Recap: FronteraFest's Short Fringe Best Of Week 1
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The tricky part of a variety show like FronteraFest’s Short Fringe—which culminates in a “Best Of The Week” marathon at the Hyde Park Theatre every Saturday—is the variety. With five 20- to 30-minute pieces by five different companies on the bill, odds are that for every out-and-out gem, you'll be forced to sit through a couple that will have you texting your friends with, "Dude this sux, meet me at The Parlor." Lesser fare like Max Langert's one-man-show Really Mature Relationships, for example, which is a high-concept piece in which a marketing guru analyzes why his relationships have failed by conducting focus groups with his exes—an ostensibly funny idea that unfortunately came off like an unrehearsed pitch for a Dane Cook movie—and Michael McKelvey and Nigel O'Hearn's Calm, which wastes an extraordinarily gifted cast of high school students on a totally incoherent script.
The cream of this first Best Of The Week—all of which feature shows selected via audience poll during the previous week's performances—came after the intermission. Sarah Saltwick's She Creatures, a pair of monologues from the perspective of mythical female characters, elevated the game considerably. Liz Fisher brought a charming, if pensive, joyfulness to “Amelia,” a siren who left the sea to find the sailor she'd shipwrecked, while Gina Houston turned in an affecting performance as “Cecilia,” a Selkie struggling to say goodbye to a world without much to offer her besides avocados and the Internet.
The evening's final show, America's Theatre Company’s A Work of Consequence, was the most fully realized performance of the night, boasting serious makeup work, costuming, and music in the service of an absurdist bit about an elderly couple eagerly awaiting the icy touch of death. The piece was the evening's only comedy to achieve more than the usual strained laughter, but its success on stage wasn't limited to mere belly laughs: As the show builds to its climax, the kookiness gives way to a surprisingly tender and poignant ending. While it’s true that Best Of The Week isn’t always the “greatest hits” show it intends to be—thanks to a disproportionate number of friends and family members stuffing the ballot box for otherwise unworthy shows, or maybe just a weak crop of competitors—but as long as there's work like this on the bill, it’s definitely worth a look.
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