Fringe of Marin moves on to the next stage

The Fringe of Marin has been going on at Dominican University since 1995, but all this time it's pretty much been a one-woman show. That may seem like a funny thing to say about a festival of short plays by many local writers, each one-act with its own cast and director, but the festival was created by Annette Lust, professor emerita at Dominican, and she continued to run the show until her death in late February at the age of 88. So it's natural to wonder whether this spells the end of the Fringe of Marin.

Well, not so fast. Gina Pandiani, a Dominican alumna who graduated in 1985, has stepped in as managing director, and she and production manager Pamela Rand are making sure this spring's festival goes on as planned.

"I started with the Fringe in the fall, and worked with Annette quite closely, especially after she had her first stroke," Pandiani says. "I went over a bunch of ideas with her, about involving high school students and other community college students and other community members from the Bay Area theater scene. They hadn't had a student at Dominican be in the show for a long, long time. Also what I'm trying to do, which I talked to Annette about and she thought it was a great idea, is have a playwriting workshop for people who want to submit plays to the Fringe specifically. I'm trying to do two of those, one during the run of the show, so people can work on it all summer, and right before the submission date we'll have another one."

Pandiani was a drama major at Dominican back when it still had a theater program 30 years ago. Lust was never a professor of hers, but Pandiani remembers her as a popular teacher on campus. Originally more closely involved with the university itself, the Fringe was founded in part to continue some theater activity on campus after the loss of that program. Initially called the One-Act Play Festival, the Fringe was an annual event until 2000 and has been running twice a year ever since. Thus the Fringe in its 31st season, though it's been around for 18 years.

Like Pandiani, Rand is also relatively new to the festival. "I met Annette a couple of years ago, of course she immediately asked me, 'Do you have any plays to present? Can you come and act?'" she recalls. "So it's been a couple of years that I've been involved, and she's always asked me to jump in and do things. It's amazing that this one little woman could carry this theater for so many years. She was quite an amazing phenomenon."

The final performance of the festival on May 5 will be followed by a celebration of Lust's life, with her family in attendance. But of course, the Fringe as a whole is carried on as a tribute to Lust, and there are many familiar names from past fests in the lineup of playwrights and directors, as well as new ones. Running in two programs on alternate nights, the fest boasts a whopping 14 short plays all in all. Lust was one of the many members of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, and as usual some of her colleagues from that group will act as a jury, giving awards to favored shorts.

Pandiani emphasizes that the changes she's making, such as trying to involve students more in the festival than they have been in the past, don't constitute a shift of focus for the festival.

"I think it's just where it always should have been," she says. "It's just things ebb and flow in this business, and sometimes it ends up being one direction, another time it ends up being another."

Although Lust's passing was relatively sudden, there had at least been time to start thinking about contingency plans, Pandiani says.

"I don't want to speak for her, but I think she had been thinking for a year or so, maybe, that she would be retiring at some point," she says." Especially when she got sick, she was thinking about what's the future of the Fringe. Because she loved the Fringe, it was like her third child almost, and so she had many conversations with me about where she saw the Fringe going, and I really think we're heading in that direction. She really wanted to see the future of the Fringe solid, because it can be iffy sometimes when the core nucleus person goes, so she really wanted to make sure it had a solid foundation to continue on."

For now, the important thing is that the show must go on. The plan is, Pandiani says, "Raising the bar and honoring Annette's legacy. Always striving to attract and recruit talented directors, playwrights and actors in the Bay Area theatre community."

"We've taken on a lot," Rand admits, "but it's exciting to see that we can move forward with the Fringe of Marin; it is surviving. Viva la Fringe."