Feb. 2, 2007-Applications Due by 5 p.m.
When I was in Minneapolis this past January, I did something that was, for me, a little bit crazy. I submitted an application for a performance slot in the 2007 Minnesota Fringe Festival, the largest, non-juried performing arts festival in the United States. If the festival selected my application, I would have the opportunity to create a 45-60 minute show (anything I wanted with no censorship whatsoever) and present it five times over the course of the 11-day festival. In short, I would have the opportunity to become a producer, a job that I had never, until now, thought that I wanted.
Feb. 12-The Public Lottery
The Minnesota Fringe selects its shows by placing all of the applicants in a public lottery. No judges or jury, just luck. Hundreds of people apply each year, so I was somewhat dumbstruck when I checked the website and saw that I had won a spot. Now I had to come up with a show to do.
I tossed around a few ideas, but my thoughts kept drifting back to a piece called Loss of Breath, a song cycle that Nautilus Music-Theater had commissioned for me several years ago. The six songs of the cycle describe the experiences of a young woman who leaves her rural hometown to live in New York City. Having left Minneapolis for New York three years ago myself, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the material.
I contacted the writer, Bill Corbett, and the composer, Ralph Johnson, and ran the idea past them. With their blessings, Loss of Breath became my entry for the 2007 Fringe.
The base application fee for the festival is $400. The festival charges only those applicants selected to perform—thank goodness. In exchange for that fee, the festival provides a venue and five performance times for each show, a technician to run it, box office staff, ushers, advance ticket sales, exposure in the Fringe’s printed program and on their website at www.fringefestival.org, and 65 percent of all box office returns. March 15 is the date beyond which the application fee is non-refundable. I’ve got about a month to decide if this is what I really want to do with my summer.
I make a few calls to see if I can assemble a team to work on the project. Tom, one of my favorite pianists in the Twin Cities, is available and interested in working together. My director friend and mentor, Ben, is willing to co-direct with me. Paul, a great lighting designer, offers to light my show, and my dear friend Doug opens his spare room to me. It looks like the pieces are falling into place. March 15 rolls by.
June 1-Complete and Return the Following Forms
I’ve never been responsible for selling a show, and I quickly realize that producing a show in the Minnesota Fringe Festival is a mini boot camp for production in general. Suddenly, I’m up in the middle of the night, gnawing the erasers off of pencils, trying to come up with the perfect 35-word description of my show for the official Fringe program.
I’m staring at a tech questionnaire, trying to answer questions such as “will you be using live reinforcement? If yes, describe.”
I’m printing postcards, collecting bios, drawing up a rehearsal schedule, buying plane tickets, writing press releases, and trying to come up with a decent graphic to use on the festival website. I complete some tasks with aplomb. Others barely make it in before the deadline. “Perfection is the enemy of the good” becomes my new, if temporary, motto.
June 4-Send Press Kits to the Media
The festival provided me with a list of contact information for most of the media outlets in the Twin Cities—a tool I found incredibly difficult to use, not because any of the contact information was inaccurate, but because I found it excruciatingly painful to market my own performance. I discovered it would be a piece of cake for me to write a glowing press release about someone else’s show, but when it comes to my own, it’s very hard to muster up that courage. I have no choice but to do the uncomfortable: I send out my press kits and hope for the best.
July 18-I leave for Minneapolis
I depart for Minneapolis with a thousand postcards in my suitcase and a long to-do list. We jump right into rehearsals. Loss of Breath exists only as a song cycle, and our job now is to shape it into a piece of music theatre. Ben and I go to work mapping out some ideas for the visual and physical aspects of the production. We also start developing some text fragments that will help guide the audience from song to song.
Rehearsals are stressful—after all, I’m the one who got everybody into this. But at least I’m back to familiar territory, developing a character and working on a performance. I find some comfort in that.
July 30-Aug. 1-Tech Week
The Fringe assigns each production a three-hour time slot for a tech rehearsal. That’s the only rehearsal time we get in our venue. It’s also the first time we get to see the space. We’ve sketched in the staging of Loss of Breath using a diagram of the stage/seating area and some photos posted on the Fringe website.
We use our three hours to wander around the space, complaining about some inconveniently placed pillars. We set sound levels, take a look at the lights, and stumble through the show. As many as 11 shows share each venue with only 30 minutes between performances, so technical requirements must be kept extremely simple. In our case, our set consists simply of a big cube, painted to resemble a slab of concrete. My only prop is a pair of black sneakers. I’m grateful we chose to keep it so simple.
Aug. 1-Out-of-towner’s Showcase
The out-of-towner’s showcase is an opportunity for me to present a few minutes of my show to an audience of Fringe enthusiasts and festival bloggers. Unfortunately, this is the day my brain freezes. The pace of the last week has worn my nerves raw and the relentless onslaught of decisions-that-must-be-made has turned my mind to goop.
I’ve never had to decide things like what font to use for the program, whether to steam the hem of my costume, or what color of gray the set should be. Now it’s time to choose which song to sing for the showcase and I can’t do it. All I can do is stare at the list of songs thumbtacked to the wall and cry because I am so certain that choosing the wrong song will make a terrible impression—and the show that I have put so much of myself into will die in its infancy. With a little help from Tom and Ben, I make a choice, pull myself together, and we head for the theater.
Just as we’re loading in for the showcase, Tom gets a text from his daughter saying that a bridge has collapsed and is he OK? Soon, all of the cell phones begin to ring. A huge expanse of the 35 W bridge has just collapsed into the Mississippi. Those of us already at the theater perform anyway and afterward everyone snakes their way home to watch the news. The effects of the bridge collapse ripple through the Fringe in several ways, both logistically and emotionally, but the festival goes on.
Aug. 5-Opening Night
Every show gets five performance times. To be as fair as possible, the Fringe has ranked each time slot according to attendance statistics from previous seasons. Every show gets a time that is great, one that’s good, one that’s decent, one that’s not good, and one that’s just awful. Our opening night is Sunday Aug. 5 at 10 p.m. Awful.
To attract at least a small audience for that first performance, I organize a reunion of alumni from the collaboration workshop where I first met the composer and writer of Loss of Breath. I make reservations for dinner at a nearby restaurant for Sunday evening.
I’m a little concerned about wearing myself out before the show, but I end up getting a welcome boost of energy and enthusiasm from seeing everyone again. In the end, 39 people come out for that 10 p.m. show, and Loss of Breath is off to a very good start. Audiences continue to grow each night, and by Saturday, Aug. 10, we sell out. After the mountains of work we plowed through to create Loss of Breath, it feels great to wait behind the black curtain while the staff adds more chairs, and more chairs yet.
Now that my own show is up and running, I make a break for the other shows in the festival. One of the biggest perks to performing in the Fringe is that every show receives several artists’ passes—tickets that let you see any other performance for free. I was able to take in more than a dozen other shows during the festival, some of which knocked my socks off, some of which changed the way I think about theater.
I should point out that, at least in Minnesota, Fringe audiences are serious about their theater. Most fringe-goers see a number of shows each year. Some see dozens. One particularly committed gentleman I spoke with figured out that it was physically possible to see 56
Aug. 12-Packing Up
As I sit in seat 12-A on my Northwest flight home, I watch Minneapolis disappear, and I realize that despite the prickly challenges of self-producing a show, I am more than a little bit in love with the Fringe.
A few weeks later, my box office payout arrives in the mail. The check is for more than I expect. I do a little math and figure that, all things considered, Loss of Breath lost about $100. I run this by a playwright friend of mine who immediately exclaims, “That’s fantastic! If I could produce a show of my own and only have a deficit of a hundred bucks, I’d do one every year.” I admit he’s got a point. I did my own thing, and it was worth every penny.
