The Castle
by Franz Kafka, adapted by David Fishelson and Aaron Leichter from a dramatization by Max Brod
Second Stage at The Adrienne Theater
September 3 - 22, 2013
Directed by Tina Brock
Director
Tina Brock
Costume Design
Erica Hoelscher
Scenic Design
Anna Kiraly
Lighting Design
Robin Stamey
Stage Manager/Light and Sound Operator
Carrie Ryan
Technical Director
Chris J. Kleckner
Sound Design
Tina Brock
Assistant Costumer
Jessica Barksdale
Set Painting
Tina Brock, Chris J. Kleckner, Carrie Ryan, Bob Schmidt
Box Office Wizardry
Eileen O’Brien
Photoshop Magic
Bill Brock
Photography
Johanna Austin / AustinArt.org)
Produced by arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
The IRC’s 2013 season is made possible in part by generous grants from Wyncote Foundation, The Samuel S. Fels Fund, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, The Charlotte Cushman Foundation, Ernst & Young, LCC and Plannerzone.
Playing time is approximately 75 minutes; there will be no intermission.
*Member of Actors Equity Association
Reviews
The Castle (2013)
"IRC's excellent CASTLE gets the Kafkaesque to a K. Weird enough to please even the Weirdmeister."
Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"The Castle is pure Kafka, and this Philly Fringe Festival entry, highly entertaining.”
Howard Shapiro, Newsworks
“…recognizes the absurdity of the mindless bureaucracy, meaningless protocol, and numbing totalitarian control…”
“...a ridiculously funny, chilling, and provocative show.”
Debra Miller, Phindie.com
Director's Notes
September, 2013
This play made me laugh and cry at the same time.
As a producer and director, The Castle contains the grandiosity of a sweeping period movie, the antics of a Buster Keaton film, the crazy characters out of a Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) story, and the all-too familiar frustrations of living in our overly complicated world: navigating bureaucracy and the challenges of communicating in the 21st century. In short, a great recipe for an absurdist/existential story about a man and his simple mission to be understood and accepted by others, to be admitted into the circle he desires most.
Since June, the Villagers and designers working on The Castle have grappled with how to translate and illustrate the gargantuan themes Kafka poses. For some of us, these issues resonated in our own lives as we weathered many personal challenges this summer. It’s been a journey unlike any other in the 8 years the IRC has been in existence, and I believe I can say we are all better for having taken it. I am beyond fortunate to be working with the creative people involved. This group, most of whom you’ve seen in nearly every show the IRC has staged since 2006, are the definition of The Village People, and without their ongoing commitment, perseverance and support, my absurdist small theater fire would have been extinguished long ago. It is the collective force and energy of everyone here, and many more in the audience, the sound booth and the wings that make it happen.
So here’s to making the journey, not giving up, persevering, standing up for your passion.
--Franz Kafka
Well wishes,
Tina Brock
Producing Artistic Director
September 6, 2013
Toby Zinman @tobyzinman
IRC's excellent CASTLE gets the Kafkaesque to a K. Weird enough to please even the Weirdmeister.
#philastage
September 9, 2013
NewsWorks WHYY-91FM
by Howard Shapiro
FRANZ KAFKA'S THE CASTLE.
Franz Kafka's unfinished novel, which was completed by his editor and published in 1926, makes a perfect fit for the city's edgy Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium.
"The Castle" is pure Kafka, and this Philly Fringe Festival entry, highly entertaining. A land surveyor called to work at a distant castle finds he's up against a bureaucracy whose control is paramount and whose reasoning is nil.
He also finds, of course, that he's up against ideas that will overpower him; the very notion that there is a castle is questionable. "Does everything have to be unclear?" the land surveyor asks a villager, whose town's culture includes long-time acceptance of mores that make little sense to outsiders. "Perhaps" is the answer.
David Fishelson and Aaron Leichter adapted Kafka's work from another dramatization, and Tina Brock, a founding member of the theater company, smoothly directs the black comedy, creates the cartoonish sound design and plays a role. Sometimes objects are hurled from backstage over the edges of Anna Kiraly's scenery or tossed around, yet it all seems pretty reasonable in a world without reason.
David Stanger is the befuddled land surveyor, and Ethan Lipkin, Jerry Puma, Kirsten Quinn, Jerry Rudasill, Sonja Robson, Tom and Michael Dura are fine and fun in a cast of 13, dressed in Erica Hoelscher's appropriate villager/peasant costumes.
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"The Castle" by Franz Kafka runs through Sept. 22 at the Adrienne Theatre, on Samson Street between 20th and 21st Streets. For information on all FringeArts shows in the festival, including dates, times and venues, visit www.fringearts.com
September 8, 2013
Phindie.com
by Debra Miller
THE CASTLE (Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium): Fringe review
September 8, 2013 - Debra Miller
David Stanger stars as K in the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s THE CASTLE (Photo credit: Johanna Austin, austinart.org)
Though Franz Kafka’s work is not categorized as theater of the absurd per se, his writings have been cited as important predecessors of the genre. So it is fitting that the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, Philadelphia’s beacon of absurdist productions, would offer a stage adaptation of his last, unfinished novel for this year’s Fringe. Director Tina Brock (who appears as the anxious Innkeeper’s Wife) recognizes the absurdity of the mindless bureaucracy, meaningless protocol, and numbing totalitarian control portrayed in THE CASTLE, and captures it in spades in a ridiculously funny, chilling, and provocative show.
Anna Kiraly’s smart scenic design, comprising three rows of detached walls and distressed doors that lead nowhere, Robin Stamey’s hazy lighting, and Erica Hoelscher’s ever-impressive costumes enhance the illogic of the script and the characterizations of its preposterous players. The IRC’s familiar ensemble members, led by the marvelous David Stanger, Ethan Lipkin, and Kirsten Quinn, turn in spot-on performances in keeping with the disturbingly risible theme, and the mere sight of Michael and Tomas Dura will keep you in stitches. The IRC always numbers among my favorites, and THE CASTLE is no exception; it is everything I expect in profound absurdity. [Second Stage at the Adrienne] September 3-22, 2013, fringearts.ticketleap.com/franz-kafkas-the-castle.
Broad Street Review
Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ at FringeArts Festival
BY: Steve Cohen 09.28.2013
Unlike Kafka’s The Trial, the protagonist in The Castle is no victim. He’s an ambitious fellow who might even be a stand-in for Kafka, or even the messiah. Or both.
The Castle. Adapted by David Fishelson from Franz Kafka’s novel; Tina Brock directed. The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium/ FringeArts Festival production closed September 22, 2013 at the Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom St. (215) 285-0472 or www.idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.
A Kafka who’s not Kafkaesque
STEVE COHEN
When we think of Franz Kafka, most of us expect bleak surroundings, robotic speech, paranoia and suffering.
This Idiopathic Ridiculopathy’s recent adaptation of Kafka’s The Castle upended such preconceptions. David Fishelson’s script contains a bit of Kafkaesque mystery and surrealism, but The Castle, unlike Kafka’s earlier novel, The Trial, also provides comedy and even some sex. The Castle shares with The Trial the presence of a remote, inaccessible authority, but its protagonist isn’t being persecuted, nor is he on trial— except in a generalized sense.
As directed by Tina Brock, all 13 of the thoroughly convincing players spoke their lines with clarity and made their feelings lucid. David Stanger, as the protagonist, was cheerful, energetic and hopeful. He was thwarted at every turn, it’s true, but he kept moving with determination. He was no victim. His character didn’t succumb to despair.
The Castle concerns the endless frustrations of man’s attempts to deal with bureaucracy, not to mention the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal. On a snowy winter night, a man known only as K comes to a village adjacent to a castle. Seeking to stay overnight at the inn, he discloses that he’s a land surveyor who has been hired to work for the authorities in the castle.
Yet none of the townspeople, absurdly, knows how to get to the castle.
Thwarted ambitions
The novel’s title, Das Schloß, may be translated as “the castle” or “the lock"— a double meaning that probably was intentional. The castle is locked and closed to K as well as the townspeople.
K is a foreign professional, sent for and then rejected. In Hebrew, the word for land surveyor closely resembles messiah, and thus K may be seen to reflect an oppressed minority’s recurring hope for divine intervention. On the other hand, corrupt land surveyors in 19th-Century Russia sometimes cheated peasants out of their lands, so the villagers view K with suspicion.
K wants to get ahead socially. He desires a home, a wife and acceptance in the community, but these are denied to him. References to ethnic differences surface here and there.
Is K a stand-in for Kafka? Perhaps.
Jewish connections
Kafka was born in 1883 into an assimilated German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Hermann Kafka, was described by Franz as “a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind”— hardly the sort of bewildered and victimized character that many of us associate with the Kafka name.
Although he had a bar mitzvah, Kafka’s Jewish education was minimal. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who influenced Kafka’s belated exploration of what it meant to be Jewish in that place and time.
Racial separatism
Several months into the writing of The Castle, Kafka took an interest in Hans Blüher’s just-published Secessio Judaica, which claimed that Jews’ sexual attitudes and economic outlook, like their blood, were unclean, and that both Zionism and German anti-Semitism reflected the unavoidable racial separation of Jews from the German people.
Blüher insisted that he bore no ill will toward individual Jews, but his call for segregation confirmed Kafka’s feeling that Jewish assimilation into German culture was doomed.
Kafka told his friend and publisher Max Brod that he envisioned an ending in which K would remain in the village and finally die there. The castle would notify him on his deathbed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid.” But Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 with his manuscript unfinished.
September 2, 2013
Metro
Dark humor and absurdism rule 'The Castle'
By Shaun Brady
The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium takes on Kafka with "The Castle," part of this year's Fringe Festival.
Tina Brock is feeling a little frustrated when she answers the phone. With set designer Anna Kiraly off teaching a workshop in Hungary, the co-founder and artistic designer of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium is laboriously trying to capture an ethereal, haunting atmosphere that Kiraly, a skilled painter, could far more easily conjure.
The process could prove useful to the absurdist theater company's latest production, however. As part of this year's Fringe Festival, the IRC is producing an adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel "The Castle," a bleak comedy all about frustrated desires. The novel itself was a source of frustration to its legendary author, who left it unfinished - ending mid-sentence - when he died of tuberculosis in 1924.
The story traces the futile and confounding journey of a land surveyor known only as K, who is summoned to a village by officials from an ominously looming castle for reasons he can never quite ascertain. "He keeps coming up against opposition and obstacles and a very strange world that doesn't make sense to him," Brock says. "The people in the world seem to understand it very well, but it has that surreal quality where you come into a situation that definitely has a structure but you don't know what it is. K wants one simple thing, but he can't seem to communicate what he needs from a spiritual or a language perspective, and he just continues on and falls apart psychologically and physically."
Typical of Kafka, the novel is marked by a distinct lack of hope or comprehension of one's fate, but also contains a remarkable amount of (admittedly dark) humor. "I find it hilarious," says Brock, who cites influences including "Fawlty Towers," Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and the Lemony Snicket books for her own approach to the material.
"There's something really funny to me about a continued, repetitive attack on a single-minded goal. There's something inherently funny about that to me. A lot of absurdist work can be very precious about making a large statement and sags under its own weight. But the weight is already in the play, in the writing, the style, the magnitude of issues that you're dealing with. So it helps to have a sense of humor."
'The Castle'
Sept. 3-22
Second Stage at The Adrienne Theater
2030 Sansom St.
$15-$25, 215-285-0472
www.fringearts.com
August 30, 2013
Newsworks - WHYY 91FM
Philly's Fringe festival begins to expand, plus some picks
By Howard Shapiro
The Fringe festival has attracted a number of solid fans over the years, and some theater artists say Philadelphians are willing to see new work on main stages through the year because the Fringe has introduced them to the idea that new work is valuable.
This is the year of the expanded Fringe. The Philly Fringe festival - now officially called FringeArts - has not just a new name, but a new outlook on its future that includes more of the cutting-edge, risk-taking, unusual, often inventive productions.
The festival, which begins Sept. 5 (with some preview shows earlier in the week), is itself expanded. It runs this year through Sept. 22, which is 18 days - two more than in the past.
What was formerly called the Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festival, and what just about everyone calls "the Fringe," still has two components: invited works by the FringeArts organization and self-invited works by everyone else.
The "invited Fringe" this year includes 16 shows, and the number of them that FringeArts is bringing in from out of the country marks another Fringe expansion: eight in all, from Norway, England, Thailand, Canada, Italy, Greece, Ireland and Germany. The other invited shows come from United States theater artists, dancers and musicians, including a number of Philadelphians.
As for the rest of the work, all self-produced, the Fringe this year has 136 shows over its 18 days - what the festival now calls the "neighborhood Fringe." This marks another expansion: the festival now has enough geographical variety to break down its offerings into general neighborhoods: Center City and Old City (still the area of critical mass for the Fringe), Fairmount, Fishtown-Kensington, Northern Liberties, Northwest, South and West Philadelphia, and even four suburban offerings as far away as Allentown.
One place the festival won't be using is its first-ever headquarters, a $7 million former fire department pumping station in the shadow of the Ben Franklin Bridge at Race Street and Columbus Boulevard. The building - with two theaters, a restaurant-bar, a box office, FringeArts offices and a two-level outdoor space - is not yet fully revamped for this year's festival, forcing some late-planning shifts in venues because Nick Stuccio, head of FringeArts, had been counting on already occupying the space.
But one of the theaters is expected to be ready in October - and that means another Fringe expansion. Beginning at that time, FringeArts will produce work through the year, answering a question many devotees have been posing over the 17 years of the festival: Why can't we see this sort of work all year long? Two shows are scheduled for the new building in October and two more in November. In December, Pig Iron Theatre Company - the Philadelphia-based troupe that is widely regarded as one of the American theater's most inventive - will remount a past Fringe hit, its outré rendition of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night."
The Fringe festival has attracted a number of solid fans over the years, and some theater artists say Philadelphians are willing to see new work on main stages through the year because the Fringe has introduced them to the idea that new work is valuable. (A few years ago, a group representing the region's theater companies determined that a fourth of all productions here were world premieres.) Even so, year-round audiences in a region where theater has exploded into 50-plus professional companies are not necessarily Fringe audiences.
Who goes to the Fringe festival? From all appearances, people who enjoy theater and dance, but also like taking risks and are not averse to paying relatively small ticket prices to see something that could just as easily be awful as it could be terrific. Fringers, as some call them, sometimes race across Center City (or nowadays, neighborhoods) to see an untried show at 7, another at 8:30 and still another after that. They like the unknown, or the bizarre, or a possible new take on a good old, regular play.
They like a play in an established theater (the Wilma, the Suzanne Roberts and Plays & players are examples of Fringe sites) but part of the Fringe fun is also watching performances in someone's tub (this year, "Bathtub Moby-Dick") or a graveyard ("Boneyards," "Spoon River Anthology" and "Six Feet Above and Under"), a restaurant ("And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens"), a tall ship (Eugene O'Neill's Sea Plays), a former prison ("The Ballad of Joe Hill"), an armory ("Hush Now Sweet High Heels and Oak"), a museum ("Jennifer the Unspecial"), the library ("The Quiet Volume") and several churches, saloons and a synagogue.
Fringe audiences also like improvisation, well represented on the schedule.
Whatever they enjoy, they'll be getting more of it. "For 17 years, we used to have just the days of the festival," says Fringe director Stuccio. "Now the festival's invited productions will be able to gather more artists here to see what they're saying around the world, and we can continue around the year with an emphasis on local artists."
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For information on all FringeArts shows in the festival, including dates, times and venues, visit www.fringearts.com.
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What to see in the Fringe? Part of the fun is the guesswork. Much of the "invited" Fringe - the 16 shows the festival produces itself - has either played somewhere else in the world and been reviewed, or has been followed by festival producer Nick Stuccio in its evolution. The rest of the Fringe - the self-produced work - could be anyone's guess. So mostly, people pick Fringe shows by what seems appealing to them, even though many of the descriptions on the FringeArts site are scant, at that
I pick my choices for reviewing (or just plain seeing) from the track record of performers and stage or dance companies; many are longtime Fringe entries. Also, several of the region's smaller professional theater companies like to begin their seasons as part of the Fringe. Mostly, though, I also choose what seems appealing.
Here, in no particular order, are a few of my choices for this year. If they work, great. If they don't, well, take some solace that most Fringe shows are shorter than normal productions. And besides, another part of the fun is the unknown.
PAY UP: This one's a sure-fire choice, a revival of a 2008 runaway festival hit by Pig Iron Theatre Company. It's a funny exploration of your own idea about the value of money - and what value means. In this show, theater is happening all around you. You have to choose what to see, and quickly, and what you can afford with the money you're given when you walk into the show. Pig Iron's idea for the show came from a study by Yale economist Keith Chen, who attempted to teach monkeys how to use money.
THE BALLAD OF JOE HILL: Philadelphia's Swim Pony Performing Arts uses vaudeville, inside Eastern State Penitentiary in the Fairmount neighborhood, to explore the life of iconic union leader and murder defendant Joe Hill. Animation figures in.
HUSH NOW SWEET HIGH HEELS AND OAK: Chorographer Brian Sanders, a Philadelphian with an eager following, is responsible for some of the festival's hottest tickets. At the 23d Street Armory off Market Street, his physically daring troupe called JUNK explores nursery rhymes.
ANTI-HERO: Another Philadelphia group, Tribe of Fools, offers a show about the Philadelphia Parking Authority. Tribe of Fools has several times produced the dark-horse of the Fringe, edgy and funny shows with lots of kinetic performance and raw emotions.
THE OBJECT LESSON: Philadelphia theater artist Geoff Sobelle has put a mound of boxes with everyday objects inside the theater at Christ Church Neighborhood House, near Second and Market Streets, in an attempt to uncover the secrets of life in storage.
MOSES(ES): A world premiere of a dance by New York-based Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group examines different iterations of Moses, secular and religious, and the stories of ancient and modern migration - particularly African migration -- intertwined with the story of Moses.
THE SEA PLAYS: Two rarely done, ocean-themed plays by Eugene O'Neill - "Bound East for Cardiff" and "In the Zone" -- are being performed by the Philadelphia Artists' Collective at the Tall Ship Gazela at Penn's Landing.
LIFE AND TIMES: Theater artists from the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma called a friend, asked her to tell her life story, and created a five-episode piece from what she told them. It spans 12-plus hours, which is how you can see it on Sept 14. Or you can see it broken down. In any case, word is that each episode stands on its own.
FRANZ KAFKA'S THE CASTLE: Philadelphia's Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium turns Kafka's unfinished novel, about a castle and its hold on the citizenry, into a stage show that it's calling "hilarious and treacherous."
FAMILY SHOWS: The festival contains some shows suitable for families, particularly some circus performance. An invited show, produced by FringeArts, is LEO, performed by William Bonnet. It's a combo of circus and theater arts, and live action and video animation. The show is a take on the laws of gravity. Another family show that seems promising, and has been done in New York, is Jennifer the JENNIFER THE UNSPECIAL, from a group called Bushwick to Broadway. It's a musical about four eighth-graders who go on a time-travel adventure.
THE QUIET VOLUME: What is the meaning of an internal world? That world, according to Britain's Ant Hampton and Tim Ethells, can be found where concentration and silence intersect in a library. At the Free Library's central branch, they'll take two audience members at a time every 15 minutes to explore that world with sets of headphones and a soundtrack of whispered words.
A DOLL'S HOUSE: Philadelphia's Ego Po Classic Theater reinvents Henrik Ibsen's classic, with one actress accompanied by a doll's house and a collection of toys. It's the first in an Ego Po season exploring Ibsen's works.
THE SOCIETY: The Jo Strømgren Kompany from Norway offers a physical performance with a nonexistant language as a way to explore a societal evil - in this case a tea drinker who invades a Europe consumed with coffee.
OUT OF TIME: Irish dancer Colin Dunne, known best for "Riverdance," creates a multidisciplinary solo show about being a dance prodigy, then an artist, and the way a tradition of Irish step dancing shapes his life.
DUTCH MASTERS: Philadelphia's Azuka Theatre opens its season with a play about a black man and white man who strike up a conversation on a subway train while Los Angeles smolders from rioting in 1992.
THE TALKBACK: This show skewers the talkback - that event in theater when the audience stays after a show to talk with the people who create it. The catch here is that there's no show to consider, just a talkback. The production comes from the Berserker Residents, Philadelphians who have created Fringe hits before.
September 5, 2013
Philadelphia City Paper Cover Story
Is Fringe still fringe?
By Mark Cofta
“Seventeen years ago,” says Nick Stuccio doubtfully, asked for his recollections of the first years of the festival he helped found in 1997. “That’s many years ago, you know.” But once the FringeArts president and producing director gets talking about shows, he’s off.
“Unusual site-based work really set the tone ... for example, Joe Canuso directed this little playlet that took place on the street. One guy’s trying to parallel park and this asshole businessman tries to sneak in and they get into this huge melee — on more than one occasion the police came. It always drew a crowd. They’re screaming at each other, then they start having this dialogue, which then transforms into this little piece of theater. That typifies what we did — we sneak up on you, we lure you with something fun, the carnival, and then we deliver something meaningful to you via an artistic experience.”
Performances in storefronts, galleries, restaurants, coffeeshops and even the backseat of an old Cadillac were a hallmark of the early years of Fringe, Stuccio says, “because we couldn’t afford theaters.” These days, there’s still plenty of performances taking place in cemeteries, homes and in one case a bathtub, but also in the Suzanne Roberts Theater, the Wilma and the Arden, some of the city’s biggest theater spaces.
Fringe has been evolving steadily since its beginnings as a five-day theater, dance, music and visual-art festival in Old City. It’s grown in performances, days and locations, bursting out of Old City with an eclectic mix of local and imported shows. But this year has brought the most changes yet. The name “FringeArts” replaced the clunky “Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe,” a name that had been the bane of copy editors since 2004. (In the interest of clarity, in this piece we’ll be referring to the festival in its many past forms as simply “Fringe” and referring to the festival in 2013 and beyond as “FringeArts.”) The length has been bumped up by two days for a total of 18 days of 16 “invited” (read: professional, curated) shows and 136 “neighborhood” (read: lower-budget, more DIY) shows.
Most critically, it was announced that FringeArts would be opening a permanent home in a renovated former pump station on Columbus Boulevard across from Race Street Pier. The FringeArts building will not only end FringeArts’ nomadic rental of different business offices, box offices, primary venues and cabaret spaces nearly every year, but will allow for year-round programming starting shortly after this year’s festival.
“Fringe” is defined as something on the margins; something outside the establishment. Theater-wise, fringe festivals create an annual window for up-and-comers without the connections or funds to put on a traditional show to get their work noticed, or to perform experimental work unlikely to appeal to mainstream audiences — a temporary disconnect from the financial realities of producing theater.
These days, the festival’s budget is more than $2 million, employing a year-round, full-time staff of 10. In October, FringeArts will begin hosting year-round performances in their 240-seat theater — for comparison, the mainstage of the Wilma is 296 — at their shiny new building, which will also include a two-tier bar and restaurant seating 80 to 120. FringeArts, in short, seems to have far more in common these days with bigger regional theaters like the Wilma, Philadelphia Theatre Company and the Arden than it does with its younger self. If you’re an establishment, can you still be fringe?
What does “fringe” even mean? Stuccio argues that all you have to do to see the definition is look at the works being presented at the festival. For example, he notes The Quiet Volume, British artists Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells’ show at the Free Library of Phila-delphia, in which two patrons at a time sit side by side, guided through reading by voices in headphones — a production unlikely to be found at any regional theaters.
“For me, ‘fringe’ has two meanings,” says Stuccio. “First, it’s synonymous with innovation — avant-garde, boundary-breaking contemporary art. The second thing is this idea that it’s for independent-minded creative people — the independent spirit of art-making.”
Fringe, he says, is what it’s always been, just a bit bigger in scale. “It’s not so much change we’re experiencing, but growth,” says Stuccio. “For 17 years, we’ve been cultivating an audience for contemporary experimental work, and [we] think they can support it year-round.”
Swim Pony Performing Arts founder Adrienne Mackey, (who participated in her first Fringe in 2002 and directs The Ballad of Joe Hill at Eastern State Penitentiary this year) has always liked the word: “It conjures up the image of being out on the edges of what is known, like the places on old maps where the cartographers would draw dragons and sea monsters.” Fringe, she says, is “less a particular look or genre, but an attitude — something that says, ‘I am asking questions that I don’t know the answers to.’”
Fringe’s 17 seasons have undeniably given Philadelphia’s small theater companies — particularly the ones pursuing experimental styles — a huge boost. Tina Brock, artistic director of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, has produced rare absurdist plays in the Fringe each year since starting the company in 2006. “Audiences seem more adventurous and willing to take a risk in the Fringe than in the regular season,” says Brock, who’s staging an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Castle this year.
Brock recalls “a village vibe” in earlier seasons due to “the proximity of the artists to each other. Once things started to spread far and wide — which is a terrific thing in and of itself — the energy was diluted and it became more anonymous.” This year, there’s 16 curated, higher-budget shows in the “invited Fringe” and 136 in the more ad-hoc “neighborhood Fringe” spread all over the city; just reading all the descriptions is overwhelming, let alone trying to see everything. Though Brock says the growth is great, she misses that old sense of community and celebration: “Where is the ‘festival’ in the Festival?”
Stuccio hopes that village vibe of earlier years will be recaptured when the new FringeArts building under the Ben Franklin Bridge opens in October. Stuccio sees great potential for developing a social arts community and rebuilding that “village vibe.” The attached bar and restaurant (operators are still up in the air) aren’t mere moneymakers, he says — they’re central to the plan.
Stuccio took inspiration from Edinburgh’s culture of coffeeshop theaters, where patrons hang out before and after performances, and from beer-hall theaters in Europe and South America. Stuccio says he’s seen patrons stick around to drink beer and discuss shows all over the world — except here.
“How a work lands on the brain happens before, during and after the performance,” Stuccio says. “The work’s always better on a full belly and liquor,” he adds, laughing. “Our theater chairs will all have cupholders so you can bring in food and drink.” He plans for the bar, restaurant and theater (separated by a giant soundproof door that can open to combine the spaces) to operate simultaneously — in fact, the space’s second performance, a collaboration with Opera Philadelphia, will integrate the opera Svadba-Wedding with a traditional Balkan wedding feast.
It’s a different notion of the theater experience: “Not purely intellectual,” Stuccio explains, “but part of a fun, social night out, with the fun happening here, not somewhere else before and after.” For example, in December, when Pig Iron Theatre Company remounts its wildly popular version of Twelfth Night from the 2011 festival, Stuccio anticipates that its 23 cast and crew members will stick around to hang out with friends and audience members, allowing an open mingling between artists and audience that doesn’t happen much here. (For the bar and restaurant to be friendly to artists as well as their patrons, he says, “price points must be reasonable.”)
“I’ll be really interested to see what FringeArts does with that new space,” says Swim Pony’s Mackey. “Philly is sorely lacking in presenting venues. We would really benefit from a place that isn’t another company trying to put out their own work, a space that is more a habitat for lots of artists to plug into; where audiences trust the curatorial point of view and create a habit of checking things out regularly even if they don’t personally know the artists.”
For Mackey, risk is still the heart of the Fringe, new building or not. She and a friend have a saying when they buy tickets: “‘It’s a gamble ... at the Fringe.’ That goes for the horrible-abomination, three-hour, terrible-lighting, pretentious agony of a performance as well as the totally unexpected lovely gem that you never imagined you’d see.
“It’s a gamble, and that’s exciting."