The Big Time!
Left Coast Theatre at Nippon Kan Theatre
Sat July 26, 5 pm.
Vera Wilde
Left Coast Theatre at Nippon Kan Theatre
Sat July 26, 8 pm.
Grueling performance schedules, the most competitive theater market in the world, negative profit margins, and only a circumstantial glimmer of reward--why would anyone consent to produce a show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?
"It's impossible to explain," said longtime Seattle theater veteran Kibby MacKinnon, who is directing two local plays for this year's festival. "The energy and excitement there is just unbelievable--it's bigger than anything I've ever experienced."
The former executive director of the Seattle Fringe Festival, Ms. MacKinnon and her husband, Adam, will export five actors and two shows to Scotland's August theater circus--Vera Wilde by Chris Jeffries, and The Big Time! by writer and NPR producer John Moe, with music by Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America. The Edinburgh Experience, in all its writhing, chaotic glory, is what's drawing them there, despite dizzying rehearsal schedules and a significant dent in their personal budgets.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe began in 1947, when eight theater companies were cut from the then larger Edinburgh International Festival. The rejects held their own festival "on the fringe," and an annual tradition was born, growing into one of the biggest, weirdest, best-attended arts events in the world. Fringe 2003 will present 21,594 scheduled performances of 1,541 shows by 668 companies in 207 venues--all in a town of only 450,000 people.
It is also one of the world's most open-access festivals, as Fringe staffers organize, but strictly refuse to regulate, the event. This year, scheduled performance venues include a public toilet, a roving red Ford Escort, and an elevator. The Fringe welcomes all comers--from plays directed by Anthony Hopkins to Japanese-language Shakespeare troupes to your hapless neighborhood mime--attracting performance artists in variety as well as bulk.
"That's the beauty of the Fringe," said Mr. MacKinnon. "Anyone can appear if they have the will and the means."
Its ridiculously gargantuan scale is the festival's blessing and its curse. If the beauty is that anyone can appear, some ugliness lies in the fact that very few will succeed.
"One friend I know went to the Fringe," said ensemble member Brian Neel, "and saw the best show he'd ever seen. It was his top theater experience--and there were five people in the audience."
Despite the daunting task of cracking a saturated audience market, the MacKinnons expect Seattle's offerings to strike a noticeable chord. "These plays represent the finest of what our homegrown folks have to offer," said Ms. MacKinnon. "They have their own accent and will translate as something special in Edinburgh. They come from a particular cultural perspective that is Seattle."
The humbly provincial among us (me included) might not recognize a distinct Seattle stage flavor, but as Big Time! playwright John Moe observed, we do some things differently and better--comedy and pop music, for example. The Big Time! is an all-ages comedy about a sock, a lamp, and a vacuum cleaner who start a household rock band called the Things.
"Good comedy in Seattle is played a lot more truthfully than in other cities," said Moe. "Yes, it's a sock playing guitar, and that's a silly notion. But there's a fully realized character in that sock --we can take things that lend themselves to smirking and mugging and approach them with real honesty."
Vera Wilde, on the other hand, follows the lives of Oscar Wilde and Vera Zasulich, a mostly forgotten Russian revolutionary who inspired one of Wilde's earliest (and worst-received) plays. While The Big Time! pulls from local comedy and music, Vera Wilde reflects a more radical gleam. "I think a lot of what inspired Chris Jeffries to write the play were his experiences at the WTO," said Ms. MacKinnon. "It almost has step-by-step instructions for change--and shows that it doesn't involve a lot of glamour."
The normal production process has been intensified to corral five actors into two shows, with rehearsals going eight hours a day, six days a week. "There's less time for niceties," said ensemble member Lindsay Brandon Hunter, "and there's a kind of dual preparation--as much as the show has to be ready, we all have to be ready to pack up our lives for six weeks."
Besides the oft-cited gritty struggles of the Edinburgh Fringe, there is some promise of reward. In a festival crawling with promoters and performers, one never knows who might show up. Perhaps even Anthony Hopkins on one of his off nights. "No matter what you expect, it will be different," said Brian Neel. "It's best to be Zen-like about the whole thing--but of course you're not. Your stomach's all curled up."
And if the seats don't sell, there's always the fun of having weathered the infamous Edinburgh Experience. As ensemble member John Osebold said, "Everyone keeps telling me I'm going to have the most incredible time."
