Fest Come, Fest Served, Act III

The three-year-old Capital Fringe Festival has a permanent home, a budget infused with government grants and consultants focused on branding strategies and operations objectives.

And two weeks ago, Julianne Brienza, the festival's executive director, spent Saturday painting the ladies' room of the group's new headquarters, in the old A.V. Ristorante Italiano building on New York Avenue NW.

Fringe Fest is bigger, more established and every inch as scrappy.

"We're getting the business side beefed up; we're becoming more of a solid organization," Brienza said last week, before yesterday's opening of the Fringe Fest, when she said her team of employees and contractors would work 14- and 16-hour days and she'd work more.

All in support of eccentric art.

The festival has grown by a third this year, to 120 shows at 20 venues over 18 days. Fueled by a $100,000 grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the nonprofit group was able to hire management consultants and ask Washington developer Douglas Jemal for a space they could occupy year-round, hopefully one with a performance space and parking lot.

He showed them A.V., with its 60 years worth of grease and rodent droppings, plus a giant marble statue in the middle of a fenced courtyard.

"We couldn't say no," Brienza recalled. "It was too perfect."

One industrial cleaning and many gallons of paint later, it was slightly more perfect. Now called Fort Fringe, the space will house two performance spaces, a lounge, a box office and an outdoor bar with a rotating daily menu.

The hope, Brienza said, is that having a physical hub "will make it more of a festival; people will just be hanging out."

Part of Fringe Fest's mission is to bring together a community of artists and innovators. In addition to the show, eight training sessions will be offered on such topics as using digital media in live performances and creating political theater. Four other "fireside chats" will take place in the Fort Fringe lounge.

"The festival is supposed to be a platform for [artists] to get on and continue producing," Brienza said, adding that three-quarters of the festival's performers are engaged in putting on shows outside Fringe. "That's important because it makes it a more active [theater] community."

If Fringe does well enough to stay in the A.V. space (at $5,000 a month in rent), Brienza is hoping that the black-box stage the group has constructed will remain in use and that the organization will be able to run training programs all year.

As always, she doesn't quite know what to expect of this year's shows. Performers who meet basic requirements are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis and then are left largely to their own devices.

The playbill ranges from serious and cerebral to silly and bizarre. (Some sample titles: "Yearning to Itch -- What Waitresses Will Do for Tips," "Good Enough for Government Work," "Abe Lincoln: A One Man Show" and "Wiener Sausage: The Musical!")

But that's what this festival is: a bit of everything. As Brienza writes in her welcome, Fringe is ultimately "a treasure hunt for what tomorrow's art will be."