Capital Fringe Festival continued

Here is the continuation of my accounting of the Capital Fringe Festival. If I forget to mention anyone I met or who saw my show I apologize. It was a busy couple of weeks!

Sunday, July 17
This morning started off with volunteering. I believe I was originally scheduled to work in the bar, but when I arrived they asked if I would mind doing box office instead. Um, no, not at all! I ran box office for two shows, Pinoy: A'merican Tale at the Apothecary and then since I have my car I ran over to Spooky Universe for Sanyasi. The latter is one of the many shows on the “Ooo I want to see this but I can't” List. But by running box office I at least get to say hi to Betsy Rosen and Nora Achrati, two of the performers.

At 4pm I made my way to the Apothecary to take in Stephen Spotswood's The Sisters of Ellery Hollow. Stephen is a DC playwright, and one of the many delightful theatre people on twitter. Ellery Hollow was performed by Rachel Holt and Melissa Hmelnicky. It was a lovely piece, about two sisters who were story tellers, revealing the magical circumstances of their birth and life. The script made use of beautiful imagery, and the two actresses performed with charm and spunk.

Then I rested for a short time before my second performance at 6:45pm. I felt really good about this performance. The nerves from the first performance seemed to settle, and the piece felt like it had a lot more flow. I felt like I was able to just go along for the ride of what was happening in my piece, and in the Juliet scenes, rather than worrying about whether I would forget my lines. I was blessed every performance to have friends in the audience, and this night were Jeremy, Joshua, Brett, Renee, and Richard.

After the show ended, Victoria and I ran over to the Warehouse to snag standing room only tickets for Illuminate: A Martial Arts Experience, as it was sold out. We are successful and run back to the tent to grab a little dinner. Time for the Apple and Cheddar Panini once again! While scarfing down the food we talk to the gentlemen performing Glengary Glen Ross. They are charming, in their own way, and we have a few hearty laughs before we have to leave.

Illuminate is fantastic, even before it begins. The packed house affords some memorable people-watching, and we'll just leave it at that. There is a loose story to Illuminate, basically a put-upon man learns martial arts to defend himself and masters the skill. The story is told through a series of martial arts demonstrations. Most of them are performed in blackout. The performers wear all black, and glow sticks on their hands and feet that reveal the moves. The hero of the story wears the color green, and that allows us to track who he is, even though the individual performing the role changes.

Victoria knows one of the performers, John Shyrock, and he performs my favorite part of the piece. In Illuminate, John showcases Chinese rope dart techniques. Again, the theatre is in blackout, and there are lights attached to the end of John's rope. He flings it out into the audience, whipping it back and forth. Every time you swear the rope is going to hit someone, yet it never does. Every time you flinch, and every time everyone is safe. It was remarkable.

Monday, July 18
On Monday, a second review, this one from MD Theatre Guide appears. It is extremely favorable, and, which I almost appreciate more, very well written. Positive notes aside, the review accurately represents the piece I was trying to create, describing the play as “part shakespearean performance piece, part memoir, and part literary discourse.” It seems disingenuous to praise a positive review, but it is truly a relief to find out that your performance goals have come across to a member of the audience. We in the theatre can spend a lot of time talking about good reviews and bad reviews and whether to ignore them or not, but I've always had an interest in dramatic criticism, and the thing you can learn from a review is what a specific audience member got from the production. And when that is exactly what you were hoping to portray, it's encouraging.

Tuesday, July 19
On Tuesday I head to Shrewing of the Tamed at the Shop. This production involves William and Mary students, so I run into a couple of former professors. I had gotten to meet a few of the students during the Fringe festival as well. I think it's fabulous that William and Mary is using the Capital Fringe Festival as a resource and learning experience and wish they had done so when I was a student there.

The marketing materials for the play asked the question “Can a woman be as funny as a man?” For some reason in my head I got the idea that this meant they were going to gender flip Kate and Petruchio. This isn't what happened at all. The main change was an increased emphasis on the frame narrative. It harkened back to the time when women were not allowed on stage, and so the actress-who-would-be-Kate had to prove that she could play the role as well as a man. The play then started from a point of competition that paralleled Kate and Petruchio's competition.

Wednesday, July 20
I start off by volunteering for A Year of Living Dangerously at the Redrum (more fun decorating rocks with Terry and Robert). Then I have to prep for my third performance. I'm nervous about this one because very important people will be in the audience. Beforehand I was talking to Kimleigh Smith, the force of nature behind the show TOTALLY. She's fantastic, and I think I met her one night while talking to Seth. She says simply and calmly, “Hey. Just tell the story.” She is right, and my nerves are settled. Just tell the story.

Jim Gagne, a dear friend of mine, and a brilliant teacher attends, as does George Grant, another brilliant teacher, and a man who knows a vast amount about Shakespeare and how to perform it. Just tell the story. Jim tells me afterwards that it's the first time he's seen scholarship used theatrically in a successful manner.

Thursday, July 21
Thursday is play night for me. No being a volunteer, just being an audience member. First up is Brett Abelman's The Magical Marriage Computer and other plays. Brett is another local playwright producing work at the Fringe festival. This set of plays explores love in different circumstances amongst different types of people. My friend Rachel Manteuffel is in the show, one of her parts being, of all things, Johnny Depp.

After that is the biker King Lear at the Apothecary. The piece is directed by Kelli Biggs, and starring one of my best friends, Katie Wanschura, as a gender flipped Edmund. Everyone is drinking beers, flashing knives, playing pool, talking on cell phones, wearing leather.

One Shakespeare play is never enough for Charlene, so after King Lear I'm scheduled to attend Hamlet: Reframed at the Shop. There's a little bit of downtown in between, so I hang out in the tent and talk to friends. Everybody is there that night, many to see Hamlet. Allison, Katy, Lee, Mark, Bess, just to name a few. I had been joking with some Fringers earlier in the week that the Festival and the Helen Hayes are the two times of year where we in the theatre are liable to run into any number of exes and past indiscretions. I chalk up the second one of the festival that night. I'm feeling spunky, so I command him to bring me water from the bar! I figured I could get away with it since it's the least he could do for me, and it's over 100 degrees that day, so Fringe is providing it for free. He humors me and graciously complies.

It's a good thing I have water because the heat in the Shop is oppressive. Audience and actors alike are dripping with sweat. Impromptu fans are being waved back and forth. Despite the distractions, the actors hold the attention of the audience. Hamlet: Reframed was a modern telling of the famous play, with one catch: all the soliloquies are cut. What do we get in this version? An unstable Hamlet, with unexplained behavior, and a King and Queen desperately trying to keep a country running. We don't get the ghost in this version, which prevents us from immediately siding against Claudius. The cut shed a different light on the characters. I thought Carl's objective for the production was clear, and that he successfully achieved it.

Friday, July 22
On this day I went into town just for one volunteer shift. I was scheduled from 5-8pm at the Free Store, which as Nyree, the Volunteer Coordinator, told me, is where volunteers go to die. Basically it's an extremely boring shift, in an hot and stuffy room without chairs. You sit on the floor and greet people as they come in, answer questions, lay out donations, and do your best not to sweat too much. And, true to reputation, the shift was rather boring, at least from 5-7pm.

For the last hour of the shift some performers came into the Free Store, and getting to know them made the end of the shift far more enjoyable than the beginning. First I met Drew and Sam, and later Nate and Nate came in as well. These four guys were half of OneBodyWorks, the group performing I See You. They had spent six weeks working on a farm in North Carolina, with limited access to technology, and developed a theatrical piece in response to their time there. The fellows were cute and charming, and became known around Fringe as “the farm boys.” At least that's what I called them, and everyone always knew who I was talking about. Apparently the guys found this amusing, since on the farm, they were the city boys. I hear great things about their show, but alas, I don't get to see it.

Saturday, July 23
At noon I show up in the side room at Fort Fringe to find out about that One Year Theatre project, whose postcards I had seen around the festival. But that story isn't for this blog – in short, I am involved, I designed the webpage, and you can learn more there and at the blog.

I scramble over to Spooky Universe for When ET Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unpredictable bus schedules mean I slide in there right at curtain time and sheepishly ask if I can still get in. Luckily they hadn't started yet. This rock musical tells the story of Joan who gets contacted by aliens that dig her music and want her to be the leader of their intergalactic band. It's starring fellow standardized patient and all around awesome lady Emily Webbe, whose fantastic voice I get to hear for the first time.

Time for the fourth performance of What, Lamb! What, Ladybird! There are several friendly faces in the audience for this one. Catherine and Terrance Aselford are there. So is Kavita Mudan, one of my favorite female Shakespeare Geeks. Matthew Pauli, one-third of Clown Cabaret attends and we get to talk shop about Shakespeare afterwards.We talk about what's missing when there is one performer – the reaction of characters. A great deal of acting comes when you aren't speaking. So when performing multiple roles, especially in Shakespeare, how do you find the balance between letting some of those reactions in, and keeping the text driving forward? Two of my former co-workers, Jennifer and Krystal, whom I don't get to see nearly enough, come as well.

This is possibly my best performance. I feel very free in the moment, and I am able to explore moments in the text in a way I hadn't been before. It feels very fluid. It feels great. Until. Disaster. I am on the very last page of the script. Right in the middle of what is a very scary and emotional confession for me. And I completely blank. I know where I'm going, but I can't remember the very next line. Words stumble out of my mouth as my brain frantically searches for the sentences that have escaped my memory. I can't find them, so I move ahead to the next moment, leaving out about three lines of text. Well, it happens. You move on. But everything was so perfect up until that moment. But I almost wonder if being more connected to what I was saying is what actually made me forget what I was saying. To be truly living in the moment of what I was confessing and finding myself unable to say the words due to the nerves and the terror of admitting was I was admitting. It's a possibility, but still, Perfectionist Charlene is not pleased!

Several of us head to Busboys and Poets for dinner afterwards, along with Karen and Jim who were at the Festival that night as well.

After dinner and after socializing at the tent Jim and I head to the Mountain for Faction of Fools' Fool For All. We are joined by Hannah, who is a co-worker and friend of Jim's, and on the staff at the Festival. The Fool for All is comprised of nine scenes and over 40 artists. Not every scene is performed every night, so it's always a different show. The production also serves as a learning experience for the artists, as they vary in experience and skill level. Some are professional clowns, others have just taken a class or two with Faction. I know next to nothing about Commedia dell'Arte, but while watching it becomes clear that there are three levels of skill to mask work. The first level: actors who are wearing the mask. Second: actors whose faces match the mask. And the third level, the level of the uber talented Matthew Wilson, are actors for whom the mask becomes a natural part of their face. It's fun to note how this works, and also to see so many friends on stage, like Gwen Grasdorf, Karen Beriss, Steve Attix, Paul Reisman, Grant Cloyd, and Sarah Olmsted Thomas.

The show is followed by more socializing at the tent, with some of the aforementioned persons, and also audience member extraordinaire and extremely intelligent guy, David Tannous. He tries to convince me to join him for Meagan & David's Original Low-Cost Creativity Workshop, but it's midnight, and I'm exhausted. I try to convince him to see my show on Sunday instead of the one he's already got a ticket to. Neither of us succeeds. Nevertheless, it's lovely to talk to him, and I've already run into him at another theatre event since Fringe.

Sunday, July 24
Here it is. The final day of Fringe. I start of at the Goethe Institute seeing John Hefner's The Road to Nowhere. Hefner is a friend of mine, and an accomplished solo artist who has toured his shows to several Fringe Festivals. He had given me advice throughout the process. I'm glad that I could make it to his show, especially as it's been quite a while since I saw him in person. He was pretty busy. As the title of his show implies, he went on a long road trip that kept him away from DC. Then he fell in love, got engaged, oh yeah, and just had a baby. Busy guy.

My final performance is in the afternoon. Friends Kelli, Katie, and Rachel are in the audience. The fact that it is over doesn't seem quite real.

We pack up my car with the set pieces. Then I have one last play to see, Belle Parricide, directed by Catherine Aselford and Nick Allen. Catherine and the playwrights have been working on this piece for something like two years. I saw a staged reading of one version of the script quite some time ago, and it has grown and improved immensely. Five female playwrights wrote short pieces about Beatrice Cenci, portraying the girl and the murder of her father in different lights. After the show I head into the tent for some final socializing and to say goodbye to everyone.


The Capital Fringe Festival was an amazing experience for me this year. I did things I had never done before. I wrote and performed a one-woman show! I went places that terrified me, and survived, nay, grew as an artist. I made a piece that was about me and about the kind of theatre I love, and infused with the kind of thinking I do. And though it was made from a very specific standpoint, audiences responded positively. It was so rewarding to discover that this dual approach that I have spent so much time talking about, so much time thinking about, this actor-scholar path, could have a tangible existence.

Will this have an after-life? I'm not sure yet. I know that if I were to perform it again, there are a couple more things I want to look up, a couple places I want to cut, and a couple places I want to add. Three people commented on the educational possibilities of the piece.

Two different people told me I should present this play at the Blackfriars Conference that the American Shakespeare Center hosts every two years. And indeed, working on this play is the very thing that confirms that I am making the right decision in attending the MFA program at Mary Baldwin this fall. The program explores the two pillars of scholarship and stagecraft, and that is exactly what my play turned out to be. And it wasn't my intent to make it that; the play came to this status naturally, simply by virtue of what I find interesting.

But the most dear compliment of the experience was relayed to me by Victoria. An actress she has worked with came to the play along with one or two other actresses, all who had played Juliet. They told Victoria that afterwards they found themselves talking about the piece and how exciting it was because I did things with Juliet they had all been told they weren't allowed to do.

And that's the point, really, I think. Let's get this false idea of Juliet as the willowy ingenue out of our heads. Let's not play what we think she is. Play instead what Shakespeare gives you in the text. Let a young actress bring all the charm and all the tempestuousness and all the lust and all the strength that she can. For that is what Juliet is: mercurial and strong, logical and loyal, curious and giving. There has never been a 14-year-old like Juliet, nor will there never be. And that is the magic of this play, this character, and Shakespeare's writing.