Fair warning! This post, which will remain all by itself on the site for the rest of the week, is the start of my soon-to-be relentless push to get You out of your house and into one of Our audiences. Next month I'm not going to be talking about anything around here except for my show (I'm doing nine) or other people's shows.
If you can't stand that sort of blatant promotion, come back in July.
This post is open to anybody who happens to read it of course, but it is particularly directed at my fellow participating producers, performers and venues of the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
It is time to come together and kick in some moolah to the administrative team that made it possible for You to to get up on a stage and do whatever the hell You want without a single string attached. You owe them. Yes, you do. We all do.
The Hollywood Fringe Festival admin team needs to raise $10K within the next 23 days to cover the costs associated with Our Festival. They are using Kickstarter to do that. You can give as little as $5 or as much as $1,000, and you should. Right. Fucking. Now.
Because what the Hollywood Fringe Festival admin team pulled off by showing up out of the blue and making this thing happen is A Confirmed Miracle. Nobody in this balkanized town has managed to pull off what they've done. They created a unified performance space/event that is open to absolutely anybody who has a Thing and can pull it off.
Generations have tried and they all failed. It took "outsiders" to make this happen. From what I can tell, they did it for no other reason than they saw a need and decided to put themselves through hell to fulfill it. They got the permits. They got competing venues to work together for You. They got viciously competing news outlets to work together for You. They negotiated deeply discounted advertising opportunites for You. They built a website from the ground-up for You to use to promote your show and talk to each other behind the scenes. They put together detailed information packets to spoon feed You through the process of setting up a project, finding a venue and promoting that project. They sent out a team of reporters armed with video cameras to do spotlights on You. They put together a pop-up outdoor bar for You to hang out in, and stocked it with delicious sangrias.
At the time, these people didn't know You from Adam, and still they did this for You.
As someone who, until last year's inaugural H'wood Fringe, pretty much restricted my theater activites to being Audience? Here's what I know, informed by eavesdropping and occasionally asking direct questions:
- You feel live theater is underappreciated in Los Angeles.
- You cannot stand the gatekeepers keeping You away from the stage you want to trod...even though you have gatekeepers of your own deciding who is/is not Legitimate enough to trod upon them.
- You want a "community," though truth be told, I have trouble trying to suss out precisely what you mean by that.
- You want to get paid.
- You want to be seen.
- You want to do your art, whatever it is.
So. The Hollywood Fringe Festival admin team parachuted into town from elsewhere about two or three years before the inaugural 2010 event and began doing the grunt-level work needed to give this glorious city its first ever fringe. By doing so, they gave You the space to roam Free.
They did not give You a guarantee of full houses, adolation, media coverage or buckets of money - 'cuz that's not their job. What they did was give You the opportunity to do what You wanted, no strings attached, along with all of their heartfelt emotional support and advice to help You pull it off.
For me, the opportunity provided by the Hollywood Fringe Festival admin team changed my life. Audience rat though I am, I had longed to be part of live theater at least once before I die alone surrounded by cats nibbling on my corpse. When I heard that there was a fringe in the works, I turned to Molly Prather to learn how to put together a story designed for the stage instead of the page, because this might be my only chance.
Even though the Litany is intrinsic to my DNA, was so very terrified. At one point I was going to drop it all and back out. But because of the landscape Our fringe admin team laid down for Us, I had met the amazing people at ComedySportz LA, who talked me down from the ledge and convinced me to continue on. They did this even though they didn't know me from Eve at the time.
Once the 2010 fringe began, I met people like Abie and Nik and Laura, who were so incredibly generous with real-world advice to a newbie. And as audience I saw a Welshman throw down as Richard Burton; and a phenomenal musical that combined my love of roots music with my love of the social justice history of this nation; and two hilarious hippies improv true life tales of sex, drugs and audience participation; and a former NYC taxi driver share his stories of the mythical era of NYC; and and and. I went broke with delight seeing so many wonderful things that probably never would have been staged otherwise in Los Angeles if not for the work of the Hollywood Fringe Festival admin team.
Now that team is asking Me and You - people who directly benefited from the brutally hard work they have done to give us this event - to help them raise the funds needed to keep the Hollywood Fringe Festival rolling Awesome. I say it is Our Moral Duty to kick in as little or as much as each individual participating performer, producer or venue can.
Take a look at their Kickstarter video below. You can donate directly at the page.
Roll out, people. You owe them. You do.
#HFF11 (and onward) forever!
