Hello, Playbill! George Strus (they/them), the founding artistic director of Breaking the Binary Theatre, here. If you haven’t heard, Breaking the Binary Theatre has taken the late, great Cecilia Gentili’s Red Ink to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. We are partnering with Playbill to document our journey (and all we're learning as first-time Edinburgh Fringe producers!). In late July, we released the first article in the series chronicled Cecilia Gentili and Red Ink's history, our producing team, and the Edinburgh casting process. In early August, the second article in the series chronicled venues, budgets, and all we did remotely before heading overseas. In today’s article, we’ll be discussing our first week in Scotland, and what we learned about getting butts into seats when you're competing with 3,000-plus other shows for attention.
On Monday, July 28, Red Ink performer Chiquitita, associate director/producer Joseph Frederick Allen, and I flew into Edinburgh (our intern Jack McCarthy and director Nic Cory joined us on Thursday August 1 and Friday August 2, respectively). After a day of rest and acclimating to our new time zone (five hours ahead from New York), on we awoke Tuesday morning and went over to our venue, Underbelly Bristo Square, for the first time for our three-hour tech rehearsal.
I picked up our artist passes, which grants us access into our venue, discounts at Underbelly vendors, and access to shows at their venues (subject to availability). Then I headed to the Jersey stage. Joseph was already hard at work with the tremendous Underbelly staff, technical director Luke and Jersey techies Brittany and Kiran, setting up our QLab file and placing our show curtains. Meanwhile, Chiqui was making herself at home in the shared dressing room.
I learned early on in my time in Edinburgh that three hours was a very generous allotment for our tech. While some shows do get multiple hours, like we did, the large majority get 60 to 90 minutes; many are not able to run their show in the venue until their first performance!
Another Fringe quirk: we have a 15-minute turn around time, meaning that we have 15 minutes pre-show to set up and 15-minutes post-show to strike; I know productions that have as few as five minutes in turnaround times (10 minutes are most common). Whether you have one-hour or three, the Edinburgh tech process is speedy and it’s important to come into town as ready to go as possible—for us, this meant a New York preview performance just before we went off to Scotland, which we hosted on Friday, July 25 at The Tank to a sold out crowd.
The day after our tech rehearsal, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe officially began on Wednesday, July 30! Thousands of shows across the city began performances and the town's streets were quickly flooded with artists in costume, flyerers, theatregoers, and locals. Chiquitita nailed her first performance.
Then, over the first week, we saw our audience sizes growing, which is a good sign at the Festival. Rosie O'Donnell actually came to our fourth performance, which was insane. We had seen her show, about why she moved to Ireland, the night prior and were thrilled to have her; she was a delight and stuck around post-show to talk with us about the show. She said Chiquitita was an “incredible young actress who played the life of a trans woman in the 1970s just beautifully.” Gaggy.
But how did we get people to show up? Well, on the first day of the Festival, I was eating at my favorite Underbelly vendor (shoutout Chicken Skoop!) and was approached by no less than 20 folks giving out flyers for shows they were a part of (or hired to flyer for). While we had amassed some fun Red Ink fans from our Off-Broadway run and had a few flyers and posters, I quickly realized we needed to up our flyer game…quickly! Out of Hand, who also handles our outdoor signage, offers printing options at affordable prices, but larger orders need a few business days to deliver; that’s where Edinburgh CopyShop came to save the day.
Just before heading to Scotland, I dusted off of my Facebook page and joined the Edinburgh Fringe Performers Forum group. It’s a public group of over 17,000 members to ask questions, exchange information, and generally offer help and support to Fringe participants. It was here I learned not only of Edinburgh CopyShop, but of many other helpful resources and nuggets of information.
The Edinburgh CopyShop staff was wonderful to work with and were able to turn around 1,000 flyers and 75 posters within a few hours (and they delivered them straight to our theatre)! With the majority of our team in town, we were able to flyer ourselves. But I knew that once they left, and it was just Chiqui and I in Edinburgh, we’d need extra support. Out of Hand also offers hand-to-hand flyering services in four key parts of town, but they tend to book up quickly and no slots were available by the start of the Festival. Luckily, BTB artist Kyr Siegel happened to be in Edinburgh for a show he was working on, a queer thriller called Faster in the Attic, and had his afternoons free. So we hired him as our Edinburgh Red Ink flyerer. Thank you Kyr!
There is so much great art happening here in Edinburgh this month. So you have to learn how to effectively sell your show in such a hectic environment.
You tend to meet artists all over town, it’s important to always have flyers on you (or an easy way for folks you meet to easily learn about your show). Also, practice your elevator pitch: Lead with your show’s strengths and figure out a 15-second pitch selling your show. If you are flyering in crowded areas like The Royal Mile, don’t be afraid to make big moves to help your flyerers stand out; big signs, costumes, puppets—all are fair game. Another way to stand out in town is to update your outdoor signage as you new show reviews and stars come in. You can print the new pages at a local shop (like Edinburgh CopyShop) and find multi-purpose spray adhesive at most shops in town and attach them onto your billboards and signage yourself.
Getting audiences into any show in the first week of Fringe is incredibly tricky—most folks in town for Fringe are so focused on getting their own shows up that no one is thinking about supporting other projects just yet. Underbelly offered us 50 complimentary tickets to use throughout our run, which we strategically used for our first five performances to help grow those audiences. This is incredibly common; most shows paper their first performances as the most important asset at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is word of mouth. Audience members who love your show are your greatest ambassadors, so don’t be shy about offering free tickets to your first few performances and doing whatever you can to fill your houses!
Check back in on Playbill just after Labor Day for the fourth and final piece in this series, where I'll recap all we learned throughout our run and include best tips and tricks for first-time Fringe producers from some other producers at the Festival this year!
In the meantime, I have set the lofty goal to see at least 150 shows in the 26 days I am in Edinburgh for Red Ink, an average of six shows per day. I am writing this Monday, August 11 (day 13 of 26) and I am 75 shows in, so I’m right on track! If you want to follow the rest of my personal theatergoing journey and see how I fare as I race towards the finish line, I’ll be documenting it all month over at @georgestrus on Instagram.
For Cecilia. ❤️
