By Donna Purchase
The Capital Fringe Festival is once again taking over SW DC this summer, with the largest festival in three years! The festival will showcase 89 productions and 500 individual performances at eight venues with 13 stages, all within walking distance of each other. Venues include Arena Stage, Arcade at the Wharf and neighborhood churches—Riverside Baptist, St. Augustine Episcopal, Westminster Presbyterian, St. Matthews and Christ United.
The 14th Annual Capital Fringe Festival runs from July 9-28, but you can experience a sampling of some of the productions at the Capital Fringe Festival Preview on June 28 at 7 p.m. at Market SW.
The festival focus is on expanding the audience’s appetite for independent theater, music, art, dance and unclassifiable forms of live performance and visual art. The event creates earning opportunities for innovative local and visiting artists to present and exhibit their work.
Fringe will once again present and produce a series of highly-ambitious productions through the Fringe Curated Series:
• A People’s History by renowned American monologist Mike Daisey—whom the New Yorker calls “A charismatic performer, his shows have the insightful hostility of the best comedy.”
• Arcade by renowned DC artist and projectionist Robin Bell. Bell’s Arcade is just that—an interactive arcade that examines the arcade as a forum for collective communication. Fringe will create a public interactive video arcade at the Wharf where audiences can both play and engage.
• Shakespeare’s Worst, a comedy that is great for the whole family, written by Mike Reiss (a four-time Emmy-winning original writer for The Simpsons) and Nick Newlin (a local actor and clown). In conjunction with Politics and Prose at the Wharf, Fringe will host an author talk and book signing for Mike’s book “Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime of Writing for The Simpsons.”
• Two new plays by local DC playwrights Iris Dauterman and Claudia Rosales Waters. Dauterman’s Hat Pin Panic details the “hat pin panic” of the early twentieth century in which women used their hatpins in self-defense against harassment. Waters’ Light Project deploys poetry, movement, sound and lights to tell the story of a post-apocalyptic world stuck on the grid.
Capital Fringe is led by Julianne Brienza, CEO/Co-Founder, and a 12-member Board of Directors that represent a wide spectrum of DC residents and businesses. Brienza has been with Capital Fringe since its inception in 2005. In her current role, she leads and guides Capital Fringe’s vision, organizational growth and community relations and development. Brienza has developed and shaped programs to engage adventurous audiences and exploratory local, national and international artists and distributed over 2.5 million dollars to participating artists.
For more information, visit capitalfringe.org.