Summer With a Fringe on Top

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. – Actress Sara Katzoff, 26, has temporarily said goodbye to her steamy Park Slope apartment and assortment of freelance gigs in theater, arts administration, and marketing.

For the next five weeks, she will be in the Berkshires serving as artistic director of the Berkshire Fringe Festival, a responsibility she shares with two New York pals: playwright Timothy Ryan Olson ,28, who lives on the Upper East Side and works at a design studio, and musician Peter Wise, 27, who lives with and is dating Ms. Katzoff.

The trio founded the festival two years ago to make an artistic mark they felt they’d be unable to achieve in the city, where expenses are high, space is hard to find, and hundreds of similar projects (including the New York Fringe Festival) already exist.

“We wanted something that wasn’t like anything else in the Berkshires,” Ms. Katzoff said at a fund-raiser for the festival Monday at the Lascano Gallery here. “We’re hoping the festival is a new way for people to explore new ideas.”

The founders have found the Berkshires economically and culturally friendly: Family and friends have been quick to pitch in, and audiences have been larger and more diverse in age than expected, perhaps because the area already has several strong theater companies.

The three-week theater festival, which starts next Tuesday on the campus of Simon’s Rock College here, will present six productions that range from avant-garde to high camp. A highlight will be New York-based composer Yoav Gal’s multi-media chamber opera “Venus in Furs,” a love story based on the 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The novel and Sacher-Masoch’s surname are the basis for the term “masochism.”

A Minneapolis solo performer, Amy Salloway, is to appear in a comedy about a Jewish summer camp, “So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz!” A cabaret artist, Fiely Matias, is performing his spoof of lounge acts in “Lounge-Zilla!,” which also appeared in the New York Fringe Festival and Don’t Tell Mama.

The crowd at the fund-raiser was a mix of locals — the fashion designer Jeannene Booher, real estate broker Nancy Kalodner, and art dealer Kurt Kolok — and people visiting from New York — fashion designer Betsy Wise, whose clothes can be found in the Cobble Hill boutique Meda; a former chef of the restaurant Applewood in Park Slope, Bjorn Somlo, who is overseeing the kitchen at the Stagecoach Tavern in Sheffield, Mass., and vintage clothing seller Petria May, who has a store in Great Barrington.

“The fact that the Fringe is happening is a demonstration of a group of young people who feel they can do anything here. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit, which is what built this region in the first place,” an artist who lives in North Adams, Mass., and has work on view at the CRG Gallery in Chelsea, Joshua Fields, said.

In a county where the population is decreasing and aging, welcoming young entrepreneurs has become a priority.

“People in the Berkshires understand it’s time to make room for the up and comers,” the proprietor of the year-old Café Adam, Adam Zieminski, 31, said.

But the Fringe Festival artistic directors aren’t giving up their places in the city any time soon. “New York is the hub of the theater profession in the U.S. It’s important for us to be there and, in terms of work, it’s much easier to make a living,” Mr. Olson said.