"Take risks and have fun about it.”
That’s Trish Parry’s advice for anyone attending a Fringe festival for the first time.
She knows from risk. Parry and performing partner Will Glenn have appeared on Fringe stages all over the world in their show A Brief History of Beer, but they’ve never taken on the responsibility of staging a whole festival themselves.
Now, as co-directors of the first Tampa International Fringe Festival (with nonprofit imprimatur and promotional support provided by Jobsite Theater), that’s exactly what they’re doing.
And how will she judge whether the fest is a success — one that can be replicated year after year as it has been in cities like Orlando (25 years) and Philadelphia (20)?
“The happiness of the artists — audiences, too,” said the USF theater grad by phone from her home in Queens. “Basically, if I feel I put on an event that everyone is happy with — regardless of my personal well-being.” (She was nursing an aching back when we spoke.)
The city’s first Fringe will unfold over four days (May 11-14, with a special free preview on May 10 at CL Space) in six Ybor City venues, with three performances each of 29 shows by 112 performers from as far away as Australia and as close as Tampa Bay. Theater, comedy, music, storytelling and genre-crossing whatchamacallits, with subject matter and style ranging from the deeply serious to the deeply nutball, are all on the docket, and one of the cool parts of the fest is that not even the organizers know what some of the performers will be doing — at least until they see them in tech.
That’s because the artists are chosen by lottery, an approach established by the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, an accrediting body, to preserve the democratic ideal of the original Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland. So Parry and Glenn didn’t know what their first TiFf lineup would be until she picked the winners out of a hat at New World Brewery on Feb. 4. With 43 applicants for only 29 slots — and half of those slots reserved for local artists — there were sighs of resignation as well as victory whoops after the names were announced. But even then, the lineup wasn’t set; it would later turn out that three acts picked for the fest would decide not to participate, enabling TiFf to add four from the waiting list.
Some of the artists were already familiar to Parry and Glenn from their time on the Fringe circuit and from working in NYC at venues like the Horse Trade Theater Group and the FRIGID Fest, or from their USF connections (Glenn, like Parry, is a USF theater grad, as is sponsor/mentor David Jenkins of Jobsite). But other applicants were new to them, like Tampa’s Theatre eXceptional.
Artistic Director Brianna Larson was on hand for the lottery drawing. “I’m very excited — we were a little anxious,” she said upon hearing that her company would get to do its production, Tyler’s Time Out, starring her brother in the title role of a show inspired by Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Theatre eXceptional is dedicated to creating innovative theater and performance art with, for and about people with disabilities.
“We were still going to try and produce it anyway,” she said of the show, but the Fringe opportunity guarantees them three performances at Silver Meteor Gallery, with technical and promotional support provided by the festival. (Fringe artists pay a $25 application fee and a $100 registration fee once selected; they get to keep 100 percent of ticket proceeds.)
Other locals who made the cut include Nicole Jeannine Smith and Giles Davies in Lady Love; Lakeland playwright/actor Thom Mesrobian’s Callbacks; Masterwork by Lakeland playwright/actress Karissa Barber; Lutz’s Innovocative Theatre, doing the one-woman play Dark Vanilla Jungle; and (also out of Lutz) Kevin Michael Wesson’s late-night romp (or maybe it’s a break-in) at Silver Meteor Gallery, Where We Go Together or The Flashlight Play, whose “FREE SHOW” declaration (See “5 Fringiest Fringe Blurbs”) is somewhat at odds with the “all artists get paid” ethos established by CAFF. “We had to negotiate heavily,” says Parry. “Now he’s going to ask for cash afterwards.”
Parry is all for supporting the artists you know; she’s a fan of Smith and Davies, for instance, so Lady Love is a must on her list. She’s also looking forward to Game of Thrones: The Musical, as she’s a big GoT fan, and to Beyond the Front Lines: Warriors and Wives, which interests her because she comes from a military family. She’s excited about Carrie’s Little Lambs, too, because “the photos look insane!” (Indeed they do.) And she's a big fan of Tim Mooney and his virtuoso solo Shakespeare turns; for Tampa's Fringe, he’s reworking another of the Bard’s complicated heroes in Breakneck Julius Caesar (complete with surprise ending).
But, Parry adds, “Don’t make it a thing where you just go to one show that your friend invited you to.” Be open to discovery, share recommendations with people waiting in line, have a drink with the artists and fellow Fringe-goers hanging out at New World Brewery, aka Fringe Central.
Meanwhile, she’s faced with seeking discoveries of her own, like the policy for flyering and postering in Ybor (the City of Tampa hasn’t provided any answers yet) and the how-to’s for overseeing multiple box offices. (Admission to the festival as a whole requires purchase of a $5 Fringe button, which you can buy online, at New World, or at any of the venue box offices; tickets for individual shows will be sold online and at the venues, with prices ranging from $5-$13.) Housing out-of-town artists has proven to be a tougher challenge than she’d thought, too — primarily, she believes, because “people don’t understand Fringe yet.”
With any luck, we’ll all understand it better come May 14 — and clamor for more come 2018.
Looking for more advance info on the first-ever Tampa International Fringe Festival? Check out our interview with Dandy Darkly, our favorite out-there performer description blurbs, and some local and incoming shows we're really looking forward to! And find out more still at the fest's official website.