Sitting around an oval white table recently, on the top floor of their theater complex between Park and Madison Avenues (three theaters and the pre- and postshow E:Bar), they discussed Edinburgh Fringes past — from happy discoveries to “one of the world’s worst versions of ‘Hamlet’ ever,” as Ms. Kleinhans put it — and about their plans for this summer. The table was soon littered with copies of the Edinburgh Fringe program, news releases on individual productions and the beginnings of the spreadsheet that will guide them to dozens of shows.  “Frankly, sometimes it feels like too much,” Mr. Tear said. “There comes a point when you almost run out of steam.”  Until that moment, though, they were planning to see a lot and hoping to find productions for the 2012 Brits festival. The 2011 version, which opens on Nov. 8, will include a few shows — “Shadow Boxing,” a solo piece by James Gaddas about the inner life of a boxer, is one — that they discovered a year ago in Edinburgh.  “First of all, we start with the Traverse,” Mr. Tear said of that respected theater in Edinburgh, devoted to new writing. With a popular bar that serves as a networking hub at the Fringe, the Traverse usually offers some of the festival’s hardest-to-get tickets, which last year included Enda Walsh’s “Penelope,” and “Roadkill,” conceived and directed by Cora Bissett.  This year the hot list is likely to include “The Wheel,” the latest from the National Theater of Scotland, the originator of “Black Watch”; “Ten Plagues,” by Mark Ravenhill and Conor Mitchell; and “The Monster in the Hall” and “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart,” both by the Scottish playwright David Greig.  Ms. Kleinhans and Mr. Tear said they would also visit the Pleasance Theater, where “Julian Sands in a Celebration of Harold Pinter,” directed by John Malkovich, and other intriguing shows will be presented. Once in Edinburgh, they will seek out lesser-known artists as well.  “The first year we did this,” Ms. Kleinhans said about scouting for the 2004 Brits Off Broadway festival, “we had Frantic Assembly.”  “They were a little company that worked out of the Battersea Arts Center,” she added, “and nobody knew who the hell they were.” A year ago the company’s production of “Beautiful Burnout,” a play by Bryony Lavery about young boxers in Glasgow, was a hit in Edinburgh. It met with less excitement from critics during a run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn this year.  Still, “It’s always great with Brits Off Broadway to bring in a company nobody has ever heard of,” Mr. Tear said. Past Brits programs have featured artists who are popular in Edinburgh, like the controversial writer and director Tim Crouch (no one knew who he was, either, Ms. Kleinhans said), whose production of “The Author” in Edinburgh last year, which sat actors and spectators together for a disturbing story about the portrayal of violence onstage, routinely prompted some in the audience to walk out.  Ms. Kleinhans and Mr. Tear are not the only theater entrepreneurs from the United States to prospect for gold at Edinburgh. The philanthropist Carol Tambor takes in the Fringe every year and awards a Best of Edinburgh prize, which includes a fully financed Off Broadway run in New York the following winter.  Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse, will also be attending the Fringe. A handful of St. Ann’s productions over the last several seasons, Ms. Feldman said, were discoveries she made in Edinburgh, like Daniel Kitson’s solo play “The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church,” which she saw in Scotland in 2009 and presented in New York this year, and “The Walworth Farce,” by Mr. Walsh, seen in Edinburgh in 2007 and at St. Ann’s the following spring. Mr. Walsh’s plays “The New Electric Ballroom” and “Penelope” were part of subsequent seasons at St. Ann’s.  At 59E59, Ms. Kleinhans and Mr. Tear were asked what they looked for when they scouted shows. “We know it when we see it,” Ms. Kleinhans said a bit vaguely, then gestured toward an Edinburgh Fringe brochure: “Three-quarters of this we know right away is not anything we want.”  She was not referring to content and quality alone. 59E59 is a presenter, not a producer. While it offers relatively inexpensive theater rentals, marketing and publicity assistance and theater staff for plays that will be seen there, it does not pay production costs. For a show to be booked at the complex, it must have financial backing from other sources. This is true of all productions at 59E59, including the annual East to Edinburgh Festival, also founded by Ms. Kleinhans (this year’s version ended on Sunday) and consisting in essence of warm-up performances for a handful of American productions, mostly based in New York, headed to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  Ms. Kleinhans may have sounded somewhat opaque about what she looks for in the theater, but what she avoids was crystal clear: “We don’t do Shakespeare in any way, shape or form of any kind, ever,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t like Shakespeare, but everybody does it, and it’s one of those things, like, ‘Oh, if you don’t do Shakespeare, you’re nothing.’ Well, I’m sorry, that’s one of those pretentious things that annoy the hell out of me.”  Given the thickness of the festival brochure, they should have more than enough other options.  A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2011, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Connoisseurs in the Theatrical Import Business. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The creative forces behind Brits Off Broadway, an annual festival at 59E59 Theaters, are off to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to scout shows to present in Manhattan.