For this couple, the Fringe festival is the main event
They started with 10 shows, now they’re producing their own plays
They’re hardcore Fringe-goers: audience members who love the festival so much that they see dozens of shows every year.
They’re opinionated, they’re passionate, they’re quirky and, in some cases, they get so into the Fringe Festival spirit that they start to make shows themselves. When I met up with Joan Jamieson and Shelley M. Hobbs in the line for a Fringe show on Thursday night, their hardcore status was already on full display: they’d run into a festival friend and were deep in conversation about what’s hot and what’s not this year.
Joan and Shelley had agreed to let me tag along on a round of Fringe-going, which included only two shows — a light night for this married couple.
The pair were already regular theatregoers when they discovered the Fringe a decade and a half ago. “We said, ‘Hey, 160 shows to choose from over12 days: let’s go do that,’ ” says Jamieson, who retired as an elementary schoolteacher in 2005. “The first year we probably saw, like, 10 shows and thought we’d seen a lot.”
“Then it started to become more obsessive, like, I’m going to take two weeks of vacation so that I can go to shows during the day!” says Hobbs, a lawyer for the provincial government who retired this year.
This month, they’re seeing 30 productions; they buy 10-show passes to get the discount ($85 per pass rather than $12 per show). Hobbs describes their selection methodology: each goes through her own copy of the Fringe program (the hard copy version, online would be too confusing) and highlights what she wants to see.
Then they put their choices together and anything they’ve both selected is in As a final step they slot in shows “that we might not have thought of, but that happen in the same venue as other things we’re seeing,” Jamieson says.
“Some years the ones we pick to fill in are a big huge fabulous surprise and some years not so . . . but that’s part of the joy of the Fringe: the discovery,” says Hobbs.
Our first show is The Seat Next to the King by Steven Elliott Jackson, which packed its first performance in the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace; this is doubtless in part because it’s the winner of this year’s Best New Play award, an honour given before the festival begins. It’s a two-character drama set in mid1960s Washington, D.C., treating themes of homophobia and racism.
As soon as we leave the theatre, Jamieson and Hobbs burst into con- versation about the intensity of the performances, in particular that of Kwaku Okyere as Bayard Rustin; Hobbs points out the characters are based on real-life figures (she tends to retain pre-show research, while Jamieson says she always forgets).
While they wonder if the show’s final’s scene was as focused as it could have been, their comments are collegial; they’re not ones to throw stones, they say, as Fringe artists themselves: Hobbs’ drama Happy Family, about three siblings’ dysfunctional relationship with each other and their disappeared mother, is playing in this year’s festival and Jamieson is producing it.
This is their fourth Fringe production together, after last year’s A Good Death and Downtown Jay, and Hipcheck — The Musical (about an amateur women’s hockey team) in 2009. Making shows is clearly a source of great pride and excitement for them, though Jamieson says you have to “market like crazy” given competi- tion for Fringe-goers’ attention.
Happy Family is playing at the Theatre Centre and it’s their ties to that venue that have guided our next choice of show: Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner. Jamieson is spearheading attempts to create a sense of community among the companies at the Theatre Centre by sharing free tickets to each other’s productions.
It’s another packed first night for this dystopian drama and we leave talking about the exceptional performances by Ruth Goodwin and James Graham (who are producing the show for the Howland Company, along with Slow Blue Lions’ Doug Watters).
Over a beer at the Scadding Courtbased Fringe Club, I ask the couple why they love the Fringe so much. It’s the festival atmosphere, says Jamieson, not in a party-all-night way but because everyone’s converging around “experimental kinds of new theatre” and because there are so many opportunities to talk about it.
Even in the lineups before shows, says Hobbs, “there’s a sense of community . . . it’s like you’re travelling with a group of people and you keep on seeing each other at the rest stops.”
“Another sort of magical thing is the restrictions,” Jamieson says. Because companies only have 15 minutes to get their shows on and offstage, and because storage space is minuscule, “people get very creative in how you use one chair, one blanket and one telephone . . . that part of it is wonderful.”
Asked for her happiest Fringe memory, Jamieson recalls when, in the middle of an informational talk in a Fringe tent, a storm came up out of nowhere and the entire audience leapt to their feet to make sure everything was under cover and safe. “And we all sat down again with water up to our calves and the speaker just talked really loudly.”
“It was like, we are all together, we are learning something; who cares if there is a thunderstorm about to wash us away?” Hobbs says.
“Everyone who was there,” Jamieson says, “felt that the Fringe was theirs.” At the Theatre With . . . is an occasional series in which Karen Fricker brings people with specialist perspectives to performances.