Back to Fringe, After a Purge: A Long Preface to My WaPo Capital Fringe story
Chris Klimek
My first WCP cover story, from July 2010. That lovely photo of longtime Capital Fringe executive director Julianne Brienza is by longtime WCP photographer Darrow Montgomery.
I am not a performer, but I think of myself as a Capital Fringe veteran. 2006, the summer of the first Capital Fringe — our unjuried and aesthetically unreliable but gloriously democratic performing arts festival, open to anyone who can fill out some forms and cough up a relatively modest enrollment fee — was my first as a resident of the District. I had a part-time job at the Studio Theatre that year, which I’d gotten as a result of having come to Studio in the employ of a performer who’d done a show there the prior spring. But I was only just becoming a theater person, an interest that would deepen as I began to cover theater for DCist, may it rest in power, in 2007. My first Washington Paper City cover story was about the fifth Captial Fringe, in 2010.
In the summer of 2015 I attended the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Critics Institute, a two-week fellowship in Connecticut that overlapped with Capital Fringe. Though I wrote another City Paper cover story about that year’s festival before I departed, I was glad to pass the baton of editing Fringeworthy, née Fringe & Purge, the City Paper’s largely volunteer-authored Fringe blog, which had been created by veteran City Paper critic Trey Graham, into other hands. I’d run it for five festivals, circa 2010-2014, expanding it for the latter three to include a nightly podcast, an insanely labor-intensive idea. Before that I’d been one of several writers covering Fringe for DCist, and I’d run lights and sound for the shows my then-girlfriend had created for the 2007 and 2008 festivals. I’d come to love the sweaty chaos of Capital Fringe, but I needed a break
The 2014 edition felt like a natural punctuation mark. It was the last of seven festivals to be held at Fort Fringe, a crumbling 21,000-square foot building situated on a stretch of New York Avenue NW just east of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center that would be razed and redeveloped the following year. For nearly six decades the place had been A.V. Ristorante Italiano, reportedly a favorite eatery of Justice Antonin Scalia. But in the Obama era it had a vibrant second life as the festival’s HQ, housing Capital Fringe’s offices, ticket booth, four performance spaces, and — critically — the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar, which became the District’s most alluring nightspot for #DCtheatre nerds for seven consecutive Julys.
The fact that it was situated mere steps from multiple stages where shows were happening was never ideal for the performers in those shows, but it was marvelous for nurturing a sense of community among Fringegoers. There was never a question of where the party would be before, after, or in between performances. It was the only bar where I ever made a habit of staying ‘til close.
The affection with which Fringe veterans recall that courtyard saloon, featuring an ostentatious stone fountain over which a statue of Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, kept watch, is profound. Our recollection of the venues that never had enough toilets and, frequently, no air conditioning is more clear-eyed and less fond. But the lousy physical plant helped to make the festival feel very punk. 2014, the last year the festival was held at Fort Fringe was the same one wherein Captial Fringe bought its own building on Florida Avenue NE in Trinidad. I clearly recall biking over to have have look at the place and being amused that the illumination on the sign for the Unisex Barber Shop across the street from Fringe’s new HQ had partially failed or, more likely, been vandalized: SEX BARBER SHOP, it proclaimed.
Fringe dubbed their new digs Logan Fringe Arts Space. It retained an appealingly lived-in vibe, with space for multiple stages and an outdoor bar. It aligned with Brienza’s ambition to expand Capital Fringe beyond the headline festival in the summertime, hosting events year-round from early 2015 through early 2018, including serving as the anchor for the 2015-7 festivals.
The 2018 and 2019 festivals were relocated to the Southwest Waterfront while the the Trinidad HQ was under renovation. Eventually, funding problems arose and Capital Fringe’s board voted to sell the building, making the festival itinerant again. But they’d have some time to find new stages, because the pandemic kept the 2020 and 2021 iterations from happening at all. The 2022 and 2023 festivals would take place primarily in Georgetown, an awkward fit for its egalitarian, DIY ethos.
Between 2016 and 2023 I was a less prolific festivalgoer. I saw shows when friends were performing in them, but I didn’t schedule my summer around Capital Fringe the way I’d done in the past. But after covering a half-dozen festivals (2010-5) intensely, and spending the same number (2016-9 and 2022-3) as a casual attendee, I welcomed the invitation form the Paper of Record to come back and dip a toe — or a leg — into those turbid but occasionally restorative waters.