Fringe 2015 - Firing Up The Old Blog Again

My Fringe press pass came in the mail the other day.  Mom has arrived for her week of Fringing and her Ultra Pass was waiting for her.  Time to start up the old Fringe blog again.  The Twin Cities Daily Planet, where a lot of blog content has resided in recent years, is undergoing some changes this year with a new owner/publisher, new editor in chief, and it’s currently between arts editors.  There will still be a chunk of content under the Daily Planet banner, but there’ll be a lot of content hanging out here as well.  I’ll try to link across the two platforms and tweet a lot to direct the Fringe curious to the coverage as it arises.

For those of you who may be partaking of this blog for the first time this year, my mom comes to visit from out east in Pennsylvania and binge on the first six days of Fringe with me.  It happened by accident one year and then became an annual theater pilgrimage for her.  She’s game for pretty much anything, so content will not be a limitation.

She is, however, in her late 70s (though she doesn’t look or act it), so since I want to keep her around for many years to come, I’m going to try not to grind her into the ground.  This will be challenging, because she gets an Ultra Pass and wants to squeeze all the theatergoing out of it she can.  That means 30 shows in six days.  We could hop in my car and zip back and forth across town the whole time.  The smarter course of action is to find clusters of shows in the same neighborhood each day and give ourselves a little chance to breathe between shows.

I’m a playwright, so I gravitate to new plays and local writers over established plays.  I’m gay, so if there are attractive men of any age in a show, that’s a bonus - actual gay content, even better.  I’m a softie, so I will lean toward seeing as many of the traveling Fringe acts as I can, because I like to be a good host city, whatever they do is something I don’t get a chance to see any other time of the year, and if they believe in their story enough to pack it up and carry it with them around the country, that makes me curious.  I also find myself strangely susceptible to being wanted, so if an artist sends me a press release or even just invites me on Facebook, I’m more likely to give them a second look.  The more I know about a show, the harder it is sometimes to say no to it.  All these rules are made to be broken, of course, and Mom also has her favorites, so with luck and random acts of scheduling chance, we'll probably end up with a nice cross section of what's on tap this year.  Follow along!