Theater Buff Preserving Fringe Shows for Sale on Digital Video

Plays that may last only a few days or weeks at a fringe theater far from Broadway may find a wider audience if a former lawyer can find a market for his video version of stage productions.

Gary Cole, the founder of StageDirect, has been a theater fan since his college days. Now, he’s using digital video cameras to record some of the best that fringe theater has to offer in hopes of building demand for fresh, edgy plays that otherwise would quickly vanish.

“There are lots of great actors and directors and writers out there that you haven’t heard about, and you should,” Cole said.

Cole, 42, had been involved in small theater productions in Oregon for the past seven years, while working in law. He co-founded CoHo Theatre Productions, the parent to his StageDirect video company. He teamed up with Jeff Meyers, medical researcher turned artistic director, to scout for risky, provocative plays that otherwise might find only a tiny audience before disappearing.

Since the two began looking in the fall of 2001, StageDirect has produced and released four videos: “The Haint,” a one-man show; “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”; “Mass Murder”; and “Poona the F-dog,” a production by Portland’s Theatre Vertigo, which Meyers co-founded. The latest video is “Straight,” a critically acclaimed play that opened last month at Cole’s CoHo Theatre.

The shows are filmed with multiple cameras over a series of performances, and then edited to re-create the intimate feel of live theater on a small stage. So far, the videos or DVDs are being distributed on the Internet or on pay-per-view channels at hotels where Cole has negotiated contracts.

But he hopes to build enough interest to persuade chains such as Hollywood Video or Blockbuster to carry them, and eventually to move into cable TV.

“It may not be for everybody, and some of it may be too edgy, but I think TV is starved for content,” Cole said.