Now in its 20th year, the New York International Fringe Festival, better known as FringeNYC, has presented nearly 4,000 productions for five-performance runs each summer, sustaining a beehive of theatrical activity in spaces on the Lower East Side. In contrast to many fringe festivals, all of which seem to owe a debt to the progenitor, the Edinburgh Fringe, FringeNYC is a curated festival, with its 200 annual productions chosen from an array of applications. Unlike reports from Edinburgh, which have some 8,000 productions scrambling for space and audiences each summer, FringeNYC engages all of the necessary spaces and doles them out to the productions they accept, controlling the probability of the highly speculative rents that have crept into Edinburgh. FringeNYC also negotiates an agreement with Actors Equity, provides lighting and sound equipment, and covers general liability insurance.

FringeNYC’s two decade history and success made last week’s “Biz Blip” from the Dramatists Guild to its members, challenging terms regarding subsidiary rights, or ongoing revenue, within FringeNYC’s authors agreements all the more surprising. While it was not sent as a press release or public statement, the missive, issued the night before the 2016 Festival began, quickly became a topic of conversation on social media. One of the early sources for non-Guild members was Isaac Butler’s Parabasis blog, which reproduced the item in its entirety. Headed “NYC Fringe Contract: Warning,” it read, in part:

Playwrights should be aware that the standard for fringe festivals around the world (including the US Association of Fringe Festivals, the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, and the Edinburgh Festival, the model on which most other festivals are based) is that, as presenting entities that are not actually producing the work, festivals are not entitled to subsidiary rights from authors. The NYC Fringe, however, under Article IV-B of their contract, requires an author to pay 2% of subsidiary rights revenues earned within 7 years of the festival (after the author’s first $20,000). And the contract does not limit the scope of its definition of “subsidiary rights,” so it includes every use of the play on a worldwide basis; this is a definition broader than a LORT theater or even a commercial off-Broadway producer might be granted.

Because Arts Integrity and its director Howard Sherman have ongoing relationships with both the Dramatists Guild (having worked with them on multiple instances of theatrical censorship and having received an award from the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund) and FringeNYC and its producing artistic director Elena K. Holy (including reporting a 3-day “Fringe Binge” for Narratively.com and participating in a panel on censorship during the 2015 festival), it was incumbent that both parties have an opportunity to explain their policies and views.

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In conversation at one of the FringeNYC Lounges on the first full day of the 2016 Festival, Holy said of the Guild statement, “My initial response is that most of what they’ve said is true about our contract. However our contract incorporates a Participants Manual, which is like 64 pages, and none of that was included [in the Guild’s summary of issues]. We don’t have an attorney on staff so we wrote the participants’ agreement in 1997 and haven’t really changed it much since then. Every year, facts, figures, dates and stuff change, and technology changes, so that part gets put into the Participants Manual.”

Regarding the Dramatists Guild’s explicit comparison to the Edinburgh Festival, Holy explained, “We call ourselves presenters, but my biggest point of contention with what the Dramatists Guild said is we should be compared to Edinburgh. They see Edinburgh Festival Fringe as an industry standard, which totally makes sense, they’re the granddaddy of them all, they were 50 years old when we started, but the model is very different. They charge a similar participation fee to us and then they hand you a list of venues, and say ‘Great, go out and rent one of these venues to produce your show in.’

“Our thought was that if we did that in New York City and set loose 200 shows all looking to book the same 16 days, forget ten grand a week it would be thirty to forty grand a week, just through supply and demand. So we rent the venues, equip the venues, we staff the venues, we do marketing, we do marketing speed dates, director speed dates, town meeting – we are very hands on, and we’re invested in their production and we like to have skin in the game. I like that we are an adjudicated festival.”

Regarding the festival’s economics, Holy said, “On our 2014 990 form, we operated on 86% earned income. We’re invested in our artists. We spend between $6,000 to $7,000 on each show at FringeNYC. Part of that is we want a) for them to be invested in us and b) if they see huge success, huge unlikely success, for having done the show at FringeNYC, which does about 13,000 industry and press comps a year, then we would like for that to be recognized in order to keep our participation fees low for future artists. In our 19, almost 20, years now of doing our festival, three shows have contributed to that.” She cites Urinetown, which paid approximately $5,000 in royalties to the festival, as well as Eva Dean Dance and Dixie’s Tupperware Party.

Holy acknowledges that some applicants resist FringeNYC’s terms.

“Our 2% clause,” she notes, “when a famous person walks into our office and fills out an application form and doesn’t submit their script, or when someone’s agent calls us and says, ‘I know they’ve been accepted into the festival but we can’t sign this,’ it’s a pretty good indication that they don’t need one of our 200 slots.

“We only have 200 spots and if their career is beyond what we can offer, if their play is being produced that widely or if in the past they’ve had opportunities on Broadway, there’s really no reason for our 2500 volunteers to volunteer to help make somebody’s show happen when that somebody has ample opportunity elsewhere. So I’m not ashamed to say it scares a lot of people off and they’re probably people that shouldn’t be applying for our festival even.”

But isn’t it possible that FringeNYC is capitalizing on people’s desire to get their work seen on a New York stage, whatever the cost?

“Are they,” Holy asks, “given that it’s kicked in three times in 20 years? Given that it doesn’t kick in until after they’ve made $20,000, which actually these days means that you have to have a major motion picture made out of your play? Are they really encumbering their project? Most often what happens here is it’s not even the plays from FringeNYC that gets picked up. It’s our playwrights’ second and third plays that are what’s being produced regionally, or that’s when they get the Netflix series or the television show or whatever. So we certainly are not still around because of that $5,000 from Urinetown in 2000, or it was probably 2001 that it started.” She notes that the Fringe has received no subsidiary income from such shows as Matt and Ben and Silence! The Musical.

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Regarding the citation of other fringe festivals in the Dramatists Guild’s “Biz Blip,” David Faux, associate executive for business administration at the Guild, explained in a phone conversation, “When we speak to festivals and producers, every single one of them can say, ‘We’re special, we’re different, we do things differently from what the other people do,’ and invariably they’re telling the truth. That’s the beauty of the theatre, every festival has its unique attributes, every producer has his or her unique attributes that they bring that nobody else can bring. That’s part of the chemistry of good theatre. So the fact that they do something that other festivals don’t do, we can just look at the other festivals and say, ‘Yeah, but they do things that you don’t.’ Why would the thing that they do different have to rest on the authors’ shoulders? Why should the author be burdened with a unique attribute of the festival?”

“We look at thousands of contracts that our authors ask us to review every year,” said Faux. “When you see that many contracts you see patterns and you see where theatres and festivals are deviating.”

“It’s always germane what other people are doing in the market,” notes Faux. “With the Guild in particular we don’t tell members whether or not to sign contracts, we don’t dictate terms of contracts, but we do express our opinions when we believe a contract has substandard terms. In that way, all we have is the comparison.”

Asked to explain a very general idea of common practice regarding subsidiary rights, Faux said, “Commercial theatres certainly receive subsidiary rights. They’re taking on a lot of risk and this is how the author shares in that risk on the back end. If it works out, the success of the authors work can go back to the commercial producer or the investors.

“With not-for-profits, there’s a different structure, because they are receiving grant monies, they don’t pay taxes, they get a certain number of benefits that commercial producers don’t. So that’s why it would be unusual to see an author giving subsidiary rights of more than 5% to a not-for-profit theatre. That’s about the top when you talk about regionals, LORTs. We’ve seen a trend lately of only having subsidiary rights kick in after a significant windfall, and by significant we’re talking $40,000 to $50,000. These are general terms.

“At festivals though, you don’t see authors having to yield a revenue stream on their future revenue. That’s what’s different about this. You know what happens, a theatre festival in Wichita, Kansas will hear that NYC Fringe is getting subsidiary rights from the author. And that festival in Wichita doesn’t say, ‘Oh, it’s New York City, of course it gets something we don’t.’ That festival in Wichita says, ‘Our production values are even better than what they’re getting in New York. Our dedication, the number of hours we put in, because we have lower overhead, we can spend more time on each individual, festival has more value.’ And they may be right about that.

“But nobody thinks, ‘New York City Fringe is so much better than my festival they deserve what they get.’ They all think they have something to bring to the table that New York City Fringe doesn’t. So suddenly because one festival says, ‘I want to tax the author,’ now authors are getting taxed all across the nation. So we have to say something about it before it becomes a standard practice.”

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Addressing some smaller items in the Dramatists Guild statement, there are several points that bear clarification.

• The Guild’s memo states, “It has been reported to us that the Fringe sent out its contracts to authors for this year’s festival at the end of July. If that is true, then it was a contract presented only a few weeks before the festival was scheduled to begin, after money has been raised and spent, leaving little or no time for authors and producers to assess their options in good faith.” Holy points out that all of the major terms of the agreements are included as part of the application process, so the terms should not come as a surprise, unless, in her words, “they didn’t read the information on the application before they submit.” However, Holy acknowledges the lateness of the agreements this year, saying, “I take full responsibility. We were trying to do everything electronically this year using DocuSign and I set it up so that the author’s agreement would fire when everyone had completed step one, the participants agreement and their W-9, and they haven’t all done that yet. That was a foolish way to set that up. So then I just gave up and e-mailed them a PDF.” Holy noted that this was a new process this year, replacing the previous practice of mailing paper contracts back and forth.

• The Dramatists Guild cites “the standard for fringe festivals around the world (including the US Association of Fringe Festivals, the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, and the Edinburgh Festival, the model on which most other festivals are based).” However, Jeff Larson, responding to an online inquiry by Arts Integrity to the US Association of Fringe Festivals, commented, “The USAFF is a loose affiliation of United States Fringes and does not enforce standards on its members.”

• The Guild noted, regarding the authors contract, that, “There are no obligations specified (either in the contract or the rules) for the Festival to support the show with any particular expenditure of marketing monies, nor any warrant of proper billing for the author and the play in whatever marketing and advertising the Fringe might do, and there is also no guarantee of mutually acceptable venues or performance schedules for the play, nor any discussion of the festival’s duties with regard to providing technical support.” As Holy noted above, those terms are included in the Participant Manual, an Appendix to the Participant Agreement. While the Guild concerns itself solely with the authors agreements, in the interest of transparency, FringeNYC might consider providing both the authors and participants agreements, as well as the participant manual, to the Guild so that all pertinent terms regarding production of the authors’ work are made clear.

• The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, which more closely follows the Edinburgh model, posts its guidelines and artist tools for prospective applicants. They can be found at http://fringearts.com/all-presentations/artist-resources/ for comparison purposes. Details on producing at the Edinburgh Fringe itself can be found at https://www.edfringe.com/participants/planning-your-show.

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So what of the FringeNYC terms regarding subsidiary rights, given the Guild’s characterization of prevailing practice and Holy’s acknowledgement that the terms cited were correct?

It is perhaps useful to look at the example of another New York summer festival, the New York Musical Festival, commonly referred to as NYMF, in operation since 2004 and the starting place for such musicals as Next To Normal and [title of show]. In 2010, NYMF sought to introduce a subsidiary rights clause to their agreements, saying in a statement:

Writers are the core beneficiaries of NYMF. Our goal is for NYMF shows to have future life, and for as many of our writers as possible to have their work produced again after the festival.

We specifically chose not to demand income from future third-party producers, as many other theater companies do, because doing so would encumber the project — making it less likely to be optioned or produced. Instead, we carefully structured our contract so that if — and only if — writers benefit substantially from NYMF’s support, they give back a small percentage so that we can provide similar opportunities to future generations of writers.

We think that’s fair.

Following a challenge by the Dramatists Guild to these new terms, NYMF withdrew its new terms in less than a month, writing in a statement:

The mission of NYMF is to support theatre artists, not to argue with them. We therefore withdraw our request to share in the subsidiary rights of authors participating in the 2010 Festival and will remove that section (Paragraph 5(E)) from our contract. Given the challenges of moving new musicals from the page to the stage and on to further productions, NYMF wants first and foremost to ensure that the shows we present have the unified support of the community.

While not working in the same kind of festival format, the O’Neill Theatre Center, one of the country’s oldest play development labs, also sought to introduce a subsidiary rights clause in 2006, at the start of the application process for the 2007 summer season. That effort drew a rebuke from Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang, the co-heads of the playwriting program at The Juilliard School at the time. A report from the New York Sun notes that the effort was quickly rescinded:

“We have their assurance that they will not this year, or in the future, be asking for a percentage of future royalties from the plays they accept for development,” Mr. Durang and Ms. Norman wrote. “They are looking for other sources of funding, but those monies will not come from your subsidiary rights.”

As the director of the Arts Integrity Initiative, I must step out of the third person to note that during my tenure as executive director of the O’Neill Theatre Center, from 2000 to 2003, I recall being charged by the board of directors to investigate the impact of introducing a subsidiary rights participation in authors’ future royalties. While I do not retain my notes from the time, I clearly remember my survey of prevailing practice, which consistently showed that regardless of whether I spoke with a festival, developmental, or producing organization, there was a clear dividing line for when it was appropriate to negotiate for subsidiary rights. That line was when a show was actually produced, not merely workshopped or showcased, even in cases where the work in question had been commissioned.

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In conversation, Elena Holy noted that “we call ourselves presenters,” although in the context of explaining how the role of FringeNYC differs from the Edinburgh Fringe, she noted more direct involvement with productions than many presenters might have. In its Participant Agreement, which is signed by the designated liaison for each FringeNYC show, FringeNYC identifies itself as the “Presentor,” as distinct from a Producer (to which the Participant may be equivalent, even when the Participant is the producer, author and performer all in one). It is the Participant who is taking on primary responsibility for raising money, securing rehearsal space, assembling the show and delivering it to FringeNYC – the role of a Producer – and is even subject to penalties if it is unable to do so after a certain date, though they may not have continuing right to the show themselves. While FringeNYC does provide resources to each production and makes an investment of resources in them, mores than many fringe festivals, anecdotally the costs of producing the shows themselves, especially for companies not based in New York, can be considerably more than the FringeNYC allocation, once artist compensation, physical production, and travel and housing are factored in. In addition to the 2% subsidiary rights participation that FringeNYC asks of authors, it also asks for 2% of the Participants’ future revenues as well (again, over the $20,000 threshold).

While the discussion of Presentor, Presenter, Participant, Producer and so on may seem semantic, it’s not. Subsidiary rights typically accrue to producers who mount full productions of shows, at their expense (or with funds raised by them), whether commercial or not-for-profit, although the terms may vary. In Arts Integrity’s experience and in the examples given, they are not customary for productions which do not meet that standard. As for subsidiary rights granted by authors to entities responsible for the original mounting(s) of their play, for more than 25 years, there has been discussion of the complications engendered by encumbrances on authors when works receive several early productions that each secure (or demand) subsidiary rights. Providing them to developmental productions as well could have the effect of making it too expensive to produce a work that has promised multiple payments to multiple entities, or severely impede an author’s ability to be properly paid for subsequent productions. Additionally subsidiary rights are typically activated once a production has given a certain number of performances; as few as five are typically insufficient.

For 20 years, FringeNYC has been and continues to be an invaluable asset for new, inventive, irreverent and diverse work in New York. While it can’t hope to catch up with the longevity of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it is deserving of a comparably long life. After the frenzy of the current festival subsides, FringeNYC would be well served to reconsider its policy regarding subsidiary rights, lest it prove an increasing impediment to the depth and breadth of work seen in its venues each summer. But precisely because the Fringe by its nature attracts younger or less established artists seeking a showcase in one of the world’s greatest theatre cities, with the possibility of being seen by industry and media professionals who could advance their shows, their careers, or both, it would do well not to ask more of its authors, its artists and its producers than any other fringe, showcase, workshop, reading series or the like. While many artists have enjoyed and benefited from the Fringe and have agreed to its longstanding terms, with the subsidiary rights language ultimately being activated for the very tiniest percentage, the Fringe’s embracing spirit can set an example for its artists and producers of what they can and should expect in the future, and that begins with their contracts.

10 days ago, I was completely unaware that an Icelandic musical had established a beachhead in one of Off-Broadway’s larger theatres. To be honest, I’d never given much thought to Icelandic theatre, let alone their musicals. So when I spotted an online Village Voice story about the show’s musical score and gave it a skim, that alone was enough to make me want to see this rara avis. So I spent Saturday afternoon, a beautiful August afternoon, in the dark at the Minetta Lane. But there’s actually a slew of other reasons why I went.

RARITY As someone who prides himself on obscure knowledge and eccentric experiences, I am fairly (but not absolutely) certain that there have not been major productions of Icelandic musicals before in New York, or even the United States. I remember a Polish musical making it to Broadway, although I didn’t see Metro, and there was a Dutch musical of Cyrano, but I daresay a piece of Icelandic musical theatre making its world premiere in New York is most likely a first. Please contradict me if you’re able.

Cady Huffman & Marrick Smith in Ragnar Agnarsson (Carol Rosegg photo)

NAME Let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to resist a title like The Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter. At least it is for me. While it’s not as mellifluous as Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You In The Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad and doesn’t approach the monumental length of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, I wanted to catch it before the musical buffs start calling it simply Ragnar or Elbow, shortened like How To Succeed or Forum. Just mentioning that I was going to it genuinely startled some people and I suspect the title will have that effect among the uninitiated for some time.

ICELAND I’ve actually been to Iceland. Not in a “quick stopover thanks to cheap flights via Icelandair on the way to Europe” way, but a two week stay. Mind you, I was 15 and it was a Boy Scout trip, but Iceland was the first foreign country I ever visited – I hadn’t even been to Canada when I went. I chose it precisely because I didn’t know anyone who had ever been there, passing up (if memory serves) alternate forays to Scotland and Jamaica. I went with so little preparation that I didn’t even know that the sun doesn’t set there in July. I climbed a (then dormant) volcano. It was all a discovery.

As a result, I’ve always followed news of the island country and thought it might give me an excuse to troop out some old knowledge. Without prompting, I explained to my wife, based solely on the title, that I knew the title character Ragnar’s father is named Agnar, given the patronymic naming that prevails in the country. Impressed? Incidentally, when I checked the website RagnarAgnarsson.com, I discovered that it belongs to a filmmaker, not to the show. For all I know, Ragnar Agnarsson could be the Icelandic equivalent of John Smith.

MUSIC I am well aware that there have been successful bands and performers out of Iceland, like Björk and Sigur Rós and The Sugarcubes, but to be honest, I’m not sure I’d recognize any of their music, only the swan dress, so perhaps this was a chance to acquaint myself with a certain rock style that had passed me by. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether the score by Ívar Páll Jónsson is representative of current tastes in Iceland or not. But now, it’s all I’ve got.

Kate Shindle & Cady Huffman in Ragnar Agnarsson (Carol Rosegg photo)

THEATRE Frame of reference, I realized as I watched, was something I lacked theatrically as well. While everyone I met in Iceland all those years ago spoke both English and Icelandic, that didn’t tell me a thing about what theatrical styles might be favored in this country of only 300,000 residents. Have they evolved their own aesthetic, do they lean toward America or England or Scandinavia or some other European region? Do they stage sagas? One show, I realized, wasn’t going to teach me that. But it was a reminder about how much of world theatre has passed me by, or that I have passed by.

It was interesting to note that the director Bergur Þór Ingólfsson directed the hit Icelandic production of Mary Poppins and producer Karl Pétur Jónsson was behind Icelandic productions of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). So maybe the cultural chasm isn’t all that wide. Of course, since the show is premiering in New York and not Reykjavik, we don’t actually know what the Icelandic public thinks of Ragnar. It could be an outlier there. Interesting strategy.

CAST Cady Huffman. Kate Shindle. What’s not to like? Those were the only two names I recognized when I looked the show up in the Theatrical Index. But it’s also great to see actors I’m not familiar with too, in this case the rest of the cast.

PLOT What appealed to me most about the plot its utter opacity. I’ve reached the point where it’s pretty difficult for me to see a show without some sense of what I’m in for. Save for my experiment a year ago at the New York International Fringe Festival, where I let someone I still have never met choose my itinerary, I have some manner of preconceived notion, however slight, about everything I see. What a joy to approach a show as a completely blank slate. For all the shows I go to with anticipation about the cast, the author, the director and so on, or with a vague sense of dread, I rarely feel the excitement of the utter unknown. Even with the fringe, I did read show synopses once I was given my marching orders. Perhaps what I felt was akin to what the folks are trying to do at the Lyric Hammersmith’s Secret Theatre in London, though in some cases there, you may recognize the play as soon as it starts. In Elbow, everything was new.

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Basically, I saw The Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter so that I could practice what I preach. Admittedly cost and time are usually part of our decision making, and legitimate factors at that, but we are forever self-selecting our entertainment. Once in a while, it’s refreshing to go to something completely in the dark. For those of us in the business of the arts, it’s a reminder of the faith audiences place in us when we convince them to come to an event that doesn’t have famous names or a familiar title. It takes us outside of the bubble of professional connections and journalism and gossip that inform our own decisions on what to see and, at least until we’ve spent a little time taking it in, enables (or forces) us to be completely open about a show because we know so little.

Obviously I’ve been very careful not to say what I thought of the show, and nothing herein should be extrapolated out to as either endorsement or indictment. It will open at the end of the week, and then it will be difficult to experience the show as unaware as I did, as others declare their opinions for your consumption. After that, you’ll have to look for, perhaps, an Estonian epic or a Uruguayan musical when it lands on our shores for your own tabula rasa experience in the theatre.

As for me, I can just say that I’ve plunged rather unknowingly into two Icelandic adventures in my life and – you should pardon the allusion – how cool is that?

Tommy Bazarian in “Still Life.” (Photo courtesy Yuvika Tolani).

Someone bathing on stage? Commonplace. Two people bathing together on stage? Seen it. Male and female conjoined twins spending almost the complete duration of an hour-long Bulgarian play in bathtub? For that, I needed to go to the Fringe.

Inanimate objects coming to life and talking? Oh, that’s so Toy Story. Two grapes discussing life for 80 minutes? Yup, that’s the Fringe.

I didn’t choose to see these plays. As a Connecticut native, raised on a diet of regional theatre, Broadway and the major Off-Broadway companies, I don’t usually spend a whole lot of time below Union Square. Coming out of college, my drama club friends became doctors and lawyers, so I was never compelled to see productions in fifth-floor downtown Manhattan lofts. Having only moved here a decade ago at age 40 to run the American Theatre Wing, which required me to see every show that opened on Broadway, I’m pretty mainstream by default. But for three days in August, I dove into the New York International Fringe Festival, letting an unknown person fill my days with the kind of theater I would never have selected for myself. What manner of lunatic am I? Let me explain.

As diverse as anyone manages to make their entertainment choices, they are ultimately part of a self-fulfilling plan. Whether it’s a play, a movie, a book or a TV show, our cultural choices are, for the most part, self-curated experiences that align with our existing interests. Only the truly adventurous will opt for an experience about which they know nothing or, even worse, strikes them as unappealing, especially if they have to pay for it. We don’t accidentally find ourselves at Mamma Mia! if we hate musicals, or a football game if we loathe sports.

Even though I see perhaps 125 theatre productions a year, attend about 50 movies in theaters and watch far too much television, I’m still not as omnivorous as the casual (or non-) theatergoer might perceive me to be. It may be hard to perceive limitations in the guy who enjoyed Fast and Furious 6 and is also the aesthete who reveled in the eight-hour marathon “Great Gatsby” adaptation Gatz, but I know my biases and where I prefer not to go. In the cultural arena, even if one is an avid consumer (since my teens) and a professional (since the age of 21) all at once, it’s easy to block out entire swaths of experience, pop and high culture alike. I wanted to get past that, to see if I could still expand my own repertoire.

Presenting some 185 productions in a span of a little more than two weeks, the New York Fringe, with its youthful irreverence, bare bones and anything-goes ethos, struck me as the perfect petri dish in which to conduct an experiment. Like any mad scientist, I made myself the test subject. What would be the effect of an eclectic, perhaps unpolished, theatrical barrage on the psyche of someone with such an establishment history? What would it be like to be subjected to a highly compressed theatergoing binge without any choice in what I would attend? Other than offering up 72 consecutive hours to Narratively and urging my editor (who I know only by Twitter, e-mail and a single phone conversation) to pack the schedule so long as I got time to eat, I committed to three days at the Fringe, taking in whatever I was directed to see, informed of my schedule each morning with minimal time to form advance notions. I know that my four or five shows a day for three days pales compared to die-hards who spend a week in Edinburgh taking in six or seven shows daily, but even this more measured pace struck my friends and my wife as going off the deep end. I had no idea what I’d think when I came out the other side.

And I’m off!

Day 1

My assigned agenda was waiting in my e-mail inbox when I awoke the first morning. It felt a bit like I was Jim Phelps (or Ethan Hunt, for the youngsters) on Mission: Impossible, getting my brief to topple a fictional Latin American dictatorship. Having paid no attention to literature about the Fringe in order to avoid preconceptions, I was a bit disappointed when all of the shows for the day turned out to be in theatres that I knew (although, in the case of The Players Theatre on MacDougal Street, I’d never been inside). Mild adventure at best.

My first show, about a would-be celebrity chef whose absurd concoctions had failed to catch the palate of television executives, began at two p.m. On a Wednesday. Oh, dear god: I’m a matinee lady. Here I thought I was breaking new ground and I start by making myself a cliché. But once I got over my panic, I noticed that the audience was in fact mostly younger than me – this held true at all but two shows. So even though I was a relatively senior patron, I was, comfortingly, at an experience sought out by those ostensibly hipper than myself, albeit theatre geeks like me. I kept waiting for food be thrown into the audience by the increasingly manic chef, wondering whether the front rows might at any moment be showered with diced vegetables, as if at a Gallagher gig. Alas, the premise stayed with self-flagellation for the solo show rather than audience assault.

An hour later, I’m back out into the sunshine. With more than 90 minutes to go until my next show, I check e-mails, tweet, return a couple of calls. But trying to avoid snacking and not being a coffee drinker, I simply have time to kill. My greatest concern in this first break, which is already longer than my time in the theatre so far? Would my phone battery hold out until I get home at midnight. Not unlike the experience of a long wait at an airport, I learn that finding an open power outlet at the Fringe is a beautiful thing.

Next show: a “version” of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints In Three Acts. I’m pretty sure I saw Four Saints once. I lived in Hartford, Connecticut for a decade, where the 1934 premiere of Stein’s piece took place, and is still referenced as a cultural touchstone when the city is accused of being straight-laced. That I can’t clearly remember the production I saw in Hartford suggests this is going to be a slog.

Daniel Bellomy, Jacob Vine, Jordan Phillips, Mitch Marois,Jimmy Nicholas, Joe Ventricelli and Carter Redwood in “Gertrude Stein SAINTS!” (Photo courtesy Jordan Harrison).

Within 15 minutes of lights up, I’m grabbing for my program, because this sure isn’t anything I remember. This cast looks so young. Who on earth are they? Who put this together? After about four bios I discover a common thread: I’m watching a show featuring undergraduates from Carnegie Mellon University. And while the word’s are Gertrude’s, these kids developed the almost completely a capella score themselves, under the direction of a CMU grad student. Loath as I am to play critic (and it’s not the purpose of my Fringe binge), before it’s half over I’m ready to buy the CD (yes, yes, I know—or download it from iTunes).

Dinner. I wolf down a piece of lasagna across the street, then back into the same theatre (La Mama) for the next show, then a quick sprint across the Village for the final show of the evening. Of these, one is amateurish but well-meaning, the other cynical and tasteless. The only noteworthy moment? During one of these shows, I see the first instance (of what would eventually become four) of simulated or mimed masturbation. Yes, it will become a mini-motif over three days. I don’t realize it right away, but collectively, they add up. Does this say something about the state of our culture? Is the motif a metaphor? Is this being taught in drama schools? I shudder at the possibilities. And I won’t even go into the implications of the show in which a character rhetorically asks to be rectally assaulted with an array of increasingly uncomfortable objects.

When I get home I give my wife the briefest of recaps, as she’s already in bed and halfway to sleep. I’m feeling a bit down, wondering whether I was taking the work on its own terms, something I always advocate, or holding it to the standard of my more conventional theatergoing fare. Have my perception and taste calcified with age and experience, or did I just see a few misfires? I haven’t spent much time in 99-seat, 60-seat, 30-seat theatres. I have to make significant perceptual adjustments for the Fringe, not because I had to make allowances for their constraints, but because I haven’t fully learned to appreciate work that may be truly new, extremely youthful, and made with the barest bones.

Day 2

Time looms before me. Despite one good experience, I do not relish two more days if the ratio of “wins” to “losses” holds at the same rate. Just to add to the fun, a small medical procedure I need to have done is unexpectedly moved up from the following week to this morning. And the day’s roster requires me to consult both subway and street maps.

Confession: I’ve never been on the Lower East Side. I’ve made occasional excursions to East 4th Street (for New York Theatre Workshop and La Mama, where I’d been yesterday), to Lafayette Street (The Public) and to The Flea Theatre in TriBeCa. But in each case, I’ve taken the subway, popping up out of the ground like some cultured gopher, harvesting my treats and jumping back into the hole.

So when I emerge on Delancey Street, I am disoriented. I have to use both the map in the subway station and Google maps to determine where I am and where I’m going. I feel like a tourist. Ten years in New York, but this is terra incognita. At one point, on East Houston Street, I happen to look to my right. Huh, there’s one of those bridges to Brooklyn. I don’t even know which one. Idiot.

I’m early, of course, a congenital habit. I have close to two hours before my first show. Then inspiration hits: I’m now near all of those restaurants I read about in New York magazine (to which I’ve subscribed for decades) but never eat at. Bigger inspiration: isn’t the fabled Shopsins around here somewhere? Carefully and repeatedly consulting Yelp and Google, I find it’s inside the very building I’m in front of. After almost being thrown out by the legendary Kenny S. for having the temerity to ask if I can plug in my phone anywhere, I eat, my choice somewhat limited by my commitment to not give in to mac and cheese pancakes, which seem to be part of every third item.

I have time after lunch, so I wander the streets a bit. Here’s chi-chi WD-40, here’s Katz’s Deli, here’s Russ & Daughters. The Zagat Guide sprung to life. I briefly indulge in a fantasy of my grandparents as immigrants to the U.S., living in these tenement buildings almost a century ago, like characters in a Delmore Schwartz novel. Though I have to admit to myself that I know little of their early lives, or when they’d moved up to Connecticut. With my parents gone, I never will know. If I have heritage here, it’s lost to me.

The first show is at a basement theatre called The Celebration of Whimsy. Reinforcing the tenet embodied in the space’s name, it is also known as the C.O.W. I see a show in which two clowns, squatting in an abandoned home, are confronted by weapons-wielding home invader clowns, in a place called The Cow. This hits a particular chord of mirth for me. Is this what it was like to go to Off-Off-Broadway 50 years ago? Was it this wacky?

Another break. I quickly learn that there aren’t spots to just hang around on the Lower East Side during the day, or at least I can’t find any (I would later discover copious places in the evening, but they’re bars and I don’t drink, plus they’re exceptionally loud). Fortunately, as I trek back to East 4th Street, I pass Fringe Central. Power outlets! I tweet my delight, which results in Elena Holy, who runs the Fringe, emerging out of seeming nowhere to greet me with a hug (we first met when I interviewed her for a podcast back in 2004). Recharged electrically and emotionally, I’m off again.

The next play, about a group of aimless teens (one of whom just happens to be a Satanist) has a really terrific first act (I’m reminded of Eric Bogosian’s Suburbia), and it’s a fully shaped play, not an hour-long sketch. Unfortunately it is let down by its perfunctory second act. I recognize the playwright from her Twitter feed and her acting roles sitting in the row behind me; I have this desperate urge to chat with her about her play. But that’s presumptuous. I don’t know her, I’ve never held an artistic position in the theatre, I’m not a critic. So I remain anonymous, but make a note to see her work in the future. Boy, I wish I could talk with someone about the promise and the problems of this show. Frustrating.

The evening takes me to a venue called Teatro LATEA, housed in an enormous former public school building. I would ultimately see three out of my 13 shows here, and I’m surprised that a building with multiple theatre spaces has completely escaped my notice until now. I see a play about corporate/industrial inhumanity, followed – in the same space, an hour later –by a two-person series of blackout sketches on the theme of romance. The latter is charming, and with some polish could make for a popular entertainment with little of the bohemian aura of the Fringe about it; the former left me somewhat mystified. So day two yielded three qualified wins and only one (not such a terrible) loss. Things are looking up.

Day 3

My god, it’s beautiful out again. When I committed to this experiment, I didn’t stop for a second to think about the distances between venues, or that it might a) rain b) be above 90 degrees c) be stiflingly humid or d) all of the above. But I couldn’t ask for nicer August days in the city. I have no doubt that my attitude towards the whole experience would have been vastly different had I been sweaty or soggy or both. Maybe there is a Thespis after all.

Penko Gospodinov and Anastassia Liutova in “The Spider.” (Photo courtesy Miroslav Veselinov).

The day offers a schedule closer to what I’d originally imagined: five shows between lights up at two p.m. and the final blackout at 10:20 p.m. Today is the day I see the bathtub play and the talking grapes. It is also the day I see solo shows so dire that I am embarrassed for both the performers and the audience. One is a stand-up act that seems to have been cobbled together from a marathon of Comedy Central stand-up material, and yields almost no laughter from anyone, least of all me. Maybe I’m being punked, and this is the next Andy Kaufman? Is this a meta-commentary on stand-up comedy? I think not. The other solo pieces, not comedic, resemble nothing so much as spoofs of exercises in a consciousness-raising group from the 1970s, with a great deal of careful miming to accompany not just actions, but words and thoughts. Isn’t it enough to be told that the sun came up without having it demonstrated? If you say you’re reading, must we watch you flip pages? How much must we learn about that clichéd first trip to buy feminine hygiene products? Oy.

Together, these shows prompt me to wonder that if these made it into the Fringe, which was curated, what on earth were the rejected shows like? Am I being cruel? Perhaps, but that’s part of why I avoid being a critic. I hold very strong opinions about what I see and at this stage of my life, I probably dislike more than I like. It’s not an admirable trait. To be fair, many years ago, Ian McKellen told me that you learn more from watching bad theatre than from good theatre. I should have invited him.

Beyond the tub, the grapes and the shows I will not speak of again, the fifth piece is another promising work with a talented, if not completely in-sync cast, that starts as workplace comedy and ends as a dystopian vision from The Twilight Zone. Again, people to watch for all around in the future, especially as I’ve adjusted my internal critic to consider promising as success.

It’s a shame that I finished with one of the downer shows, as my final day doesn’t exactly send me out on a high. That said, I complete my final day with a reasonable amount of energy. I’m sufficiently stimulated by the past three days that I sleep very little that night, and awaken the next morning as if preparing to head out for day four. But in point of fact, come two p.m., when I might have been back in the theatre, I commence a multi-hour nap, and my Saturday is lost in lethargy and recuperation.

Epiphany

Did I think I would learn something new about theatre when I concocted this scheme? Perhaps. Or maybe I just wanted to set some mini-endurance goal for myself, something that would be a good story to tell friends. “Hey, remember that time I saw 13 shows in three days?” But truth be told, just as I went in blind about what I’d see, my thoughts were comparably inchoate about what I’d discover. These three days of solo theatergoing pointed out several things about myself, and about my relationship to theatre.

I had to grapple with the fact that, as the product of elite theatre, I have been molded into an elitist. In addition to the Wing, I’ve worked at, among others, Goodspeed Musicals, Manhattan Theatre Club and The O’Neill Theatre Center, all well established before I ever set foot near them. That, plus growing up in such proximity to New York, and so very close to the Yale Rep and Long Wharf Theatres, meant I was seeing very highly developed work from the start.

The construct of my Fringe experience also brought home an aspect I’ve not previously contemplated about theatergoing, namely that it is a social experience. I’ve certainly spent plenty of time in theatres (legit and movie) by myself, but it’s not my preference. However, having committed to 13 unknown shows, I couldn’t very well find one person who would want to join me, and the lack of advance schedule meant I couldn’t invite different people to different shows.

As a result, I was largely speechless for the better part of three days (uncharacteristic of me, to say the least) because I was alone and I’m not prone to striking up conversations with people in adjacent seats, or standing next to me while waiting in line. I was able to use the social media lifeline, but sparingly and only intermittently. To top it off, as someone who often attends shows late in previews or early in their runs uptown, I’m used to constantly running into people I know at the theatre; that happened at only a single show. I was among strangers virtually the whole time. My binge was a lonely adventure. That’s not in the Fringe brochure, but it was a lonely stint of my own making.

Corollary to the loneliness was the dislocation. I was a stranger in a strange land. Save for the occasional chain restaurant (one can find Subway and Baskin Robbins on the LES, though I spotted no Starbucks), every storefront was new to me, and because I hadn’t mapped out my trip, I was often at a loss regarding where to go in my limited free time. That eased by day three, as I learned that the Lower East Side isn’t some far-off kingdom; it’s merely a few blocks beyond territory that I know, a couple of stops on the F train that I’ve never taken. I will go back, on a camera safari, on a dining trip with my wife. My island has gotten a bit bigger. What the hell took me so long?

And as for letting someone else choose theatre for me? Even after seeing them, I doubt I would have made any effort to see even one of the pieces I went to, had they been described to me.

What was the scorecard? I found: one show which was an utter surprise and brought unstinting joy; a play by a very promising writer who I plan to follow; two potentially strong pieces with general appeal, but in need of greater polish; a surprisingly charming and thoughtful work about inanimate objects; a clever sketch that would have benefited from firmer direction; a funny idea that was buried inside too much exposition; a singularly unique idea that nearly wore out its welcome; a play that was well intentioned but unskilled; a puzzlement; two shows that were embarrassing for both audience and performers; and one piece that was loathsome.

But as I think about it, adding the Fringe programs to my random stacks of theatre programs that haven’t yet been sent to storage, here’s the funny thing: I wouldn’t be surprised, were I to line up any of my regular theatre-going in 13 consecutive production chunks, if I had the same range of reaction. Might the more finished work that is my usual fare yield a better ratio of hits to misses? Perhaps. But bigger theatres and bigger budgets are no guarantees of success, and I say that as someone who saw Suzanne Somers’s brief Broadway turn in The Blonde in the Thunderbird, a solo autobiography show of massive self-absorption that remains the hilarious nadir of my theatergoing life. That might have been better at the Fringe, funnily enough, perhaps performed in a bathtub. As I’ve learned, it’s all a matter of perspective.

To read this article in its originally published form, visit Narratively.

During the 2012/13 Broadway season, a total of nine new musicals appeared on Broadway (hitting the average annual level of recent years). Of those nine, only four are still running. As I write, there are seven new musicals playing Off-Broadway, with an eighth due in a few weeks; there may well be others. What does it tell us when 12 months of Broadway yields just about as much new musical material as we find Off-Broadway in only a couple of months?

To be fair, many of the Off-Broadway musicals are limited runs in the seasons of subsidised companies, and two are commercial transfers from such companies from earlier this year. Only one will play in a theatre which is comparable in size to Broadway venues, and in that case it’s under the auspices of Shakespeare in the Park; most are in spaces where one week of performances equals the capacity of one Broadway performance. A transferred Off-Broadway hit can easily become a Broadway casualty given the commercial demands of larger theatres and higher costs.

Certainly, hit Off-Broadway musicals are hardly new; one need only look to The Fantasticks, You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, Godspell and Little Shop of Horrors for precursors, and it’s unlikely the current new shows will ever attain the longevity of those icons. But in recent years, the standard model has tended much more towards the Off-Broadway to Broadway transfer for success, as evidenced by shows ranging from Rent to Avenue Q to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Even shows that began in rudimentary stagings at the New York International Fringe Festival and the New York Musical Theatre Festival have fought their way to Broadway, including Urinetown and Next to Normal.

Surveying the variety of material, it would appear that the modest scale of Off-Broadway allows for a greater range of topics and styles than the Great White Way, from the sung through pop opera of Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (based on a portion of War and Peace, and performed in a tent) to David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Imelda Marcos disco bio Here Lies Love. There’s one musical that is drawn from a film (Far From Heaven) and two with their roots in Shakespeare (Venice, after Othello, and Love’s Labour’s Lost). Several adopt variations on an environmental, break-the-proscenium approach (Here Lies Love, Murder Ballad and Great Comet). None model themselves on the formula of the classic American musical.

I suspect that no one is getting rich off of these productions, while the backers of Kinky Boots, Matilda and Motown on Broadway will surely do quite well over time. For these Off- Broadway musicals to become true earners for all involved, they will either have to manage sustained runs under a commercial model, on Broadway or Off, or spawn productions across the country and abroad. But even if that doesn’t come to pass, what they are doing is providing a superb showcase for predominantly new talent and unexpected subjects; they are bolstering the musical repertory at a pace at least equal to Broadway and building the reputations of artists.

This shouldn’t suggest that musical success Off-Broadway is a breeze, and it’s worth noting that many of these shows are only mounted with significant donor underwriting or “enhancement” from producers who hope the property will turn out to be Broadway-worthy. But with different scale and different expectations, Off-Broadway musicals may well be supplanting Broadway in advancing the form.

Hindsight doesn’t benefit anyone, but it is hard to resist wondering whether the short-lived Hands on a Hardbody might have fared better at director Neil Pepe’s Atlantic Theatre Company instead of in a Broadway theatre. Ironically, that was the birthplace of Spring Awakening, a musical that had struggled through a number of developmental productions over the years only to find praise, first Off- Broadway, then on.

There’s an old saying that one can’t make a living on Broadway, but can make a killing. It’s not easy to make a living off of Off-Broadway musicals either, but you can build a career.