Edinburgh Fringe: Day 9
McKenzie takes all of her friends to a bad show. Chris has an act three emotional breakdown.
M: Our first full week in Edinburgh. Twenty-three shows for you, and twenty-one for me. Some failures, some triumphs, some bangers, some flops. To begin, I honestly think we had a perfect first Fringe weekend.
C: I think so too! Having some genuine flops is part of the Fringe experience. You haven’t really experienced Fringe until you’ve been uncomfortable, sweating, and hanging on by a thread to get through an excruciating show. Live theatre, baby! But in general, our ratio of excellent shows to less excellent shows has been great so far.
M: We’re here in pursuit of high highs and low lows.
C: Should we jump right in?
M: Yes! I keep hearing in the news that this is a record-breaking year for Edinburgh Fringe, with almost four thousand shows in the official program. How on earth did we parse through that? What was our strategy for booking our first full weekend of theater? Since we both work full-time, weekends are when we pack our schedules as much as humanly possible.
C: Last year we found a lot of consistently interesting stuff at Paine Plough’s Roundabout venue in Summerhall and at the Traverse Theatre (a company with year-round programming, but has a special “TravFest” that aligns with Fringe). To get a head start on what we thought might be some of the hits, we did a full Saturday at Summerhall and a full Sunday at Traverse.
M: Not to mention the fact that we kicked off the festival on Friday with some comedy. We ran into our first Fringe Fail when we showed up at McEwan Hall to a power outage, rendering our tickets to My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do) useless. We improvised and checked out Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going To Do One (1) Backflip (hilarious) and then ran across the Pleasance Courtyard to make it to Patti Harrison’s My Huge Tits Huge Because They Are Infected NOT FAKE! (hyped up, but ultimately not for me).
C: Technically, I snuck in a last-minute show on Thursday: The Mosinee Project, which was one of three Untapped Award winners this year (which is a grant for small companies that boosts their production value and gets them a nice slot at a venue). That one was extremely well written, scrappy, and fresh - a perfect start to my Fringe.
M: I still need to check that one out! On Saturday, we decamped to Summerhall for the day and saw the following line-up: Nation, Instructions, My Mother’s Funeral, Or What’s Left of Us, VL, and Main Character Energy. We had a fun crowd of friends join us at Instructions, which tragically was our dud of the day. It turns out AI should not write theater. However, it JUST got four stars in The Stage. (We’re baffled.)
I adored (read: wept aggressively at) My Mother’s Funeral, which was a riotous and devastating piece about art, grief, and capitalism. Within three minutes of the show, I knew we were in good hands. Plenty of shows at Fringe can feel half-baked, like the creators almost have an amazing idea and are really close to nailing it, but My Mother’s Funeral was crisp, well-constructed, urgent, clever, and gut-wrenching! Art is truly amazing.
What stood out the most to you?
C: I may have seen my favorite show of the entire festival on our first full day: Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left Of Us. I mentioned last newsletter that I’m a fan of the company, and somehow they blew me away with a piece even better than the last I saw.
Sh!t Theatre’s taken a five-year hiatus from devising, for personal reasons, and the show is billed as a “Folk Singaround.” They got really into folk music and folk pubs on their time off, and they weave together songs they’ve learned with stories from the folk communities they’ve interacted with (In the classic, rabbit-hole-style investigations that are what I love about them).
It’s the type of show that Fringe is about! Looking at the blurb, I would never think a “folk sing around” show would be for me. But it was incredible.
M: We then kicked off Sunday with a full day at Traverse, where we checked out the UK premiere of a Broadway show called The Sound Inside, a new place featuring cooking onstage called My English Persian Kitchen, a new musical called The History of Paper, and a performance art piece about female insanity called BATSHIT!. Our Traverse day was quite the mixed bag. What were the highlights and lowlights for you?
C: My personal least favorite of the festival so far has been The History of Paper. The musical sold out its entire run before Fringe even began! I’m not just saying this to be contrarian!
The show tracks an (extremely sparsely fleshed out) relationship between a man and woman through the paper that links their memories: menus, origami, maps, plane tickets, etc. The music is generic and the lyrics are very bad. Warning for spoilers: the show goes off the rails when we learn in Act Three that the woman died in the Twin Towers on 9/11! I’m speechless! I don’t even know what to say about that!
M: I am typically a very weepy theater-goer, but I was sitting stone-faced in the audience when we heard a chorus of sniffles and sobbing around us. It felt very bizarre! I’ll also flag that there already is an intimate contemporary musical theater piece about 9/11 that heavily features paper, and it’s a lovely little show called Ordinary Days. Did we need another?
On a more positive note, we adored BATSHIT by Australian performance artist and psycho-siren (her words, not mine) Leah Shelton. She ties together the experience of her grandmother at a mental institution in Australia in the 1960s with a general commentary on female insanity over the ages. Smart, sharp, weird, intimate, and moving. I love leaving a theater and immediately yammering with you about all the things we loved. It’s such a thrill.
We had a couple of random funny themes we noticed in our shows this week. Multiple shows utilized small motorized toy cars driving around onstage. Lots of meta acknowledgments during a piece about how we are an audience in a theater watching a show. A couple of shows had lots of paper dramatically flying through the air. Did you notice any similarities between the shows we’ve seen?
C: The main theme between shows I’ve noticed this first week - and a piece of criticism I’d like to get into - is the third-act emotional breakdown. This is when a performer has a moment of stripped-down emotional rawness about 70% through the show before the finale. We went to so many comedians and one-man shows that ended in this way, and to be honest - it’s hard to get right!
Where it worked most successfully was in These Are The Contents Of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show). This show (a last-minute booking!) follows cabaret artist Salty Brine through stories of his childhood - interweaved with the plot of his favorite novel, The Awakening, all set to the music of Annie Lennox. It’s a beautiful interplay you’d never expect of three texts, and the emotional punch lands so well. I think it lands because the whole show is informed by these two hyperspecific sources - it doesn’t just draw from Brine’s personal life, and the sources give the piece a backbone.
M: I think actors are tempted to fully halt the show, stop the act, and speak from the heart to get their message across, but this technique works best when it's embedded in the structure of the show itself. In your example, Salty Brine had their rawest moment during one of their cabaret numbers. They didn’t have to explicitly say “Isn’t it moving how I, my mother, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening experienced similar feelings of feeling alternately trapped and free in our life journeys?” - they trusted the audience to understand the message implicitly.
Same with BATSHIT. Leah Shelton had a breakdown towards the end of the show that theatrically drew a line between the experience of her grandmother and the repeated portrayal of difficult women as crazy today. She didn’t say her thesis out loud. We got it from the show.
It is left effective when the performer cuts the music and stands onstage and says “I have lots of stress and anxiety and insecurity in my life”. Of course you do! Why else would you be making art? Trust the audience to follow along with you and connect the dots themselves.
C: What show are you most looking forward to in our upcoming weekend?
M: We’re going and seeing Weer tonight at Traverse, which my friends went and saw earlier this week. They wouldn’t tell us a single thing about it, but instead just repeated “You HAVE to go” until we booked tickets. Such suspense! I’m also looking forward to Comala, Comala, which is a Mexican original musical and is billed as a “Day of the Dead-style theatrical experience”. It’s also in Spanish, which we are extremely average at! What about you?
C: I’m particularly excited for a pretty silly Sunday. We’re seeing a double feature of TWO musicals written about the Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial. Running about 2 hours apart from each other. Two completely separate productions. It’s The Wild Party all over again! Prepare for some extremely direct comparisons in the next newsletter.
I’m also super excited to see Catherine Cohen - she’s one of my favorite comedians, who I saw for the first time at the 2019 Fringe!
M: That’s all for us now! Catch us after our next marathon weekend, if we survive it! Happy Fringe!
