by Brendan Kiley

Listening to artists talk about the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival's financial trouble, I'm amazed by the passive resignation to an obvious and enormous blunder. "Finger-pointing won't fix anything," they very charitably say. "Let's just move on."

To hell with that. I want to see more than pointed fingers--I want to see heads roll. We shouldn't move on yet for three simple reasons:

1. In a letter to Fringe Fest participants, Seattle Fringe Theatre Productions' board president, R. David Persson, wrote that "when [SFTP executive director] Andrew Haines assumed leadership of this organization one year ago, the financial problems were already in place." One year? Does this mean SFTP signed artists' contracts knowing, or even suspecting, they couldn't be honored? If so, they are liars and cheats.

2. I'm a fan of accountability. Immediately letting responsible parties off the hook--indeed, not even asking who they are and what they were thinking--creates a culture of permissiveness in which actions have no consequences and this kind of mistake can be made again and again. SFTP has been negligent at best, dishonest at worst. Either way, this is serious business. Somebody has to take responsibility.

3. Asking participants for donations before confessing they can't be paid is crass. Thinking broke artists would make good donors is foolish, and I suspect SFTP paid vendors before artists because vendors can afford lawyers. And I can't understand how the board failed to learn its lesson--come clean early, avert disaster--from ACT, which nearly died of the same closemouthed disease mere months ago.

Somebody (or -bodies) fucked up big-time. He or she (or they) should be publicly identified, interrogated, and, if the public finds it appropriate, scourged. Whoever fumbled probably did so with the best intentions, but good intentions don't pay the rent. Good results should be rewarded, bad results condemned.