The 2015 Fringe: Staging design like Philly’s never seen

Putting on a Fringe Festival stretches a lot of production designers to the limits: Among this year’s curated productions are ones that require a 10,000 gallon pool, a tiny house, a revolving soundstage, and two armories that need to be converted into theaters.

The stage for director Ivo van Hove and scenic designer Jan Versweyveld’s After the Rehearsal/Persona, getting its US premiere, is covered with six inches of water surrounding a platform with walls on three sides. The first act is performed on the platform, but then the walls collapse, a storm arises, and the watery surface becomes the stage.

Van Hove envisioned the play, which is based on the scripts of Ingmar Bergman’s movies (he claims never to have seen the films), taking place in a rehearsal space, a hospital, and a lake, and Versweyveld brought it to life. (For those who do want to see the films, they will be screened prior to the production at the Roxy.)

“Ginormous” transformations

The challenge for FringeArts was to find a big enough space for all this. Although normally done in a traditional theater, no local theaters could house this production: “It’s ginormous,” says FringeArts production manager Derek Hachkowski.

So they’re converting the 23rd Street Armory: putting in a riser with 343 seats, building a proscenium arch, installing stage lights, and ensuring enough electricity to run the production. “It takes more electricity to stage a production than to run a warehouse,” says Hachkowski. The pool liner is being transported in three shipping containers from Amsterdam.

This has been done before with great success: “It’s amazing to walk into a space and you can’t tell where you are,” says Hachkowski.

Claustrophobia in A Doll’s House

Norway’s Jo Strømgren Kompani production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House presents other challenges. While A Doll’s House is a classic symbol of women’s emancipation, Strømgren transcends the issue of feminism and focuses on the environment. A choreographer as well as a director (his other Fringe productions this year, There and The Border, are dance pieces), he interprets the play through the physicality of space and the body. Therefore the set is a six-foot cube of a house in which Nora can barely stand up. In this claustrophobic environment, no wonder she wants to break away.

This world premiere production is still in development, so Hachkowski says it’s not clear yet how it will manifest on stage. He’s waiting for his stage manager, Melanie Leeds, who is in Oslo working with the company, to update him. Jo Strømgren Kompani hopes the production will go on to tour the US and Europe.

From Thaddeus Phillips to Frank Gehry

Meanwhile, Thaddeus Phillips, who collaborates with Jeff Becker, a New Orleans-based, large-scale installation artist, is turning the Prince Theater stage into a TV soundstage complete with camera crane and a platform that rotates so the audience can see behind the scenes, literally. Another world premiere, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental's Alias Ellis Mackenzie follows the adventures of American pilot and drug smuggler, Barry Seal, an actual person who was involved with the CIA, Colombian drug lords, and American politics in the 1980s. Not that reality limits Phillips’s conception of what might have happened.

The show was inspired by Phillips’s role as Seal in the Colombian TV show Alias El Mexicano (MundoFox 2013). Last May, Phillips presented a prequel, The Incredibly Dangerous Astonishing Lucrative and Potentially Completely True Adventures of Barry Seal, at FringeArts.

And then there’s Available Light, a collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer John Adams, and architect Frank Gehry. Conceived and first performed in 1983 in a warehouse space with seating on two sides, to inaugurate the opening of the Temporary Contemporary space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the piece has since then been staged only in traditional theaters, if at all. For the first time since its inception, it will be performed in a warehouse setting at the Drexel Armory with seating only on one side, but with the space left essentially raw except for the defining industrial set.

Hachkowski has been working on this project for over two years now and has tried to mount it in several locations before finding success at the Drexel Armory.

Challenges in Philly theaters

Inviting a production to participate in our Fringe Festival means not only selecting the shows, but also making sure that Philadelphia has venues for them. This is difficult, says Hachkowski, because many state-run theaters in Europe are large, multifunctional spaces, while Philadelphia venues’ houses and stages tend to be smaller.

They often lack sufficient bathrooms and offstage space for dressing rooms and storage. Some venues, like FringeArts and the Prince Theater, don’t have loading docks for bringing scenery in and out. Some equipment must be rented. And then there are the logistical problems. The Prince becomes a church on Sundays until 2pm. If the Film Society wants to show a film, the set has to accommodate a movie screen. When FringeArts turns into a party space with a DJ after the show, the set has to be tucked away and reinstalled later.

But that’s what makes the Fringe Festival so exciting. Unconventional performances in unexpected spaces.

For the full lineup of curated and neighborhood shows, including venues, dates, times, and prices, visit the Festival online.

At right: Things get crowded in Jo Strømgren Kompani's A Doll's House. Image courtesy of FringeArts.