Rooting for the Home Team

Today is the official opening of the Fringe, which means that the first American High School Theatre Festival shows performed today. We decided as a company that we were going to take the morning and support our peer performers. For some of us, this meant rising a little early to finish breakfast and walk out into the city to find the Space Triplex venue to see A Midsummer Night's Dream. Midsummer is to Shakespeare artists what The Nutcracker is to ballet companies. It pays the bills. We've all been in it, seen it, and directed it at least a dozen times. I once saw a production entirely in Korean, and could provide my own subtitles from memory. And yet, whenever I see it, there is some directorial choice, or some acting moment that makes me think about the show and the text in a new way.

It was a lovely production with gorgeous singing, a simple and elegant set, and engaging actors. But at 9:00am, there wasn't much of an audience. The Amerian High School Festival guarentees you an audience by assigning schools to sit in for each performance, so there was a group from South Carolina in the house, and there was half of our company. Surprisingly, this school is scheduled for 2 of these 9:00am performance times. In a festival atmoshpere where most people are staying out late into the night, every night, an early morning show is a death sentence. Maybe if you do a children's show, you have an off-chance of catching some foot traffic at 10:00am, but 9:15? And to ask a school to do that twice? It made me feel guilty for our good fortune in having only excellent afternoon time slots.

The production deserved more of an audience, but AHSTF is pretty frank about the fact that our shows don't typically sell well, and that the goal should be to perform for the other American schools. When I went on this program 10 years ago, the average size of a school group was 30. Now it seems that the average is closer to 15, with many delegations of 10 or fewer. That leaves an awful lot of empty space to rattle around in. But we had a grand time in the audience, and based on the size and honesty of the grins on the faces of the actors during curtain call, I don't think they were are distressed as I was. Since this school became friends with our students, we often re-told the story of our first year in VTA when we were smacked with the evil 8:00am time slot, which was very nearly the end of us. These actors fared far better!

The other half of our group went off to watch "Chipped/Drift" which was two separate one-act plays presented together. The first was a common theme in this year's Fringe: the anxiety over technology erasing human interaction. The second play was about homelessness. While our kids praised the efforts of the student actors, they felt that the scripts let the performers down.

Later in the day, some of our company saw "The Complete History of America, Abridged" which led to some interesting discussions of the racism in the show among our group, that both Dr. Dixon and Montana thought was a poor use of the cast's one black actor. I had raised similar issues had been after watching "The 25th Annual Putnam Coutny Spelling Bee" (where a 90% white cast had a white actor portray a bucktoothed, "R for L" racist-accented, shuffling, bowing, "oriental" Jesus.) Throughout dinner and later into the evening we continued our discussion about what responsibilities students and directors have when representing racial issues on stage. I'm always impressed with our kids' ability to wade into these thorny discussions with passion, tact, and intelligence. We don't always agree on what constitutes racism on stage, but we are willing to talk about what bothers or hurts us.

Throughout the journey, we'll be going to a few more AHSTF shows, including "The Giver" which is based on a book I've never read, but which the kids are deeply divided on. Still, it's a good start to our Fringe journey!