San Diego Fringe Festival

The San Diego Fringe Festival, in its inaugural year, took the East Village by storm as performers filed in from across the county and across the globe. In true Fringe fashion, performances went beyond Fringe Central and included free street performances at Seaport Village, Searsucker Restaurant, and featured venues such as the NewSchool for Architecture & Design, Space 4 Art, and the 10th Avenue Theatre (Fringe headquarters).

The Fringe tradition started in Edinburgh, Scotland (San Diego's sister city "Fringeneers" were quick to point out) where performers who were excluded from the Edinburgh International Festival decided to start a festival of their own running concurrently. In 1947, the festival began on the fringes of the central festival space. Over time, the Fringe Festival grew in popularity and started springing up in cities all over the world though the Edinburgh Festival is still the largest of its kind.

Traditionally rapid-fire (plays are typically no longer than 60 minutes in length), with minimal sets and technical aspects and highlighting original or obscure works, the festivals are a smorgasbord of various genres of performing arts. Even in its infancy, San Diego's Fringe Festival was not only an accurate representation of traditional and more established Fringes, it also was a downright delight to attend.

With performers and volunteers hailing from San Diego to Kennebunk, Maine as well as Canada, the U.K., Mexico, France, and Italy, love of theater was the common theme and there was plenty to be seen. Nearly 50 unique shows, and hundreds of performances, were staged over the seven day festival and here are a few highlights.

First was San Diego's own company Circle Circle dot dot who staged "The Warrior's Duet," written by Charlene Baldridge and Laura Jeanne Morefield. The story of a mother watching her daughter fight stage 4 cancer as told by the daughter's poems and the mother's narrative was moving, empowering, heartbreaking, and eloquently staged.

Combining storytelling and poetry together with movement and dance showed the delicate choreography both mother and daughter created to get each other through the tragic outcome that would eventually be. Kathi Copeland as the mother and Samantha Ginn as Laura, her ill-fated daughter, stole the show and left the actors -- as well as the audience -- sobbing, hugging and communing on the way out the door.

Brenda Adelman's one-woman show "My Brooklyn Hamlet" retraces her path to forgiveness and resolution after the tragic death of her mother by her own father's hand, her parent's violent on-again and off-again relationship throughout her childhood, and her realization of being used by the man she so often defended after his remarriage to her mother's own sister. Who needs reality television?

Though painful and hopeful as her story may be, nothing told her tale better than her casually sly grin and raised chin as her recounted her story step by hurtful, bloody step. Mercy and absolution are indeed the end result of this near tragedy.

"Secrets of a Gay Mormon Felon" is Kimball Allen's self-guided journey from rural Idaho, through adolescence, the Mormon Church, a jail cell and on to repentance. Raw and intriguing, this show will have greater impact with a little direction and better timing. The message is there but can get lost in dead air and re-dos.

Also of note is Jeffrey Wylie's "Texas Loves Lyla." Set in fictional Cooterville, Texas, Lyla KaRug runs her own weekly radio call-on show along with her nephew Norman. Filled with Texas-sized innuendos and riddled with Texas inside jokes (I swear I saw that giant travel mug filled with iced tea and the H-E-B) this show has "Lyla" has heart, humor and a moral thread that nearly binds this show together. On top of that, the final caller and final message is one that sends the audience out on a beautiful mission: to be a miracle to someone.

So mark your calendars for the first week of July 2014, when the San Diego Fringe Festival plans to return. If this first attempt is any indication of what future Fringers have in store for them, be prepared to laugh, to cry, to connect, to meet audiences of every walk of life, and to walk away thoroughly and fully entertained.