Scuba Diving Takes Center Stage at America’s Oldest and Biggest Fringe Festival

What if you were offered the dive trip of a lifetime—but you knew that your ailing father, the man who taught you to love the ocean, might die while you were gone? What choice would you make?

That’s the dilemma at the heart of Goodbye, a play debuting at the 28th Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival (May 14-27, 2019).

Fringe Festivals are non-juried theater, music and dance festivals that got their start in Edinburgh, Scotland, after World War II, when artists not invited to the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival took to the streets—and buildings, vehicles and any other sort of unconventional space where performances could be staged. Today, dozens of Fringe Festivals take place around the United States and the world, and many shows travel from Fringe to Fringe. Orlando Fringe was America’s first Fringe Festival, and is now also its largest and longest-running.

A veteran Orlando actor/singer/dancer, Robby Pigott is also a NAUI instructor and avid scuba diver. The story behind Goodbye—the chance win at a DEMA Show cocktail party of an Explorer Ventures liveaboard trip to the Maldives, a father dying of brain cancer, and a choice to make—is a true one. But the six-person show, from the creator of other award-winning Orlando Fringe shows, is about much more than that.

“The play’s main message is essentially to live your life as hard as you can and leave something good behind if you can,” Pigott says. “We don’t know how long we have. Certainly this has been a common theme in art for centuries, but [playwright] John Mark Jernigan was inspired by how enthusiastically I talked about the scuba trip itself.”

“My father is the only person in my immediate family whom I’ve lost; it’s not as though it wasn’t devastating,” Pigott says. “But even as I look back at pictures, knowing what was going on at the time, I see nothing but wonder and happiness in my face. It was literally the best trip of my entire life—and it happened while I lost my dad.”

Rather than a play about diving, Goodbye is “a play about how important it is to live every moment,” Pigott says. “Do we live our lives to the fullest, or do we live them the way we think other people feel we should live them?”

Pigott believed then and now that his father—“a swim coach who taught me to be comfortable in a pool weeks after I was born”—would understand. His dad also was responsible for Pigott’s dive certification, when he was 13 or 14.

“My first time snorkeling around the point of Wailea Beach at age 8, I was swimming beside him,” says Pigott, who was raised in Maui, Hawaii. “It’s because of him that I love the ocean and would feel satisfied being underwater every day for the rest of my life.” Pigott still marvels at the irony of the name of that Maldives liveaboard: Carpe Vita. Seize Life.

It was Jernigan—a nondiver—who saw scuba diving as the right lens for the drama. “As I told him about the story, he couldn’t help but see the passion I had for diving,” Pigott says. “Over a few beers I gave him a few dive lessons from my teaching days. We talked a little dive science, and at one point my character actually stops the action in the play to explain to the audience what an emergency swimming ascent is. John Mark made a beautiful connection between diving and life.”

“I hate to give too much away,” Pigott says, “but my character gets passionate in the play at one point, talking about how divers know a little something about appreciating every breath they take while underwater. We become obsessively aware of just how precious each moment truly is, because we know that time is not on our side.”

If You Go

The 28th Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival takes place May 14-27, 2019, at Orlando’s Loch Haven Park, at Mills Avenue and Princeton Street. Performances of Goodbye are in the festival’s Green Venue, located inside the Orlando Repertory Theatre building at the southeast corner of the park. Admission to all Fringe shows requires one-time purchase of a $10 Fringe button, which pays festival costs, and a ticket for each show—$12 for performances of Goodbye—proceeds of which are returned entirely to the artists. Goodbye has a 60-minute run time and is suggested for audiences ages 13 and up.

Performances of Goodbye take place:
May 16, 2019, at 7:45 p.m.
May 18 at 3:30 p.m.
May 20 at 7:15 p.m.
May 22 at 5:30 p.m.
May 23 at 10 p.m.
May 25 at 3:30 p.m.
May 26 at 1 p.m.