Two fringe festivals bring organized chaos to Atlanta theater this June

Photography courtesy of the Atlanta Fringe Festival

One of Ty Autry’s first encounters with fringe theater was as a performer on the international stage. He traveled to the 2019 Dublin International Gay Theater Festival to launch a one-man show based on his life, A Southern Fairy Tale: The Story of a Gay Christian Who Grew Up in the Deep South. The show, limited to one hour, took Dublin audiences on a magical journey through Georgia, with Autry’s protagonist thwarting a wizard who wields the power of conversion therapy and a dragon who breathes fire from fear. “I was so nervous about getting in front of that audience, but they were so generous and wanted my story,” says Autry, a Thomasville native.

Fringe theater is performed without production or rehearsal weeks, and occurs primarily as a single festival. The idea originated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1947, created as an alternative showcase for non-traditional shows ignored by the city’s premier theater festival. The unique nature creates a theatrical pressure cooker, with an audience present for organic, weird and wonderful performances that usually last only an hour.

Five years after Dublin, Autry made his debut as director of a new fringe festival in Atlanta. Lavender Fest will feature nine performances by queer artists June 19-23 at the Out Front Theater, where Autry is a member of the artistic advisory board. “I wanted a space that could support queer works and also educate a Southern audience,” he says. “The fringe format is perfect because they are not full-length productions, highlighting stories you will never hear before and probably never will hear again.”

Lavender Fest joins a busy June schedule for fringe activities in Atlanta. The Atlanta Fringe Festival runs June 3-9, featuring 20 different shows in 7 venues. Instead of competing, fringe festivals promoted each other to make June Atlanta the fringe season. “It’s like we have a best friend,” says Diana Brown, co-founder of the Atlanta Fringe Festival, which began in 2012. “Lavender Fest has this incredible platform to bring queer artists to the stage, and I can’t wait . go.”

Brown launched the Atlanta Fringe Festival without having seen a fringe festival herself. She had heard about the concept from friends and they were able to arrange performances in small theaters around Atlanta. The first fringe show she saw was its opening night. A group called Performance Gallery created scat poetry to show how syllables come together to form language. The show, titled Fricativeguided the audience through supernatural settings, such as aliens coming together to decipher words like painting. “It was so weird I cried in my seat,” Brown says. “The show was exactly the weird thing I wanted – nowhere else in Atlanta had anything like it.”

Each year, Brown draws candidate names from a hat to fill out the list. The result is a wide variety of shows, from clowns and puppets to tragic comedies and dramatic tales. This year, the festival will utilize theaters like 7 Stages and Limelight, in addition to unique spaces like Wrecking Bar Brewpub and East Atlanta Kids Club.

For Lavender Fest, Out Front will host four evenings of four shows each. Autry has chosen shows to represent every facet of the queer community, with comedy, musicals, drag and more. “There’s a slice of the rainbow for everyone,” Autry says. “I know Lavender will be a deeply personal space because that’s what fringe is: the artist trusting the audience with their story, and the audience trusting the artist to tell a story that s ‘will span the breadth of human experience.’

This article appears in our June 2024 issue.

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