Hollywood Fringe Is Seen By ‘The Complaints Department’ (The NoPro Review)

Providing a loopily circuitous throughline for the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2024, the three separately ticketed events that made up ‘The Complaints Department’ pencil you in for some face-to-face time with the irrepressibly zany and purportedly immortal bureaucrats who make up the eponymous inter-dimensional bureau created to address the many grievances that pile up over the course of human existence. While the central show many have closed with the Fringe, the one-on-one offshoot ‘Complaint Appointments with the Supervisor’ continues to offer bookings for those still looking to vent through August.

The structure of the main experience was borrowed from the already established Fringe Cabaret model with an added narrative twist. Audiences were asked to lodge a written complaint prior to the experience, and as the group was guided from room to room by the department’s quirky functionaries, they encountered, in turn, three guest complaint technicians in the form of visiting Fringers adapting characters from their own fully separate shows to address the audience’s woes in short vignettes that were part preview, part interactive improv as each one cherrypicked from the stack of written grouses, fielding them in unique and engaging ways.

The tone of the show is decidedly tongue in cheek, almost to a fault, blowing right past irreverence and into a kind of breezy chaos. And, for the most part, it actually worked. Messy, yes, at times meandering, sure, but in almost all cases the commitment and attitude of the cast kept the audience dialed in and engaged. While the guest Fringers got to play around and improv with their allotted time, the normal cast adhered to a set script that’s imbued with a goofy strangeness, sketches punctuated by cul-de-sac-like digressions and philosophical musings that never quite add up to a consistent story, but more of a diverting mood piece rife with playful clowning and subversive wit, encouraging the audience to let go of their complaints and embrace the lighter side of their brief existence.

Credit has to be given for both the show’s framework and its execution. With the flight of guest Fringers rotating each day, the Complaints Department gave twelve different Fringe shows a platform to engage directly with dozens of audience members, cross-promoting to the extreme that aligns beautifully with the supportive ethos that Fringe thrives on. There’s something tremendously generous about structuring the whole thing around these Fringers getting to interact directly and form real connections with the audience members that could lead to ticket sales of their own. For my part, I attended the show twice to see how a different roster may have affected the performance as a whole, and as a result I ended up seeing four of the six shows represented– likely none of which I would have sought out otherwise.

The curation of which shows were invited for sampling was both considerate and effective, the pool largely made up of one-person solo shows where direct address and audience participation were already baked into their premise. The Complaints Department helped the creators to bridge the gap between crowdwork and true immersive interaction to make their characters feel alive and of a piece with the circumstances of the world presented. Were you not aware of the gimmick, it’s likely you wouldn’t be able to sense a difference between the guests and the permanent cast. That the show was modular by design while remaining cohesive as new personalities were swapped in and out, apparently with next to no prep time, is genuinely impressive.

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While Fringe shows by design are usually no frills in the tech department given the time constraints from the busy venues, I will say I had trouble reconciling the stated premise with how little it was represented physically. The concept of the Complaints Department being specifically a “multiversal organization outside space and time” is an interesting way to explain these characters from different shows coming together for a single performance, but without any stagecraft supporting it, the aesthetic one would expect from a story rooted in science fiction felt largely unattempted, let alone realized. I think that some simple lighting, sound, and a more intentional costume design would have gone a long way toward selling that reality. Immersive is as much about being deliberate with the environment as it is actor/audience interplay, and while some site-specific work can get away with natural light and a mostly undecorated space, here it felt like the setting was contradicting rather than complimenting the work done by the performers.

The first of the two separately ticketed supplementary shows, ‘Complaint Appointments with the Supervisor,’ ratchets the unfocused, gonzo energy of the base experience up to eleven with a one-on-one consultation in the company of the affably dotty head honcho of the Department. The cheerfully decrepit old red tape wrangler chats you up on the way to a nearby undisclosed location where they directly address your specific complaint with a randomly selected one of a number of supposedly corporate-approved strategies (mine being roleplay with hand puppets). A playfully bizarre encounter buoyed by the endearing central performance, though I sense it likely would have benefitted from some additional playtesting prior to opening, as the improv, the engine by which an extended solo encounter like this needs to run, felt a little unsure. To be fair, I experienced this one early in its run and have been told it has since been revamped. As stated above, this is the only part of the trilogy still running, with bookings now being taken through August.

Praise is certainly deserved by Zander Ayeroff, (also the creator and chief writer of the Complaint Department experiences), who features heavily across all three shows. The intriguing character of the Supervisor takes a tremendous amount of physical and vocal commitment, bordering on Kabuki-like, and no matter how many random passersby we’d encounter on our way to and from our meeting, they’d each get a cheerful greeting and an uncomfortable amount of small talk before Zander allowed them to go on their way. They may not have had the slightest idea what was going on, but it’s hard not to be won over by Ayeroff’s fearlessly friendly energy. At the end of my time, after being prescribed a handful of shows from the Fringe catalogue that the Supervisor felt would match my sensibilities, I stood and watched for minutes as they shuffled slowly down a full city block and turned the corner. Whether they knew I was watching or not I don’t know, but they never once broke character. The fidelity to the bit was sincerely impressive.

The final separately ticketed event, ‘The Complaints Department Awards Show Gala Spectacular,’ was unfortunately the weakest of the three offerings, largely because the conviction that had been present in the previous two installments felt mostly absent. Winning in-world bits like an In Memoriam montage of the entire month’s worth of collected and addressed grievances and a running riff on the existential dread of corporate hold music were muddled by another sampling set of visiting Fringers that felt more perfunctory than organically integrated compared to the main show, and odd moments like a short, immersion-breaking Q & A held early enough in the evening that it undermined much of the continued character work that came after. What can be considered charmingly shaggy one minute can feel deflatingly underbaked the next if you’re not careful, and I found myself disappointed that the ambitious experiment came to a somewhat scattered end– especially considering the month of prep. Still and all, the spirit of Fringe was felt to the end, and the endearing commitment and obvious joy projected by the close-knit cast carried it off.

“Did you know that a complaint says more about you than it does about the world?” Wise words from the experts themselves, and an interesting thought to hold onto when finishing a review. Fringe is a place for bold risks, big swings, and the ambition it took to attempt this kind of long-form experience, coupled with the spirit of community, collaboration, and play that this ensemble so clearly exemplifies should absolutely be celebrated. The Complaints Department anchored my experience through Fringe this year, focused and guided me to discover other new works and creators, and fostered a sense of cohesion and connection in an environment that can often leave you feeling aimless and unmoored. The idea is there, maybe they just need to go further with it. Instead of a show, why not an official partnership with the Festival?

What if the Complaints Department hosted Fringe Cabaret next year? Set up a desk at Fringe Central with characters in shifts acting as a sounding board to recommend the perfect show as a remedy for your problems? Appeared at the actual award show instead of having to worry about putting on their own? Retire the Freaks and put the Supervisor on a Participant button! It could provide the entire festival with a narrative continuity that I suspect would be well received by the Fringegoers, and give a much-needed shot in the arm to immersive representation in an event that still seems largely unsure about it. I may be getting ahead of myself, but, at the very least, I’ll be looking forward to what this group does next. However shaggy or silly, as long as they bring the same spirit and drive they gave this Festival for an entire month, you won’t get any complaints from me.

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