Fringe magnet

Fiely A. Matias's international fringe hit, Lounge-zilla!, is set to invade the Edmonton festival. (Fringe Theatre Adventures)

It was 25 years ago this August, in the city of Edmonton, that Brian Paisley created a monster.

Armed with a fistful of grant money and charged with the job of spending it on something theatrical, Paisley organized a little festival in Edmonton’s historic Old Strathcona neighbourhood. Based on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but with some significant modifications, it featured 45 acts giving 220 performances and had a budget of $50,000.

This year, on Aug. 16, the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival kicks off its second quarter-century with 146 acts, 1,058 performances, a budget of $2.1 million and a projected attendance of more than half a million visitors. It’s the oldest and biggest fringe festival in North America, the spark that ignited a movement which now consists of some 40 similar events across the continent.

Back in 1982, did the Dr. Frankenstein of the fringe ever think he might be unleashing a theatrical phenomenon?

“Of course I did,” declares the Irish-born Paisley, who now pursues a career as a screenwriter in Victoria. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ll start this and then, 25 years from now…’” Unable to sustain the joke, he lapses into one of his genial laughs. “No, it’s true, you never know with these things,” he adds seriously. “You just take a chance. We did the first fringe as a lark, in a sense. The grant was a gift from the city and they needed something done with it, and with a little help from my friends, I pulled it off. I don’t even think the people from the city bothered to come down and see it that first year.”

The initial festival, which sold 7,500 tickets, was meant to be a one-off, he says. “But then everyone said, ‘We’re going to do this again next year, right?’” They did — and doubled their audience. And again in 1984, when the previous year’s attendance was doubled yet again. By then, Paisley & co. realized their laissez-faire experiment — give little theatre groups a space, some tech support, and then let them do whatever the heck they wanted — was filling an obvious gap for both artists and audiences. Here was live theatre for the price of a movie ticket, offering new and uncensored plays that ran the gamut of subject matter and competed for attention with lurid posters and zany titles.

Before the end of the ’80s, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal had caught the fringe virus, too, building a chain of festivals strung across the summer calendar.

Playwright/director/producer Stewart Lemoine launched his career at Edmonton's fringe festival. (Teatro la Quindicina)

Today, it’s hard to imagine a time when Canada didn’t have a fringe circuit; a whole generation of theatre artists has come tumbling out of its makeshift venues, including such originals as adult puppeteer Ronnie Burkett, playwrights Brad Fraser and Stewart Lemoine, comedienne Sandra Shamas, horror clowns Mump and Smoot and the One Yellow Rabbit ensemble. More recently, the seeds of mainstream hits — the Tony Award-winning The Drowsy Chaperone, the TV-bound ’Da Kink in My Hair — have been sown on the fringe; while fringe-bred solo performers like Rick (MacHomer) Miller and Charles (One Man Star Wars Trilogy) Ross have found international success touring their wry tributes to pop-culture icons.

The bigger fringes also cultivate homegrown stars — artists whose work acquires a local following over time and often sells on name alone. None more so than Edmonton, where a new show by hometown heroes like Chris (BoyGroove) Craddock or drag-queen supreme Darrin Hagen is always a must-see. Both are featured at this year’s festival — dubbed “Live and Let Fringe” in honour of the year ‘007 — with Craddock taking on celebrity worship in a new play called PopTART, while Hagen’s Guys in Disguise does a transgender riff on John Hughes with the road comedy Planes, Trans and Automobiles.

Lemoine was the Edmonton Fringe’s first local star. His company, Teatro la Quindicina, founded for the first festival (and named, in the random and obscure fashion favoured by fringe artists, after a brothel in Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt), played every Edmonton Fringe, bar one, until 2002 and amassed a loyal following. Without the fringe, it seems doubtful that his quirkily nostalgic comedies would have found a home in the mainstream theatre.

“You could write anything you wanted at the fringe,” recalls the prolific playwright, “because you knew you were kind of on a buffet, so somebody was going to want what you had, but there wasn’t any pressure to make sure everyone wanted it. And there wasn’t any pressure to make a producer buy into it.” Eventually, Teatro acquired its own theatre, the Varscona, and now produces a regular season of Lemoine’s work outside the fringe.

There are lots of success stories like that, says Julian Mayne, executive director of Fringe Theatre Adventures, the company that runs the Edmonton Fringe. “What you’ve got [with the fringe festivals] is an incubator of talent. It allows people to be extremely creative, without any restrictions, and I can’t help but think that’s got to translate to an increased creativity across Canada within the theatrical community.”

Mayne, who joined the Edmonton festival in 2006 after managing the city’s Winspear concert hall, says the fringe is going to have to grow in the future to keep pace with that creativity. “We had far more applications than we could accept this year — as we always do,” he says. “If we could accept everybody, I’d be thrilled. But to do that we need more revenue and more venues.”

The festival already has one of the sweetest setups of any fringe. Every August, it takes over the entire Strathcona theatre district for 11 days, turning it into an enormous street party whose outdoor attractions — from buskers to beer tents — draw almost seven times as many people as the indoor shows. It has even given rise to its own fringe around the fringe — the Bring Your Own Venues or BYOV’s. Instead of using one of the theatres provided by the festival, artists find their own playing spaces in the neighbourhood, which can be in anything from churches to bars. The idea was introduced in 1992 and this year half the festival’s 24 venues are BYOV’s.

Edmonton's Panties Productions delivers a surreal new comedy, Lobster Telephone, at this year's festival. (Fringe Theatre Adventures)

“I think that’s a wonderful way for the fringe to grow,” says Mayne. He adds that the BYOV managers could also begin personally programming their spaces in the style of the Edinburgh Fringe, where major theatres such as the Traverse present their own “seasons” within the larger festival.

Lemoine likes the idea of venues with hand-picked acts. He and Teatro quit the fringe five years ago, after he decided he no longer wanted to submit to its method of choosing participants by lottery. “There’s a certain frustration now because of the lottery system,” he says. “Established professionals who could be doing good things at the fringe find it a little bit off-putting to go through the lottery process. So there’s a spotty presence by mid-level successful theatre artists now.” He says the festival’s overall quality suffers as a result.

The fringe still follows Paisley’s original guidelines, which were formally enshrined in 1990 with the founding of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (CAFF). Its 21 Canadian and U.S. members abide by principles that include accepting any and all participants on a first-come, first-served or lottery basis and letting artists keep 100 per cent of the box-office take.

Paisley thinks the fringe’s quality can be improved without bending the rules. “Maybe its organizers have to go out again and look for stuff, the way we did in the early years,” he says. “There’s always a danger of organizational complacency. If I saw an artist that was promising and thought they belonged at the fringe, I’d encourage them to apply.”

In recent years, Edmonton and its CAFF brethren have also been criticized for taking on large corporate sponsors, trademarking the term “fringe” and allegedly losing their egalitarian nature by charging artists’ application fees. But Paisley believes the festivals still fulfill his initial intentions. “They’ve passed the torch along faithfully,” he says. “There always has to be a place where the novice or beginner can go, or where the experienced artist can try new work, and the fringe provides that. I can’t see the fringe’s energy dissipating until the day that nobody wants to do live theatre anymore.”

The Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival runs Aug. 16 to 26 in Edmonton.

Martin Morrow writes for CBCNews.ca Arts.

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