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San Francisco Fringe Festival 2003
SF Chronicle September 6, 2003 (Robert Hurwitt)
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Take a chance. Take a pass. Bring a throw pillow. Advice and opinions abound at the San Francisco Fringe Festival, where everyone's a critic and just about anything goes.

 

Follow the buzz. The first rule of fringe festivals is the hardest one for a critic to observe. No, not because we think we know better than anybody else (not always, anyway). It's just that there's usually very little buzz to follow by the time most critics attend.

Still, two of the three San Francisco Fringe Festival shows I saw Thursday - - all on their festival opening nights -- had generated enough word of mouth already to make me very glad I'd listened in one case and genuinely rueful that I hadn't in the other. Fringe rule No. 987: You just have to quash that fear that somebody in another theater is having a much better time.

Now in its 12th year, the second-oldest fringe festival in the United States (after Seattle's) is an unjuried affair -- following in the tradition of the oldest and largest of the lot: the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, born when eight companies showed up uninvited at the first Edinburgh International Festival in 1947. The 54 companies at this year's fest -- from locales as far- flung as Melbourne, Australia; Sedona, Ariz.; Vancouver, British Columbia; San Diego; New York; Folkestone, England; Juneau, Alaska; and Berkeley -- gained entry on a first-come basis.

That means that even Exit Theatre directors Christina Augello and Richard Livingston -- founders and executive producers of the Fringe -- have little more idea than I of what's going to be hot this year when we trade tips in the theater hallway Thursday. This is the second night of the festival, and audiences are always sparse the first two weekday nights. Buzz hasn't reached the faint-hum level yet. Even the very helpful Fringe Festival Web site has only a smattering of audience reviews so far.

Fringe Rule No. 69: Check out those audience reviews. They're often as refreshingly brutal as enthusiastic ("ridiculing the all-too-commonly ridiculed," "There are good parts in the scripts, and there is some good acting talent, but the good parts of both never quite seem to match up"). They provide useful advice ("Bring a throw pillow"). And you'll find observations you won't read in most newspapers ("Wish she could explain the unexplainable: Why does any woman now stay a Mormon?").

Fringe Rule No. 70: Beware the audience reviews, or at least apply a few grains of salt. Some are written by friends, family or members of the company. One upbeat review I read Thursday was for a show that wouldn't open until Friday.

I like the Fringe. The potluck format appeals to my sense of theatrical adventure, and most of my annual visits have yielded one or two truly exciting experiences. This year, with only one night to sample the wares, I decided to stick to Fringe Central -- the Exit on Eddy Street, where I could catch the maximum possible three of the 18 shows on tap that night. A visit to one of the outlying venues would have cut my options to two.

The Exit Cafe and the crowded central hallway leading to the two theaters is the best place to pick up audience buzz (Fringe Rule No. 189: Watch out for actors dashing down the hallway with armloads of costumes or parts of the set between shows). Thursday, though, audience members are outnumbered by performers -- some in costume, some in clown noses -- promoting their shows. Talk of shows seen is minimal compared to performance evaluations of the evening's minor earthquake.

I'd already made my choices, based on the usual onslaught of press releases,

tips from festival publicists and staff members, some past experience and a certain amount of gut feeling. All of which served me pretty well for the first, a 7 p.m. show at the Exit, J.B. Enterprises' "Crime and Variations," a sly, funny and curiously, creatively twisted tale of Stephen Sondheim facing a creative crisis over his newest musical.

This one had looked promising for several reasons besides its subject. Playwright Joe Besecker has a long, productive local track record, including some plays ("Tennessee in the Summer," most notably) that have been widely produced. Director and designer John Sowle has an equally impressive performance history, particularly with his Kaliyuga Arts partner Steven Patterson, who plays Sondheim.

"Crime" pays. True, the script is a little repetitive and at times self- indulgently catty, and the acting is uneven. But Besecker invents a funny situation -- Sondheim sulking on his 45th floor Manhattan patio (a playfully attractive set by Sowle) after a disastrous backers' audition for his new musical about Alex King, who killed his father with a baseball bat before trying to hide the evidence by burning the house down. Then Besecker turns it on its head with some very clever twists.

It is, as advertised, "a classic bitch-fest" among Patterson's depressed, caustic and lecherous Sondheim; a wily, animal-sexy Alex (Kevin Malfatti, a bit overmatched by the part); his wealthy, older wife (Carolyn Doyle); and a bitter, ambitious, sexually ravenous Daisy (daughter of Hal) Prince (a sharp, dynamic Jennifer Taggert). But it's also something more. Beyond the theater in- jokes and cunning lampoons of Sondheim songs, "Crime" works some creative twists on the writing process -- and the author as subject -- itself.

"Clearing Hedges," my second show, was chosen less for its subject (Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the dominant female track and golf athlete of the '30s through the '50s) than its provenance. Chicago writer-performer Jennifer Barclay had developed it in a workshop with Mary Zimmerman, creator of the magical "Metamorphoses" (and the forthcoming "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" at Berkeley Rep).

As staged by Jay Paul Skelton, "Hedges" shows little debt to Zimmerman, but it's a direct, compact, engaging and deftly performed solo. Barclay, an athlete as well as a busy Chicago actor (she had to take a two-week leave from another show for the Fringe), builds her portrait from several points of view - - Babe's, her wrestler-manager husband's, her sister's, her possible lesbian lover's -- quickly shifting characters and their ages with a good use of accents, tone and body language.

Back in the cafe between shows (beer, wine, other beverages and such offerings as taquitos, pizza and quiche), there's just a bit of buzz about my last choice -- Richard Kenji Shields' new musical "Neon's Crazy Blue" -- and it's negative. I should have listened. An ill-fated romance with a Noh-theater- style demon, it's ineptly written, flatly staged (by Michael Carlisi) and indifferently performed -- by a cast that, in fairness, looks marooned by the material. Ah well. Fringe Rule No. 10: Unlike the lottery, the more chances you take, the more likely you'll come up with a winner.

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