Theatre Crude Fringe Festival goes virtual due to pandemic

A version of this story appears in the Sunday Life section of The Oklahoman.

Like ‘climbing into a treehouse and discovering a speakeasy’
Second annual Theatre Crude Fringe Festival goes virtual due to pandemic

Rodney Brazil is cooking up something special for the Oklahoma City’s second annual fringe festival.

But the OKC actor, writer and producer also is making some last-minute changes to the recipe for his new one-man show.

“What’s going to be interesting with ‘Naked Brunch’ is my life has had a lot of twists and turns since I conceived the show and entered it into the festival earlier this year. The show talks a lot about figments of our imagination and hallucinations we have and ways that we deceive ourselves in certain situations. My thinking on that has changed dramatically in the last few months. So, it’s really going to be a very, very fresh kind of storytelling piece for me, where I talk about recent life events that I’ve gone through and how that’s changed my feelings about socializing, going to brunch, drunken weekends and those original things that I was going to talk about,” he said.

“And when entries to this festival were starting, I had been to brunch more recently. Now, I’m going to explore more about what it’s been like for me (since) my husband and I, we’re still not dining out because of COVID. So, I’ve got some distance looking at all those brunches that we used to have and getting to explore that change in our lives as well.”

The fledgling Theatre Crude Fringe Festival is going virtual in its second year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The festival will be streamed online to audiences Thursday through Oct. 10 on Theatre Crude’s YouTube and Facebook channels.
Adam and Jenny Brand co-founded Theatre Crude with the goal of launching what was believed to be the first state’s fringe festival last fall. Produced in most major cities around the globe, fringe festivals showcase an array of new, experimental and original theater and performances.

“A fringe festival provides a unique opportunity for both artists and patrons to try new things on and see if they’re a good fit with a small time investment and a small monetary investment. So, it is a scratch pad, it is a sandbox, it is a coming-together point. It is a playground for both artists to try new things but also for patrons to come and try new things as well,” said Jenny Brand.