It's not broken. It's just really dim, according to at least one playwright and the creator of last week's Rogue Performance Festival.
For six days last week, the works of independent theater companies and local playwrights were on stage at the 200-seat Sanctuary Stage Theater at Calaveras and M Streets in the first annual Rogue festival. The audience's four favorite performances will be performed again March 15 and 16.
Rogue artistic managing director Marcel Nunis hoped the "smorgasbord" of theater would give people a chance to see something other than performances at 2nd Space Theatre and Roger Rocka's Dinner Theater.
Nunis doesn't knock mainstream theater. He just wants to see something different.
Good Company Players -- which runs the musicals at Roger Rocka's and plays at 2nd Space -- do well-known performances because each show lasts eight or nine weeks, said Nancy Miller, the company's publication coordinator. In order to make a profit, they need to perform trusted plays that will bring in big audiences, she said.
Roger Rocka's current season includes familiar titles like "The Scarlet Pimpernel," "South Pacific," "Chicago" and a musical about William Saroyan.
But those shows aren't as common as you would think, and many are brand new to Fresno, Miller said. Neither "South Pacific" nor the Saroyan play have been performed in Fresno before, she said. One ticket holder said he'd never heard of "South Pacific," Miller said. "Chicago" hasn't been here in 15 or 20 years, she added.
Good Company Players surveys have shown that people want to see those plays, Miller said.
"We've stayed in business nearly 30 years because we listen to what they say they want and what they don't want," she said.
That doesn't leave much room for the local playwright, Nunis said.
"Where does the local playwright go to? The local playwright does not have an avenue in this town," he said. "They have to put a production company together to get their work performed."
The Laundromat Theater Space, next door to the Veni Vidi Vici restaurant in the Tower District, was once a place for independent theater, but it closed in 1995 because it didn't make enough money.
Some people may fear that independent theater is weird, full of nudity, swearing or otherwise offensive, said Jaguar Bennett, a Fresnan whose play "Crime Doesn't Pay Enough" was performed at the Rogue festival.
Usually, it's not, Bennett said. Every once in a while, it is, Nunis, said, but there are plenty of different kinds of theater to go around.
Fresno has an inferiority complex, Bennett said.
"Fresnans are used to going out of town for theater," he said. "There's no reason to do that."
The talented playwrights are here, he said. "I have seen brilliant shows that have had maybe 20 people in the audience," he said.
Many Rogue performances had 30 or 40 people in the audience, but that's a good start for the first year, Nunis said.
Now they just need to fill the rest of those seats.
That can be tough, said Terry Miller, a California State University, Fresno, theater arts professor and playwright. Good Company Players will produce a musical he wrote this spring, one of the few times a year the company takes a risk and does something independent, he said.
The media may be hesitant to pay attention to any new production, and without the publicity, the audiences won't come, he said.
And sometimes, new plays just don't work out, he said.
But the performances Rogue audiences voted the best should be worth seeing and be one step toward changin.g the face of theater in Fresno, Nunis said.
Readers may e-mail reporter Bethany Clough at bclough@fresnoneighbors.com.