Gerald Osborn, Fringe Theatre’s Office Administrator and official historian, chats about his three decades (!) with Fringe!
“It just gets kinda seductive, that you can tell a story so easily, instead of in film, where you gotta bring in all the equipment. [At Fringe], it’s just there.”
Gerald Osborn has seen it all.
Or at the very least, he’s seen more than anyone else. Currently Fringe Theatre’s Office Administrator (and official historian), Gerald’s spent three decades working for the organization. In that time, he’s watched Fringe evolve in many ways: from a first- come-first-served application system to an Artist lottery, from in-person ticketing to online access. He’s seen entire generations of Staff come and
go while remaining as the steadfast anchor of institutional memory.
“I always think of myself as Radar on M.A.S.H.,” he says. “The choppers come in and then it’s a whole new cast.”
Osborn started out as an attendee at the 1983 Fringe—”I pretend that it was the first Fringe, but it was the second,” he admits. A few years later, he wrote his very first Fringe play, Slideshow. The appeal in getting involved, he notes, was how accessible the Festival felt: some of the barriers separating the Artist from their audience fell away here.
“I was a filmmaker—telling stories was always significant to me,” he recalls. “Then just the fact that [Fringe] was so close…it just gets kinda seductive, that you can tell a story so easily, instead of in film, where you gotta bring in all the equipment. [At Fringe], it’s just there.”
He’d go on to write a total of 19 Fringe shows over the years, including hits like Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard and Gossamer Feast. In 1989, he joined the Festival’s administrative team, which, in the pre-internet days, meant he was passing most messages to wherever they needed to go.
“Initially, everything had to come through me,” he says. ”I knew what was going on about everything.”
Now, Osborn admits he isn’t quite that privy—many of those messages now fly between inboxes all on their own—but he’s still the first point of contact for countless new Fringers, helping them understand the Festival, and get started on their own Fringe journeys.
In 2019, his dedication to Fringe was recognized with the creation of the Gerald Osborn Playwriting Award, a yearly $500 cash prize that supports a local Fringe playwright in creating work. Which is fitting: after 30 years of growth and changes, Osborn notes there’s one thing that’s remained the same through the many eras of Fringe.
“What’s still the same is that anybody can, if they decide they wanna do a show, have the possibility of doing a show,” he says. “It’s just that accessibility to the creative side.”
Make sure to buy your tickets to this year’s Festival here after August 9th at 12Noon!