My column in the Graduate Center Advocate this month focuses on the Fringe Festival (NYIFF). As per usual, there were some typos that slipped by the editor (and which, of course, I should have caught before the piece was submitted.)
Every August, a couple hundred theatre companies, some long established, others formed specifically for the event at hand, converge on lower Manhattan for the New York International Fringe Festival (NYIFF). Billed as the “the largest multi-arts festival in North America,” the festival’s organizers claim that it “generates an atmosphere of extreme excitement” and that their “energy is contagious!” Indeed, to be sure they were getting across just how excited they were — and how excited we should be — about about the festival, the homepage of the 2008 festival employed no fewer than seventeen exclamation points. Some sentences had so much excitement bursting out of them that one exclamation wasn’t enough (“Subscribe to the FringeNYC Fans newsletter!!”)
For the first few years of the Fringe — which has now been around for twelve years, more than long enough to make many of us feel old for remembering year one — it was almost possible to share in the excitement, manufactured or not. New York has a sprawling, chaotic, energetic, and vital scene of small, independent theatre companies. Many of these companies come and go in a year or two; most lose money; much of the work is dreadful. Despite, or perhaps even because of, these caveats, many consider this scene the heart of New York theatre. The high-priced, risk-averse, aesthetically conservative, middlebrow, blandly competent work generally produced by the commercial and institutional theatres of Broadway and, increasingly, off-Broadway, certainly doesn’t seem representative of the anarchic energy that seems to fuel so much of the theatre in this city.
Full article here.
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