Artistic Fringe

For theatre people, the greatest theatre experience on the planet may be the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, conducted each summer in Scotland since 1947. Theatre artists and organizations from around the world, big and small, pro and am, conventional and unconventional, gather for the month of August to present to the greatest crowd of theatre patrons ever. Lots of street performance and side-show work, of course, but some quite meaningful in content.

I've never attended but have followed it. The 2017 Edinburgh festival is gone as of this weekend, but in 2018 it will run August 3-27.

The Fringe began in 1947 when eight groups were refused performances at the newly formed Edinburgh International Festival. They performed on the streets, the "fringe" of the main event. 2017 marked the 70th anniversary of these groups' defiance, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is now the (self-proclaimed) largest arts festival in the world. The online program lists some 700 events.

Nobody is denied entry. The nature of the fringe events vary from generally traditional small-cast or one-person works that are quite provocative, to larger scale events that might engage and incorporate the audience. From images of the festival, it also includes many street acrobats and jugglers, rope walkers, flame eaters and the like.

Several years ago there was an attempt at a Boston Fringe. It didn't get far, I think because there was no concentration of venues and events. I attended a few productions listed, but the venues were all over the larger Boston area and poorly promoted. The few shows I saw were somewhat unconventional and fairly well put together, but poorly attended as I saw them. Other major cities likely have more organized fringe efforts.

University theatre can be the most exciting theatre around, and the annual regional festivals sponsored by The Kennedy Center offer some unconventional work that is quite good. Annual high school festivals very often have conceptually exciting pieces, as I've learned from years of judging them. There's quite significant festival cross-fertilization among schools. It's more difficult to find theatres, players and audiences to support that work outside educational environments. The EMACT community theatre organization in Massachusetts maintains a festival for committed groups that also features interesting work and theatre ideas developed primarily for competition.

There continues to be something vaguely called "experimental theatre," a term that once had some actual meaning, when most theatre was conventionally scripted stories with conventional characters - today's TV mysteries and sitcoms. Those experiments largely have yielded their results and much has been incorporated into convention. We have learned to become sceptical of strangeness for it's own sake, while at the same time celebrating things that are different because they are different.

American Repertory Theatre notably has always had a reputation for unconventional works under Brustein, Orchard, and now Diane Paulus. ART's audience-centered cabaret event called The Donkey Show is quite popular. Other theatres routinely take unconventional approaches to works. Such shows as Blue Man Group have become popular, which have much to do with theatre and nothing to do with the drama.

I reflect on John Lahr's 1973 tome Astonish Me about the experimental theatre at the time. The Edinburgh Fringe festival pushes to astonish us. It's easy to be astonished by what is racially/sexually/politically/religiously offensive to us. But we still have the capacity to be astonished by art. And acrobats.

Arthur Dirks

August 26, 2017

Tugging Freshmen

We approach the season when people are scrambling to ready for school. Memories of early college experiences make brief amusement in our lives.

When I (first) attended Fort Hays State -then- College in the mid-1960s, I was part of a routine freshman humiliation - the Freshman-Sophomore tug-of-war. A friend from another town I had known over the years through scouting and DeMolay was a mover and shaker, and he brought me on as part of what today might be called his "posse." We ramped up a campaign for him as freshman class president, which had student senate positions and other perks to hand out. An election was held the first weeks of classes, and my friend won handily among people who barely knew each other

By tradition, on Homecoming morning, a sophomore team and a freshman team face off in a tug-of-war across a Big Creek tributary that ran through campus. It was hardly the magnitude of the modern day tug-of-war between LeClaire, Iowa, and Port Byron, Illinois, residents across the Mississippi River, but it was a festive humbling of last year's high school seniors. The creek was a 15-foot-wide water course through the campus and countryside, often nearly dry but flowing gently in fall - mostly about 2 feet deep with a very muddy bottom you'd sink half-way to your knees

My friend, as class president, and I put together a team of fellow freshmen we had gotten to know from towns in the region through scouting, church retreats and various high school activities. Six guys in all. Calculating traction and weight, I wasn't the best choice, but it was more about rewarding supporters than winning the tug-of-war

[{1910 East Oregon State tug of war.]

All excited about doing this, we strategized on what to wear and the best for traction. It all had a very festive feel and we were festive as you could be at 10:00 AM. I remember that I wore shorts, T-shirt and boots, because the creek bank was dense mud. On Homecoming Saturday morning we gathered early as the crowd was beginning to show up for the 10:00 event. It was a bright, clear October day with temperature in the 60s. We stood around on our side of the bank, shivering a little in morning chill, excited in anticipation. The rope had been laid across the stream.

At 10:00, five guys came over the embankment. They were all business, in their jeans and white T's and boots. They said nothing, walked over to the rope, picked it up, and waited for the signal. I think they wore shades, didn't talk or high-five or greet anybody. On our side, we picked up the rope, too, and dug our feet into the muddy embankment.

The signal was given. The guys on the other bank, counted out "One, Two, Three!" and hauled our freshman butts, in our gaudy shorts and random T's and tennis shoes, right into the water. We dug our heels into the mud and slid right in. Then they dropped the rope, turned around and walked away, the epitome of cool. We stood up and staggered through the mud back to the bank, slopping mud off our elbows and butts, to the very happy jeers of the crowd.

As school life transpired, I never participated in campus politics and my friend and I drifted apart. But that tug of war was a fun introduction to campus life.

Long Fade of Pool Halls

Recently, Diane and I stopped by a billiards parlor for a few games of pocket pool. Willaby's is a clean well managed room with a dozen or more tables in Swansea on Rt. 6, a 40 minute ride from Taunton. We're pretty rusty players, but I was thinking how much this differs from Schwein's, where I learned to play. The tables and the room are quite different from where I miss-spent too many hours in my late high school years.

Pool-playing long suffered a bad reputation. Think of Music Man, and historic community concerns for most male activities besides athletics. Bowling managed to re-brand itself, but pool-playing was consigned to barroom culture and suffered classist social prejudice. It gained some cachet in postwar because military dayrooms had well-used pool tables.

Schwein's was a standard mainstreet store-front, big glass windows and an inset door. In one of the window spaces was a barber chair, manned by one of the brothers, keeping eyes with his customers on passing life on Main Street. The rest of the space was the pool hall run by his brother.

The room had a bare wood floor with chairs and benches lined up against the walls, and a drink rail about head height around the room. Several cue racks were on the walls. A small bar in back - Kansas was "3.2 at 18" at the time.

There were two rows of tables - a billiards table, a pocket pool table, and 6 snooker tables with bright lights above. Wires ran across the room about 8 feet above the floor between tables. They were strung with wood beads for scoring, that you moved with a cue stick.

One paid by the game or rack. I think it was 10 cents for pocket pool and 20 for snooker. There was a "rack man" who hung out in the bar area and collected the money and re-racked the balls for each game. Or you could pay by the hour to practice if tables were open.

Most people today only know pocket pool, with striped and solid numbered balls. It is a modest sized table, and the two-ball-wide pocket openings have angled bumpers so you can bank a ball in. We routinely referred to the game as "slop." Mostly that table was played by beginners and people waiting for a snooker table to open up - or for a haircut.

[Early 1900s pool hall. Quite typical of all until the re-branding as "clean, well lighted places".]

Many people have never seen a true billiards table except on television. It is larger by a foot or so each way than a pocket pool table and it has no pockets. The game is played by two players with one red and two white balls. Each player owns a white ball (one has a red dot) and scores by touching the other two balls with his, usually requiring 3 cushion-bounces between the touches. It is not a high-scoring or speedy game and requires good skills.

Snooker was the preferred game by far. A large table, same size as billiards, but with smaller balls than pocket pool and only ball-and-half-wide pockets that have rounded bumpers. The game starts with a triangle of red balls and numbered balls spotted around the table. There is an arc limiting the placement of the breaking ball. You sink a red ball, then as high a numbered ball as you can. The numbered ball returns to table until the reds are gone, then numbered balls go down in sequence. Scoring is one point for a red ball and face value for a numbered ball. You maintain count by moving the beads strung above with your cue stick.

In terms of difficulty, snooker requires much more precision than pocket pool. It's not a very good game for taking out frustrations. Three-cushion billiards particularly is really quite difficult and does not reward frustration well. Compared to pocket pool, billiards is like chess to checkers. Snooker is a happy middle ground.

My nostalgia for this is mixed. It's cool to have had that experience, but there's little motivation to be good at it today. Three-cushion billiards and snooker are more demanding than my interest could sustain. In fact, I was pretty terrible at pocket pool today. It rewards practice. Diane enjoys the play, so we'll probably hit Willaby's again.

Arthur Dirks. August 13, 2017