It didn’t come out of nowhere. Trish Parry and William Glenn – both of the revered 2014 Orlando Fringe show A History of Beer – knew the ropes, the challenges and the fun of a Fringe Festival without even having to think or drink too much. While Orlando’s Fringe is touted as the oldest in the country at 26 years now, Tampa has never had one before. That changes on May 11.
“Three years ago, we brought our show to Tampa, because my show partner William Glenn, he was from there, and I went to college there,” Parry says. “We brought our show there and we were produced by this company called Jobsite Theater. We sat down with the artistic director of that and told him all about Fringe and we told him all about how we had been touring with that after college on the Fringe circuit.”
A polite promise to respond after the completion of said artistic director’s Ph.D studies, the duo came at Jobsite Theater with the premise again. Thus began the roots of Florida’s newest Fringe Festival, set in Ybor City.
“People are very responsive, but they’re also genuinely confused. I struggle not to sound like a school teacher when I say, ‘Well, Fringe, that began in the 1940s in Edinburgh.’ Some people think it’s a theater festival, and, yes, obviously there’s theater involved,” Parry says. “Until the Tampa people come to the festival, I don’t think they’ll fully wrap their minds around the kind of cross-genre, eclectic, unique and intellectual kinds of work that come out of Fringe and Fringe artists.
Parry’s past experiences with Fringe festivals the world over has taught her a thing or two about how to manage the inaugural event. She says that she prefers Orlando’s approach – in lottery and participant pay – over others she has engaged in.
“I’ve traveled to Edinburgh [the world’s oldest Fringe festival] and Adelaide, and I feel like that’s sort of like the capitalistic version, where it’s open access but the chances of anybody making any money are slim to none, even the famous people that go there,” she says.
That doesn’t mean it’s been easy to build this Fringe up from the ground. She’s been in contact with Orlando Fringe and other Fringe leaders to keep things in proper line and dealing with the “various situations” that may present themselves.
“I normally just produce my shows, or maybe shows here and there in New York, but this is a way bigger thing and it’s been a big learning curve about just diving in and saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about food truck licensing.’ Or ‘1099 tax paperwork, what?’” she says.
Likewise, the scale of the initial Tampa Fringe shouldn’t be expected to match the scope of Orlando’s event, which begins on May 16, though some of the shows at Tampa Fringe will cross I-4 to perform in Orlando as well. In its early years, Orlando Fringe was largely presented in abandoned downtown venues, many without air conditioning. It was a much more spartan affair than the celebration that now occupies Loch Haven Park, including the Orlando Shakespeare Center and the Orlando Museum of Art. But that could change, Parry says.
“In the future, there could be the possibility of having something more central, like having a bigger centralized area like Loch Haven Park in Orlando, because there are some big community areas in Ybor like the Cuban Club. But because we’re trying to start small – we started with two venues and ended up with four somehow – we want to maintain the walkability of it. Having experienced how centralized Orlando is, I’m aware that people don’t necessarily want to drive.
The venues are HCC Ybor, the Silver Meteor Gallery, Crowbar and Urban Phoenix, and ticket prices will range from $5-$13.
And, being a Fringe festival, it has to have distractions built in to buy time in between performances.
“We’re cultivating some other events around the festival to try to draw in different parts of the community so that more people understand and have a chance to perform. So we’re doing an opening night open-mic at our Fringe central bar, New World Brewery,” she says. “So we’re going to reach out to all different types of people and say, ‘Come on! You need to understand what the hell is going on here!’”
The whole point of launching a new Fringe is to make theater more inclusive, Parry says. The theme of this first Fringe is “Making the Past into the Future.”
“It’s kind of convoluted, but it has to do with the idea with how, in a lot of places, the performing arts are dying. I feel that,” she says. “In Tampa, there’s theater that’s happening for theater people. I like using black box theaters for alternative audiences that normally wouldn’t go to the theater.”
“We do have three-to-five year plans that are more ambitious, like kids’ Fringe. We have a thought that it could be kind of cool to have dual Fringe in different areas: one in Ybor, one in downtown St. Pete. But that’s a very far off plan to kind of bridge the gap of that bridge.”
For information on show times and tickets, go to TampaFringe.org.
