Las Vegas Little Theater Fringe Festival raises questions

If there are three words I've grown to detest in regard to local theater, it's "edgy," "avant-garde" and "fringe."

I wish I knew what those words really meant, because local playhouses sure use them a lot.

When I encountered Las Vegas Little Theatre board Vice President T.J. Larsen prior to a show last week, I told him how confused I was about his group's fringe festival (opening tonight for a two-weekend run). I badgered him with questions. He came up not with answers but better questions.

My rant began with something like, "How can your publicity releases claim this series of plays is from nine local theater companies when I haven't heard of about half these groups? These outfits were formed just to be in the festival! And look at the list of playwrights! Are you going to call Tony Award-winners Richard Greenberg ("Take Me Out") and Lee Blessing ("A Walk in the Woods") fringe writers? They're about as radical as the old Sears-Robuck catalogs. And some of these works aren't even new to Vegas. I've seen three of them before."

The ever-polite Larsen nodded. He said he was disappointed with the lack of participation by "established" local theater groups, although he understood that many didn't have the time to participate. He agreed some of the groups were formed just to participate in the event, but he wondered if that were necessarily a bad thing. It might be, I said, when it comes to quality control, but I conceded we don't really know yet. And I then reminded myself that the unpredictability of what you're getting is part of what fringe festival fever is all about.

As far as which playwrights are really avant-garde, we both realized how much the question is a local matter. If you live in a small farming community, maybe David Mamet is "fringy." It's also a time-period issue. "Oklahoma!" was revolutionary in its day, but I have a feeling theatergoers would be very unhappy to see a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in a fringe festival lineup.

I also argued that if you took all the new plays produced on Broadway within the past 20 years, you'd find most of them "edgy," either in structure or dialogue or visual presentation.

Larsen asked too if it were necessarily a bad thing that a few of the works had been seen before locally (albeit by small audiences). One of the festival's functions was to unite many dramatic points of view.

I walked away from our conversation with fewer opinions. Maybe we sometimes try too stubbornly to neatly define things. Maybe the line between "fringe" and the traditional has become so blurred that the labels are often meaningless. Theater always has been dangerous, always evolving, so the borders are never quite clear.

(More information about the first Las Vegas Little Theater Fringe Festival is available at lvlt.org.)

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas NV 89125.