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The fringe of it all: Omaha Fringe Festival fulfills founder Tamar Neumann’s dream
The fringe of it all:
Omaha Fringe Festival fulfills founder Tamar Neumann’s dream
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in the July 2019 edition of The Reader (thereader.com)
If fringe occupies the outer edge of things, then expect a grab-bag of eclectic stage work during the first Omaha Fringe Festival, July 24-27, at UNO.
Omaha Fringe founder Tamar Neumann’s inspiration for her open-access, unbound event is the Minnesota Fringe Festival. She got hooked on it working in Minneapolis as a theater critic and Chameleon Theatre Circle administrator.
She developed the event as part of her thesis work for her UNO Master of Arts in Theatre degree,
Neumann, who teaches writing, is a former playwright. She’s recently transitioned into being a dramaturge. Upon moving to Omaha in 2016 she was bummed to discover no fringe fest here and determined to start one.
“I really like fringe festivals,” she said. “I think they’re exciting and fun. They have a way of bringing all these people together that other theater festivals don’t. I think it’s because you don’t have that adjudication piece, so kind of anything goes. It’s kind of wild.”
Her fledgling Omaha fest netted 25 applications from area individuals and ensembles. Ten productions were chosen by lottery. The work ranges from performance art shows to narrative stage productions. There are no costs to the artists, who receive 75 percent of box office receipts. Neumann sees the event as a platform for encouraging and monetizing new work.
“I noticed there were a lot of works being created here by a lot of really great playwrights, but there wasn’t always a lot of room for people to get paid for their work.
It’s a community with a lot of volunteers and not a lot of professionals.”
Naturally, her start-up is a fraction of the large, years-in-the-making Minnesota Fringe she’s modeled hers on.
“Theirs is smashing. It’s two weeks long with over 200 productions. It takes over the city (Minneapolis). It’s crazy, it’s huge, it’s super fun.”
The nearest fringe to Omaha is Kansas City.
it turns out, fringe is a real thing around the U.S. and the world that started in Edinburgh, Scotland after World War Ii and spread. Creighton University professor of theater Amy Lane has made a study of the scene and gives a run-down of what to expect.
“Fringe is like a choose-your-own-adventure experience for the audience with several shows playing at the same time – and the options are always adventurous,” Lane said. “Fringe artists embrace the new, the experimental, the weird, the avant garde, the cutting edge. It’s like a cultural sampler platter. And it’s fun. Theatre can have a reputation of being elitist, stodgy, inaccessible, but fringe is the opposite. Fringe is a carnival where you get to decide which rides you’d like to try.”
It’s these qualities Neumann’s strived to present here.
“The thing I love about fringe festivals is how diverse they can be,” Neumann said. “You have a wide range of theater and performance styles and I feel like we really got that. We’ve got full plays, short plays, a standup comic, dancers, one-man shows. I feel like we’ve got a really good mix of artists and themes.”
Each Omaha Fringe work will be performed multiple times over the four-day fest, with shows running from morning through evening.
An established outside-the-box arts organization, Omaha Under the Radar, has taken Fringe under its wing, sharing marketing and other resources with its young partner in edginess. Radar’s own fest runs concurrent with Omaha Fringe, only at different sites.
Neumann enlisted Radar’s Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and stalwart metro theater figures Amy Lane, Cindy Melby Phaneuf and Lara Marsh to learn the festival ropes.
When Neumann broached the idea with Phaneuf, who teaches at UNO, she was encouraged “to go for it.”
Bartlett saw it as an opportunity to pay forward the support her own organization’s received. “It’s so scary and exhausting to go out on a limb and build an event from scratch, and I admire Tamar for taking this on with such tireless sincerity. Her heart and mind are in the right place. She wants to make something beautiful and positive for Omaha – so really I couldn’t say no to helping her out.”
Besides, Bartlett said, her group and Fringe share the same “zeitgeist” and “crossover appeal”as showcases for “creative risks” and “independent thought:” and in “uplifting the voices of local artists.”
“UNO Theatre sees it as part of its mission to connect with the community,” Phaneuf said.
In addition to mentoring from arts veterans and support by the host University of Nebraska at Omaha Theatre Program, Neumann credits operations manager Aaron David Wrigley for making it a reality.
“He joined me in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign and I literally would not be running this festival without him. He does all the technical and logistics stuff. We’re a team of two in the trenches.”
The process of organizing the event, Nuemann said, has rekindled a passion for theater that had waned.
“In high school I discovered in theater a group of people who welcomed me and understood me. I enjoyed the community theater created and the freedom inhabiting another role created. As I grew older and became more of an audience member than a creator, I found joy in theater because of its immediacy.
“Fringe has reinvigorated me. When I first moved down here I didn’t go to much theater, but in this past year I’ve seen so much and I’ve been able to embrace it again. I feel like I’ve reinvented myself by finding something I’m truly passionate about. I’ve always loved theater, but it kind of disappeared for a time, and creating this festival has helped me find that passion again.”
Along the way, she said, “I’ve learned so much about the Omaha theater community. I connected with so many people. It’s really empowering to know that I created this – that this is happening.”
She fully intends making Fringe “an annual thing.” That depends, she acknowledged, on “the community supporting and embracing it.” After this first fest wraps, she said, “I’ll take a step back and evaluate what worked and what didn’t work and how I want to move forward.”
The Lineup:
Improv Art by Big Canvas
Artists will create original pieces of art inspired by the antics of Big Canvas improv comedians and audience members’ own creativity. This in-the-moment. interactive art experience will culminate in an unveiling.
Celebration: A Belly Dance Show
Della Bynum and the ladies from her Chrysalis Studio will perform this ancient midriff dance that celebrates the feminine and the cycles of life. Onlookers may be invited to join in as the rhythm moves them.
Hummingbird – A Theatrical Tribute to Robin Williams
Playwright Jason Levering directs his own script in this love letter to Robin Williams that imagines the comic’s last hours of existential angst. This Crook Factor Productions show has a free form befitting its subject.
Secondhand Love
Standup comic Andrew Morton riffs on some of his life journeys – of the physical, hiking variety and of the mental health what-is-fantasy-versus-reality variety.
MOABIRTHC
Playwright and actress Colleen O’Doherty is joined by other performers in her celebration of physicality in theater, comedic and otherwise. Bodies in motion through space and time lead to interesting possibilities.
TBA: Tired, Barren and Alone
Jean-Paul Zuhur performs this one-man show he’s also written that is a contemporary take on Dante’s Inferno.
20 Questions
Doug Hayko pushes the limits of discourse and vulnerability in this exploration of the moments right before and after his HIV-positive diagnosis and coming out. The conceptual piece lives in the intense emotions between theater and reality. For mature audiences only.
Carnival
Tim Barr’s one-man show from his own Jungle Productions 2 revolves around deep research he’s done into the life of carneys and the subculture of carnivals. It’s Carousel meets Nightmare Alley.
Darkness Like a Dream
Anna Jordan and her new Found Ensemble present this full production retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in In the forest of ancient Athens. Lovers run from persecution and tyranny. The gods rage. Tragedians rehearse an ill-fated play. Monsters are born and mortals are magicked. A sinister thread weaves everyone’s stories together – revealing a darkness in the forest and in themselves.
Little Wars
The festival’s star entry may be this UNO Studio Theatre production from Jeremy Stoll and fellow grad students that addresses homo sapiens’ hard-wired desire to “make war. From armed warfare to schoolyard beefs, this work of devised physical theatre explores the nature of human conflict by imagining it as ritual.
The play’s toured Nebraska. Its cast and production team will next bring Little Wars to the mother of all fringe festivals – Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.
Fringe unfurls at UNO’s Weber Fine Arts Building (Dodge Street campus).
For Fringe schedule and tickets, visit www.facebook.com/omahafringefest.
Read more of Leo Adam Biga’s work at leoadambiga.com.
Noah Diaz making run for his dream at Yale School of Drama and theater companies nationwide
Noah Diaz making run for his dream at Yale School of Drama and theater companies nationwide
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in the August 2018 issue of The Reader (www.thereader.com)
Noah Diaz proves there’s no prescribed way to follow your passion. In 2017, the Council Bluffs native and Omaha theater darling received a full ride scholarship to the prestigious Yale School of Drama without majoring or even minoring in theater as a UNO undergrad.
He’s already a rising star in Yale’s vaunted graduate playwrighting program after winning accolades for acting and directing here. Though he didn’t formally train locally, he said, “I’ve received so much second-hand training from the people I’ve worked with over the years. I’ve worked with a staggeringly high number of talented people on stage and off. I have mentors, big and small,” said Diaz, who’s been home over the summer.
“In many ways I was raised by my mentors from whom I received theatrical and life lessons.”
Feeling he already had theater covered, he studied special education and communication disorder and creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Meanwhile, his play The Motherhood Almanac opened theater doors for him here and outside Nebraska. The Sheltebelt staged it. He did a residency with it at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference in Idaho. Two New York City theater companies workshopped it. Encouraged by fellow playwright Ellen Struve, he applied to name graduate theater programs. Like a feel-good turn in a play, the one school he assumed he had no real chance at accepted him into its illustrious ranks.
“I thought it was never really going to happen for me,” he said. “It was hard not to recognize what kind of capital ‘I’ institution Yale was and how impenetrable it appeared. But there actually seemed space for me there and then it was space I was heartily welcomed into.”
He learned of his acceptance on his mother’s birthday.
“We had already planned having a dinner that night with the extended family. My mom said. ‘The only gift I want is to share the news myself with everyone.'”
His first year in New Haven has been “astounding” and “profoundly rewarding.”
“It’s a really intense program. We don’t have many breaks. It functions as a conservatory. We are often in classes six days a week from 8 a.m. until about 2:30 p.m. and then we’re in rehearsals from 2:30 to 11 p.m. It’s similar to how medical students are in classes and then go on their hospital rotations.
“I’m busy every day. I’m very tired. My mind was prepared but my body wasn’t. It’s a matter of gritting yourself and barreling through. In so many ways it was the longest year of my life and yet the shortest. It requires such exertion of energy, not just creatively, mentally or emotionally but physically as well. I wrote five plays over the year, one of which went up to a workshop production in the spring, in addition to many others I started and abandoned.”
His apartment is close to the venerable campus, which he said “reminds me of Hogwarts in Harry Potter.”
As an arts and letters Ivy Leaguer, his life is consumed by studies, rehearsals, writing and craft analysis.
“I live alone which is smart because I do a lot of writing and I need a lot of quiet. A huge challenge for me personally in this program is generating work so quickly and so frequently. I’m learning themes that constantly keep reoccurring in my work, what that’s telling me about myself, why I’m interested in exploring these things and what dramatic structures I keep leaning on.
“I have a lot of conversations with my colleagues about knowing the difference between what is a playwright’s voice and what is a playwright’s schtick. The difference, at least for me, is honing my artistic voice and not simply relying on the same bag of tricks. I’m proud of this first year body of work because I’ve tried things – somewhat reinventing myself or at least challenging myself in new ways. That’s intentional.”
The work doesn’t all just stay on the page either.
“This particular playwriting program is a little unusual in that we are offered a production each year.”
He’s written three new scripts over the summer.
“My second year production starts rehearsal the first day of classes or shortly thereafter, so I have to prepare options to present.”
There’s no shortage of stimulation.
“I’m working with incredible people in my cohort. They are so talented and smart. My faculty – Sarah Ruhl, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Amy Herzog, Robert O’hara, Jackie Sibblies Dreary, Young Jun Lee – are all luminaries still working in the field. It enriches my learning experience,”
With notable alums on stage and screen, the school is a recognized talent pool that industry producers, directors and agents scout. Diaz has already heard from some.
“I’ve been really fortunate that a lot of people have been reaching out. I’ve been taking meetings, I’ve been in touch with fantastic companies. This summer alone I’ll be at three different theater companies across the country developing my work.”
He was in Chicago for the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) Carnaval of New Latinx Work in July. This month his Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally is part of the Two River Theater Latinx festival in Red Bank, New Jersey and a workshop at The Lark in New York City.
Diaz said the example of other Omaha playwrights has emboldened him to forge ahead with his own career.
“Our community of playwrights inspire me. Because of all the people who’ve come before me, it never really crossed my mind that I couldn’t. I saw people doing it and I just always kind of had that feeling, Oh, when it’s my time, I will do it, too.”
He’s excited that two more Omaha theater nerds, actresses Roni Shelley Perez and Bailey Carlson, recently made the big move to NYC.
“I hope that line continues.”
He’s not forgetting where it all started for him.
“I thank Omaha in so many ways for having prepared me and supported me. It’s really great to know they have my back. I plan to be back every summer for the Great Plains Theatre Conference.”
He was back for this year’s GPTC, where his star Yale prof, Sara Ruhl, was the honored playwright. He also had a reading of his You Will Get Sick at the Shelterbelt.
He wishes playwrights had more showcases here.
“There are not many places for playwrights to go and yet these playwrights continually write and persevere to tell the stories they need to tell. That tenacity and initiative to write in a town that isn’t always ready to hear the stories they do write is exciting to me.
“What I love about the playwrights in our community is that so often it’s not about accolades or attention but rather generating and creating pieces of art important to them. That’s something I try to do. I try to tap into whatever it is I personally need to tap into.”
One of his Yale plays, The Guadalupes, cuts closer to his life than anything he’s written. It explores questions he has about his own racial identity and his relationship with the Hispanic side of his family.
“It’s about my grandmother, my grandfather and my father and mother. It’s this deeply personal play about being both white and Hispanic and the irreconcilable differences between the two. It deeply affected me. It was well received, which was great.
“I think for any writer of any form the history that you carry will always seep into the work. But this one was directly about my family, so that was a first for me. I don’t know if l’ll be doing that again anytime soon, but I did get that one out of my system.”
As things continue moving fast for him, he takes comfort in the surety his Yale degree will mean something.
“We’re told that regardless of what you think your personal career trajectory will look like, you will be working in your chosen field. They’re not promising us Tony Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, but having gone to this university and through this program, I will be able to live and work and pay my bills as a writer.”
“That (prospect) is so fulfilling and rewarding to me.”
Image by Debra S. Kaplan
Follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/public/Noah-Diaz) and Twitter (twitter.com/diaz_noah).
Read more of Leo Adam Biga’s work atleoadambiga.com.
If the play’s the thing, then what about gender?
If the play’s the thing, then what about gender?
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in the July 2018 issue of The Reader (www.thereader.com)
Theater offers windows on the world, yet only a fraction of plays produced anywhere are written by women. This arts parity issue has urgency with national initiatives extending to Omaha, where theater artists variously discuss the problem and implement remedies.
“The initiatives have been around for about a decade now,” said Creighton University theater professor Amy Lane. “The most well-known, 50/50 by 2020, started in response to a study that revealed women’s voices grossly underrepresented in theaters.”
In 2006, 17 percent of plays professionally produced nationwide (12 percent on Broadway) were written by women. “Surprising,” Lane said, given that “60 percent of the theater audience is women.”
She wonders if “there will be true gender equity by 2020” and what “progress” has been made thus far.
UNO theater professor Cindy Melby Phaneuf echoes many when she says, “My opinion is we are moving in the right direction, but still have a long way to go.” She heads the National Theatre Conference, whose Women Playwright Initiative has produced 500 plays by women since 2011 and expects to reach 1,000 by 2020. “I am encouraged by the energy and interest in gender parity, but am most interested in taking action.”
“I support these initiatives and applaud the theaters implementing them,” said Omaha playwright Ellen Struve.
Struve’s had plays mounted at the Omaha Community Playhouse (OCP) and Shelterbelt Theatre and across the nation.
“When I began writing plays, I didn’t know many other women getting produced on a regular basis. This past year I was able to invite more than a dozen Omaha-based women playwrights to participate in the 365 Women A Year project. It was so exhilarating to look at that list of writers. Even better was to see a few of the plays fully-produced by Denise Chapman at the Union for Contemporary Art.”
2017 panels hosted by the Blue Barn Theater and the University of Nebraska at Omaha dialogued about the social-economic context behind exclusion and why plays written by women would enrich any season.
“Panels are great for raising awareness. Representation matters: for women and female-identifying playwrights, directors, actors, designers, crews, administrators. Discussions are fine, but action is what is needed,” said Lane.
She created the 21 & Over series at OCP “to introduce Omaha to new works and new voices.” 21 & Over seasons were 50/50 by 2020 compliant, she said..
OCP’s ongoing Alternative Programming series continues to be diverse.
Creighton and UNO are devoting their respective theater departments’ entire 2018-2019 performance seasons to works by women playwrights.
Lane said Creighton’s “made a commitment to continue with the 50/50 by 2020 Movement” beyond this season.
Phaneuf and colleagues want to move things forward.
“UNO and Creighton have agreed to shine a light on what our greater Omaha community is doing already and look to the future to provide more opportunities to revel in women’s voices. The goal is gender parity on a permanent basis as an ordinary way of programming our seasons representing diverse voices. With parity also comes a desire to produce plays by writers of color. We are constantly on the lookout for plays that represent a variety of cultures and heritages.”
Outside the academic setting, Omaha presents a mixed bag in theater gender parity.
Phaneuf said despite some gains, many Omaha theaters present seasons with only one or two works by women. Sometimes, none.
“Those making artistic decisions at Omaha theaters either care about this issue or they don’t. If they care, then it is not a difficult task to make sure a theater’s season includes works by women,” Lane said. “There are plenty of terrific plays out there and plenty of resources to find them. If this is not an issue that matters to them, then they shouldn’t be surprised if they get called out. I think more of us who do care should speak out more when we see gender parity ignored.”
OCP artistic director Kimberly Hickman said “more opportunities for female artists is among her programming guidelines.” This past season several OCP playwrights and composers identified as women as did all its guest directors and many designers.
“Those priorities remain in place for 2018-2019.”
“Parity in theater is a complex issue that can’t be simplified to only gender,” Hickman said.
A session on female leadership she attended at a recent conference for regional theaters brought this home.
Photo by Colin Conces
“While the room of women had many things in common, our experiences were very different due to ethnicity, sexuality, economic status, academic background, location. All these factors need to be taken into consideration. I believe the best way to make progress is to look at who is at the table making decisions. If the people all look the same, that is a problem and steps need to be taken to evolve. I also think accountability is important. I have intentionally surrounded myself with people I know will hold me accountable.”
The Shelterbelt has a demonstrated “strong commitment to gender parity, not only for playwrights, but for all production positions,” said executive director Roxanne Wach. “We do try to include at least 50 percent women playwrights in a season, while still creating a balance in storytelling and genres. It’s a conscious choice by our reading committee and a shared vision of our board.
“I personally feel if we don’t start with parity in the small theaters, it will never happen in larger theaters.”
Shelterbelt’s won recognition from the International Centre for Women Playwrights for reaching equity goals.
“To look just at playwrights is only scratching the surface,” Wach adds. “We’ve got to start valuing the work women bring to all areas of theater production and the great value in having different points of view.”
Omaha’s largest footprint on the national theater scene, the Great Plains Theatre Conference (GPTC), uses a 100 percent blind reading process selecting plays.
“We are one of the few major development programs that do this,” producing artistic director Kevin Lawler said. “We have had many long debates about whether we should change to have predetermined selection percentages to include gender, race, identity, but the overwhelming consensus by our staff and those who attend the conference is to keep the selections blind.
“Even with a blind selection we have always been close to parity. This year was a clean 50-50 split. Our women playwrights often appear on the Kilroys List (of most recommended unproduced or underproduced plays).”
UNO’s new Connections series is being curated from GPTC works by underrepresented playwrights.
GPTC playwright Sara Farrington terms parity “a triggery question” and initiatives to date “a baby step.”
“Many people simply don’t and won’t trust plays by women. It is astonishing people still assume women can or will only write about being imprisoned by their bodies or men. That idea has been beaten into a mass theater-going audience by over-produced, overrated, wildly misogynistic male playwrights and producers and by artistic directors financing and programming plays with reductive and fearful depictions of female characters.
“Women playwrights have a deep, refined, 200-proof rage. Rage makes for badass and innovative storytelling. Women playwrights tell stories backwards, sideways, in a spiral, upside down, from angles you’d never expect. They are utterly complex, psychologically profound and contemporary.”
Fellow GPTC playwright Shayne Kennedy, a Creighton grad, calls for systemic change.
“I believe men and women tell stories differently and because the creative industries have long been dominated by male voices, we as a culture have become conditioned to hear in those voices. I think to correct the imbalance we are going to need some risk-takers, visionaries and deliberately opened minds.”
Read more of Leo Adam Biga’s work at leoadambiga.com.
Link to the 2018-2019 UNO theater season at:
http://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/theatre/index.php
Select UNO Theater 2018-2019 season:
TARTUFFE (Studio)
by Molière, adapted by Constance Congdon from a literal prose translation by Virginia Scott
Director Jackson Newman
August 23-25
THE CLEARING
by Helen Edmundson
Director Lara Marsh
September 26-29, October 3-6
SECRET GARDEN
Book & Lyrics by Marsha Norman, Music by Lucy Simon
Director D. Scott Glasser, Musical Director Shelby VanNordstand
October 31-November 3, 7-10, 14-18
CONNECTIONS
Director Dr. Ron Zank
February 20-23, 27- March 2
MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY
by Anne Washburn
Director: Jeremy Stoll
March 14-17, 2019
THE WOLVES
by Sarah DeLappe
Director Dr. Cindy Melby Phaneuf
April 10-13, 17-20, 2019
___________________________
Link to the 2018-2019 Creighton theater season at:
https://www.creighton.edu/ccas/fineandperformingarts/boxoffice/
Select Creighton Theater 2018-2019 season:
HANDLED
Written by Shayne Kennedy
World premiere play/Mainstage Theater
October 31 – November 4, 2018
KINDERTRANSPORT
Written by Diane Samuels
Play/Studio Theater
February 13 -17, 2019
LEGALLY BLONDE THE MUSICAL
Book by Heather Hach; Music and Lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benajmin
Musical/Mainstage Theater
March 27-31, 2019
Life Itself VII: 25-plus years of Omaha theater stories
New plays are discovered at Omaha’s own Great Plains Theatre Conference
https://leoadambiga.com/2018/06/06/new-plays-are-di…eatre-conference/
Kevin Lawler, ©photo by Debra S. Kaplan
Kevyn Morrow
John Guare
Brian O’Bryne and Swoosie Kurtz in Frozen
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