“The world is so big, and you’re so small,” she says. “Every performance you do is a gift.”
Skinner is one-half of Jackie and Allison, a sketch comedy team that specializes in “clowning” — not the Ringling Bros. variety, but the resurgent form that encourages absurd behavior in a celebration of human frailty. This alternative form of comedy is one of the dominant features of the packed schedule for the inaugural Boston Fringe at the Rockwell in Davis Square, which kicked off Monday and runs through the weekend.
Boston Fringe is the brainchild of Deby Xiadani, who has run the underground theater at the Rockwell since 2023, and Anton Monteleone, who spent several years as a workshop instructor at the Improv Asylum. Based on the model of the Edinburgh Fringe, which has presented a huge range of performing artists every year since 1947, organizers hope to establish the local version alongside the many other fringe festivals that take place in cities across North America and beyond.
Boston is well-known for its thriving music and comedy scenes, Xiadani says, but it’s less disposed to avant-garde forms like “clown.” By establishing a new home for fringe theater in Boston, she hopes that “this whole ecosystem can be elevated and become more generative,” she says.
The anything-goes atmosphere of fringe is underscored by the format’s rules about how performers get accepted to partcipate. Some of Boston Fringe’s presenting groups got their slots on a first-come, first-served basis; others entered a lottery. With several acts appearing each night and full days on Saturday and Sunday, programs include “Facts & Figures” (a “dance murder mystery”), an absurdist one-person play called “Barroz” by Bryce Flint-Somerville, and Xiadani herself in an imaginary beauty pageant called “Miss Route 1.”
Though this year’s Boston Fringe takes place entirely at the Rockwell, Xianadi and Monteleone are already talking to business owners around Davis Square about using additional spaces next year. Xiadani, who grew up in Cambridge, thinks of all her curatorial work for the Rockwell as an “incubator” for creative work.
“Fringe is a playground,” she says.
The premise behind “Jackie & Allison Into the Multiverse,” which they will perform three times during Boston Fringe, grew out of the two performers’ friendship. Skinner, who hails from Waltham, met Allison Villaseñor while they had been colleagues at a cloud storage company in San Francisco.
“Pretty exciting stuff,” Skinner says of their then-day jobs with a laugh.
In Los Angeles, where she now lives, Skinner took a class with Chad Damiani, a leader in that city’s thriving clowning scene.
“What I like about clown is the emphasis on the vulnerable,” Skinner says. “So much of the New York sketch and comedy scene is ‘Look at how clever I am, how well-written this joke is.’ With clown, it’s just, ‘Let me be funny for the audience, and show them I’m listening to them.’”
“You want to invite [the audience] to your party,” adds Villaseñor. “What do you feel like doing or saying? How do you feel? Show that. Have fun. Go back to your childlike emotions.”
The two friends share a pronounced sense of humor; Villaseñor’s sister, Melissa, spent several years in the cast of “Saturday Night Live.”
“Jackie & Allison Into the Multiverse” envisions two office pals who lose themselves in surreal daydreams, one of which involves wearing chef’s costumes while attempting to play basketball. Skinner says their collaboration is based on both of them being “stupid idiots.”
The rising popularity of clowning can be attributed to several factors, Villaseñor suggests, “from our political climate to the whole overworked, burnt-out” frame of mind that seems to be a growing concern.
With both women in their 30s, they say their act is a response to the idea that they’re supposed to have their lives “figured out” by now.
“A lot of our friends have kids, go to jobs,” Skinner says. “Clown is the antithesis of all that. You go onstage without having it all figured out. That’s scary.
“But I’ve found that clowning has helped me figure out that it’s OK.”
BOSTON FRINGE
At the Rockwell, 255 Elm St., Somerville. Through Sunday. Tickets $15 per show. therockwell.org
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
