When it comes to experimental theater in Colorado, the fringe is well, living on the fringe. Barely.
When the LIDA Project recently left its downtown space, it left Colorado without one dedicated experimental theater company. Even though 99 companies performed at least one play in 2004, the time has come for Colorado theater to get real about not getting real.
“When you are completely missing the avant-garde from the picture, you are missing a vital piece of who we are as human beings in whatever way you want to contextualize our world,” said Lawrence Kampf, executive director of the upcoming Boulder Fringe Festival, which will offer 300 performances by 70 groups at 20 venues in and around Boulder over 12 days beginning Wednesday.
“My experience of theater in Colorado has been more of the same, more of the same,” said Israeli-born Ami Dayan, who lives in Boulder and teaches in the Naropa Institute’s MFA program. He said LIDA’s decision to focus on performing outside Colorado leaves a big gap.
“Even at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, I’ve never seen anything avant-garde, like say, a three-man ‘Macbeth,”‘ Dayan said. “This is no comment on a specific institution, but there is nothing that really takes us out of our comfort zone.
“By continuing to stage the same kinds of plays over and over – yes, we are confirming ourselves as cultural – but we don’t ever really take ourselves out of that realm ‘of the same,”‘ he said. “And making art demands that.”
Dayan is the main attraction of this year’s festival. A relative of Moshe Dayan, an Israeli statesman and hero of the Six-Day War, he served as an Air Force rescue-team commander before taking up writing and teaching. His “A Tale of a Tiger,” an adaptation of Dario Fo’s classic, was well-received in its New York debut last year.
Now he presents “The Man Himself,” the adaptation of an Alan Drury piece first staged by London’s National Theatre in 1975. In it, a despised Brit who is ostracized at home and work finds welcome in the open arms of fascists.
Dayan’s first adaptation of the play was at an Israeli festival in 1992, making Drury’s central character a soldier in the Kahana Movement. When Dayan asked Drury if they could collaborate on an adaptation set in 2005 Denver, “it was such a mad idea I had to say yes,” Drury said via e-mail from London. “It’s not my original play, but that’s the point. I can’t wait to see what people make of it.”
The premise can work anywhere, Dayan said, so long as the “protagonist” is ideologically adrift. For Boulder, his “Little Hitler” is a despised manager of a large electrical goods warehouse in south Denver. When cast away there, he is taken in by evangelicals.
“‘The Man Himself’ talks about a very small man who is alienated from everything – society, the workplace, the neighborhood, the family,” Dayan said. “The only real road that’s open to him is from the religious right.”
Dayan sees the play, debuting Thursday, as a warning to Democrats who historically have been seen as the most welcoming of the disaffected.
“I thought it was perfect in terms of what is going on in the country right now,” Dayan said. “I think we are seeing the religious right really taking a stand on social issues and really managing to reign in lost souls. And I want to say this in the most positive way: I think they are really giving these people shelter.
“My guy, Michael, needs help, and they really are saving his life, or at least his sanity. So I want to at least credit them for good social work.”
In the adaptation, London’s Clapham Common underground station becomes the Market Street bus station on Denver’s 16th Street Mall.
“Ami had to find the way the character now speaks,” Drury said. “Not only are the vocabulary and rhythms different, but so are the ways the two countries use language. Americans state things more; there’s less use of suggestion. They also talk in less formal grammatical structures. For me, it was like working on a translation.
“However, the biggest difference between the two countries is religion. It is part of American national life in a way that is unthinkable in Britain. Religious experience is an issue in the original script. It’s even more so in the adaptation. The original is about one man’s involvement with the extreme right. Then, in the UK, the extreme right was secular. Now, in the U.S., it is not.”
While Dayan has localized “The Man Himself” to Denver, “what I am trying to get at is an American issue,” he said.
“The left had its time under the Clinton days, and it kind of fell asleep on its shift. The religious right is taking over as being this great security cushion for lost souls who are looking for new direction and meaning in life. They are manipulating whatever it is these people are psychologically lacking and converting it into political activism.
“I am just bringing the awareness that if we don’t wake up and do something to reach out to these kinds of people, then somebody else will.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
Boulder Fringe Festival
Some theater highlights include:
“MAGDALENE”|A new rock opera from Mary Magdalene’s point of view, from her birth in Egypt to becoming the woman entrusted with carrying on Jesus’ legacy.
“THE MAN HIMSELF”|Ami Dayan adapts Alan Drury’s 1975 piece from London to present-day Denver. Michael, ostracized at work as a little Hitler for wanting everything just so, is embraced by local evangelicals.
“THE SEX LIVES OF TEENAGE GIRLS”|Created in March by the Naropa Institute with Moises Kaufman and the Techtonic Theater Project, creators of “The Laramie Project.” This play is performed – seriously – in a public bathroom.
“LE CARACTÈRE FÉMININ”|Choreographers Joan Bruemmer and Krista DeNio play on the motif of female isolation as a woman waits alone by the phone on a Friday night. This comedy, incorporating physical movement and postmodern dance, mixes anxiety about technology with the possibility of making a real connection via the Internet.
The Boulder Fringe Festival runs Wednesday through Aug. 28 at 20 locations in or near downtown Boulder. For showtimes and a full schedule, call 720-563-9950 or go to boulderfringe.com
