Organizers are hoping to sell 20,000 tickets to the Capital Fringe Festival, which showcases 116 performances throughout D.C. later this month.
Now in its second year, the Fringe festival features plays, live music, dance and alternative performances like improvisation. Last year, 18,000 tickets were sold for the 93-act show, festival Director Julianne Brienza said. Thirty-three performers are returning and the rest are new entrants, Brienza said. About 40 percent of the acts come from D.C.; the rest are from surrounding suburbs and across the country. Works celebrate racy themes like sexuality, unusual topics like the fate of a cockroach, or combine divergent genres, such as “Lysistration”, a rock opera take on a Greek comedy. Twenty-six acts are family-friendly this year, Brienza said.
Since last year’s event was the first in D.C., many weren’t aware of it, Brienza said. This year, the group stepped up its marketing efforts, hosting a nine-bar promotional happy hour tour and hiring local firm Design Army to do line-art caricatures of participants to use in its advertising campaign.
Performances will be scattered throughout the city, with major centers in Penn Quarter, Shaw and H Street, Brienza said.
This year, the Fringe will conduct a study to find out the festival’s demographics — last year, the group did not do revenue estimates or figure out how many attendees were tourists, and now it wants to be able to let the city government know the event’s impact on the area. Kristin Cantwell, a local actress whose one-woman show, “Confessions of an Invisible Woman”, sold out three times last year, returns with her first foray into cabaret: “Butter: A Love Story.”
“Theater is such a hard business to get into; everyone here has a day job and does this stuff on the weekends,” Cantwell said. “The additional publicity and venues provide a wonderful opportunity to do your work.”
Fringe also gives established companies in the area a chance to explore edgier material, said Dan Brick, producing director for Hyattsville’s Solas Nua, whose Fringe piece last year, “La Corbière,” was performed in the Georgetown swimming pool. This year, “The Drunkard” is the only Fringe piece to appear every night of the festival.
