District Fringe revives D.C.'s indie summer theater fest

A few years ago, Gigi Cammarato was writing a short story for a class on meditation and hallucination at Georgetown University. The piece was fairly autobiographical, exploring her feelings of disorientation and isolation during the pandemic.

“My whole world had fallen away, and everything that I thought was normal was just gone,” she says. “I was left with myself and all this time on my hands.”

Today, that story-turned-play, “Lotus: A Quarantine Story,” is one of more than a dozen productions in the inaugural District Fringe Festival, running through July 27 at the University of the District of Columbia. 

The two-week event picks up the baton from Capital Fringe – a come-one, come-all D.C. theater romp that let just about anyone with an idea mount a show on a shoestring budget. After two decades, though, organizers quietly announced its closure earlier this year. A host of challenges securing funding and space had beset the festival in recent years and ultimately contributed to its demise, ending a lengthy run of providing annual opportunities for local artists (the organization does plan to continue its mission through a grant program).

“I would not have found my unique voice in producing or even acting and singing in theater without Capital Fringe,” says Karen Lange, a nearly 20-year veteran of the D.C. theater scene and co-founder of Pinky Swear Productions. “Taking over your own destiny is an incredibly powerful feeling.”

After learning Capital Fringe had closed, she put out feelers on social media to launch a new festival and was stunned by the deluge of support. District Fringe quickly raised some $80,000 and secured multiple sponsors, including the National Cherry Blossom Festival, Van Ness Main Street, and UDC. (The 51st is also a sponsor.) The funds are supporting festival staff, though many of the workers—including each of the three festival co-producers—are volunteers.

“I have never experienced such an outpouring of love for a project—ever,” Lange says. 

In establishing District Fringe with her fellow producers—Tracey Erbacher of Theatre Prometheus and Aubri O’Connor of Nu Sass Productions, both also alums of Capital Fringe—Lange says she wanted to “pay forward the opportunities” she was afforded. 

The new festival began July 11 with a spectrum of ticketed dramas and comedies staged at a UDC lecture hall, as well as free programming in the university’s amphitheater and a pop-up bar up the street. Due to limited capacity, the shows were vetted (most Fringe festivals, including its predecessor and the 78-year-old Edinburgh Festival Fringe use an unjuried selection process).

When attendees step inside for a performance, Lange hopes they “lose themselves” to the power of storytelling. “Stories are important,” she says. “Art is the way we teach empathy.”

The festival is going up at a time when federal support for the arts is on the decline, including existing and proposed funding cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, and amid an assault on arts and humanities programs that support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That’s another major impetus for creating the new festival, according to Lange. “The federal government isn't just interested in balancing budgets,” she says. “They're interested in quelling voices.”

Playwright and actor Rodin Alcerro, who is producing “Go” at District Fringe, says the Trump administration’s attacks on arts programming and freedom of expression have affected the “psyche” of the local theater community—but haven’t diminished its durability.

His mostly wordless show explores the “universal language of the body” through the journey of two clowns, a performance technique he has studied. Both Alcerro and his co-star are immigrants raised in Honduras, and “although we can communicate easily, sometimes we feel the need to transcend the language barrier and express what we feel through our bodies,” he says. 

Through “Go,” Alcerro wants audience members to tap into their own emotional world as they reflect on the human experience. The show is “an opportunity to feel, to feel emotions that are bigger than life,” he says.

“Lotus,” too, examines the emotional realm, heightened for many during the pandemic. For Cammarato, the displacement she felt during the pandemic ultimately led to self-discovery, inspiring her to trade pre-med for theater and psychology. Though her one-woman show is based on her own experiences, she envisions a broader appeal.

“I hope … people see themselves in ‘Lotus’ and see their own growth that they went through during quarantine,” she says. “And I hope it shows people we're not alone.”

Since taking the leap to acting professionally, Cammarato has performed with local theater companies and become a theater educator. While the financial challenges for artists, paired with recent cuts to arts funding, have brought her new anxieties, she remains optimistic. 

“[It’s] nice to know that I'm not alone in feeling afraid, and that there are other people in the arts community who are fighting and who are working together and finding solutions,” she says. “Theater makers are professional solution-finders.”

Lange and her co-producers are already contemplating a potential second year for District Fringe. To prepare, they’re gathering feedback from participants, considering an unjuried or hybrid selection process, and connecting with Fringe festivals in other communities. Next year, they plan to attend the World Fringe Congress in San Diego.

If the festival moves forward another year, she hopes it will retain the spirit of Capital Fringe, she says, giving local producers the same “intoxicating” experience she had when her first Fringe show was staged.

“[It’s] a real feeling of accomplishment. And the sort of elation that you did something concrete, that people experienced with you,” she says. “Isn't that amazing?”