Capital Fringe founding executive director Julianne Brienza and audience services manager Cory Ryan Frank at last night's festival-closing party.

It was a Capital Fringe Festival in which technically impressive shows—whether the technique on offer was digital or manual—were the talk of the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar.

It was a festival that cost more to attend than in prior years, at least until a withering heat wave inspired a $12 weekend ticket special.

And if it didn’t seem mildly, casually sexist to proclaim a festival in which six of the nine big award-winners were female-run companies The Year of the Woman, then we would go right on ahead and do that.

(Oops.)

It’s a fact that lady-run companies ruled the TheatreMania-sponsored Pick of the Fringe Awards, winning in five of the eight categories. (How’d we get to six out of nine? Well, the Best Dance victor was a tie between two entities, the DC Aerial Collective for UPheaval and Verena Lucia for SHE. )

Best Comedy went to Nu Sass Productions‘s Priscilla Dreams the Answer, directed by Emily Todd and produced by Todd and Aubri O’Connor. Best Solo Performance went to Katie Molinaro‘s punky suite of retribution-rock against her former boyfriends, On the Rag to Riches. (She’s moving to Los Angeles pretty soon, so fellas of the District won’t have to sleep with one eye open for too much longer.)

Molinaro’s show shared a theme as well as a venue (the suffocating Baldacchino Gypsy Tent) with the Best Musical winner, Pinky Swear Productions‘s rowdy, randy CABARET XXX: Les Femmes Fatales. Even the triple-digit heat index didn’t prevent the show’s final performance, at 6 p.m. Friday evening, from selling out.

Allyson Harkey, Julianne Brienza, and Karen Lange. Harkey & Lange are co-artistic directors of Pinky Swear Productions, whose CABARET XXX won Best Musical.

Best Experimental production went to Pointless Theatre Company‘s The Super Spectacular Dada Adventures of Hugo Ball.

The Directors’ Award, which Capital Fringe Executive Director Julianne Brienza and Producing Artistic Director Scot McKenzie bestow on one festival entry each year for professionalism and artistic excellence, went to iKilL, a challenging, Japanese-themed movement piece performed in the stifling Apothecary venue. It was written and directed by Izumi Ashizawa, who has staged shows around the world. With its supernatural air of dread and its operatic style of acting, the show to me recalled legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa‘s 1965 ghost story, KWAIDAN.

Taking home Best Drama award was Grain of Sand Theatre‘s Hamlet Reframed, which examines the titular melancholy Dane from the point of view of the other characters in the play, excising all of Prince Hamlet’s famous soliloquies. Carl Brandt Long directed the piece.

Best Overall went to Marshall Pailet and A.D. Penedo‘s musical satire (there’re two kinds of musicals nowadays, satires and Oklahoma!) Who’s Your Badhdaddy?, Or How I Started the Iraq War. Its producer, Charlie Fink, was behind last year’s Best Musical winnter, Super Claudio Brothers, as well as the concurrent F#*king Up Everything.

Of course, award-winners are not necessarily always the most unique or notable examples of their form. There were no shortage of imaginative shows this year that didn’t take home trophies, which are in this case actually paper certificates. “If you didn’t win an award tonight, please relax,” Brienza said during the ceremony last night, adding that of 17 shows she’d taken in this year—a personal record—”only one of them was bad.”

I saw 16 shows this year. In my unscientific estimation, both ambition and quality of execution seemed to have risen across the board.

Traditionally, the Fringe format—at least as practiced here in the District—has restricted how ambitious a show can be in terms of physical production, not just because the shows are low-budget, but also because they get very little opportunity to rehearse in the space they’ll actually perform in.

That makes efforts like Illuminate: A Martial Arts Experience, wherein the performers execute jaw-dropping physical feats in the dark, mere feet from the audience, all the more impressive. When John Shryock (who also directed the show) swings his rope-dart, the weapon snaps at at the air close enough to the audience that patrons in the front row, and possibly the fourth, feel it on their faces. That’d be impressive even in a show that had the benefit of lengthy tech rehearsals. (Shryock told me he and his fellow performers practiced their elaborate fight choreography in a space marked off to replicate the exact dimensions of the Warehouse stage.) Meanwhile, UPheaval staged its aerialist acrobatics in the Studio Theatre‘s Mead space without any Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-type catastrophes.

Sixty-five performances sold out this year.

e-Geaux (beta) was another festival entry that generated substantial buzz. This parody software product demo was so convincing that I had trouble telling how much of it was a joke.

A: All of it, actor/producer Joseph Price assured me. While I understood that the specific products promoted during the show — a self-explanatory photo-alteration app called Furry-izer; a Facebook plug-in called eGeaux-Stroke — were fake, I assumed that Pepys, Inc. was a real startup that would be rolling out some kind of genuine social networking product in the near future.

A big reason the illusion was so persuasive was because of its digital sophistication. Price and his castmates invite arriving audience members to “opt-in” via a custom-built web portal. Once you opt-in, Price’s confederates appropriate your Facebook account to complete a demographic analysis of each house, recommendations of who among your fellow audience members you should friend-as-a-verb, and some hilarious new captions for your photos—for all in attendance to enjoy, naturally. (I didn’t opt in, but my publicly available mug ended up in the show anyway. Price said it was a screw-up and apologized.) It takes real techy know-how to do those things. So the tech-elves working on the show — Chuck Harmston, Allen Leis, and Hannah Poferi — were doing all that highly skilled labor (effectively) for free, just for fun?

Yep, Price told me.

Perhaps because of the first price increase in Capital Fringe history, the festival’s five years of steady expansion leveled off, with the festival slimming its roster by 10 percent (from 137 shows in 2010 to 124 this year) and selling about 20 percent fewer single tickets. The final tally of about “just over” 27,000 individual tickets was good enough to make this the second-most-attended Capital Fringe, but fell well short of last year’s all-time high of 33,897.

Audience participation is perhaps more prevalent among Fringe fare than theater at large, but even so, this year’s preponderance of shows wherein the audience was critical to the very conception of the finished work still felt notable.

Fringe artist emeritus-turned-invaluable Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad member Ryan S. Taylor pointed this out in our “critique the critics” dialogue between our bloggers and Fringe artists last week. An incomplete list of audience-participation shows: Megan and David’s Low-Cost Creativity Workshop, Gwendolyn & Cicely’s Fantastical Capital Balloon Ride, Who Killed Captain Kirk?, Tactile Dinner Car, Stevie Jay‘s life, love, sex, death… and other works in progress (a multi-chakra extravaganza), eGeaux (Beta). There’re surely more.

A few other trends I observed, if an accumulation of two can be called a trend:

Dylan Marron and Jo Firestone. Their MEGAN AND DAVID'S ORIGINAL LOW-COST CREATIVITY WORKSHOP was one of many audience-participation shows this year.

Meanwhile, Jo Firestone and Dylan Marron won the Directors’ Award last year for their Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite, which they continue to perform around the country. Their Megan and David made its debut here. Our critic, Benjamin J. Freed, didn’t like it nearly as much as I did. Like Abe Lincoln‘s cabinet, the Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad is a team of rivals.

Shows Performed in the Warehouse, in the Dark, Using TRON-y, Rave-y Neon Visuals: Illuminate and Illuminopolis, a burlesque revue that featured fire-eating and a stripper who did Illuminate‘s L.E.D. gloves one better, donning L.E.D. pasties.

Shows Featuring Jokes About the Feebleness of Using the International Star Registry to Name a Celestial Body After Your Sweetheart: Iluminopolis and Hookups, which we reviewed twice. Totally on purpose.

Shows about Roosevelts: The Man in the Arena, about Theodore and Alice, about Alice Longworth Roosevelt.

Outer Space: As contemplated in Paco Madden‘s Who Killed Captain Kirk? and Evan Crump‘s FLYBOY, both of which I have effused about at length.

Brienza

There’s an invaluable, hotly pursued commodity at the Capital Fringe Festival this year, and it isn’t nudity, air conditioning, or a properly carbonated draft beer.

It’s the swing voters, you might say. Civilians. People who appreciate, but do not participate in the making of, theater. Normals.

Besides presenting unconventional or unfinished work that perhaps doesn’t lend itself to a traditional stage presentation (or that simply has “Fuck” in the title), Fringe is supposed to reach atypical audiences, too—people who dont make a habit of seeing theater. Between the inaugural Capital Fringe in 2006 and last year’s edition, attendance grew steadily. Between 2009 and 2010, it fairly exploded: The 33,897 tickets the festival sold last year represented an increase of nearly one-third from 2009′s tally of 25,500.

With this year’s Capital Fringe now two-thirds in the books, the numbers appear to be slightly down. Meanwhile, one thing has gone up: the price of tickets. In March, the festival announced the increase as a necessary response to the increased cost of licensing, equipment, insurance, and staff salaries. Show tickets went from $15 to $17. The perennially divisive Fringe button (required for attending performances) went from $5 to $7.

Some artists are fingering the price hike, the first in the festivals history, for the slump. Gwydion Suilebhan, a D.C.-based playwright who blogs prolifically about theater, fired off a post last week opining that the increase is costing the festival audience. (Suilebhan has presented work at the festival in prior years, but not in 2011.)

Nothing Suilebhan said was new. Gripes about pricing are as endemic to Capital Fringe as gripes about the humidity. The button, especially, has been a contentious topic since its introduction in 2008.

But the litany of digital Amens! in Suilebhan’s comments section—and in debates that spread on Facebook, where one local theater artist even posted Capital Fringe Executive Director Julianne Brienza‘s salary, and among patrons in the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar—indicate the price increase clearly touched a nerve. “We’ve passed a tipping point,” Suilebhan says two days later—as he’s driving to a Fringe show, in fact. “The combination of an increase in price and the economic downturn has resulted in people being unwilling to hold back their feelings anymore.”

It’s unclear if the market will bear the price increase. The drop in ticket sales could be partially attributed to a decrease in programmed shows, but finding more causes get trickier after that. The debate over ticket prices has revealed two things, though: that the Fringe organization’s finances aren’t as healthy as they’ve been in past years, and that as consumers, artists can get pretty prickly.

In fact, most of the complaints seem to be coming from artists—people who are, as one who declined to go on the record told me, “culture-rich but cash-poor.” In other words, they’re folks who will probably show up for Fringe shows, or at least hang out in the festival’s Baldacchino Gypsy Tent bar, even if they think it’s too expensive. To a point.

The overwhelming majority of past and present Fringe artists I know say they’re pleased if they break even on their shows; they’re not complaining they don’t make money. (Artists get back about 70 percent of their gross, but they pay participation and insurance fees that come to $775, plus whatever they spend on sets, props, costumers, actors, etc.) Rather, they’re upset that even with the festival’s artists passes, they can’t afford to see their friends’ shows, and that the buttons make it hard for them to invite their friends from outside theaterworld.

As for the civilians, the people that vote with their feet: It’s tough to argue with Suilebhan’s basic premise that $24 (or $27.75 after the $3.75 “convenience fee” if you book online) is a lot to ask someone to gamble on a show that in many cases will run an hour or less, may be performed in a suffocating room sans air conditioning, and is subject to far less quality control—none, actually—than a show at a comparably priced theater company, like, say, Solas Nua.

Of course, a festival is a different beast than a regional theater company.

Brienza wishes people would understand this.

—

The Facebook debate became the cocktail chatter of choice Saturday in the Gypsy Tent. Jessica Lefkow, who is directing a Fringe show and works steadily in D.C. as both director and actor, told me she doesn’t doubt $17 is the price point the festival, as currently conceived, needs to stay viable. But she’s convinced a more accessible model can be found, perhaps by engaging an organization like the New York-based arts nonprofit Fractured Atlas. “This is a challenge for an inventor,” Lefkow says.

Suilebhan thinks someting drastic is in order. “Maybe a corporation should buy the Fringe Festival, like the way the Humana Festival [in Louisville, Ky.] is paid for by Humana,” he says. “The right corporation may not exist in D.C.”

Brienza has never made any bones about the fact that the festival’s pricing is designed to encourage patrons to see more than just one show. That’s the position with which Suilebhan fundamentally disagrees.

“Weve decided to favor theatergoers who are frequent theatergoers, which is a problem endemic to all of the theatrical ecosystem,” well beyond Capital Fringe or Washington, Suilebhan says. “Making theater for people who already like theater is making us more and more secluded, more and more provincial, and disconnecting us from the larger audience of America.”

Sales have dipped this year, but it hasn’t been apocalyptic. Not even close: As of 4 p.m. Sunday, overall ticket sales were down slightly from at the same point last year, falling from 20,134 to 19,093—a drop-off of 5.1 percent. Button sales were down, too, albeit by only 77 buttons, or less than 1 percent from the 9,073 sold by the festival’s second weekend in 2010. Some performers, like Faction of Fool’s Barbara Papendorp, say their shows are playing to smaller houses. But with about a 10 percent overall decrease in shows, the drop in attendance is probably minor. Box Office Manager Cory Ryan Frank, who’s worked for Fringe since its inception, says that while fewer shows are selling out than in years past, fewer are playing to single-digit houses. He estimates the average Fringe crowd this year is about 40 people.

Meanwhile, sales of multi-show passes (offering four, six, or 10 admissions at a reduced per-show freight) grew from 1,158 to 1,411. Those passes make it difficult to handicap audience trends, because pass buyers dont have to allocate all the admissions on their pass at the time of purchase—they can save some or all of their ticket-punches, to bring a friend or catch a show on the fly. Pass redemptions aren’t recorded as admissions until they’re actually redeemed for a ticket to a performance.

And a festival can’t be accessible if it doesn’t exist. Ticket sales cover about 23 percent of the festival budget, Brienza says, a figure that doesnt fluctuate much year to year. She says that nearly everything the festival must pay for, from utilities to lumber to permits issued by the Department of Consumer and Regulatory affairs, costs more than when the festival began. Until now, the festival hasn’t been passing those costs on to consumers.

In an interview at her office Sunday evening also attended by box office manager Frank, Brienza was visibly wearied both by the manner in which the conversation had started (online, without any outreach to her staff) and by its timing (right in the middle of festival, when, she says, the focus should be on the art). “Everyone is saying they want to have a discussion, but no one is talking to anybody here,” Brienza says.

Everyone I spoke to felt compelled to point out that they were not attacking Brienza personally. “She deserves a medal for having contributed to the artistic diversity of Washington, D.C.,” Suilebhan says. “The festival is not going anywhere. It’s not going to die.”

That’s the paradox: The price of Fringe shows is undoubtably steep, but the festival’s critics also take its sustainability for granted. When Brienza moved here from Philadelphia in 2003, there was no Fringe festival and nothing very close. Working with collaborators like Damian Sinclar and Scot McKenzie, she built Capital Fringe from nothing. Now it’s a quintessential part of cultural life in the District. After Independence Day, it’s Fringe time.

But it could still fall apart. Since 2009, the Festival has run a deficit that’ll amount to about $86,000 this year, almost a tenth of its $900,000 budget. The organization hired its first full-time business manager in March and has a plan to get into the black by the end of 2012. Among other cost-saving measures, Brienza and the festivals two other full-time employees took a 10 percent pay cut this year. Brienza’s 2011 compensation will be about $63,000.

Most of the artists complaining know none of this, says Brienza. “How can you have a discussion when you don’t have the information?” she asks. “It’s just unfounded. That’s what’s exhausting about it.”

—

I interviewed patrons exiting Saturday’s 2:30 p.m. performance of Gallantry, an opera I chose because it is, to the best of my knowledge, the shortest show of the 124 on the roster. Its run time is listed as 45 minutes, but a Washington City Paper critic clocked it at 27. (She also noted the show features soprano Emily Casey dressed in a sexy nurse costume with stockings and garter belts—surely a perceived value-add for some patrons.)

Mindy Raithel of Bethesda had no complaints about the brevity (possibly an opera first). She was splitting a four-ticket pass with her friend Cindy Petit, of Howard Country. Raithel and her husband had shared a six-ticket pass the prior weekend. “I think the pricing is fair,” Raithel said. “I’m willing to take a chance to support the arts.”

The couple I grabbed coming out of Meagan & Davids Original Low-Cost Creativity Workshop a couple hours later might represent the festival’s targets of opportunity. Max Fischlowitz-Roberts and Alli Gold had each paid $24 for a single ticket plus a button. Their motivation was the same as a lot of attendees: friendship with the performers.

Their $7 Fringe buttons glinted in the early-evening sunlight. Would the couple be sticking around, or perhaps returning, to take in another show? “I dont know,” said Gold. “We haven’t really looked at the schedule.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Julianne Brienza doth protest too much during her Friday-night MATCH GAME appearance. It was all for charity, folks. Charity. Image (c) Andrew Bossi, Flickr.

A fun game to delight ladies and gentlemen both young and old, if of a sporting disposition: Try to match Andrew Bossi‘s must-see photos of Friday night’s Julianne Brienza-starring edition of The Match Game DC to each moment of gameplay, as faithfully reported by Fringe and Purge. (If you were following us on Twitter @FringePurge, you’d know ALL ABOUT this already. Keep up!)

Lindsey Boyle was the Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad‘s deputy on the scene–her review is here. The game show’s celebrity panel included Red Palace “tenured freak” Mab Just Mab, Bond 45 Executive Chef Enzo Febbraro, Miss Pixie’s proprietor Pixie Windsor, drag-queen-about-town Queen Bambi, and artists Dana Ellyn & Matt Sesow. But ’twas Brienza who emerged as the evening’s uncontested scene-stealer, despite the fact that Mab Just Mab either swallowed or very convincingly appeared to swallow a four-foot balloon at the top of the show.

Remember, folks: This is a game wherein the panelists are encouraged to overindulge and to comport themselves in a NSFW manner. It was all in good fun, and all proceeds generated by the items auctioned during the “commerical breaks” benefited worthy DC nonprofits: the DC Film Alliance, Food & Friends, and the Washington Literacy Council. So: Do not censure Brienza for her participation, which was both vigorous and honorable.

That said, Brienza has since ordered onstage drinking banned at The Match Game‘s remaining Fringe installments on Saturday, July 23 and Sunday, July 24, which is regrettable even though we can kind of see her point.

Oh, Bossi has also posted great shots of Pinky Swear Productions‘ Cabaret XXX: Les Femmes Fatales and Mark Pagan & Justin Pruvis‘s Z: The Apocalypse Improvised. Give those a scan, too. He’s got some game, does Mr. Bossi.

Being a numerological recap of the 2010 Capital Fringe Festival in glorious 2-D Julianne-O-Vision.

We’ve left in a few cameo appearances by Founding Institutional Memory Trey Graham‘s other half’s beer-drinking hand to preserve the cinema vérité atmosphere. If you recognize yourself as the owner of the voice that can periodically be heard remarking “Yeeeaah!” and “YeeeeEEEEEEAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHH!”, please identify yourself in the comments. The Shakespeare Theatre Company has a pair of season tickets for you.

DISCLAIMER: Actually, we just made up that thing about the Shakespeare Theatre Company wanting to give you tickets. But it’s an impressive set of pipes you’re sporting there, drunky.

Er, hi.

So, about last night . . . um, you’re not going to be weird, are you? No one wants for things to be weird between us. We at Fringe & Purge truly, sincerely value your readership, and we don’t want anything to get in the way of that.

Anything else — look, the last three weeks have been an emotional time, for you, surely, as well as for us. And last night, at the Gypsy Tent, after the Pick of the Fringe Awards had been given and the Southampton Double White Ale kept flowing and DJ Smudge kept playing all that Prince and The Clash and David Bowie and James Brown and Talking Heads like it was nineteen-seventy-goddamn-nine or something, and we are just fine with this . . . Anyway, do you think we can still be friends?

Truth: Fringe & Purge is off to a late start this morn — er, afternoon, on account of having spent the first half of today seeking some long-delayed medical attention for a shoulder injury sustained in the course of activities utterly unrelated to whatever may or may not have occurred at the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent last night after some loud-talkin’ chump stepped up to Fringe & Purge all like, “Season Three of Slings & Arrows was a huge disappointment!” You do not want to be peddling that kind of insolent jibber jabber.

Anyway! We’re here now, is what matters.

We posed the question three weeks ago, “Can the Fringe Grow Up?” We were being rhetorical — we’re annoying like that — but ain’t nothing rhetorical about 33,897 tickets sold this year, up from 25,500 in 2009. Sales had been ticking up steadily each year since the first Capital Fringe in 2006, but between ’09 and ’10 the tally swelled by 33 percent. That’s some quantum shit.

As festival Executive Director/Washington City Paper cover girl/excellent dancer Julianne Brienza remarked last night, fringe button sales didn’t increase at nearly the same rate: The festival sold 11,000 last year and 13,000 this year. The data suggests, said Julianne, without using the word data, that more people were seeing multiple shows than in years past: “More of you saw more individual shows. And what that means is that we actually had a festival this year.”

Did we ever.

Senior Fringe & Purge Action News and Commentary Squad members Trey Graham, Glen Weldon, and I will offer some What It All Means-type thoughts on this year’s wildly successful, decidedly growed-up fringe in a day or so. For now, we want to congratulate the Pick of the Fringe Award-winners and revisit what we had to say about those shows when we reviewed them.

Best Comedy: Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending. F&P said — um, well. It seems we, ah, did not manage to get a critic to this one. By way of compensation, please enjoy this three-year-old review of The Juliet Project by Glen. Or this Roger Ebert review of Franco Zeffirelli‘s 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. My ninth grade English teacher showed us this movie in class and somehow managed to pause the VHS tape (yes, me: old) at just the right second to freeze-frame one of the picture’s very fleeting glimpses of Olivia Hussey‘s unclothed bosoms. Would I even be here, writing this, if that had not occurred? I wonder.

Best Drama: Genesis. Now, when Fringe & Purge reviewed this, we were particularly moved by the . . . oh, you have got to be kidding me. We didn’t get this one, either? Seriously? I’m sorry about this, readers. Here, go ahead and watch the “Land of Confusion” video on us.

Best Musical: Super Claudio Brothers, the New Video Game Musical. Hey hey hey, we sent our ringer. “Matthew A. Anderson’s evil-platypus-as-New-Jersey-crime-boss keeps events grounded, believe it or not,” observed G-Weld.

Best Experimental: The Sleeping Beauty: A Puppet Ballet. No. No! You’re actually telling me we — WHY AM I SURROUNDED BY FRICKIN’ IDIOTS? Um. Hey, isn’t that Danny Glover walking out of The Cloak Room?

Best Dance: How Frail the Human Heart. Okay, all those others? Those were all our fault. But this one, totally not. The FPANCS’s dance expert bailed on us to go work for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper after the festival had already begun. This would be a good place for another Genesis joke, but we have too much dignity to return to that well. (Because they had a big song called “I Can’t Dance.” Ha.)

UPDATE! Hey, sorry, Ben Egerman, for overlooking your Best Solo Performance win. Our humblest apologies, our most heartfelt felicitations. We are delighted you won. Do you know why? Because we totally reviewed your show. ‘Twas perhaps with a flash of premonition that our Sophia Bushong enthused, “Remember Ben Egerman’s name, and keep your eyes and ears peeled for where he may be in five to ten years.” Ben, we’re sorry we forgot to remember, and we congratulate you on your achievement.

*Sigh* The recipients of the Directors’ Award — the laurel given by festival honchos Julianne, Producing Artistic Director Scot McKenzie, and their inner circle in recognition of artistic risk-tolerance, professional integrity, and general excellence — went to Dylan Marron and Jo Firestone, the ingenious creators/performers of Ridgefield Middle School Talent Nite. And do we have some decent coverage of that, at least?

Would it surprise you to learn that we do?

Finally, on a serious note, Scot last night dedicated the Directors’ Award to the memory of Darin Ellis, a young singer and actor who appeared in the show Assembly Required before dying suddenly of congestive heart failure on July 22. We offer our sincere condolences to the loved ones Mr. Ellis leaves behind.

See you all back here tomorrow.

If this is your first visit to Fringe & Purge, welcome! If you’re an F&P vet, welcome back! If you stalked us last year, for the love of God, please stop!

“But prithee,” you might ask, “what the hell is Fringe & Purge?” An excerpt from last year’s propaganda:

Want to know what show is hot? Fringe & Purge blog. Want to know what show has the most nudity? Fringe & Purge blog. Want to tap into the opening-night buzz? Fringe & Purge blog. Want to know where the party is? Fringe & Purge blog. Want to know what the hell you did at that party? Fringe & Purge blog.

Go out and fringe. Come here to purge.

So what can you expect from this year’s iteration? Well, if history is any judge….

Last year’s blog featured raves, pans, audience participation, Gonzo criticism, spontaneous prose, porn stars, blood, Socratic dialogues, dramaturgical meditations, eavesdropping, liveblogging, WTF?s, and long comment threads on the subject of nudity. Also, Oxford commas—sorry, house style.

Our review format is the “hip-shot”: off the cuff; breezy; brief. Our audience “interactivity” constitutes populism verging on anarchy: we couldn’t do what we do without your tips, opinions, rumor-mongering, verbal abuse, &c. Blogging’s a contact sport—and after all, we’re still refining our technique.

Like the festival itself, Fringe & Purge has grown up a fair bit. In 2006, Cap Fringe’s inaugural year, this blog ran under the tagline: “Trey Graham Throws Up a Blog About the Capital Fringe Festival.” Trey’s stomach has since settled down, and these days we market our offerings as “daily digests from the Capital Fringe Festival”–a rather more gastronomically salubrious tagline, if you ask me. Also, like most addictive substances, Fringe & Purge can be consumed in any number of ways. These days, we’ve got a twitter account, a newsletter, an RSS feed, &c.

So, yes, as I said: refining our technique.

Stay tuned for the good stuff. We’ve got a stellar cadre of guest-bloggers this year, as well as Trey Graham and Glen Weldon, our resident Fringe codgers gurus. So come early, come often, and brace yourselves for 18 days of…let me see [riffles through dog-eared Fringe program] … ah, yes: “Unjuried, risk-taking, independent performing arts.”