The Answer is Fringe

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

If The Answer Is Fringe, as we’ve long suspected, our giant summer theatre festival has arrived at the last day of exploring, and playing with, the Questions.

After 11 days and nights of sun, smoke, flood and mosquitoes, the 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s summer theatre binge, the first and biggest of its kind on the continent, signs off Sunday night. And by Sunday morning, with a full day and evening of shows still to go (updates to come), the Fringe had sold 114,000 tickets to its 185 indoor shows in 35 venues.

The number of shows, artists, and tickets sold are substantially up, to be sure, from the 2022 edition, with its sales tally of 94,500 tickets to 164 shows in 27 indoor venues. But what pleases Fringe director Murray Utas the most, he figures, is the payout, exceeding $1.2 million, to Fringe artists, who take home 100 per cent of ticket sales (minus the $3 festival surcharge). That’s up from 2022. And it’s an even more impressive return, proportionate to shows, than the epic 2019 Fringe (258 productions) and the $1.4 million returned to artists that year.

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A Fringe artist himself by temperament and background, the ebullient director/ actor/ playwright/ producer Utas points, with delight, to the 365 sold-out houses at The Answer Is Fringe, compared in relative terms to the 440 of of the 258-show 2019 edition, with audiences spread out over a much larger landscape of shows.

“There’s nothing more adventurous than Fringe audiences,” he says. “And I want to honour them…. We’ve hit a new place in (audience-artist) interaction!” As he tells Fringe artists “show me your heart, and Fringe audiences will care for you…. We are all in this together.”

Elena Belyea in This Won’t Hurt, I Promise, Tiny Bear Jaws, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

In this he echoes actor/playwright Elena Belyea, whose solo show This Won’t Hurt, I Promise has been held over by Fringe Theatre Adventures Sept. 1 and 2. The muse-in-residence at the adventurous indie company Tiny Bear Jaws, Belyea says “the Fringe audience just isn’t a typical audience. They’re so ready to dive in head first … so game to play!” As a point of comparison, Belyea has taken her play Miss Katelyn’s Grade Threes Prepare For The Inevitable to both theatre seasons and to curated festivals, as well as the Fringe. “I’ve loved doing it for Fringe audiences best.”

For an indie artist, even one as experienced and accomplished as Belyea, getting an audience for an indie production is a struggle. “With Smoke and I Don’t Even Miss You (award-winners both), I’d get a 30-person audiences. With this show, at the Fringe, it’s 150 a night…. It’s a (better) way to try out something new, see what works.”

With the Fringe, “you don’t have to convince people to come; there’s a giant infrastructure and a built-in audience…. ” Belyea feels “a different kind of contract with the audience” at the Fringe,” and it’s very conducive to experimenting, as she did with a solo show that expands the notion of standup into a piece that sets about helping deal with a world that’s maddening and toxic.

“If I hadn’t got the Fringe slot I wouldn’t have made the show.”

Vance Avery and Chris W. Cook in Fiji, Shatter Glass Theatre, Edmonton Fringe 2023. Photo supplied

Lora Brovold, an actor with a distinguished Edmonton theatre resumé, ventured into directing for the first time — on request of a new young producing team, playwright Michelle Robb and partner Gavin Dyer — with one of the Fringe’s trickiest, weirdest plays. Fiji starts out as a meet-awkward rom-com, and ends up taking audiences ever so gradually, plausibly even, into the truly shocking discovery of where the quest for human connection can lead.

The play itself is risky, to say the least. But then, as Brovold points out, the Fringe itself is a gamble … perfect for artists and for me, taking a creative risk.” And “because it’s all about risk, that takes away the fear that sits on my shoulder.” The audience seemed to be hip to that synchronicity of risk-taking, she reports. Nearly every performance of . was sold out.

Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023

Utas, for his part, loves the co-mingling and collaboration at the Fringe of experienced artists and relative newcomers, as the four-show holdover series he’s curated attests. The delightful Rat Academy, a very skilful and funny dark-side clown show by the team of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner, young heirs to the great Mump and Smoot tradition, is one (Sept. 1 and 2).

The Cabin on Bald Dune, held over by the Varscona Theatre Wednesday (Aug. 30), is another example. It’s a resonant, expertly turned out thriller by the young playwright Jezec Sanders. And it attracted an all-star cast, Jenny McKillop and Kristi Hansen.

The adventurously off-centre theatre-maker Steve Pirot, a former Nextfest director and the artistic director of iHuman Youth Society (a multi-disciplinary arts collective for marginalized youth), was onstage at the Fringe for the first time in half a dozen years. He brought his own new show Unkl Stiv’s Looping Machine, a case of  “Steve bringing his weird to the festival!” as Utas declares happily. 8-5 Crew on Cypher Avenue (85th Avenue), for young up-and-comers, a multi-disciplinary mural street-scene initiative for impromptu, music, dance and the visual arts, is a shared-custody brainchild with Utas, in its second year.  The idea is to nurture the next generation of artists.

As the townspeople in What Was Is All, a startlingly ambitious new folk-rock musical I caught this weekend at the Roxy, wondered (in song), “is it too late to try on a new life? The Fringe steps up and always answers No. Congrats to all the artists and audiences who hitchhiked together through the galaxy.