American duo hoping to duplicate offbeat route to off-Broadway

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This article was published 20/07/2015 (4064 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is the dream of many a Winnipeg theatre troupe to use a hometown fringe festival as a launching pad to a career-boosting New York run.

It’s rarer that a company of Americans makes a beeline for the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, sure that a success here will ensure a date in the Big Apple.

Florida’s Elan Wolf Farbiarz and his New York City writing partner Cory Terry are back in town to unveil their new one-act show, Becoming Banksy, in the hopes of duplicating the career breakthrough they enjoyed here with Killing Kevin Spacey in 2008. Later renamed a more publicly palatable Channeling Kevin Spacey, the comic romp ran off-Broadway in 2011-2012 and was a financial success.

With Becoming Banksy, they didn’t want to jinx themselves by messing with their winning formula.

“We decided to put on in the exact same place in Winnipeg,” says Farbiarz, over the telephone from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “We wanted to follow the exact same path as Spacey. We wanted to bring Spacey and Banksy at the same time.”

The plan is to take both off-Broadway in September and then move the hotter ticket to London.

The pair will both be in Winnipeg this week, when Farbiarz plays a meek office drone named Charlie who is stuck in a dead-end job and a loveless relationship. Charlie identifies with Spacey movie roles, but one day, he decides he needs to up his game and be the macho characters Al Pacino played in his films.

“Winnipeg was the first place we put it anywhere,” says Farbiarz, who had appeared in Winnipeg in a fringe show called The Bible (abridged) two years earlier. “We didn’t rehearse it in front of anyone and we were kind of shocked people loved it. It was an amazing feeling and we want to re-create that feeling.”

That surprising box-office performance in Winnipeg was replicated later that summer in Edmonton, the following year at the Toronto Fringe Festival and in Fort Lauderdale in 2010.

Word started to get around, and representatives of Spacey, the Academy Award-winning actor, reached out to Farbiarz and Terry to ask if they would change the name of their play. The pair was fearful a cease-and-desist order from Spacey would shut them down, but the star of American Beauty and House of Cards made it clear, through his people, that he was a keen supporter of independent theatre.

“He gave us two suggestions, including Channeling Kevin Spacey, so we changed it,” says the Toronto-born Farbiarz, who graduated from the University of Connecticut and has lived most of his adult life in the United States. “Funny enough, we were in a diner in Sundance a few months later and we were sitting eight feet away from him. I went up to him and told him my name and he knew who I was.”

An off-Broadway producer then called them, offering up his theatre, but Farbiarz and Terry held out to self-produce in New York themselves.

“We put it up hoping for a run of a couple of weeks, but it started selling out and continued to do that for two years,” says Farbiarz. “It was phenomenal and it kept on running.”

The writers think that Becoming Banksy has the potential to go even farther than Spacey. A cult has grown up around Banksy, a controversial street artist whose celebrity is based on his anonymity. He is a world-renowned mystery man even after over 20 years of involvement with the graffiti scene.

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The pair developed a story around a guy from England with a similar name who is the first on the scene of a new Banksy piece in New York. A video that captures him there goes viral and the world thinks the mystery of the Banksy identity has been solved. When his denials are ignored, he accepts the fame, even though he is living a lie.

“We wanted to show how the media directs the public where to look and that’s what Banksy’s art is all about,” Farbiarz says. “One of these days, you are going to hear that Banksy is rumoured to be this person, and I guarantee you, at the end of the day it is the real Banksy pulling the strings.”

Farbiarz is thankful there is a fringe circuit where new work can find an audience and artists can create their own destinies.

“A lot of people don’t know how great the Canadian fringes are and what a stepping stone it is,” he says. “It’s the best path on which to show off your talents. It’s very hard to go to New York City and do it.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca