I'm writing to you from the Capital Fringe Festival, Washington DC. It's been an eventful week here at the Capital Fringe; mounting a new production, interviews, workshops and seeing plenty of shows. The beauty of this festival is the eclectic mix of performers and shows - I've seen a one man performance from a local binman to a 25-strong Gospel rendition of the Nativity with leather-bound Satans. Somewhere in the middle of this is the play I've brought over, Marsha. It's a one-woman show, co-directed and performed by Julia Thomas, and we're half way through the run.
One of the reasons to bring new writing to the festival was to see how work is received by a foreign audience - the play is set firmly in a Welsh village and yet, as a playwright, one of my aims is to work with universal themes and see how they translate to an unfamiliar audience.
We have a local stage manager, Zoia Wiseman (who has worked at the Capital Fringe in the past) and ASM Colin Manning (a recent theatre graduate) and for the show we were allocated a space - The Fort Fringe Bedroom - and a venue manager. The festival contains around 130 shows and is run along the lines of the Edinburgh Fringe but with some well thought out differences.
Looking back at our journey here I feel it's been an opportunity work in an uncensored way and the creativity of the piece is the most important thing - our rehearsal process was supported by Sherman Cymru and Arts Council Wales and Wales Arts International helped us get here. It's been obvious that the American artists don't have the same level of support from funding bodies and organisations - myself and Julia attended a workshop of artists and audience members where we discussed the various models of making original work and also trying to get that work staged.
One of the most fruitful parts of this experience has been the discussions with other companies who have brought work to the festival - local companies such as Dog and Pony and the aforementioned Gospel group who have managed to come up from Georgia with 25 performers and a five-piece band.
People here are interested to find out what is going on in Wales theatre-wise and it's been great to share that with theatre-makers in DC. I did a radio interview with the festival's boss Julianne Brienza and local performers Ron Lipman and Margaux Delotte-Bennett - it was a phone in which was excellent fun and also, today, I'm going for a meeting with the literary manager of the Studio theatre, one of a handful of new writing companies in DC, to learn a bit more about their organisation and see how they develop new writing.
The show itself has gone down well:
http://www.dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2013/07/13/capital-fringe-review-...
and it's been a good feature of the festival that it has a centre - a bar where you can meet other artists and chat with audience members about the work.
Taking part in the Capital Fringe has also been a lesson in how to package up a small show and deliver it in a unfamiliar space - we teched show at the studio space at Sherman Cymru (with sound designer Tom Elstob and lighting designer Isobel Howe) before we left and then sent a prompt script to stage manager Zoia before arrival. Even though the shape of the two spaces (the Sherman studio and the venue here in DC) are very different it made our two-hour tech slot in the space much smoother than it might have been.
Right, off to another show. It's called How To Be A Terrorist which should be fun.
Alan