They are tiny works of art with an offbeat sense of humor: a drawing of a demented rooster, a cartoon 40-ounce wrapped in a brown bag, a photograph of a redhead being crushed by a tree. If you haven’t yet seen them stuck on shirts, hats or pinned to jean jackets, you probably will this week. They’re Fringe Buttons, created by Dissentia Curatorial Services, a local collective committed to putting art in unusual places. And they’re just one way the Philadelphia Fringe Festival is trying to connect art, commerce and community.

It’s an effort that doesn’t always succeed, but the Fringe is still growing strong. Inaugurated in 1997 as a five-day festival with 65 artists in 20 venues in and around Old City, it’s now (to quote the boys from South Park) bigger, longer and uncut! The 2000 Fringe Festival, which opens Sept. 1, is a whopping 16 days long, with more than 225 artists performing in 40 venues.

As the festival enters a fourth year, it’s worth asking some questions. Has it fulfilled its original intention of opening doors for artists and connecting them with new audiences? Has the Fringe effected a noticeable change in the city’s performing arts climate, or does the September surge of energy fizzle out over the year? Arts advocates always talk about the financial benefits of cultural events, but Old City merchants say they’re not exactly rolling in Fringedollars.

Philadelphia may love the Fringe. But what exactly has the Fringe done for Philly?

Mission Accomplished?

The mission of the Fringe is to "provide the opportunity for artists who are taking risks, breaking boundaries, a place to showcase their work and provide audiences a way to connect with that work," says Fringe Producing Director and co-founder Nick Stuccio. To achieve that goal, the festival holds an open applications process, through which artists’ proposals are considered by panels of jurors, and also seeks out particular artists doing groundbreaking work. Those selected for the festival are provided with venues and technical assistance from load-in to load-out, as well as publicity assistance and house management services from ticket sales to ushers. Artists in the Bring Your Own Venue (a.k.a. "Unfiltered," or non-adjudicated) part of the festival find venues on their own and handle their own tech needs, but they get publicity and box-office assistance too.

By affording this financial and technical support and a festival atmosphere, the Fringe makes possible many a production that might never have happened otherwise.

For one thing, the Fringe gives a recalcitrant theater-going public reason to take a chance. "There has to be something recognizable for audiences to come — the play, playwright, actors, company name," says Joe Canuso, artistic director of Theatre Exile. "If you don’t have any of those elements, then it’s hard [to mount your own show]."

During the first Fringe, Canuso and his then year-old company mounted two short plays, Escurial and Death and Taxes. Attracting attention for an unfamiliar pair of one-acts would have been near impossible at any other time of the year, but the Fringe provided Theatre Exile with a built-in audience. People came because the show was part of the festival, says Canuso.

Once audiences were exposed to the work they came back — not just for the Fringe, but for Theatre Exile. (The popularity of their 1998 Fringe show the Frankenharry Plays, three one-acts written by Joseph Sorrentino and performed by Frank X and Harry Philibosian, is proof of that.) Last year the company’s Live at the Apollo Diner was one of the festival’s biggest critical and popular hits.

Theatre Exile isn’t producing at the 2000 Fringe, instead concentrating on their fall production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

"The Fringe was the impetus to get us doing more shows. It’s enabled us to do work outside of the Fringe," says Canuso.

Other companies and performers have experienced similar effects, with Fringe exposure catapulting them into mainstream awareness. Madi Distefano’s Brat Productions made its first big splash at the 1997 Fringe with Eye-95, a multi-media tale of a runaway white trash cheerleader. Then they advanced their reputation further with a 24-hour Bald Soprano in 1998. "[The Fringe] found us an audience," says Distefano, "a community in which to have high visibility." Now Brat’s a year-round company, but they’re still using the Fringe to take a risk: This year it’s their first children’s show, Max in Hollywood, about a Hollywood-bound canine.

When director Whit MacLaughlin decided to relocate from Virginia, he considered both New York and Philadelphia. But Philadelphia won out because he felt his fledgling experimental pop theater company New Paradise Laboratories could find a home here (and partly because his then-fiancee, now wife, actress Catharine Slusar, got a part in A Man for All Seasons at Bristol Riverside Theater).

"The festival and its energy really was persuasive in founding the company," he says. And now that he’s here, MacLaughlin says, "The festival acts like a magnet to the type of people that might want to see our work."

A significant benefit for artists at the festival is the chance to see and learn from each other’s work: actors watching dance programs, dancers seeing plays, visual artists learning from performers. And at the end of the day, many artists head to the Fringe’s late-night cabaret, a networking mecca where lots more creative cross-pollination takes place.

Because of the Fringe, artists from different genres are not just viewing each other’s work, they’re talking about it. And some of that talk has led to action.

Arden Producing Artistic Director Terrence Nolen, blown away by Eric Shoefer’s dance epic Icarus at the 1997 Fringe, hired him as movement director for a production of Hedda Gabler. Headlong Dance Theater loved the work of David Dorfman at the first Fringe, and since they’ve established a mutually helpful relationship with the New York-based dancer/ choreographer, sharing their studio space with him when he returned to the festival the following year.

"There’s been a lot of dialogue and ferment because of the Fringe," say Headlong’s David Brick. "It’s intangible how that dialogue contributes, but it’s important."

"There used to be such a distinct dance and theater world," says Joe Canuso. "Now the genres are merging. The Fringe has had a big say about how that has come about."

And the money isn’t bad, either, though hardly a sure thing. Fringe performers take home 70 percent of their box office (except for the four curated acts, which are paid a flat fee between $3,000 and $10,000, and the Bring Your Own Venue artists, who are not required to share their profits). Sometimes the box office doesn’t even cover an artist’s expenses, but Stuccio says performers like dancer/choreographer Brian Sanders of Junk, whose slip-and-slide Patio Plastico was a huge hit last year, are often elated to make even a tiny profit — a rarity, unfortunately, in the local dance world.

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