BWW Blog: On The Verge 2016 - Live Fast, Die Awesome

Creating theater, whether or not it's your "day" job, tends to be a labor of love. Few people's stage careers yield generous and consistent stipends; despite that, Santa Barbara supports a sizeable, like-minded artistic community that has, for the past two years, collided their stories and aesthetic styles into building blocks of communal inspiration. The constructed product is the annual On The Verge Summer Repertory Theater. This festival presents a vision of reality interpreted through the lens of the young, upcoming generation of theater artists.

A concept I've become hyper-aware of since seeing Jafar Panahi's Taxi is the idea of "sordid realism." Taste varies amongst viewers, yet I champion the presentation of this sordid realism--or, as I like to call it: realism. I crave theater that offers the experience of familiar epiphany in unexpected moments; theater that satisfies a grotesque curiosity; theater that throws me into provocation. It's great fun when something like On The Verge, which advocates the importance of being audacious and genuine despite potential decadence, comes to town and creates a space for that expression.

The brainchild of Kate Bergstrom, Riley Berris, and Jessica Ballonoff, the On the Verge Festival began in 2015 as a maelstrom of pop-up theatre featuring new plays that pushed boundaries by existing in realms just out-of-phase with true reality. This year's festival brought the same experimentation and creative collaboration, resulting in four productions that fearlessly celebrated themes of intimacy, escapism, the burgeoning acceptance of alternate lifestyles, and how the evolution of technology affects how we connect with each other.

Artistic Director Kate Bergstrom, a current graduate student at Brown Trinity, charges from one coast to the other coaxing monuments from mud. She brings needed unconventional energy to Santa Barbara--she's a fast-and-loose presence of power that bolsters young theatre artists to expand and explore. Festival performers hail from coast to coast, and the productions forge connections between the various theatrical factions all over Santa Barbara.

This summer, On The Verge presented four plays on two sets in the Community Arts Workshop downtown. Theatre created within found spaces prompts creativity and imagination, and the sets were glorious piles of stylish flotsam.

The plays were exciting and well produced. I'm Alive You Bastards and I Always Will Be, by returning playwright Roxie Perkins, was a twisted Calvin and Hobbes-style story in which the main character, a smart, mostly unsupervised kid in an under-stimulating environment, creates a stark and twisted fantasy universe that overlays reality in a chaotic sequence of disturbing events that push the story toward a frightening precipice.

Other productions included From White Plains (by Michael Perlman) in which a bullied teen-turned-Hollywood screenwriter wins an academy award for a film based on his childhood, during which his best friend, bullied for being gay, committed suicide. His acceptance speech, which calls out his erstwhile tormenter, begins an Internet feud between the still-grieving writer and the one-time bully who regrets his actions--but won't tolerate being a web pariah. Jason&Julia (by Jenny Rachel Weiner) explores a young romance in which twenty-somethings realize for the first, painful time that love isn't enough to keep a relationship together. These Walls (by Olivia Khoshatefeh) asks questions about intimacy by exploring the relationship between a man living in a glass box art installation and the woman who watches his exhibit--a women who re-trains trauma survivors to embrace physical touch.

The On The Verge Festival is also an important outreach and training experience for theatre students. On The Verge brings high school kids, college students, and young theatre professionals together to develop their skills by creating work that is visceral and raw. The festival has matured since last year with exciting results, so keep an eye out for the 2017 festival!

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