For even the most seasoned theatregoer, wandering the streets of Edinburgh during the Festival can be as exhilarating and over-whelming as a stroll through a bazaar in Istanbul. During the last weeks of August every year, this staid Scottish capital is transformed into the theatre capital of the world, not by the official festival, prestigious though it is, but by the gigantic Festival Fringe which has engulfed it.
The Edinburgh Fringe, like all of the fringe festivals modeled on it, does not in any way pre-select groups who wish to perform. In other words, anyone who can scrape together the money for travel, room and board, and then find a venue (often with the help of the Fringe administrative office), can participate. The facts and figures are daunting: Last year, for example, more than 550 companies performed each day for three weeks in 162 venues across the city, from 10 a.m. to midnight. Participants range from established names (last year Garrison Keillor, Steven Berkoff and England’s Hull Truck Company were in attendance) to a dizzying array of new writers, directors and performers, youth and community theatres, and university companies.
To get a street-level view of what it’s like to take part in the Fringe, we asked one of last year’s participants, New York-based solo performer Ellen Hulkower, to describe her experiences. Her piece, Zel Rebels! The Story of a Woman in a (1) Man Show, is an irreverent examination of the metamorphosis of female roles. The characters she portrays, linked by an instinct for survival, include the sweetly impossible Regina, a repressed older woman who loves to describe in detail her finicky eating regime and occasional colonics; the volatile and brassy Darlene (portrayed with a set of plastic breasts), who surprises would-be harassers by harassing them back; and the long-suffering Ma, who voices her parental exasperation through rant-like “momologues.” Hulkower also pokes fun at the audience’s voyeuristic tendencies in a brief interlude in which she takes Polaroids of the spectators while she is naked.
She spent more than six months fundraising to bring Zel Rebels! to Scotland and hired two assistants, Dan Kagan an Philip Galinsky to help her run the show and publicize it. What follows is an imaginary (?) stateside slide show in which Ellen tel Ma what she did last summer.
ELLEN: Okay, this is the city of Edinburgh and the amazing castle on a hill in the center of town which you have to walk past to get anywhere –
MA: (In a thick New York Jewish accent.) I know, I’ve been there, go to the next. Oh this is the military tattoo. Didn’t you love the tattoo?
ELLEN: I wouldn’t know, we never saw it. We were so busy campaigning that we missed out on a lot of sightseeing.
MA: Your father and I loved it, all those bagpipes, all those horses –
ELLEN: All those men with nothing on under their kilts.
MA: That’s just a myth.
ELLEN: Ma, it’s true. I know.
MA: Oh you’re full of it. What’s this, why did you take a picture of people standing on a long line?
ELLEN: It’s called a queue. These people are queuing up at the Fringe Box Office.
MA: They look so confused.
ELLEN: That’s because they’re overwhelmed by trying to decide what to see. Last summer people had to choose from 572 possible shows –
MA: 572! And I thought Boca Raton was crowded in the winter.
ELLEN: Boca schmoca – 572 doesn’t even include the main festival, the film festival, the bi-annual book festival and the endless free theatre happening in the streets.
MA: So why would anyone want to see your show? You’re not famous or anything.
ELLEN: You’re so encouraging, Ma. We pretended I was famous. You know, act as if? Look, here’s a picture of one of the billboards Dan, Phil and I made.
MA: It’s huge!
ELLEN: Yea, we kept making them bigger and better, adding more blown-up phrases from reviews hot off the press and 8 x 10 glossies from the show. Everyone hung flyers around the box office, but we wanted to stand out. So we hung a giant billboard from the scaffolding at the entrance of the box office, not a legal thing to do. Each time they tore it down, we’d just make another one. Usually we’d do this around 3 a.m., no competition then. Plus it was a glorious time to walk the Royal Mile. This is a picture of Dan and Phil with flyers pasted all over them.
MA: Dan doesn’t look too happy.
ELLEN: He had just been flyering for four hours straight and his bunions were killing him.
MA: Oh, he has bunions just like you. Don’t give me the evil eye, they’re not from my side of the family.
ELLEN: And here’s a shot of the greatest publicity scheme of all, me wearing the plastic breasts from my show.
MA: Did you have to wear that motorcycle jacket? You look like such a derelict.
ELLEN: I was freezing my tits off, pardon the pun. I thought it was going to be warm in August.
MA: Edinburgh lies on the same latitudinal line as Juneau, Alaska, dopey.
ELLEN: Well I’ve never been to Alaska.
MA: I have.
ELLEN: Yes, I know, I’ve seen your slides. We were prepared for all the rain, but ended up shopping for sweaters at thrift stores –
MA: Thrift stores? Why couldn’t you go into a normal store like a decent person?
ELLEN: The thrift stores were amazing in Edinburgh. There were tons of them and they were all run by little old ladies, like you. Only they were charming and spoke with incomprehensible Scottish accents. We were able to buy wool sweaters for 2 [pounds]. Better than Loehmann’s.
MA: Yea, yea, yea. Now explain to me why you were running around the streets with those plastic boobs on.
ELLEN: Thank god for that prop, they made my publicity. We had to hang 700 posters and hand out 12,000 flyers in three weeks. We tried to make contact with each person we handed a flyer to, otherwise we’d consider it a throw-away. People couldn’t keep their eyes off the breasts. It was such a fabulous marketing ploy that I bought Dan and Phil each a pair. But theirs couldn’t squirt water out of the nipples like mine did.
MA: Oy, vay iz meer.
ELLEN: Here’s a slide of us, aren’t we sexy? We’d charge three abreast into stores, pubs, banks, bathrooms, other shows shouting catchy slogans like, “Colon cleansing comedy!” “Family fun with full frontal nudity!” “The ultimate comic strip!” Look here’s a slide with a bobby wearing my boobies.
MA: Wait a minute, who was that a picture of? Go back one.
ELLEN: A local Scot we liked to bug. Isn’t he cute in his kilt? He worked in one of the zillions of Scottish souvenir shops handing out free samples of shortbread. We’d go from shop to shop just to get free food. He’s the one who showed me that true Scots wear nothing under their kilts. I showed him my tits, he showed me –
MA: That’s disgusting.
ELLEN: No, disgusting was when I was handing out flyers with the breasts on and a man pulled down his pants and flashed me! That was the second uncircumcised pe –
MA: Enough! Change the slide already. Oh, you eating. How unusual. With all the fish and chips and beer I guess there was no need for you to buy plastic thighs.
ELLEN: You know, if you paid for my therapy I’d invite those comments. The “chippies,” as they were called, were greasy and delicious. The beer was brewed right Edinburgh so the city smelled like yeast morning, noon and night. Personally I favored baked potatoes stuffed with cole slaw. Dan managed to eat almost only at Burger King, and Phil actually ate Haggis more than once. He liked Haggis.
MA: Oy, even I wouldn’t eat Haggis, and I like pig’s feet.
ELLEN: How could anyone even think of eating Haggis? It’s Cow’s Pluck and Bag.
MA: What is cow’s pluck and bag?
ELLEN: I don’t know, I could never get a straight answer out of anybody. Oh here’s one of the Polaroids I took of the audience during the show.
MA: Looks like such a small theatre. What could be so difficult about filling that up? Couldn’t you just depend on your good reviews?
ELLEN: Not so small, a 75-seat house – larger than most of the venues on the Fringe. We filled it up six or seven times and the other nights averaged around 25. We thought that was great since the average audience size on the Fringe was 7.
MA: What about all those radio shows you did – the time you were on with Garrison Keillor?
ELLEN: I wasn’t on with him, his interview was on right after mine. Ironically he made things more difficult for me because his show played for several nights at midnight too. So did many of the big comedians. They performed in these huge theatres and had an insane amount of publicity. But we rode on their coattails. We’d follow the guys hanging up their huge 30×40″ posters and while the wheat paste was still wet we’d slap on our 11×17″ fluorescent pink posters. Saved us from having to drag a bucket of glue around town or getting a 6000 [pounds] fine. You were lucky if your posters hung for 24 hours. The competition –
MA: I told all the neighbors and relatives you were on with Garrison Keillor.
ELLEN: Sorry. One night I played to an audience of four men. I told them they were my own private bachelor party, and we immediately bonded. It turned out to be one of my best performances.
MA: So that was your highlight? Running around naked on stage for four men?
ELLEN: Ma, I did 22 performances in 24 days, not including all of the excerpts I did the pubs at 2 a.m., or at Fringe Sunday or on the Mervyn Stutter Show. It was a true test of stamina and a test of my material in a town not littered with friends. Audiences seemed to love the show. Many people saw it more than once –
MA: Maybe they didn’t get it the first time.
ELLEN: Funny. A middle-aged woman from France saw the piece five times, a 12-year-old Scottish boy saw it seven maybe even eight times and a group of high school students from Arkansas –
MA: A 12-year-old boy saw you running around naked?
ELLEN: Yea, he loved it, kept calling it “brilliant.” That’s their word for cool, everything’s “brilliant.”
MA: Where were his parents?
ELLEN: His dad was the super of the theatre I performed in, Randolph Studio, so Mark was able to sneak in. His mother finally stopped chasing him. She got me back though. She made me eat Haggis. Mark drew this caricature of me – wait, I have a slide of it somewhere…yea, here it is. Great, huh?
MA: Brilliant.
ELLEN: I had it printed up on flyers and T-shirts, it was a smash. Another audience member who sat in the first row sketched me naked.
MA: No wonder they kept coming back.
ELLEN: One time during the show a curtain caught on fire stage left. “Excuse me,” I told the audience, put the flames out with my bare hands and without a breath turned and said “I’m so damn hot the whole place is going up in flames.” They applauded wildly.
MA: When a plane finally lands after a bumpy flight people applaud wildly, too.
ELLEN: The whole experience was kinda like a bumpy flight. The ultimate satisfaction came from moving people who were from different cultures night after night. It was very powerful. A young woman from Manchester came up to me and said, “I can’t believe it, that was my life up there.”
MA: Did you tell her it was really my life up there?
ELLEN: Your’s mine and ours, Ma. After all, if I’m not careful I’m going to turn into you someday anyway.
MA: Now that would be “brilliant.”
