one, she says, "It's
a complete full circle ... and they told me at the Exit that I'm the
first person that's ever done this."

The 2001 lineup also includes a new show from Wendy Weiner
called Searching for the Sixties, a piece essentially about
slacker-generation nostalgia. Weiner won a Best of the Fringe
Award in '98 with a show called Give Me Shelter, on another
familiar theme -- How to Find a Goddamn Apartment -- which,
now that she lives in New York, is a question that's been settled in
her favor. "I have a rent-stabilized one-bedroom in Alphabet City,"
she says. "I got it because a friend of mind slept with the realtor."

Aha. Did Weiner also have to sleep with the realtor?

"I did not. He was a gay man, so it wasn't even an option. But
that's how I got this great apartment."

Something, maybe, for directors here to keep in reserve.

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