A fringe festival, if you don’t know, is a theatre festival dedicated to producing work from, well, the fringe.
“So it’s not necessarily scripts or performances that a professional theatre might do, at this point” said Gretchen Teague, executive director and founding member of the group.
The organization has accepted a few pieces from within its ranks and more than 10 from outside of it. This includes a physical theatre/puppetry ensemble piece about grief, a domestic ‘farcical tragedy,’ a short play series and more. Since DOTS is not itself a producing organization, the rehearsal processes for all these pieces have been handled by either other theatre orgs, like Rebel’s Guild or Necrobroth, or by playwrights themselves.
Because of the number of pieces at the festival, DOTS has had to expand past their original scope.
“So originally, we thought we were going to be in one venue, and now we have two venues,” Teague noted.
Since DOTS doesn’t have a performing space of their own, those venues will be Springfield Contemporary Theatre’s Fox Theatre on the square and High Tide Theatrical’s Lightroom Lounge, off the side of Martha’s Vineyard.
Each piece will be performed multiple times throughout the festival, which runs from July 18 through 21 (view the schedule here). Tickets are $10 for a single performance and $50 for a festival pass (buy some here).