Edinburgh Fringe

The first play I ever remember seeing was Peter Pan. The drama program at our elementary school performed it, with an astounding set built by Carol Jackson, (a local artist who treats detail and imagination with honor). They created it in an old building with creaking wooden floors and tall windows of warped glass, beautiful in its ancient drabness. Magic nested in the dusty corners, the heavy red curtain operated by a faulty pully system, the clunky light switches. There was just enough there to be useful. Nothing fancy. No catwalk, no fly system, no sound except the speakers people wired up themselves with long trails of extension cords. To get from stage left to stage right, you had to hurry down a steep set of concrete stairs that wound down to the basement, run the full length of the building, and go up an identical set of stairs on the other side, each one with big strips of painter’s tape across it with “Quiet!” written in thick black marker. The whole place was impractical and unadorned, and perfect. I sat on the floor among other first graders and watched the girl playing Peter seem to vanish from one side of the stage and reappear, magically, at the other. I watched the boy playing Hook sneer and saunter with real menace. I watched the heavy red curtain swish open and shut, open and shut, over scenes built by a community that had come together to take playing pretend seriously. And I wanted it.

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Edinburgh Fringe felt just like that first play.

When I wrote The Telltale Lilac Bush, I had no idea that Fringe existed. It’s one of the strange things about being a playwright with no formal training; there are little bits  of slang, and big cultural touchstones, and important names, all of which you just don’t learn. So when I started telling people my play was going to a theater festival in Scotland, a handful of people raised their eyebrows and asked, “Do you mean Fringe?” and I blinked at them in innocent confusion. “Sure, probably, that sounds right,” I said. Even when I looked into what Fringe was, I couldn’t bring myself to believe my little Appalachian play was going to that Fringe. Probably some other Fringe. Probably something Fringe-adjacent. Probably the kind of place where most of my works have been performed: beautiful, drab buildings, with just enough in them to be useful.

Fringe seemed to be something else altogether.

It’s a festival that swarms and devours the heart of Edinburgh, causing small theaters to hatch like locusts in unexpected corners. Some form of art – circus, dance, wrestling, mime, theater – is happening everywhere, all the time. You can’t see it all. You’ll miss things, you’ll discover things, you’ll start to believe the whole world operates in the pinched avenues of time between one show and the next. Nowhere, ever, have I seen so many daring and dedicated artists amassed together, pressing flyers into each other’s palms up and down the Royal Mile, where Vikings spit fire and acrobats cling to lamp posts and tourists jostle in the August sun.

The Telltale Lilac Bush is a play based a collection of West Virginian ghost stories, gathered by Dr. Ruth Ann Musick. Not all the stories in it have what you’d call a theatric arc. Many simply describe the existence of a haunted house, or a ghost, but tell no story about it. There’s a very West Virginian sensibility to those – a kind of ‘There’s a ghost! What more do you want?’ attitude. Others, in the chapter about the ghosts of slaves, are written with outdated and offensive language, though told in a forties-era attempt at throwing progressive light on unspoken regional horrors. And some stories are evidently affected by the narrative skills of the person Musick collected them from, embellishing and meandering. As a whole, the collection presents an interesting challenge to a playwright and a director. How do you dust off these hand-me-down accounts and string them into a narrative that’s about more than its pieces? How do you take something so quintessentially Hillbilly and present it at Edinburgh Fringe? Could a show like this belong?

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But Edinburgh knows about hand-me-downs. The old city exhales wafts of time. Its stones are comfortable as old bones in their favorite armchair, each gray block of it older than any US city. Like many of the stories in The Telltale Lilac Bush, you might mistake its age for simplicity; a tourist trap, a bygone glory, a toothless history lesson on a hill. But the city’s oldness is not really friendly. Its moods shift, hour by hour, and there are very different versions of the city under the sun or moon. By dawnlight, a fairytale castle sailing through the mist-blurred air. By night, a nest of teeming shadows, the breeding-ground of ghosts.

Our little blackbox theater sat in view of the castle, on a narrow  street reached by the Scottsman Steps, in a haze of construction work and tourist-tumult. But that’s where I saw the cast for the first time, lined up in their costumes after the harrowing work of peddling flyers. That’s where I met the people who’d labored for months to bring this little play to life, first among the schools of southern WV and now, here. For some, this was their first trip abroad; young actors and technicians, getting to learn early what Fringe is. Getting to tell people forever afterward that they performed there, in the summer of ’24. I watched them tell this story with humor and heart, to an audience who’d come at random to take a chance on it; an audience who filled that little theater! Who laughed! Who gasped!

After something like that, you kind of love the street for being narrow and dirty and loud. The same way you love the old city for being grim and steep. The same way you love your first theater for its dust.
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The thing about Fringe is that even the sold-out, gigantic shows are crowded death traps with no real AC. Even the ones in findable locations on major streets are offbeat experiments at something you can’t get away with anywhere else. Even the shows with inescapable advertising and world-class talent are carrying on that same tradition – a bunch of people working hard to take playing pretend seriously. The festival thrums with that feeling of unity created only by people scraping together magic from whatever’s useful, clapping to revive a fallen fairy. Maybe it’s no wonder our little Appalachian ghosts felt so at home.

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