The Beautiful Absurdity of Saskatoon's Fringe Festival

by Scott Roos

photos courtesy of Tall Mark

There's something wonderfully unpredictable about the Saskatoon Fringe Festival.

You can walk into one show expecting comedy and leave unexpectedly emotional. You can wander outside afterward and find a fire juggler entertaining a crowd, browse handmade art from local vendors, take in a cool workshop and then head into another theatre for something completely different. That's the magic of Fringe.

Running July 30 through August 8, the Saskatoon Fringe Festival, produced by 25th Street Theatre, returns for another ten days celebrating independent performance in every imaginable form. This year's festival features 26 indoor productions at the Broadway Theatre, The Refinery, The Cosmo Seniors Centre, and Grace Westminster United Church's Bring Your Own Venue, alongside buskers, artisan vendors, carnival games, community activities and Broadway Days from August 1–3.

The Fringe has always celebrated the unexpected.

Its roots stretch back to 1947 when a group of artists, excluded from the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival, simply decided to perform on the "fringe" instead. That act of artistic rebellion eventually became a worldwide movement. Today more than 250 Fringe festivals exist around the globe, with Canadian festivals maintaining the tradition of selecting many productions through a lottery rather than juried competition, giving emerging and established artists the same opportunity to find an audience.

It's one of the reasons Fringe remains one of the most exciting places to discover something completely new.

Sometimes that discovery comes in the form of a powerful drama.

Sometimes it's outrageous comedy.

Sometimes it's a performer you had never heard of before who walks onstage and completely changes the way you look at the world.

That may very well be what audiences find when they stumble into A Tall Mark Show: Eat It Anyway.

At first glance, it's easy enough to describe. It's a one-person show. But after spending half an hour talking with creator and performer Tall Mark, it becomes clear that even he struggles to summarize exactly what audiences are about to experience.

"It is a one-man show," he says. "It is a one-man operation. I always hire a stage manager because I have so much gear and production that I can't prepare it and perform it all myself, but it's really helpful to have somebody set up and tear down with me in the fifteen minutes that Fringe requires. Otherwise, yeah, it's all me—written, produced, directed, acted, performed. They're all true stories that I have lived."

Those stories draw from roughly the last decade of his life. While each stands on its own, together they reveal a larger narrative that gives the show its unusual title.

"They are stories that are all related, first and foremost, because they are the stories of the last ten years of my life, or at least some of the stories, a very small packet of stories in an hour's worth of stories. They're all connected in that they're all my life, in that they're all my perspective. And there is a narrative that I have learned, which I can tell you right away is Eat It Anyway. It's the title of the show, and it's the lesson, if you will. It's the takeaway. There's a connection point between all the stories, and it requires a little bit of deeper thought, and I hope to drag the audience through those thoughts and give people something to chew on after they leave."

The show is described as "absurdo-realism," a phrase that immediately caught my attention.

When I asked him exactly what that meant, he laughed.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah... I love that. I coined that. I don't think anyone's ever used that term before."

So what exactly is absurdo-realism?

"I'd call it my perspective on the world, where you look around at what's going on and you say, 'What the heck? Is this actually what's happening here?' Everything from hot dogs to wildlife encounters, to corporate slavery, to pharmaceuticals. You look at the pharmaceutical industry and you're like, 'Whoa... this is kind of absurd. There's pills for everything. Everything you could possibly take a pill for... we've got a pill for that.' It's absurd. I think hot dogs are absurd. I think there's a lot of absurdity to everything that surrounds us, but we don't necessarily see it. So in the show I try to take a step back and put my finger on some of these things. Not in a rude way because my mother always taught me it's rude to point but I want to highlight them. I want to take a highlighter over hot dogs and go, 'Hey... let's just talk about this for five minutes.'"

Of course, beneath the humour lies something much more personal. One of the show's central threads follows Mark's experience living with ankylosing spondylitis, a rare autoimmune disease that dramatically changed his life.

"It's an autoimmune condition that is genetic. It's not my fault," he explains. "Basically, I couldn't walk six years ago. And there's a story there. There's a strong theme in this show of healthcare and a strong conversation about living with the mortality of your own body. You know, we're all going to die. We have a culture in North America that's very fearful of death and very fearful of disability and very fearful of even conversation around it. I hope to bring that to light a little bit more."

He recalls returning home after spending seven months backpacking, checking off the biggest item on his bucket list, only to find himself unable to get out of bed just weeks later.

"I had just done this beautiful big trip," he says. "I said, 'Oh, I can die happy now.' And then my body kind of did."

The journey toward diagnosis became its own lesson in absurdity.

"When you come to that point with doctors where they're like, 'Well... we don't know. I guess we'll just keep trying stuff,' I think that really changes your perspective on the world.

I grew up with this sense that everybody knows what they're doing. Somebody designed the park. Somebody designed the bus stop. Everybody's an expert. Then you ask your doctor what's wrong and there's this moment where that normalcy kind of breaks. You realize... someone just decided to put a bench there. Maybe it wasn't the perfect place for it. Maybe there could have been a better spot. Everything's kind of ridiculous. Everything's kind of absurd. How did all this come to be? Who made all these decisions? We all just kind of trust each other that it's right. And even when it's not right... we use it anyway."

Fortunately, the story doesn't end there. Mark eventually received a diagnosis and today tours the country performing the very show inspired by that experience.

"I walk with a cane now and I pace myself," he says. "I won't spoil the show."

Music, meanwhile, is woven through every moment of the production.

"The show is a series of songs. They're all songs I've been writing for the last ten years. Each piece is a snapshot into a moment of my life where I just went, 'Whoa... what is going on? What the heck is this?' Writing the show meant distilling years of experiences and discovering how these seemingly unrelated experiences could flow through one another and complete a story."

Don't expect one instrument. Or even two.

"I play a bunch of instruments in the show," he says with a grin. "I won't tell you which ones. You've got to see the show."

The lifelong musician describes himself not as classically trained, but "trained by ear."

"My mother was holding me at the piano before I could even sit up on my own. From then until now I've played a lot of music. I always have an instrument on me. I've had an instrument on me every day of my life for the last eight years because I'll have a musical idea and I want to get it out."

That restless creativity carries directly into the performance itself.

"I've got rampant ADHD," he laughs. "I don't want to play the same instrument for a whole show. I want to jump around and have fun. I pick up an instrument, play a song, tell a story. You laugh, we think, we talk. I put the instrument down, tell more of the story, pick up a different instrument, play that instrument. Maybe we sing along a little bit. That's how the hour flows."

Even after describing the music, the storytelling, the themes of mortality and absurdity, Mark insists audiences still won't know exactly what they're walking into.

"I've got lighting cues. I've got a beautiful wardrobe, which I custom made for this show. I've certainly got... how do I say it? You could not possibly expect everything that I have lined up in this show. Even though I've told you there's five instruments, even though I've told you there's no bananas, and even though I've told you there's one swear word, you couldn't dream up all of it."

So why should someone scrolling through the Fringe guide circle Eat It Anyway?

His answer couldn't be simpler.

"If you're at this point in reading the article and you're thinking, 'Oh, this sounds interesting,' you really ought to just go to the show. There might be another musical show. There might be another comedic show. There's probably certainly another storytelling show. But there's only one Tall Mark show. And if there's one thing I'm good at, it's putting on a Tall Mark show."

That, in many ways, is what Fringe has always been about. Take a chance. Walk into something you know almost nothing about. An hour later, you might come out laughing, thinking, or seeing the world just a little differently.

A Tall Mark Show: Eat It Anyway performs at The Broadway Theatre during the Saskatoon Fringe Festival. Check the official festival program for performance dates and showtimes.