The Bleeding Edge: The Capital Fringe Festival

IT'S 30 PERCENT bigger. It has its very own building and even a special button.

"The Fringe Festival is here to stay. The longer we're here, we're going to be louder and louder and louder," said Julianne Brienza, executive director and co-founder of the Capital Fringe Festival.

This year's festival introduces a dedicated headquarters, located at 607 New York Ave. NW. The building will house a bar and a cabaret dance hall.

Brienza, via telephone interview, cited the Fringe Festival Button as another essential feature. The $5 button — mandatory for entrance to all performances — gives patrons access to discounts at a number of area restaurants and shops for the entire year. The eventual goal of the button, said Brienza, is to be able to pass100 percent of ticket revenue along to the performers by the festival's fifth anniversary; currently, that percentage is 70.

"The main purpose of [the Fringe Festival] is to not rely on what's already established here," Brienza said. "We're a performing arts festival ... People can let their hair down and see risk-taking performing arts."

Indeed, performers run the gamut from suspects usual — Woolly Mammoth, for example — to unusual and even downright Weerd, as in the Weerd Sisters, 2007's "Pick of the Fringe."

Weerd Sisters writer/choreographer Diana Tokaji collaborated with singer/songwriter Annie Johnstone and other artists to develop the production, which plays at the Source Theater. She likened this year's performance, "Crashing Home," to a meal.

"The 'meal' includes live music, song, spoken word, dance and video. The flavors combine well, but sparkle and sometimes shock the palate," she said in an e-mail interview.

While Tokaji seems to prefer to let the audience discover the meaning behind the work, she said, "This one is saying: Come out. Come out as who you are. Be willing. But don't expect 'pretty' in return."

Audiences also might not expect "pretty" from Dizzy Miss Lizzie's Roadside Revue's production of "The Oresteia." According to Revue's co-founder Debra Buonaccorsi, who also co-wrote and co-directs, the production of Aeschylus' Greek tragedy "is rowdy, raucous, loud and literate."
The group, Buonaccorsi said in an e-mail interview, aims "to create a new form that marries theater, rock music, vaudeville and burlesque."

Also touching on history is Forum Theatre's performance of Peter Weiss' "Marat/Sade," which depicts a performance of a play Marquis de Sade wrote at an insane asylum. The play raises questions of equality and power in society.

"It takes these historic events and allows for a new perspective of some big, universal ideas about how we live," director Michael Dove said in an e-mail interview.

Audience, beware: "The actors are pretty excited about finding ways of 'reminding' the audience that they can be seen and are in a room with lunatics," Dove said.

» Various locations and times; through July 27; $15-$35; 202-737-7230; capfringe.org.

Written by Express contributor Erin Trompeter
Photos courtesy Hijos del Limbo, Patricia Di Bella and Laura Gross