SEATTLE FRINGE FESTIVAL
venues on Capitol Hill
central box office at Broadway Performance Hall, 1625 Broadway, 322-2018
Thurs., Sept. 19Sun., Sept. 29
Seattle’s fringe theater scene is full of important experimentation and razor-sharp ingenuity—and it’s also the quickest way to feel like someone’s just punctured your left lung with a dull butter knife and would like you to clap him on the back for it.
There’s a very Seattle philosophy surrounding that particular experience: In this city’s culture, you’re allowed to think anything you want, and it may very well be what’s most true, but for heaven’s sake, don’t say it out loud. Offended Seattleites are still busy sending enraged, defensive letters to California in response to a recent Los Angeles Times Magazine piece that had the audacity to suggest that our city has fallen on some very hard economic times—so you get the picture.
The insular Fringe crowd can suffocate you into either submission or escape; an innocent bystander must choose to join in the knowing ooh’s and aah’s and deliberate laughter of the “in” crowd, or admit to being baffled and remain forever on the outside. The biggest threat to the deserved future vitality of, and support for, fringe arts in Seattle is the detrimental notion that its failures—not its noble nice tries, not its ambitious misses, but its oh-lordy-did-that-just-hurt failures—should not be as freely acknowledged as its triumphs. And shouldn’t they be? If the arts community truly is as important to a city’s health as we need everyone to believe, shouldn’t the public get to respond to its failings as they would to any other municipal snafu?
What’s frustrating for most average folks about attending any kind of scrappy theater is the condescending hubris about what just plain doesn’t work. The community increasingly seems to want patrons to welcome experiences beyond the endurance of even the bravest of souls—as if every nonactor making his nonacting debut, every gay man with an indulgently therapeutic grudge against Dad, every defiant woman contemplating the sag of her aging breasts in a solo show were vital to the existence of Theater. It’s like asking a patient to feel sympathetic for the doctor when heading in for a risky operation. No, it’s more: It’s asking someone to submit to a doctor who has never successfully held a scalpel—much less performed an entire surgical procedure—forgo the anesthesia, watch a kidney fall out, then sigh with benevolent understanding, “Well, he tried, didn’t he?”
Without question, a lot of this is part of the adventure of live theater—willingly heading into life-or-death surgery—and for some audiences, that’s the particular excitement of fringe: You either walk out delirious, drugged, and in stitches, or you watch your kidney fall out. The risk is everything.
However, friends or dates or the curious man on the street who have just been innocently exposed to an amateurish, ill-conceived spectacle should not feel intimidated by their own displeasure. What’s most damaging about this local conceit—and about an audience full of flamboyantly vocal, in-the-know “supporters”—is that someone in every audience has never been inside a theater. And he’ll never set foot in one again.
That’s a real shame because, as the upcoming week-and-a-half-long Fringe Festival will once again prove, Seattle theater is home to a few diamonds in the rough. Here’s hoping we all decide to respect their shine by acknowledging what will never be more than just rough.
