Tampa Fringe staff pose with local actors participating in the Seventh Annual Tampa International Fringe Festival in Ybor City this May. Credit: Photo by Jennifer Ring

I was there at the exact moment Tampa Fringe discovered they could have a year-round space in Ybor City.

It was January 5, 2023. A handful of arts professionals had just moved into the historic Ybor City Kress building at 1624 E. 7th Ave. Emiliano Settecasi opened his Department of Contemporary Art with a show about the future — an appropriate theme for a young curator moving into a new space. Next door, Jessica Todd showcased a collection of Jacob Z. Wan’s work in her new Parachute Gallery. And QUAID settled into their new location with Dinonetics: Fossilized Feelings and Prehistoric Misfortune.

It was a night of firsts, including the first time Tampa Fringe Producer Trish Parry got a good look at Ybor City’s hottest new art spot. And they still had spaces available to rent. Parry had just had dinner with Silver Meteor Gallery Director Michael Murphy. The two friends were discussing potential venues for Tampa Fringe when Murphy suggested they check out the opening receptions at the Kress building next door. Three months later, Parry and I returned to the Kress building with Festival Director William Glenn. Here we revisited that moment of inception, discussed what makes a theater, and talked about the future of Tampa Fringe.

“So, I’m wandering through here and there’s just studio after studio available and they were saying what the rent was,” Parry told me. “And I was like, oh, that is a risk that we can actually afford to take now. And then I ran into you, and you said something. And Mike Murphy just shut it down. Mike Murphy was like, ‘This is all off the record. We’re not talking about anything right now.’”

Well, it’s on the record now. Parry’s since talked it over with Glenn and Tampa Fringe’s Board of Directors, and they all agreed. Tampa Fringe would set up shop in the historic Ybor City Kress building. They started transforming the small space into a 30-40 seat black box theater in February.
It’s a big change for an annual theater festival that’s used to seizing whatever stage they can get.

Over the past six years, Tampa Fringe has set up shop in Silver Meteor Gallery, Urban Phoenix, Honey Pot, Hillsborough Community College, The Attic at Rock Brothers, Crowbar, and Bernini. After all this time converting restaurants, night clubs, and live music venues into temporary theaters, setting up a space in the Kress building is a relatively easy task for Parry and Glenn. When I asked the duo how they would take a space like this, historically a department store, and turn it into a theater, Glenn said, “looking at the questions you have for us, this is the one that isn’t hard to answer at all, because it’s the thing that we’ve been doing for six years. You go into an empty room, and you make it into a theater. There are the technical items that are kind of common. We’ll bring in a PA or amplification system for the audio. We’ll bring in some lights and a means of hanging them, whether that’s a truss or if we end up bolting pipe to the ceiling….” “But I think really what will make this room in a building that used to be a department store into a theater is when the artists come in and start sharing their work with audience members. To me, that’s how you turn an empty space into a theater.” Parry and Glenn have seen people convert bathrooms, hotel rooms, and private kitchens into theaters.

“You don’t need anything,” says Parry. “You got performers and an audience — you got two people, and you got a theater.” Creating a physical theater may be easy for Parry and Glenn, but creating theater Tampa remembers and loves is a much bigger challenge.

“At some point I started asking myself, ‘What does Tampa actually need?’” Parry told CL. “We have lots of theater. What is the niche that we can really fulfill? What have we been trying to do, and what could we actually try to do longer? And I realized it’s that incubation space. It’s having an affordable space for our local artists to create and learn.”

As they set up, Tampa Fringe is already considering how they can support local artists year-round in this new space. They’re tossing around ideas, and they’ve already come up with some great ones. This could be an affordable space for local artists to workshop a show, rehearse, or take acting classes. It can also be a space for fringe theater to grow in Tampa.

“It gives us more of a year-round footprint that will keep our festival in people’s minds throughout the year, and, therefore, will help to grow the festival,” Parry told CL. “We’re always trying to grow the festival…”

The Tampa International Fringe Festival has grown to include 31 shows this year. The list includes a kid-friendly stand-up comedy show hosted by writer/comedian Clark Brooks, a puppet show from Japan, the sequel to Jordan Bertke’s solo superhero show “The Sack,” and several solo storytelling shows. The team posts new show descriptions to the Tampa Fringe Facebook page nearly every day. All 31 shows are crammed into a fast five days in May, the 10th through the 14th. To see them all, you’d have to watch at a rate of about six shows a day. Most will be in the Kress building this year — in the new Fringe Theatre, Screen Door Microcinema, and actress Nicole Jeannine Smith’s studio, which they’re temporarily turning into “The Cage.”

“If you’re claustrophobic, don’t go see shows in The Cage,” says Parry. “It’s called The Cage for a reason.” The space only seats 15 and will host primarily stand-up and solo shows. Tampa Fringe has a lot to look forward to as they enter their seventh year, and so do we.

“There’s kind of an arts movement happening in Ybor right now,” says Parry. “This Kress building itself — this project of Darryl Shaw’s — is amazing because there’s so many different kinds of artist in here.”

It’s exactly the type of environment that could lead to interesting collaborations among artists. “I really want to bring different disciplines together, because you can utilize so many different disciplines within a performance art thing, and there’s not enough cross pollination happening, I feel. And in this very building, there’s a poetry writing workshop. It’s going to be awesome. It’s like a sandbox, a playground…”