I'm not sure entirely what to expect -- from what little I've gleaned from social media and correspondence, it looks to be running into the usual first-year chaos and damage control. Which is fun as a spectator, but a tetch nerve-wracking as a performer, insofar as I'm not really sure what I'm preparing for here -- a packed house, or three people?
I've got an hour slot, so I'll be sampling excerpts from the Camelot Cycle. Which is where a good chunk of my creative energy has been going for the past two months -- finding the right pieces, arranging and restructuring them, memorizing, and reblocking (with an emphasis on more casual accessibility -- I'll be in street clothes, chatting up the audience in between sets, et cetera).
Another reason I'm nervous is that I'm really flying in the face of conventional convention wisdom here, in terms of doing something both dense and dramatic. (One of the reasons I think I struggled to sustain a con audience is because I've so rarely brought straight-up comedy. My big geek show has some pretty hefty production values and is a pain in the ass to remount, whereas most of my solo comedy material tends to be pretty racy, confrontational, and riddled with cheap shock humor, so a tough sell for an audience that's not already seeking out that specific thing.)
Still, I've received a lot of the same advice about the Fringe -- to quote Mel Brooks "no matter what you do on the stage/keep it light, keep it bright, keep it gay" -- and over a couple of years I've managed to carve out a space for my more weird, expressionistic stuff, so who knows? I've made my peace with my fate as a niche entertainer -- and if ever I'm going to find a body of people as obsessed with early Brit Lit as I am, it's here.
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