Many years ago, Clare Schapiro and I got our act into the Fringe. It was a mocking little piece called How Ibsen Got His Start written by me and designed to tear a strip off Maurice Podbrey’s hide.
Inspired by actual incidents from Henrik Ibsen’s life, the plot went like this: a young, contempt-filled playwright submits a thick manuscript to the artistic director of the town’s one big bloated theatre. The director growls and tells the playwright to trim it by half. Incensed, the writer storms off to Italy, but not before convincing the director’s long-suffering wife to come with him. The jilted husband tracks them down in a two-bit Italian b & b and bursts into the love nest dressed as a Viking, swinging an axe, a scene of hilarity and liberation during which the couple’s passion is rekindled and the playwright gets a good idea for a play.
The Podbrey role was played by Clare’s brother Stephano, a hulking, bearded guy who had until recently been living as a hermit in Tuscany. Having heard a rumour it was about him, Podbrey, then of course the boss at Centaur Theatre, came to see the play. His only comment: “The fellow playing me should be much better looking.”
What I remember most clearly – apart from Stephano jumping on a bed wearing horns borrowed from the Centaur props (we were shameless) – was the heat. Talking on the phone with my head stuck in the fridge freezer, inhaling icy mist, delicious.
Playmaking at the Fringe is akin to what the French call camping savage. At least it was then. Maybe it’s all gone slick and easy. I plan to find out next week when the 19th Fringe opens on the Main. Seven hundred performances by 90 companies.
Bravo to Jeremy Hechtman and his army for somehow keeping the fringy feeling while deftly turning this annual ritual into a veritable institution. No sign of dry rot seeping in, no need for a snarky little play telling JH it’s time to jump. (By the way, Podbrey did jump shortly thereafter and is indeed living in a warmer clime and looking good for the change.)
But my little fringe tale has nothing on the truly legendary story of what happened a few years later, when a local theatre critic took umbrage when Fringe organisers refused to grant a free press ticket to a play taking place in an automobile – actors in the front seat, audience in the back. (At the time, the critic would have been making, I’ll estimate, $60,000+.) A verbal exchange ensued and quickly rose to the corporal level, with one member of the squabble ending up broadside on the pavement. Shortly thereafter said critic’s by-line disappeared from coverage of theatre and stayed gone for several years.
But that’s all behind us now. Times have changed. So have some people. Maybe the Fringe has changed too. I can hardly wait to find out.
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who who who??