The Martlet

With summer winding down, the season’s to-do list is shrinking. But one still-to-come event you shouldn’t miss is the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival, which runs from Aug. 26 to Sept. 5. The festival, now in its 24th year, is the third largest fringe festival in the country.

“Fringe, for Victoria’s community, is so important. It’s so small and promotes how important the fine arts is for the community, especially after all the recent cutbacks,” said Pat Rundell, who will act in this year’s Fringe.

The festival prides itself on the power of word-of-mouth reviews, a belief in non-censorship, and fair pay, with the artists retaining all of their box office proceeds.

Mily Mumford, a first-time participant this year, describes the Fringe as a “theatre free-for-all.” There are no rules once you’re in the Fringe, as was the intention when the festival was first created in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947.

The unjuried festival reflects equal opportunity by pulling names out of a hat: each year performers enter Fringe through a lottery pull and getting a performance slot is all about the luck of the draw.

The Victoria Fringe Festival will present 64 shows from across the globe this year, all in partnership with Intrepid Theatre, a nonprofit organization that produces other local theatre events such as Uno Fest. This year, 19 of the shows are based in Victoria. The shows’ contents range from wacky and weird to poetic and poignant. Here’s a sampling of what you might see.

[b]Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead[/b] Fresh off his run in a local production of Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rundell is bringing Dog Sees God: Confession of a Teenage Blockhead to this year’s Fringe. The play saw a successful debut at the New York Fringe in 2004, and Rundell is excited to see it be taken on by another cast.

This show will find a special place in one’s childhood memory as it features the death of one of the most eccentric and famous drawn dogs: Snoopy.

“Dog Sees God is a parody of Charlie Brown,” Rundell said. “It’s a dark comedy where Snoopy dies and it shows the aftermath of his death.”

[b]Gonads & Gametes[/b] Jeff Leard, a recent UVic theatre graduate, is taking an expanded version of the project he did in university to the Fringe’s stage in a comedic tale following the lives of sperm and eggs.

Leard’s one-man show features a very materialistic sperm duking it out with ritualistic and pagan eggs.

“Gonads & Gametes is a whole big series of events that follow the sperm and egg through their reproductive cycles into sex,” Leard said. “It is the biological tragedy before birth.”

[b]Thank You My Love, Goodbye[/b] For something more serious, try Jim Leard’s Thank You My Love, Goodbye, a historical love story based on true events.

Leard Senior, 63, is the father of the aforementioned Gonads & Gametes star, Jeff Leard. The elder Leard was also UVic’s first Bachelor of Fine Arts and Theatre graduate in 1970.

“Thank You My Love is a biographical piece, a love story that starts right before World War II. It is where a lover is lost and the woman left behind walks in the footsteps of her lover, following his ghost,” Leard said.

With the two Leards performing this year, the Victoria Fringe Festival has become a family affair.

“Besides being my son, Jeff’s also my competition,” said Leard with a smile. The father and son are also banding together to work with the elder Leard’s theatre company, Story Theatre Company, which performs in schools and communities across Canada.

[b]Pretty Monster[/b] This year’s Fringe will also feature an esthetically unique play written by and featuring Mumford, a thirdyear med student at UVic.

Pretty Monster is a film noir homage.

“It’s sort of set up like a film would be on stage,” Mumford said. “There’s opening credits and music, all in a 1940s era. It’s completely black and white with shades of gray.

“It’s a murder-mystery-romancecomedy. It’s also meta-theatrical because the play pokes fun at itself and realizes it’s a play pretending to be a film.”

[b]Everything is Awful[/b] Recent UVic Theatre grad Tyler Longmire is bringing a comic to life on the Fringe stage this year with his production of Everything is Awful, which adapts the Pictures for Sad Children comics by John Campbell.

“I felt that the language of the theatre and the language of comics are very, very similar,” said Longmire.

“And Campbell’s work was so bare, I felt it read more like a playscript than any other comic I’ve seen. It’s been really fun to translate it onto the stage.”

The play suspends reality, with severed heads screaming out the latest gossip and people growing wings. The protagonist, Gary, keeps stumbling upon extraordinary things, but interacting with them proves detrimental.

“In his search for meaning, these amazing events keep happening to Gary and only make life more confusing, and ultimately less meaningful. It’s overwhelming and we descend into shallow entertainments and narcissism,” said Longmire. “But it’s still funny to watch.”

For more information on these and other Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival shows visit victoriafringe.com.