Fringe by Numbers: An Introduction

It is that time of year again.  The Minnesota Fringe Festival is in the not-too-distant future.  The electricity in the air around the theatre community is palpable.  It's true.  As an actor and director in this town, this is one of the most exciting times of the year.  It is a busy, crazy time.  At no other time of the year are there over 165 separate productions going on in one two-week span of time.

Now, here's the odd challenge that goes along with the excitement.  How does one see all the shows?  You can't.  Plain and simple.  Even if you saw a show in every single time slot of the Fringe Festival, you'd still fall just shy of 60 shows.  This causes a conundrum for those of us in the theatre community.  How do we see all the shows our friends are in?  We can't.  The answer is the same.  Realizing that fact led me to a decision a few years ago.  Back in 2004, Leah Cooper (then the Artistic Director of the Fringe Festival) invited me to join the League of Extraordinary Fringers.  We were a group of eight folks who wrote blogs on the official Fringe website in order to promote the Fringe, Fringe shows, and anything else even remotely Fringy.  The moment I started covering the Fringe Festival, every single one of my friends in theatre, and many people who I didn't know at the time, sent me messages begging me to come to their shows.  I did the math.  There was no conceivable way for me to see all the shows.  And, there was no good way to tell some of my friends that I'd have to choose other friends over them.  I had to devise a system of choosing shows that, at the very least, appeared to be fair to all parties.

Which leads me here.  For the 2004, 2005, and 2006 Fringe Festivals I wrote a column on the Fringe site called "Fringe By Numbers".  Strangely, you'll note that title is on this blog, too!  How about that!  In 2007, I took a break from being a Fringe Blogger in order to accept a role in a play out-of-town (that's a long story, in and of itself, for some other time).  I'd planned to return to the scene in 2008.  But, just as I'd made that decision, the Fringe Festival got out of the business of hosting blogs.  Timing isn't always one's friend, I guess.  But, sometimes luck is. 

I've found a new home for my Fringy thoughts.  Right here at City Pages.

So... For those of you who have read my column at the Fringe Festival website over the past few years, the rest of this entry may be a bit of review (albeit, important review that it would behoove you to read... I'm just sayin'...).  But, for those of you who are new to my theatrical musings, I humbly submit a bit of introduction to the concept behind this blog and the credentials of the fool who is writing it:

I had to address the aforementioned dilemma somehow.  How do I choose which plays to see without hurting feelings of friends?  How do I get past those friends whose shows I still didn't want to see, no matter how much I felt I owed it to them?  Let's face it, I get as excited as the next guy about the non-juried nature of the Fringe (well, not the next guy, he's got a huge grin on his face that makes me worry about what he might be doing over there). 

The non-juried format is what is so beautiful about the Fringe.  It is beautiful.  It is also frightening.  One could say it is the good, the bad, and the ugly all wrapped into one.  Some of my friends, not entirely through any fault of their own, get themselves into some of the worst crap ever put on anywhere, not just the Fringe.  And so, I kind of try to avoid seeing their shows, if I can absolutely help it.  But since I've been very open about my love of Fringe shows, and my eagerness to cover them, I desperately searched for a way to tell them that I'm still not going to their shows.

So I tried to figure out a theme for this column that would involve avoiding every friend I know.  You know, something to the effect of "My column will be entirely objective, because I am not going to any shows where I know the people in them."  Then I realized that such a decision would pretty much relegate me to writing about the out-of-town shows, and that wouldn't be much fun at all, since part of the joy is getting to see what local folks are doing.

A side note that will make all things clear.  I love the thought of chaos.  Not in the practical sense.  I don't want people running around and doing whatever the hell they want to the detriment of all society.  I like chaos as a theory, though.  I'm not talking the higher mathematics, per se, but the more real-life applications of it.  I'm also a former gamer, one might say that I am on a temporary-to-long-term hiatus.  And nothing works better to create a controlled form of chaos than a random encounter table.  For those of you who don't speak D&D-speak, there are a lot of charts in role-playing games, and they often require a person to roll a die, or dice, to randomly determine what happens next.  And that's where I got the idea for what I'm going to do for this Fringe blog!

I will randomly attend a show during each time slot of the Fringe Festival.  I will have with me, each day, a set of charts that represent the entire Fringe Festival and the shows available each hour.  I will roll a 20-sided die (d20) on those charts once per time slot in order to select which shows to attend.  Every show I attend will be completely randomly selected by the roll of the dice.  Yes, I realize that I will end up seeing a lot of crap, but I'll also see a lot of good shows.  Yes, there is a chance that this system will force me to see a show involving said friends who are involved in the aforementioned crap, but there's an even greater chance that I won't (since each show only gets 5 slots).  The odds and the chaos work to my favor.

Before I get to the Fringe itself, I have a lot of work to do.  I'm currently compiling the charts.  Historically, that has been the most work-intensive part of this job.  I've had the complete list of shows for a few weeks now, and I'm still only through the 6th day of the Fringe chart-wise.  I need to get a move-on in that area.

Up until the Fringe's launch date, I'll be keeping you posted on a few things: 

#1) Fringe Previews (Like the Fringe-For-Alls, and the other free previews being held at the public libraries)  #2) What I'm thinking about some of the shows I may or may not get a chance to see.  #3) The meaning of life in general.  #4) What a sample of my crazy whirlwind Fringing schedule might look like -- when I test the charts out.  #5) What my friends have to say in response to my telling them that after reading my column, it isn't them that I'm talking about.  

I'm sure there's other random crap I'll throw in there, too. There's always random crap.  It has become a staple of my column.  Somewhat to my dismay, I have had some friends tell me that they ready my column exclusively for the bits of randomness (I'm guessing that's direct payback for calling their shows "crap").

Anyway, now I can tell everyone that I'm not making any promises to see anything specific.  That way I don't have to worry one way or another about choosing one friend over another, or anything like that.  It's all in the hands of this d20 in my hand.