Sadly, there is no official bar. The Baldacchino Gypsy Tent Bar and its successor, the Fringe Arts Bar, were a huge part of why Fringe veterans recall the decade of festivals circa 2008-2017 with such fondness. Though the festival moved during that era, from a now-razed former restaurant it had been leasing in Mount Vernon Triangle to a gallery space on Florida Avenue NE in Trinidad it purchased in 2014, both locales had a central outdoor gathering place selling cold drinks just steps away from several of the performance venues — a massive value-add. (Capital Fringe eventually opted to sell the Florida Avenue building after a planned renovation ran into funding problems.)
I’d covered the festival intensively during that era, and after a number of years away, I was eager to dive back in and see how, or if, it had changed. Maddeningly, the Capital Fringe website does not offer a calendar view, which made building a sample platter needlessly difficult. Still, I tried to curate an itinerary that conformed to my arbitrary notion of Fringeitude: I looked for things that seemed idiosyncratic, personal, District-centric or otherwise unlikely to be available in another context.
I chose one show — director Michael Chamberlin’s 50-minute edit of Ben Power’s translation of Euripides’s infanticidal tragedy “Medea” — because it was one of the first of the festival, and because a close friend (who happens to be a Washington Post staffer) was in it. Express versions of famous tragedies have been something of a Fringe staple, and often funny. (Tragedy plus time equals comedy, but tragedy-minus-performing-time can have the same effect.) “Medea” wasn’t funny, but it was lavish by Fringe standards, featuring a cast of a dozen and making good use of its venue — the DCJCC’s 140-seat Cafritz Hall — with stark lighting effects throwing dramatic shadows on the curtain behind the actors. Happily, they played to a full house.
I picked my next show, the musical “Over Her Dead Body (Revival)” because I’d enjoyed Pinky Swear Productions’ many prior Fringe entries. This one is a lightly revised, new-to-me remount of an offering they’d first staged in 2016, and — as performer/co-artistic director Karen Lange announced — the first show the company would be taking to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which takes place in Scotland next month. It imagined a live-in-the-studio broadcast of a radio show called “Bluegrass Benediction.” Members of the company sang murder ballads like “Long Black Veil” and “Delia’s Gone” while offering tongue-in-cheek advice about how to avoid becoming the subject of one. “No. 1: Try very hard not to be a woman,” their advisory began.
This show was in the DCJCC’s larger space, the 240-seat Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater. The room felt more than a little formal, in contrast to my memories of bawdy, beer-soaked Pinky Swear performances at the Gypsy Tent of old, but the DCJCC is a comfortable building, with space to sit and chat in between performances. Veteran Fringegoers know better than to take reliable air conditioning and clean, plentiful bathrooms for granted.
I loved “Penis Envy,” a monologue (solo shows are a key part of the Fringe taxonomy) by Becky Bondurant. Obviously, an attention-grabbing title is not nothing: “Are you here for ‘Penis Envy?’” the staffer at the desk asked when I entered the DCJCC lobby, without any discernible inflection. I was more persuaded by the detail in Bondurant’s bio that she’d taken two years of classes from controversial monologuist Mike Daisey, whose work I’d followed after first encountering it in the festival many years prior.
Speaking before a backdrop of presidential portraits she’d made with her two children, Bondurant told us she’d been nine months pregnant with the daughter she’d expected to be born into a country that had just chosen its first woman commander in chief when Donald Trump was elected instead, throwing her into a tailspin. The show segued into a journey back through her burgeoning social, political and sexual consciousness as adolescence gave way to young adulthood, and an account of how she struggled to reconcile her ambitions as a writer and professor with her other responsibilities. Nothing radical, but it was all vulnerable and truthful to her, and funny and inviting.
That same afternoon I attended “Why Are You Brown?”, a showcase of comedians of color (plus one White guy) organized by civil rights attorney, filmmaker and comic Badar Tareen. “How’s everyone doing tonight?” Tareen asked us at 3:35 p.m. on a scorching Saturday. The five comics were varied in their material, though all addressed the theme of racial stereotypes and prejudice. “I was inspired by a lot of American movies,” Indian-born comic Prince Arora began. “Like ‘American Pie.’” Later, Dee Ahmed referred to the inner suburb of Arlington, Va., as “White Wakanda.”
These comics perform regularly outside of the festival, and every one of them made me laugh. But stand-up isn’t an oddity; it’s on TV every night of the week. It just doesn’t feel fringey to me in the way that a 75-minute solo adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” does, or a romantic dramedy “Love West of Dupont Circle.”
I sought out the latter, a two-hander by John Harney, which was performed at a venue the festival dubbed Delirium, a former Gap. (The other Connecticut Avenue venues are Laughter, formerly a T-Mobile, and Bliss, formerly a Talbots.) It turned out to be an hour-long meet-cute between two youngish Catholic writers who disagree politically but are drawn to one another nevertheless. It was earnest and heartfelt and charmingly clunky, as many fringe shows are. The festival is most enjoyable if one is willing to meet the artists halfway or even a little more than that, whether because they’re your friends or family or simply because you respect the fact of a nonprofessional artist (though pros take part, too) screwing up the courage to put their imaginative work into the world.
The Sunday matinee I attended was the only one of the show’s four performances, as the playwright told us, to feature understudy Jocelyn Honoré as the conservative columnist. Gil Mitchell plays the more liberal churchgoer who falls under her spell. Both were solid, but I was impressed that Honoré had learned such a large part to perform it just the once. Fringe!
On the sidewalk after the show, Harney told me this was the second Capital Fringe in which he’d taken part. Despite having dotted his play with references to specific D.C. churches, neighborhoods, publications, restaurants and watering holes — one of his characters calls Georgetown’s Cafe Milano “a hangout for adulterers from both parties” — he was not a native; he’d moved from New York a few years prior. He confirmed he’d set out to write something that reflected his adopted city.
I loved that. I loved that the city I’ve chosen to live in provided a place for him to do that. Even if it happened to be a place where I’d once returned a pair of pants.