EDMONTON - Summer used to be the theatre off-season in these parts, the fallow period when actors and directors didn’t just exit stage left, they stampeded.

But that was long ago, before the city invented (and exported) the bright idea of a Fringe Festival. Before Shakespeare camped out in the river valley for a month. Before summer theatre festivals exploded the notion of a seasonal stage drought.

Three decades ago, the Fringe was a village of experimenters. Now, it’s officially a city — a city that never sleeps. The upcoming 30th anniversary edition of Edmonton’s big and boisterous alternative theatre binge has been christened Fringeopolis.

Fringe Theatre Adventures executive director Julian Mayne announced the name and theme of our annual festivities at a news conference Monday. The municipality of creativity, a veritable city-within-a-city which attracts a yearly audience of about half a million, runs Aug. 11 to 21 this year, primarily in Old Strathcona. That’s where the 11 official stages and most of the 32 artist-run BYOVs (bring-your-own-venues) are located.

The real draw, for the citizenry of Fringeopolis, is a veritable metropolis of performances from nearly 200 productions by artists from here, across the country and around the globe. Fringeopolis is not a burg choked with bylaws: artists’ work is neither juried nor censored.

In honour of the big birthday, by which “we enter into our 30s, with a little more spread,” as Fringe director Thomas Scott notes with a smile, the festival has reinforced links with the Art Creation Foundation for Children (ACFFC) of Jacmel, Haiti. Throughout the KidsFringe, 10 young artists from ACFFC will create and perform folk stories and vignettes, assisted by playwright/novelist Marty Chan and storyteller/playwright/author Tololwa Mollel. Local author Patti McIntosh and Fringe director of operations Mike Ford will travel to Jacmel this month to help the Haitian kids prepare.

As for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, playwright-in-residence Will Shakespeare will be with the people in Hawrelak Park for the 23rd straight summer June 30 to July 24. Othello will get its festival première, in a Marianne Copithorne production starring real-life couple Mark Meer and Belinda Cornish as Othello and Desdemona, with John Ullyatt as Iago. It alternates with the multi-hued comedy Twelfth Night, directed by Theatre Network’s Bradley Moss, and starring Julia Guy as Viola, Annette Loiselle as Olivia, Nathan Cucko as Orsino, John Wright as Sir Toby Belch and John Kirkpatrick as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Moss’s production will be inspired by steampunk, a “pseudo-Victorian mechanical style where Utopian flying machines exist.” What he’s after is a fantastical playground where things can happen.”

“For the last 50 years Othello has been a racial issue,” says Copithorne, of the tragedy where a villain deliberately provokes homicidal jealousy. “But that’s been done. America has its first African-American president. Multiculturalism is a global phenomenon.... How Iago turns everything dark by preying on insecurities is something that interested me more.” Her production will be set in a post-modern world where Othello is indefinably “exotic.”

“Accessibility” was the word of the day at the Freewill Festival’s Monday news conference, interrupted by Troy O’Donnell’s excitable Malvolio in full yellow-stockinged splendour. Also announced was a fundraising initiative with Rapid Fire Theatre’s Improvaganza. The School of Night, a London company that improvises Shakespeare, will preside over the event on Father’s Day. Check out RFT’s Othello plot outline in rap on YouTube.

lnicholls@edmontonjournal.com