First Faulkner Fringe Festival 

   Every summer, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival hosts over 1,000 dramatic productions that are shown all over the city in bakeries and bistros, bookstores and restaurants, church basements and theatre auditoriums. Nicholas Papademetriou of Sydney, Australia, says of the program, “It’s really weird. It’s not selective; if you pay your money, get there on time, and get a venue, you’re in” (New York, August 21, 2000, p. 72). London’s Fringe Theatre provides an alternative to West End, high profile theatrical productions. It parallels the Off-Off Broadway theatre movement that was started in the late 1950s and early 1960s at La MaMa, the Living Theatre, and the Open Theatre by such theatrical legends as Joseph Chaikin, Jack Gelber, Ellen Stewart, and Jean-Claude van Itallie. The past August, New York City hosted its fourth Fringe Festival, with 180 selection that were performed in a hectic 11 days on the Lower East Side.

   On July 24th, the 27th Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference gave its blessing to the first Faulkner Fringe Festival, which was cohosted by Milly Moorhead and Colby Kullman at Southside Gallery on Oxford’s Square. Marianne Steinsvik, who comes to the conference every July from Sweden by way of Spain, is the Founding Mother of the Fringe program. A self-styled “silent, solitary Faulkner fan,” she told the Fringe audience, “Nobody introduced me to Faulkner. I had been looking for the human condition in Spanish literature, but there was something missing. At that time, I was doing all my reading in Spanish. That’s how I found him, and I read his books in translation.” Eventually hooked on Faulkner, she went to New York, bought the books in English, and started all over. In her presentation, “Faulkner and I at the Roman Outpost,” Steinsvik explained, “There is so much hidden independence in the word ‘fan.’ There were no compulsive page-turning, no exams, no questions asked. Somebody said that ‘there’s no substitute for close reading’--so I took my time. Great writing makes us feel less alone, and Faulkner gave me a cosmos of my own. My reading was highly self-gratifying. Did I get stuck? Of course I did. MY MOTHER IS A FISH. . . .”

   Designed to give everyone a voice, 15 minutes at the microphone, “15 minutes of fame” (thanks, Andy Warhol), the first Faulkner Fringe Festival was honored by Janet Nosek’s enthusiastic reading from her new commonplace reader of William Faulkner’s fiction titled “My Mother Is a Fish”; Shirley H. Perry’s theatrical presentation of her story “The Spot”; Kimberly M. King and C. Robert Miller’s dramatic compilation of “readings” taken from the tombstones in St. Peter’s Cemetery and titled “Simon’s Cemetery”; and Steve Cheseborough’s comic afterpiece called “Things Left on Faulkner’s Grave.” 

   Standing with Marianne Steinsvik, at the Roman Outpost, the participants in the first Faulkner Fringe Festival join her in concluding, “And to you, Mr. Faulkner, thank you for letting us hold your Tyrrhenean Vase.”

Colby H. Kullman