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San Francisco Fringe Festival
SF Bay Guardian September 11, 2001 (J.H. Tomkins)
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Fringe groups
Festival 2001: the pretty good, the bad, and every once
in a while, the exquisite.

By J.H. Tompkins

'I'M NOT GOING to say a performance or a performer is good or
bad." Christina Augello, founder and artistic director of San
Francisco's Exit Theatre and producer of the city's annual Fringe
Festival – which opened Sept. 6 – has the floor. "Who's to say? That's
just opinion. But I will say that sometimes I find a performance
exquisite."

Augello and I have parked ourselves in Exit's Eddy Street theater,
whose Tenderloin location and striking, well-aged red-brick and basic
black decor locks time into what I like to think of as a permanent
midnight. The festival, which this year will showcase some 50
productions and 250-plus performances, is about to begin. Thousands
of people will flock to a grab bag of performances that were selected
for the occasion by lottery rather than perceived merit, an approach
that guarantees surprises. Augello and I are debating – this could be
too generous a description – cultural criticism and its relation to class,
culture, and popular taste.

A dive into these waters can provoke the impetuous to consider the
easily shaped will of the people that lies at the foundations of
democracy. I may be overthinking, but don't Americans flock to
stupefying Hollywood blockbusters? Don't we tune into Cops, Real
World reruns, and Oprah? Isn't Jesse Helms – a dead man – still in
office? Is this state of affairs not unfortunate, or is mediocrity just a
matter of opinion? If there are social truths – standards, if you will – are
there not artistic truths as well?

Augello has heard it before – perhaps not as I am arguing the case,
but certainly in a more vexing context. In 1999, a few days before the
festival opened, San Francisco Chronicle theater critic Steven Winn –
fed up with what he felt were the disappointing results of unjuried
programming – announced, in print, a one-person boycott.

Her tone of voice leads me to think that she's bored with the issue.
Fringe festivals, she believes, don't need to make excuses. They are
thriving worldwide, and though San Francisco's – now 10 years old –
is still relatively small, it's flourishing, an assessment that includes
sales of 8,000 tickets for the 2000 festival. For this reason – perhaps
there are others, but I like to think not – she seems less than totally
committed to our conversation. The memory nearly provokes me to
open fire on a Fringe production that slowed time to a degree unrivaled
by anything this side of ACT's Hans Christian Anderson.

I restrain myself, because 24 hours earlier I had stumbled into a Fringe
performance that I will call, in deference to Augello, whose principles
and contagious energy I admire, exquisite.

Seeing God

Saturday at 3:30 p.m., I was trying to chose between Meet John
W.T.O. – a solo dramatization of action, reaction, and acquired
wisdom at the Seattle riots – and another solo show, called God
Complex, in the theater I'd just left.

Solo performance is part of the Fringe backbone. It is, as Augello says,
"cheap and portable." Showcased during the '90s at the Solo Mio
festivals and the Valencia Street home of the Marsh, solo performance
spread like a weed. The city was treated to remarkable work by artists
like Charlie Varon, Marga Gomez, and Josh Kornbluth. Shows like
Kornbluth's Red Diaper Baby and Gomez's Line around the Block –
both rooted in autobiography – were dramatized, shaped, and
reshaped so effectively that when staged they seemed almost
effortless.

This illusion, delivered with a drop of populism – anyone can do it! – to
a herd of yearning humanity, spawned a flood of often regrettable
work. The problem was not in the raw material (although it must be
said that cheerleading, sexual initiation, and fear of football are
overdone) but in the fact that the work wasn't ready, and in some
cases would never be ready, for the stage.

I spotted Rhonnie Washington – one of my favorite local actors –
walking down Geary Boulevard toward the Phoenix box office. Pivoting
quickly, I followed and snagged one of two remaining tickets to God
Complex.

Gabriel Diani opened his show – a series of short, thematically linked
bits – playing a civic leader in ancient Egypt promoting the idea of an
afterlife as an effective spiritual bribe for an exploited populace. After a
jittery start, Diani locked in and proceeded to blaspheme for 45
delightful, smart minutes. He played, among others, Jesus, God, and
sometimes himself, precocious, a little rough around the edges, and
full of promise. As Christ he took a shot at Eurocentric Christians: "I
want to look European. I'm telling ya'; white people are gonna be big."
He delivered WWF-style play-by-play about gladiators massacring
Christians, echoing and reversing the same theme during a chance
encounter between a hiker and a murderous Christian zealot.

The audience laughed at Diani's sharp-witted, disarmingly weighty
observations that cut neatly through socially constructed defenses.
Toward the end, God offered a few thoughts on floods: All cultures
have floods, he confided, because when the waters recede, life begins
anew. People, in his estimation, like to screw up, knowing they have a
second chance. "My word isn't written in Hebrew or English," he said.
"It's written in the web of spiders, the roar of the wind, the dirt under a
person's fingernails. Whether or not I exist is irrelevant: the flood is
near."

The lights went up to huge applause, which barely ebbed before
volunteers cleared the house for the next show. In what I consider a
perfect Fringe moment, I segued effortlessly to what proved to be a
crowd-pleasing exploration of the dating experience, The Condom, the
Cucumber, and the Girl from Ipanema, courtesy of the Pauper
Etiquette Theatre Company Inc., from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The
company had issued this warning in the Fringe program: "Coarse
language, nudity, Canadian." The line was already long when I arrived.

Only in America

The oldest and most revered, the Broadway – or would Woodstock be
better? – of all fringe festivals takes place annually in Edinburgh,
Scotland. The town doubles in size, a vision of the idealized cultural
paradise that inspires smirks from Yankee know-it-alls – the practical
men, smart-ass cynics, conservatives, and neocons who rig the rules
of the cultural marketplace and then demand that art go out and do
business.

Augello also points to the lively, wildly popular fringe circuit in Canada
as an inspiration. "The Edmonton festival, which this year reportedly
drew more than 40,000 people, began some 20 years ago and
subsequently spread through the country," she says. She makes a
connection between the relatively small U.S. audiences and an
unadventurous streak in the American character. "In Canada," she
explains, "there's not as much of an attitude about the nonjurying.
We're just corporate designer people here in the states; everything
has to be approved before you buy it."

Flying blind

I was thinking about approval – from critics, culture-savvy piranhas,
even the Chronicle's much-hated "Little Man" – while entering the Exit
on Thursday night for Rogues' Yarn Theatre Co.'s Heart of Darkness.
I'd adopted a decision-making strategy loosely based on instinct and
novels I'd read in college; Darkness caught my attention. So, too, did
the program's testimonial from members of the Joseph Conrad
Society, who hailed the production as "The yardstick by which we
judge all adaptations of Conrad."

The society was, I assumed, an invention of the company, the blurb,
tongue-in-cheek. Today, even in England, tackling Conrad's saga of a
white man's burden in a world of dark-skinned savages is, well, an odd
choice. Perhaps the apostrophe after the s in Rogues' hinted at an
intellectual rigor that should have tipped me off – what artist has time
for grammar and punctuation? My guard was down, and anticipating a
production that began where Dennis Hopper's lunatic photographer left
off in Francis Ford Coppola's recently rereleased Apocalypse Now, I
took a seat. The Rogues, in fact, played it straight as an arrow, and I
believe that we were – the company, the audience, and me – the
worse for it. The acting wasn't bad, although Kurtz's death rattle was a
low point. But as the boat headed upriver, the room filled with the kind
of jungle sounds familiar to aficionados of 1950s American television:
chirps, wails, caws, and cries so thick as to nearly muffle the police
sirens that intermittently shrieked outside. The wall of noise, initially
intriguing – one rarely hears good jungle sounds anymore –
underscored the tedium of a script burdened by long passages of
narration, the fatal flaw in this Heart's heart.

Show time

The sale of 8,000 tickets may not sound like much when stacked up
against the Edmonton festival, but in the small if generally energetic
world of Bay Area theater, it's significant. American theater is not dying
("Artists are like weeds," Augello tells me. "You can't kill them, and they
can grow anywhere."), but burdened by expensive tickets and outdated
models, and out of touch with younger audiences, it's suffering. By
contrast, the Tenderloin theater scene is, for a couple of weeks
anyway, in high gear. Long lines cue up outside shows, and clusters of
people move from performance to performance as casually as if they
were headed for a movie.

The Fringe Festival is the kind of urban sideshow that attracts, in part,
some people with only a passing interest in theater. I cross-examined
anyone who'd talk to me, and some allowed that for them, theater
began and ended at the festival. Just as many, however, claimed to
love theater as much as they hate the expense and the sometimes
alienating social rituals that go with the territory. "How do you make
theater as important to a community as clean air?" Augello wonders
out loud. "As important as fresh water and the fire department? That's
a tough one. You have to build up from the community, until there's a
theater in every mall, along with Chuck E. Cheese, the Sizzler, and the
movies. It has to be part of daily activity."

I crammed 10 performances into three days, including Searching for
the '60s, Wendy Weiner's flirtation with solo quicksand – the overly
familiar theme, a lawnful of autobiographical detail ("I grew up in
Piedmont" is not much of a hook), and a gratuitous cheerleader
reference. Nevertheless, though long, it is funny and occasionally
touching. That was enough for me, given what might have happened,
and I was ready to file it as a solid if low-flying production when Weiner
pulled off a minor miracle in a finale so graceful and surprising that
Searching – against all odds – soared off into the night.

Kaliyuga Arts' cramped, busy The Pilgrim Project took potshots at
religious hypocrisy, Puritan lust, and the settlers' conspicuously slow
progress. Several actors gave solid performances, despite time and
space constraints. As it ended, Miles Standish wondered out loud why
his is the only pilgrim name anyone remembers. It's a question I have
never considered.

What little I know about mime didn't help me much with Stranger and
Stranger. The dance-theater piece Another Femme Fatale Freak
Show, by Monkeyhouse, was sexy, high-spirited, and visually dazzling,
a combination that shored up the company's limited movement
vocabulary. Sisters of Saturn, a collaboration between Bernadette
Quattrone and Kathleen McGinty Alomia, featured well-intentioned,
sometimes predictable testimony to friendship and the cycles and
successes of personal growth at the expense of other dramatic
possibilities.

Keeping it simple

I ran into Augello everywhere I went, or so it seemed, and she was in
her element. "Every year," she says, "I rush around everywhere trying
to get ready, wondering why I do it. And then I sit down at that first
show, and suddenly I'm in the middle of one of those moments, those
fragile moments – this is what matters to me. The bottom of the
pyramid is just as crucial as the top, and way more interesting as far
as I'm concerned. I'm so much more interested in the artist than the
creation."

I can only guess at the satisfaction she must feel, and though I
cheerfully believe it's possible and often helpful to pass judgment on
the merit of a production, without Augello and her allies, thousands of
San Franciscans would not be enjoying this year's festival. The town
would be much the poorer for it.

I share her affinity for small theater, although I'm wary of
oversimplifying the road ahead. Today, the most challenging,
demanding, and volatile elements in American culture are being
sacrificed to a mediocrity that's served up George Bush, Al Gore, a
new season of Ally McBeal, and Pearl Harbor. Of course, in the
interests of equal time, I should note that that same landscape has
birthed gifted playwrights like Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, and
José Rivera.

And then there's the 10th San Francisco Fringe Festival to consider, a
three-ring exercise in artistic democracy that for better or worse plays
by rules of its own. For a couple of energized weeks, the physical
divide, if nothing else, between pricey, big-budget theaters and the
stuff of the Tenderloin is blurred. The festival, always contradictory and
unpredictable, is also divine, disappointing, inspiring, and tedious.
Fringe 2001 is moving ahead according to plan.

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