Fringe preview night presents a panoply digest of short-form entertainment over the next 11 days

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The applause that greeted a line in Mayor Joe Hogsett's short speech to the IndyFringe Festival's Preview Night audience seemed to have topical resonance.

Mayor Joe Hogsett put an official seal of approval on FringeFest.
In any given year, his words would have been applicable to what the festival is all about. But in 2017, after the mayor had extolled "the performances and talent it attracts," he praised the annual performing-arts bash for "the diversity and inclusion it welcomes and lifts up." Yes!

To mark the start of the festival with two-minute pitches by 50 acts, Hogsett then read excerpts from the mayoral proclamation designating Aug. 16, 2017, as Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival Day in Indianapolis.

Certainly a large crowd gathered in the Athenaeum Theatre knew that the honor is rooted in the open-ended mission of the Fringe, which enters its 13th annual season today, continuing through Aug. 27 on eight stages on and around Massachusetts Avenue.

And while it's always possible to point to ways any artistic project could inject even more diversity into what it offers the public, IndyFringe is establishing a solid record. For one thing, it has cultivated two mini-festivals during the regular season to promote female and black playwrights, respectively: DivaFest and OnyxFest.

The range of presentations Wednesday evening was immense. Many were excerpts — scenes, songs, anecdotes, jokes, vignettes — from shows that specialize in those things. The idea was to whet the appetite for admission to the full 45-minute to 1-hour performance, most of them available six times between today and a week from Sunday.

In contrast, the choice to talk about their shows was perhaps provoked by the artists' sense that no two-minute excerpt could do justice to them. A pair of agile, improvisational clowns kept performers within the 2-minute limit and chased erring artists gently but firmly offstage.

Jill Ditmire and George Wallace acted as hosts for the parade of performers, with cameo appearances that included a charming duo team of Indianapolis City-County Council members: Zach Adamson and Jeff Miller. They would have been an example of smooth-working bipartisanship if not for technical difficulties with the soundtrack meant to accompany their Bad Lip Reading-style collection of "real" lyrics behind a few popular recordings.

Like many attendees, my response to the parade of pitches was all over the place. Some choices I made in advance are now tinged with qualms or even regret. Some things I had passed over now look to me like must-sees. Other wham-bam presentations left me in a vast "meh" area.

That's part of the fun of the Fringefest: no hunches are set in stone, but at least bets you place on shows that will please you are more likely to pay off than any given lottery. Sure, you pay a little more to place those bets, but the rewards are more probable.

So: Happy Fringing (or should that be "Fringeing," so it doesn't rhyme with "ringing"?)!





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