Whose Faulty Vision

Perennial Fringe Shows

The Fringe is half over. So far, I’ve seen 8 shows in 7 days–not bad, huh?

I love the Fringe dearly, and what I love most about it is the sheer diversity of material you see during the festival–stuff that you’d never see anywhere else–but like anything else, it falls into its little patterns. This is my fourth year volunteering at the Fringe, and I’ve started to notice that some show types pop up over and over again. So here it is, my list of Shows you’ll see at every New York Fringe Festival:

The one-person autobiographical show “exploring my identity as a handful of adjectives”. There are always a few of these, with only the adjectives changing–”exploring my identity as a gay Norwegian-American” or “as a Vietnamese Catholic” or whatever. I’m not a big fan of these things. On an artistic level, they’re horribly self-indulgent. On a philosophical level, the underlying assumption behind all of these things is that your identity consists of a small handful of adjectives, most of them things that you’re born with, and once you “understand what it means to be” the various adjectives, that’s your identity in a neat little bow, and I fundamentally reject that premise. It’s old-fashioned tribalism, and I’m an individualist. (Okay, my views on tribalism are a bit more nuanced than that makes them sound, but that’s a topic for another post.)

The one-person autobiographical show about “my struggle with” alcohol, depression, cancer, overeating or whatever. These things are just as self-indulgent as the first sort, but I don’t have any particular philosophical objections to them, and hey, maybe they’ll actually help somebody.

The musical set behind the scenes at a theater putting on a musical. Last year’s was also a murder mystery, and actually a lot of fun. This year’s seems to be doing very well–I was volunteering there, and it sold out–but I haven’t seen it yet myself, so I can’t comment.

The updated version of a Shakespeare play. This year there are two (seriously) Hamlet variants and a Winter’s Tale musical (which was actually quite good).

Related to that, The retelling of a classic piece of literature, or a Greek myth, focusing on one of the female characters. Seems like kind of an obscure thing, but they keep popping up.

The show inspired by a hot trend, but thanks to Festival lead times, it’s rather out of date by the time you actually see it. Last year there were a couple of reality show parodies, this year it’s MySpace.

Oh, and let’s not forget The preachy show banging on this year’s hot-button left-wing cause du jour. There are always a couple of those. Last year it was the Iraq war, this year it’s Global Warming.

I don’t want to make it sound like the Fringe is incredibly repetitive. There are about 200 shows a year, so naturally there’s a certain amount of overlap. And there’s lots of crazy original stuff every year too. But man, I’ve sat through enough of the above shows by now, I really have.