PostFest

Vicky Boone,

FronteraFest

Maybe it takes a Texas native to ride herd over what's almost a stampede of theatre professionals and amateurs each year. Maybe it takes someone at least geographically connected to cowgirl mythology to oversee the staging of 80 (!) short- and 21 full-length performance works in several sites throughout Austin over the course of a month. Maybe that's why Houston-bred Vicky Boone, artistic director of Frontera, was able to bring FronteraFest from its relatively minor beginnings to the veritable Ponderosa of performance that it has become today.

"Well, I didn't do it alone," says Boone, laughing, FronteraFest 2000 now safely wrangled into local theatre history. She's stopping for an interview, here, at a neighborhood taquería halfway between work and home. "Starting out, it was me and Jason Phelps and Annie Suite. And now I have a lot of people who are in charge of lots of things. Each year I enlist event producers and other producing staff to help take care of different parts of it. Programming is slightly different each year, so we have different producing structures."

FronteraFest started in 1993, as a way for Boone & Co. to raise money and expand community awareness of their fledgling Frontera theatre company working out of Hyde Park Theatre. "At first, we were thinking of it as a kind of fundraising benefit," recalls Boone, "but the community aspect quickly became the most awesome part of it. I'd say that 99% of the people I know in the theatre community, I met them because of their involvement with FronteraFest. It's an annual family, to a certain extent; and every year you meet all these new people who get involved. And you get to see them when they're kind of vulnerable and creative, too; you get to have that kind of relationship with them that's about their work. So it's fun, it's great fun."

The operational aspects, though, can sometimes be other than fun. And problems that arise during the first few installments of a festival may, like the reality of the Old West transmogrifying through translation to popular stage and screen, mutate into different, but equally interesting, challenges.

"In the beginning," says Boone, "we thought all kinds of things could go wrong. We had very pedestrian production anxieties. Like, does the system work? Do we know what show we're doing right now? Are we running the right cues? What if the lights don't work? Those were the kind of things we worried about back then." She smiles, remembering. "One of our basic philosophies, then and now, concerns hospitality. We want the participants to be comfortable. Because they're all in that kind of artist-place, you know, and we want to make sure they feel completely taken care of. And to make sure we don't make any technical mistakes, we've developed a lot of criteria. Like, if a piece is too technically complicated, it will have to be simplified so we can ensure that it's properly executed -- with only a one-hour tech rehearsal. That's all the technical rehearsal we have for the short pieces: one hour."

Boone pauses to sip at her -- also Texas-born-and-bred -- Diet Dr Pepper. "Now we worry about how to take what we've learned, what we do well, at the short fringe festival -- like supporting artistic voices and hospitality -- and translate that to the Long Fringe. How do we make it attractive to national participants? In the Long Fringe, they get 100% of the box office, so they're really reliant on ticket sales. Which means that we have to persuade them that it'll be financially worth it for them -- because of the box they'll make here. Which means we have to cultivate an audience base to support the out-of-town artists. So all our worries -- all my worries -- are about the Long Fringe."

The ultimate goal is to have a truly international performance festival, along the lines of the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. But earlier attempts at corralling anything near that magnitude have lacked ... something the French have a word for. From '95 through '98, Frontera committed to doing a National Featured Artist series as part of its festivals at Hyde Park Theatre. Each night of FronteraFest, it would run three 30-minute pieces by local performers, then a longer work by a National Featured Artist. Unfortunately, this news failed to reach much of the potential audience; the program generated a bit of press after the fact, but the initial before-the-event publicity never materialized sufficiently to make a big enough impact. Would-be audience members, it seemed, were staying home in droves. So, after three years of struggle, the featuring of national-caliber artists was retired.

"We've temporarily surrendered on that," says Boone. "Which is too bad, artistically, because I think that Austin benefited from the national dialogue. We got to know some national artists because they came as FronteraFest guests, and then we went on and used them in our mainstage, outside-the-festival work. So, for me, the next challenge is how to find the best of both of those things. To understand what works, what the public loves about the Short Fringe program at Hyde Park, and to create a forum that's also friendly to national artists in the long fringe, to performers outside of Austin. So we're not so insular. So we have a dialogue going and ... an exchange."

But surely the outlook isn't all that dismal, right? Surely things have turned around in recent years? The influx of educated professionals yearning for entertainment? The booming economy? Whiz-bang?

Boone shakes her head. "Bottom's Dream from Los Angeles," she says. "They're the leading cutting-edge theatre group in Los Angeles -- well, Actor's Gang and them, probably. They were here, as part of the Long Fringe program this year. They contacted us and said, 'How can we be part of the festival?'"

"Well, exactly," I point out. "And Bottom's Dream did really well, right? There was a lot of publicity about them."

Boone doesn't even blink. "They had, like, single-digit houses," she says.

"They had -- "

"Single-digit," she says, nodding ruefully. "So what does it take to make it work, that's what we're trying to find out. To have these great, exciting things happening all at once ... and have it make financial sense to the participants."

"Single-digit houses," I repeat, stunned. "We had three national artists this year, including Bottom's Dream. We had Lisa D'Amour -- who already has an audience, a body of support, in Austin. And a Frontera piece with Grisha Coleman and Daniel Jones. Lisa's piece did the best, financially. The other two did ... poorly."

"Single," I say, "digit. And you don't think theatre's a dying art?"

"Theatre is a cruel business," says Boone. "It's like the desert, y'know what I mean? It just looks at you and goes 'Yeah? You want me to what?'"

But the Short Fringe portion of FronteraFest has been consistently successful. Even consistently wildly successful. So what does it take to run such an event?

"Hospitality," says Boone. "You have to be hospitable to the participants, by doing every single thing you can to execute their artistic vision within the given environment, to make sure each piece is the best it can possibly be. And you still have to find some way to attract an audience. The Short Fringe has a sort of built-in attendance: There are so many different local performers each night, so many people who know them coming to see them, it operates on a real grass-roots level. For anything else, you have to answer the question 'Who is the audience?' Because if you don't answer that question, it will answer you -- in a rude, harsh way."

So saying, Boone sets aside her bottle of Dr. Pepper and looks off to the west. The sun is setting there -- in the West, where Cattle once Thundered o'er the Plains -- amid telephone wires and billboards, against a sky like a painted orange backdrop. Sometimes, even life has its stagey little resonances.