FLOPPING AT EDMONTON FRINGE 2023
written just after my last Edmonton Fringe, on the eve of my next one...
Bleary eyed, Vincent Prix lurches into a chair, takes inventory in the mirror. His eyes are crystal blue orbs holding the misery of the world and also the joy of a private infinity pool. He is lit spectacularly: the smokey lid, the parted lip, the highlight on a stalwart cheek bone... He breathes. Out. In. He has never looked more handsome, more full of vitality. He studies himself, snatches a pre-rolled joint from a jacket pocket, takes a drag. Drunk, stoned, counting out the sleeping pills for the night, he offers himself soothing mantras.
“One show at a time.”
“Tomorrow is another day.”
“Every performance is good experience.”
He shakes his head to himself. “I'm a big star!” is all his mind can cry. “I deserve more!”
"It was your fringe," a friend said to me the other day, about Edmonton Fringe 2014. There's no reason anybody else should remember a festival from a thousand years ago, but I do, and it felt incredible. I showed up with a handful of quarter-size, 1-sided black-and-white fliers. I think I did thirty minutes of flyering, total. Quickly sold out the whole 100-seat 10-show run, won awards, all the cookies. The whole fest I was higher than a jet, and not on that many drugs. That fringe festival launched me, made me feel like I could do Edinburgh in 2015, which led me to Australia 2016-2018 and then all over the place. "Your show was the show to see," another friend of mine said to me about my Edmonton 2014 experience. She and I were now at Edmonton 2023, standing amidst a sea of festival goers definitely not coming to my new show. My show was not the show to see at Edmonton Fringe 2023.
I know some of the reasons. The show I brought in 2014 was with a character and material that I'd been working on for seven years. I had done 4 Canadian festivals with that show before Edmonton 2014, so there was already some word-of-mouth happening on the circuit. And then, also, maybe magick.
Also sometimes I worry that Butt Kapinski is all I'm really good at, the one thing I have that pops.
“Noooooo,” Vincent moans, careening toward me. He is already two manhattans in, scanning the room to see if anyone has drugs. He clutches at my lapel, and his voice, mid-Atlantic, husky yet smooth, is in my ear. “I'm stunning,” he murmurs. “All you've ever wanted is to be Tim Curry, and I'm the closest you've come. I deserve the world, and the world deserves me.”
“And what about him”, Vincent continues, nodding over to a dashing young man with big hair leaning against the wall in a leather bomber jacket. There are three other people of various genders hovering around the young man, and he is listening to each of them talk and laugh, looking very thoughtful and almost intelligent. They all want to take him home, and he is open. Vincent goes over to the group and pulls the young man away. “No!” Vincent says, correcting a dog whom he knows will do the same wrong thing again. He puts the young man in front of me. The young man looks up at me, eyes big and soft and curious. “Are you going to tell me the world doesn’t need him too?”
Considering how disheartening Edmonton Fringe 2023 was, I’m buoyed by how beautifully Brooke and I weathered it as a duo, how much we still love each other, and more to the point, how much she still seems to value her collaboration with me even though I am a ridiculous and annoying person when things don’t go my way. Don’t get me wrong; our festival experience was nice in many ways. We got some great reviews. We had plenty of fun. We laughed and were laughed at. We probably averaged 20 people a show. But it was not enough for me. I am a monster; I am insatiable; I need it all; I don’t need that much; I just need a hundred people or more thinking I’m a genius all at the same time, over and over again. Brooke is able to look at our experience at Edmonton Fringe 2023 in a more balanced way. She sees what we can do differently (changes to the show, marketing strategy) and be reasonable and emotionally unattached about it all. I am working on being more balanced too.
“You’re a failure,” Vincent murmurs ominously into the mirror. He wipes his mouth with the cuff of his sleeve, daring his lipstick to smear. “You think anyone’s going to want to work with you after this debacle? Your future workshops will be empty. No one will hire you to direct their shows. You will lose the paltry, tiny, itty bitty career you’ve eked out these past ten years, and you will have to be a substitute middle school teacher for the rest of your life.”
The stakes feel very high for me. Whether I will actually lose my career if this show isn’t a hit, who’s to say. The only career trajectory I know is the one I’ve had thus far, so it’s scary to not know how risks will play out.
Everyone talks about how awesome learning is, and it may be awesome, but it’s not glamorous or comfortable, and it doesn’t feel good. Learning feels like acid reflux, it feels like something you want to get away from, not something to run toward. Has it always felt like this?
My daughter is two. She has a lot to learn, and she knows it. Every day, she’s like, Whaddya got for me. Shopping cart, water wings, spatula, nose blowing. And so much falling. She falls down all the time. And she cries. Not endlessly, but short bursts of humiliated sobs whenever she falls, whenever she feels that she’s temporarily lost that precious sense of self-control she has been fighting for as long as she’s been alive.
She tries some complicated move—stepping off a big stoop, say—and falls. She cries out, but even as she cries, she slowly, determinedly gets herself back into position on that stoop, and she tries again. She usually gets it right the second time.
I’m in awe of her: her acceptance of the deep discomfort of learning, and the determination to do something again, without any confidence that it will succeed. Just a passion to fix that feeling of failure inside her, to swallow the acid, to re-write the story of the big stoop.
I will write a new story of Edmonton Fringe 2023. It will be the story of Edmonton Fringe 2023 SLASH 2024, in which we learned a ton and took good notes and worked hard all year long, to bring a show back, and…. Well, who knows. We don’t know. We just know, it’s a big stoop. It’s a stoop I somehow flew over once, nine years ago, and then this time it wasn’t so easy. But just as I believe that all the heartbreak in my life has made me a better person, a more empathetic teacher and a more sensitive performer, I believe that flopping at the Edmonton Fringe 2023 (a very small heartbreak, relatively speaking) will work out for me in the end. Maybe it’ll just give me something to smile wistfully over while I’m ducking rotten apples hurled at me by dismissive middle schoolers. But that’s still something.
Great read!