Culture Watch

This Week’s Fringe Festival Goes from Zany to Historic

by Bruce Chadwick

Bruce Chadwick lectures on history and film at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News.

The Fringe Festivals are off-off-off Broadway theater festivals designed to give avante garde writers a chance to stage their far-out plots and unknown actors an opportunity to shine. They are definitely not aimed at the $130 a ticket Broadway crowd, but at the younger, more casual group of people looking for good entertainment at reasonable prices.

This formula started with the first Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1947 and has been successful ever since, with festival productions and audiences growing in size over the years. The New York Fringe Festival, held each summer since 1997, drew 75,000 people last year. In winter, New York is home to another fringe group, the Horse Trade Theater Company, that stages an annual ‘Frigid Fringe Festival.’ It just opened.

The good thing about the Frigid Fringe Festival plays is that tickets are just $16 each (you can buy a three-play, $30 ticket). The shows are short, usually just an hour. If you are smart, though, you can double up, buying tickets for back to back shows at the same theater.

The Fringe Festivals have not only grown in size, but in scope. Now up to a quarter of their plays are about history and these works, whether the biographies of songwriters, the Civil War or 1940s murderers, have succeeded.

The Frigid Fringe Festival, which continues for another week, has thirty plays running at three different theaters in New York. Six are about different forms of history. Many of the summer plays in the Fringe Festival in New York last August were about history, too. The International Theater Festival in New York last summer, a Fringe-type association, had so many plays about history that its producers had to list them in a separate category in their brochure.

The plays about history in this week’s Frigid Fringe Festival are a good mix. They are:

Scarlet Woman, by Matthew Wells, is homage to both women victims and killers in 1940s movies and novels. It runs this Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday at the Kraine Theater.

The Oregon Trail: Quest for the West is an interactive story with five pioneers and several audiences members. The recruits trudge through mountain passes, run from snakes and ford rivers in the nineteenth-century hike to Oregon. It runs Monday, Thursday and Sunday at the Kraine Theater.

Wonder Woman: A How to Guide for Little Jewish Girls, by Cyndi Freeman, is the story of a young girl who loves the old Wonder Woman comic books and is empowered to grow up to be a famous stripper, Cherry Piaz. The play runs at the Red Room Theater this Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Yippie!, by Randy Anderson and Harrison Williams, is the colorful story of the Youth International Movement, the political organization that was founded in 1967. It will be staged on Thursday and Saturday at the Kraine Theater

My Pal, Izzy: the Early Life and Music of Irving Berlin, by Melanie Gall, is the story of legendary songwriter Berlin’s early days, from singing waiter to late night scribbler. It will be presented at the Kraine Theater on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

The Mysterious Mystery of Mystery Street, by Sergio Solarzano, is another ‘40s noir story of a woman who hires two private detectives, naturally wearing old trenchcoats, to solve a homicide. It will be staged at the Kraine Theater on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

The Kraine and Red Room Theaters are in the same building at 85 E. 4th St., in New York.

There is a wonderful history double header some nights at the Kraine Theater where you can see My Pal, Izzy and then, a half hour later, The Mysterious Mystery of Mystery Street (you need to buy two tickets).

The executive director of the Frigid Fringe Festival, Erez Ziv, was a history major at the University of Minnesota, so he loves history plays. “Plays have had an important role in telling history for hundreds of years and still do,” he said. “Good history plays give you a lesson in history, but in an entertaining way.”

Ziv, who sees every one of the thirty shows each winter, thinks history plays also succeed because of good stories and performers. “The woman who is the star of My Pal Izzy, the Irving Berlin story, is a really gifted performer who makes Berlin’s story come to life—as if he was right there on the stage with her,” he said.

The Frigid Fringe Festival has been pretty successful in its five years in New York. Each year, audience size has increased by 20 percent, even last year, when the city was hit with a horrific blizzard the week that the festival was held.

Ziv thinks there are several reasons why the Frigid Fringe Festival, and all fringe festivals, work well. “In a fringe festival, you see very new works, lots of different theme plays and the tickets are very inexpensive. History buffs get a chance to learn a lot about history, but very different kinds of history. The Fringe groups are becoming more and more successful.”

The Fringe Festivals are all over the U.S. (in twenty states) and in Canada. You can look them up, state by state, by checking out the Fringe Festival Association on the Internet. It gives the festivals for each state and you can click on them to get details on plays and dates. All of them charge about $15 a ticket. You can sometimes find two history plays back to back in the same theater, as there are in the Frigid Fringe Festival in New York.

It’s nice to see that the producers of the Fringe are realizing that the people that enjoy history on stage are the same people that enjoy trapeze acts, magic shows, comics and drag shows, too.

(For tickets to the Frigid Fringe Festival: Smart Tix: 212-868-4444)

Bruce Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.

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