Love n Wood

Bums on Seats.

A Managing Director/Playwright’s Woes about Getting People to Her Show

So while sitting in the Warehouse yesterday trying to come up with schemes to get Arch Campbell to come and cover my show– which included an iced chai latte and taking off my pants– I realized, “Gee, I don’t really have a good gimmick for advertising this show”. I mean back in Bawdameer (Baltimore for those of you not from the area), just having a show named “Love and Wood” was risqué enough. Apparently that is not true here in a Fringe Festival. I mean how can I compete with “Naked Cabaret” and their cool t-shirts? Nevertheless, Fringe is something I have wanted to do again ever since participating in the New York Festival last year, and it had to be done.

I wanted to “fringe” again so bad I helped recharge what would have been a dying theatre company, haphazardly edited a script and tried to raise some funds for it by putting it up in a month or two for an introductory performance. Mostly, it worked, and Unmentionable Theatre was reborn, with the help of a few volunteers and a desire to fringe always at the forefront. We were going to do it again in DC!

Last year, as an artist at the New York Fringe, it was easy to draw attention to ourselves. We were, after all, one of the few puppetry groups, the only one who boasted trash as their building materials, and so our props were portable and forever replenishable. We would walk around New York grabbing random boxes, newspapers, beer cases, what-have-you… and turn it into um…art. We took a puppet on the subway, on the Today show, to the club, on the Good Day New York Morning News, to the World Trade Center. We were the popular kids at the Fringe (or so we believed). This year, we can only boast a handful of half naked actors and a funny script about sex, but no one seems to care.

How do you get to these people in this tightly knit theatre community? I mean, I have had cute girls advertising the show dressed alike everyday. That’s cute! Who can resist cute! I mean, I am not going to lie and say our venue has encore performances of the One-Man Star Wars Show. I will not stoop! I will not run down 7th Street tearing down all the other posters! I will not wear the shirt that says, “Love and Wood is about sex people!!!! *@@Q!!!”. No Stooping!

Last year, as a fringe patron, I avoided any shows with “surreal” or “absurd” in the title or description. To me that just said: weird, underdeveloped, or weird. So I made sure I wasn’t one of those shows this time around. Maybe no one is coming because they can’t read the back of our postcard to find out what the dang thing is about (darn you sabotaging evil demon printing company!). Maybe no one speaks German and they keep mispronouncing my Venue!

So there are some bumps along the road to get those bums on the seats of the Goethe-Institut. My favorite tagline for this experience has been, “But this is what a fringe is all about”. And what that statement represents, I guess I will explain when this is all over.

Erica McLaughlin

Managing Director

Unmentionable Theater

www.ericamclaughlin.com/loveandwood/