The first group to perform on the first weekend of Seattle's SketchFest was a mediocre duo called Bucket. Their opening gambit involved an aborted blackface joke. The white half of the pair naively smeared on black makeup, saying: "I want to do a tribute to Canadian coal miners..." The more sensitive Korean half panicked: "Whoa, whoa—this is the United States. This is not gonna fly." That was the joke. It went downhill from there, with sketches involving gratuitous references to Derrida and Camus and backpedaling jokes about sketches that gratuitously reference Derrida and Camus. It was a mess. After intermission, the Cody Rivers Show, a stellar duo from Bellingham, shocked the audience back to life. They began with a synchronized dance routine dressed as Vikings then slid into ridiculously busy sweaters to deliver an infomercial in French on how to deal with les gens difficiles. The audience went nuts. It was a typical festival experience—cream rises, shit floats, and the two bob side by side, all with equal billing.
It was not so different at last weekend's Vancouver Fringe Festival, just more variety and volume—40,000 people, 74 groups, and all kinds of theater, from comedy to drama to puppets. The Cody Rivers Show drove up from Seattle's SketchFest, hotly anticipated with preview coverage and a cover photo on one of Vancouver's weekly newspapers. There was the inevitable garbage: Zombies, a trite solo show from Ontario about how boring people are. There was the crème de la crème: the Pajama Men, an intensely imaginative comedy duo from Chicago who leapt from character to character—cranky old people in a restaurant to two ninnies (both) named Nigel in a haunted house to a father and his snippy preteen daughter—and had the audience roaring. There was the fast and funny Excursionists, by Seattle actors Jonah Von Spreecken and Christopher Bange, about two Victorian Brits who set out in their invented underwater train to find a new England after the original England sinks.
Should Seattle miss its fringe festival? It was born in 1991 and died, disastrously, in 2003, so deep in debt it couldn't disburse the ticket money each act had rightfully earned.
Arguments against fringe festivals usually run like this: Good shows will find an audience on their own; the festivals attract swarms of mediocre artists who inflict self-indulgent effluvia on defenseless audiences. But that is only part of the picture—besides great out-of-towners (will someone please, please, please bring the Pajama Men for a Seattle run?), there are good local acts that we miss for lack of a festival. Gloomology, a morbid solo comedy by Von Spreecken of The Excursionists, earned consistently enthusiastic reviews throughout the 2005 Canadian fringe circuit, the rough east-to-west arc many performers follow in a cross-continental road trip. But Gloomology hasn't had a Seattle performance because of the financial risks—paying for a venue, a technical crew, and publicity, all of which are covered by festivals in exchange for the participation fee (usually between $500 and $700). If the fringe festival is run correctly (timed to land in late September at the tail end of the Canadian fringe season; the performers keep their box-office revenues—neither of which was the case until late in the Seattle festival's doomed life), the payoff for quality acts is tempting. The Pajama Men sold out their first night in Vancouver, a 400-seat venue, at $12 a ticket. That's $4,800 a night, $24,000 for their five performances at a single festival.
Founded in 1999, Seattle SketchFest is the closest thing we have to a fringe festival—and it's growing. In a book-happy, theater-happy town that couldn't sustain a Bookfest or a fringe festival, Seattle's SketchFest is small, but actually growing. According to artistic director Val Bush, in 2003, 400 people attended; in 2005, 800. Earned income has grown from $9,000 in 2001 to $15,000 in 2005 and donations and grants have gone from $1,000 in 2003 to $8,000 thus far in 2006.
Managing director Ian Bell attributes the success to lean staff: "Small-cell arts organizations are just more nimble. Besides the volunteers and board, we have three staffers and everybody knows what's going on; fewer things fall through the cracks." And fundraising: "We put as much effort into it as the festival, if not more." And fiscal conservatism: "Every budget is based on what we have in the bank. We just don't ever, ever spend money we don't already have."
Seattle can't technically miss a well-designed fringe festival—it never had one. But we should want the festival that wasn't: lean, nimble, financially sane, designed to attract successful touring shows, and scheduled for September, the end of the Canadian circuit. SketchFest is already leading the way.
