INTERVIEW: FRIGID reimagines its fringe festival
Photo: Death of a Dandelion, written and performed by JJ Ivey, is one of the many productions at this year’s New York City Fringe Festival. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.
The New York City Fringe Festival, formerly known as the FRIGID Fringe Festival, is starting anew in 2024. The theatrical extravaganza, headed by Erez Ziv, FRIGID New York’s managing director, brings together many different types of shows for nearly three weeks of programming. This year’s festival kicks off Wednesday, April 3, and continues until April 21. Performances take place at UNDER St. Marks, The Wild Project and the 14Y Theater, which is a first for FRIGID. They have never partnered with outside venues for their festival.
There are too many theatrical shows to mention at this year’s festival. Some of the highlights include Victoria Montalbano’s The Princess Strikes Back: One Woman’s Search for the Space Cowboy of Her Dreams, Hal Cantor’s The Importance of Being Anxious and Rachel Redleaf’s Too Much of a Good Thing, among many others.
What makes this fringe festival different is that plays are selected according to a lottery system, and proceeds are given back to the participating artists, according to press notes. The festival is also a member of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals. To explain this process and delve into some of the plays at this year’s festival, Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Ziv. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How is this year’s festival different from years past?
This is going to be the first time we are intentionally producing this festival outside our own venues in 15 years, and it will be more than 50% bigger than it was in 2019 and twice as big as last year.
How exactly does the lottery system work?
We pull names out of a hat, or in the case of this year, using a computer-generated fortune wheel. It really is that simple.
What’s it like to partner with new theater spaces this year?
We just closed The Fire This Time Festival a couple of weeks ago, which was our first collaboration with Wild Project. It was an absolute pleasure. We are so looking forward to working with them again for the New York City Fringe Festival, and we expect it will be just as good with the 14th St Y. Akia, at the helm there, has produced a few shows in our festival over the years and was a resident artist of ours for many years. She knows exactly what is coming their way and is ready to receive. In our 26 seasons of programing, we have only used an outside space twice, so our experience is limited. We made sure to make these first steps into the wild of space rental in NYC with venues we know to be reliable, friendly and pleasant, and we are very much looking forward to the experience.
Will the performers also have the chance to tour Canada after the New York City festival?
I know some performers have fringe plans for Canada this summer; some have plans for European fringes. Most of the shows in our fringe are local shows and have no touring plans, but for those that do have touring plans, we hope to provide them with great pull-quotes, great promo videos and maybe a couple of laurel leaves for their posters this summer.
With more productions than ever, how do you keep everything organized?
If I had to boil it down to one word, it would be Sam, our festival artist coordinator. Sam is the one that handles all the communication between the festival and the almost 50 productions in the festival. This is a monumental task, and we are very fortunate to have had Sam Adrain with us for multiple festivals now. I would be much less confident about this growth spurt if we did not have him on the team, and what a team we have this year.
Are so many New York artists represented simply because of where the festival is located?
New York City is an expensive place to come to for three weeks. This greatly limits the number of out-of-town artists that we have access to and that have access to us. It’s unfortunate, but has to be left in the column of things we cannot change and must accept. But we love our New York artists, and we really look forward to meeting new ones every year. I am always shocked at how many applicants we have that I don’t know at all, and we are always on the lookout for new artists to work with on stuff for the rest of our season. We often pick up shows or artists from this festival and plug them into one of our other festivals or for non-festival runs.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The New York City Fringe Festival will play April 3-21 at various venues in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
