The Fringe Festival has been a Vancouver Island tradition for over three decades. And it’s returning this year: from August 24 to September 4, more than two dozen shows will be presented by various indie thespians.
Ingrid Garner is one of this year’s performers. In 1999, WWII survivor Eleanor Ramrath Garner, now 92, published Eleanor’s Story: An American Girl in Hitler’s Germany, an autobiographical account of her experiences as a young girl living under Nazi occupation, and what it was like to grow and mature into her teen years amidst these struggles.
For the past nine years, Ingrid—her granddaughter—has taken up the mantle in a solo production with the same name as her grandmother’s book. Garner says that her mother read her the book when she was 10, and hearing what her grandmother went through blew her away.
“To me, it was stunning when I learned her story. I only ever knew my grandmother before then as such a magical person. She has this affinity with nature. She’s like Snow White—she has this beautiful magical garden out back that she tends to immaculately, and she trains blue jays to eat peanuts out of her hand,” says Garner. “So it was very strange to me to read that as a nine year old she had gone through this harrowing, stunning, wild odyssey.”
Garner says that writing the book was very therapeutic for her grandmother, and it helped her build strength of character.
“Many war survivors never address it and they don’t want to speak of it again. But, unfortunately, when you do that, the trauma just keeps wheeling you back,” says Garner. “She suffered with what we know now is PTSD for many years. And one thing that really haunted her was the sound of people knocking underneath the rumble of collapsed buildings, but when she finished the book, the knocking stopped. In her 70s she found a new sort of peace, and life. She is very strong.”
Garner says that a major takeaway from the show is that even in times of trial, humanity persists, with all its complexities.
“A really profound part of my grandmother’s story is seeing the humanity during wartime. I think people will just expect a harrowing story, but it’s very fascinating how people cope in a war. Even in the darkest of times, people find ways to joke, and to be themselves, and find identity,” says Garner. “You know, just because my grandmother was going through a World War doesn’t mean she wasn’t going through all the stages of puberty. What’s it like to get your period in a war? What’s it like to like boys in a war? All these staples of life still go on. I think that fact is what makes this story more accessible, as it is told by a girl growing from age nine to 16.”
Another show on the Fringe roster this year is The Multiverse Mix Tape, which follows the format of a science-fiction anthology. Writer, producer, and actor David Elendune says that the show was inspired by old television shows that he grew up with.
“I suppose if you were going to sum it up, this is like Twilight Zone on stage,” says Elendune. “We all grew up watching reruns of ‘50s and ‘60s stuff, The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, and they usually comprised of three, maybe four stories in an hour, and usually there’s a setup and a twist.”
Elendune says that although he is performing in the production, his real passion is writing.
“There’s an old joke, I think it’s Dorothy Parker: ‘I hate writing, I love having written,’” says Elendune. “I love writing once I’ve got a first draft and I know it works, and then polishing the dialogue, but I find first drafts painful, like most people do.”
Elendune says that he lived within a time period where science fiction was booming, which was impactful for him.
“Sci-fi was what I grew up with. I saw Star Wars at the magical age of about six or seven,” he says. “It’s obviously hugely different to the technology now; a lot of the time you grew up reading the stories, there was novelizations of films, or comic-book versions of films, that was how I experienced a lot of the stuff.”
Elendune says that science fiction is a way to explore existentially uncomfortable situations and problems, with the intent to draw people in unconscious of the allegory at play.
“Sci-fi, to be honest, is no different from Aesop’s Fables, or parables in the Bible, it’s a way of telling you something about today’s society that if you wrote it in today’s society, it would be too on the nose, but if you put it in a different society, then people will swallow it a bit more,” he says.
Marya Folinsbee is also performing in this year’s Fringe. She’s a writer and performer who started her own company, Material Theatre, in the Kootenays. In her second year with the Fringe, Folinsbee is performing Domestic Disputes, about Evelyn, who is “A perfect housewife, stewing in her own repressed juices,” according to the Material Theatre website. The show combines mundanity with the surreal.
“The show was kind of inspired by, I don’t know, the sort of bizarre relentless boredom and overwhelm of early parenting, and housework,” says Folinsbee. “My character talks about this fight with entropy. Oh, you have to do the laundry, and then you do the laundry again, and again, and this kind of meaningless relationship with housework. Then all of a sudden this woman is in this wild dream world. She’s full of sexual desire, but has no place to put it, so she ends up putting it into her housework.”
Folinsbee says that Evelyn is a way for her to explore parts of herself that she’s not quite familiar or comfortable with, and she feels that she has grown with the character.
“I am not the most vulnerable, and this character is really vulnerable. She is not me, but she is not-not me, too, so just being comfortable with showing this very weird side of my own brain was kind of a challenge,” says Folinsbee. “Evelyn has taught me a lot; we have totally grown together. I discovered new things and found new meaning.”
Fringe Festival
Various times, Wednesday, August 24 to Sunday, September 4
Various prices and venues
intrepidtheatre.com