Above: Playbills from the 2024 Raleigh Fringe Festival

RALEIGH, NC – It’s tempting to call 2024 the Year of the Fringe, what with fringe groups, leveraging fringe politics, mounting fringe candidates whose behavior in some cases has gone – well, beyond the fringe. But last weekend in Raleigh, an impressive constellation of imaginative artists, and a small but seemingly tireless cadre of organizers, technicians and volunteers reclaimed and redefined the term.

For those unfamiliar, the theater’s fringe movement got underway in 1947, after eight Scottish troupes became somewhat piqued at being excluded from the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival. The octet collectively said what the hell, showed up anyway, and brazenly staged their unauthorized works along the festival’s borders. Thus, the first fringe festival was born.

Following psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s famous dictum, “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size,” the Edinburgh Fringe grew. Eventually, it exponentially outstripped the International, becoming in the process the world’s largest performing arts festival. (This year’s iteration during the month of August hosted over 3,300 different productions – that’s not a typo – in 262 venues across the city and its environs.)

Over recent decades, some 200 similar festivals have cropped up across the world (including two springtime fests in North Carolina: the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival and Boom Charlotte). 

Though they frequently seem haphazard and eclectic, fringe festivals still fill several vital functions in the theatrical ecosystem. 

They give promising, up-and-coming artists – many of whom don’t begin to have the funding to hire out a venue and produce their works on their own – a relatively low-cost, low-stakes place to build community, meet other artists and audiences, experiment, present their newest work and (sometimes, at least) find proof of concept for their wildest ideas.

They also give audiences a place to sample from a smorgasbord of new art and artists that are often innovative, original and edgy. Rosters of brief, 30-minute to hour-long productions let viewers encounter several new works in an afternoon or evening, giving more artisans more opportunities for exposure. 

In doing so, fringe festivals support creators and work that are situated, not in the mainstream, but on the borders of the known. That is crucial if an art form and an arts community are to grow; after all, that’s where new art frequently comes from – the edges, and not the center. 

Reason enough, all told, to cheer on Mikki Marvel, Emily Freer, Pimpila Violette and Ariel Fay Gray – and sound and light board engineers Grace Tomasino and Josh Spector – who dreamed, organized and then muscled this impressive first iteration of a Raleigh Fringe Festival into being. It’s also reason to give gratitude to sponsor Theatre Raleigh Arts Center, which turned their campus over to the festival for the weekend when they hosted the event. 

With over 500 attendees attending the 12 mainstage productions and affiliated jams, workshops, prop swaps and screenings over the weekend, product demand has been demonstrated. The region’s artists and audiences clearly need this. We can’t wait for version 2.0, next year. 

 

The most promising work of the 2024 festival came on opening night, in the first public appearance from a new company, Hypothetical Futures. Playwright and performer Jonathan Fitts worked locally at North Raleigh Arts and Culture Theater and Burning Coal Theatre in the early 2010s, before his literary and theatrical walkabout in New York after graduate work at NYU, and a subsequent stint as a screenwriter in Los Angeles.

His new one-person show has the potentially off-putting title The Eschatology of Terence McKenna. But relax: Fitts’ entertaining and brisk – if somewhat mislabeled – solo piece is no arid post-grad treatise on an obscure ethnobotanist from Berkeley. Instead, it’s a remarkably candid, clear-eyed, autobiographical – and extemporaneous – account of how Fitts came to dose himself with dimethyltryptamine, a powerful psychotropic drug also known as DMT.

The pathway to those particular doors of perception take him – and us – through a series of unlikely episodes. After recounting a breakfast skirmish at Denny’s with his grandfather in the retirement community of Villages, Florida (which found notoriety after achieving that state’s highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases in the early 2000s), an undergraduate gut class on “Conscience and Consciousness” leads Fitts into a vividly detailed recount of Yale anthropologist Michael Harner’s experiences in an ayahuasca ritual in the Amazon in the 1960s.  

Fitts is a captivating storyteller, whose penchant for straight-no-chaser autobiographical reportage leavens bemused personal reflections reminiscent of a Spalding Gray and what sounds at times like some of the less aghast cultural analyses of Mike Daisey (with whom Fitts studied).

As he weaves the threads of his addled soujourn in Los Angeles with memories of his grandfather, we sense the desire for transcendence, if not out-and-out escape, that haunts him and his patriarch both. A childhood spent in a family “waffling between conservative Southern Baptist Christianity and really conservative Catholicism, so I get the best of both worlds of trauma” has prompted many to seek such an exit.

Fitts’ ultimate compassion for McKenna, his grandfather, and an unlikely cast of fellow transients including both lead vocalists for the recently reformed 90s rock band Linkin Park, is only underlined by the show’s offbeat, home-brew lighting design. In a Millennials’ version of what once would have been a tale told by a campfire, a laptop screen and a cheap plastic nightlight now provide the only sources of light in our darkened room. As Fitts crouches over both, an odd intimacy develops – one that Edward R. Murrow, of all people, might once have recognized, between himself, his subjects and everybody out there, watching and listening, in the dark. 

And that’s where Fitts leaves us: not with a prayer for the dead – not exactly – but a sober and grateful acknowledgement instead among sojourners, on what David Byrne once designated, cheerfully enough, as the road to nowhere. 

There’s talk of a revival for the production, around the holidays. Stay tuned.

Woman acting with puppets on hands, standing in front of a woman writing with a feather quill and a woman playing the piano.

Suzanne James, Alissa Roca, Gwen Hyland – and puppets – in Paradox Opera’s Don Giovanni (Abridged) at the Raleigh Fringe Festival

Sometimes you just have to say, well, we couldn’t have seen that one coming. 

COVID Chronicles, the opening pandemic-based production by those upstarts at Paradox Opera, was followed by its empassioned rejoinder, Autonomy, a suite of commissioned new-music works about the reversal of Roe v. Wade

So, after the company took a holiday break with the operatic chestnut, Amahl and the Night Visitors, what would be their next move? 

Why, a take on Mozart’s war horse, Don Giovanni. Inspired by the comedians of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. 

Of course.

This RSC’s fractious theatrical franchise of abridged literature includes The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged), which presented all 37 of Shakespeare’s works – well, sorta – in a brief and single evening, The Bible (abridged), All The Great Books (abridged), and The Complete History of America (abridged). Among others.

But operatic baritone – and now, playwright and librettist – Gwen Hyland had the nerve to one-up the RSC’s shtick. 

After all, their corpus is always performed by three actors. 

This abridgement of Don Giovanni uses two: Hyland, and Paradox’s founder, soprano Alissa Roca.

True, the couple certainly has their hands full as they animate a series of puppets to flesh out the major roles in the script. Hyland brings flawless pitch – and nimble, mischievous narcissism – to the title role. In this version, Don Giovanni, somehow still immaculately coiffed and costumed after 400 years of torment (having been dragged down to Hell by the worst dinner guest in history, the ghost of Il Commendatore), has ginned up a parole hearing before a Seraph from heaven (Roca). 

Why? After having been forced to listen to his own opera performed, in endless rotation, over the last four centuries (a torment indeed), he’s reformed. 

No, really. (And cue those Carol Channing batted eyelashes.)

The festival audience howled as Hyland and Roca subbed in significantly different lyrics to Mozart’s score, including particularly risqué addendums to La ci darem la mano (There we will hold hands) and Mi tradi quell’alma ingrate (Cruel heart, thou hast betrayed me). Seemingly the only time their jokes didn’t land was when brisk pacing or volume made them momentarily unintelligible. 

But can all things possibly end in goodness and light when one of history’s greatest seducers tries to mack on a angel? Audiences will have to see for themselves when the troupe restages this ribald operatic confection, possibly in one of the region’s piano bars, in the months ahead.

 

Representations of artificial intelligence entities have certainly varied over the years, from Haley Joel Osment in A.I. to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, with more nuanced recent reads from Rachel Roberts, Alicia Vikander and local hero Evan Rachel Wood. But indefatigable performer Patrick Basquill and keyboardist Thaddaeus (Daddius) Freidline filled in a missing blank – AI as a digital, fun-loving bro? – in the curious but not fully thought-through interactive music theater piece, party robot

Basquill’s character has one purpose alone: to make life itself a perfect party for his users. But, as no less of an authority than Prince once observed, parties weren’t meant to last. We can sense this makes the end of a party something of an existential threat to this character, who tries to forestall that conclusion as long as he can. Though Freidline’s high-energy dance-music soundtrack was the strongest element, it didn’t ultimately mask a work whose numbers lingered well after making their points.

 

Kevin Aponte, Akili Holder-Cozart, and director Nat Sherwood secured their most valuable player status during 7 Tales from 7 Voices, a retrospective of short scripts over recent years from Cary Playwrights Forum. In April Giancola’s opening sketch, Buckle Up, Aponte telegraphed the comic envy and disappointment of an abused airline passenger while Holder-Cozart dished out slipshod customer service. Later, Sherwood achieved uncanny, moving – and deeply disturbing – moments with both actors when their characters had unlikely (and possibly unhealthy) reunions with their respective dogs in Mac McCord’s Serling-esque The (Dog) Park.

Eight actors bowing at curtain call

The cast from The Standbys’ Give My Regards to (off) Broadway at the Raleigh Fringe Festival

Elsewhere we noted strong beginnings and further development needed in Hayley Cartee‘s enigmatic clown show, Toast-Her, and soulful performance by spoken word performer Indigo and disclosive interpretive dance in Roni Nicole‘s introspective ritual work, Our Hues Are Enuff to Withstand the Storm. An intercultural interface between step-dancing and classical Indian Kathak was the most fascinating part of Seema Viswanath‘s Taali se Taal Tak / When Clap Narrates, and Averi Zimmerman and Jesse Farmer sliced the Gordian knot of Jonathan Larson’s interpersonal fugue, “Therapy,” from Tick, Tick…BOOM! in The Standby’s opening-night showcase, Give My Regards to (off) Broadway.

Not up to par: the disappointing Hearts & Minds from Sumter, South Carolina’s Outside the Box Theatre. The energy from the youthful cast was good. But despite references to contemporary tech, most of writer and director Carlos Waters’ dated, hackneyed and relentlessly heterosexual sketches in this “guide to relationships” seem to have been lifted from a time capsule buried in the hip-and-happening early 1970s. Plus, sloppy swordplay with foils in a dueling scene appeared unchoreographed – a decision that could easily have put performers and bystanders in danger.

 

Editor’s Note October 4, 2024: Updated for minor typos.