Starting its second decade, the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival will feature 23 shows, many from outstanding indie theater companies in three venues, during the event which will run from July 24 to Aug. 3, in downtown Salt Lake City. The event will take place at the main hall and the black box at the Alliance Theater, connected to the Utah Arts Alliance, at Trolley Square, as well as the MadKing Fellowship Theater at The Gateway.
Founded a decade ago as part of a Westminster University enterprise project, the Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF) festival has been admirably resilient flexing with having staged the annual event in three different parts of Salt Lake City, managing through the pandemic and developing a brand that has gained the loyal support of a solid core of members from Utah’s performing arts community. As a creative incubator, GSLF has remained true to the ideals of that first independent festival 77 years ago in Edinburgh, where four criteria are essential: no prior professional performing arts experience required, no juried selection, no pretentiousness or poseurs and no costly, complicated professional production values. A significant note is that one of the 2025 shows, Morag Shepherd’s My Brother Was A Vampire, which premiered at Plan-B Theatre in 2022, has been restaged not only for the local Fringe but also for 10 performances next month in Edinburgh.
To reiterate a point made in past years at The Utah Review, Fringe is a model of artistic equity in terms of treatment and access. All of the ticket sales revenue is paid out to each performer or group, based on their cumulative audience numbers. Because the Fringe model puts every performer on as equal a playing level as possible, it is up to the individual show creators and performers to promote and advertise their work. From year to year, many Fringe participants have stepped up their social media and public relations game, which has whetted the public’s appetite for viewing work that is being presented for the first time. GSLF is co-directed by Jay Perry and Shianne Gray.
The event kicks off on July 24 with an opening night party (6-9 p.m.) at the Alliance Theatre at Trolley Square, featuring live jazz, teasers from some of the shows slated to be performed during Fringe along with food for purchase and a cash bar.
For tickets and more information, see the Great Salt Lake Fringe website.
2025 SHOWS OF NOTE:
Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos
Coming up from the depths of failing a comedy show audition, Pedro Flores realized that he might have had a different outcome had he chosen a monologue along the lines of East L.A. Baywatch in which a chola plays a lifeguard at the community pool, which is part of award-winning Rick Najera’s Latinologues,
While watching the Harry Potter film franchise with his girlfriend, Flores was taken aback when the character of Cho Chang appeared. Obviously stunned that such a blatant stereotype put down came from the pen of an author committed to boosting the superiority of white feminism, Flores imagined that if a Mexican wizard character appeared in the Harry Potter stories, the name would have been ‘Juan Jose.’
From that, Flores, an actor who recently has turned his creative efforts to playwriting, developed a razor-smart, bristling, raucous, innuendo-rich monologue Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos, which he will direct and perform in a world premiere run at this year’s Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF). The work is presented by Plan-B Theatre, one of the local performing arts companies who appeared in the first GSLF in 2015.
Juan Jose has just been expelled from East L.A. High School and the play opens with him waiting to see the Hogwarts principal. Donned in the hooded Hufflepuff robe, he is wearing black-and-white sneakers and black knit gloves. It is Hermione’s senior year, the setting, of course, coincides with the franchise’s penultimate fantasy novel. Instead of the Deathly Hollows (the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Cloak of Invisibility), we have the Deathly Vatos and Flores spares no time in pitching the stakes in a parody that is impressive in how well it parallels the original source of its inspiration.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Flores said, “The seed for this idea has lived within me for years and when I started writing this, I already had a basic understanding of Harry Potter and the overall arc of movies and books.” He added that whatever references to elements in the stories popped up in his writing, he double checked the original material to make it intelligible and impactful.
As for creating the persona of Juan Jose, Flores thought in depth about the sights and sounds that surrounded him during his formative years: hip-hop in Los Angeles, Chicano rap, old school R&B and movies such as the 1995 Mi Familia, directed by Gregory Nava and narrated by Edward James Olmos, which tells the stories of three generations of a Mexican family who eventually settle I. East L.A.
“The character comes from deep in my memory bank,” Flores said. “I never was a gangbanger but there were a lot of them around, who were friends of friends or cousins.” Najera’s Latinologues served as a template for Flores to emulate in ensuring Juan Jose’s voice picks up the nuances and character traits he envisioned for the character of a Mexican wizard. While Flores did not intend to perform the piece, he had thought about asking actor Danny Borba, a local performer who now lives and works in New York City, to join the world premiere. Flores said that Borba told him that instead he should perform the monologue himself because the words he wrote perfectly encapsulated his voice.
Of course, Flores’ comedy is anchored in truths about representation and character resonance in the contemporary storytelling world and how a character such as Cho Chang, especially in the books, was blandly and one-dimensionally framed. Harry Potter fans know that Cho was the first love for the eponymous young wizard but then Ginny Weasley comes along, with practically no substantial character development, to step in and become Harry Potter’s girlfriend in the The Half-Blood Prince story.
Harry lost interest in Cho because she was not the Chosen One but Cho also was very good in the sport of Quidditch and she was in Ravenclaw, which meant that she was as intelligent, if not more so, than her peers. Curiously, the chatter in the world of Harry Potter fandom especially among more recent generations of readers and movie viewers has turned to more questions wondering why a character such as Cho Chang was shortchanged and why even if she and Harry were not destined to become partners in love, they could have bonded as friends precisely because they shared emotions of losing those whom they treasured.
As Juan Jose, Flores signals that if he is going to be in the Hogwarts world, he will not be receding to any bland, one-dimensional backdrop as a character of convenience. As he summarized in a Plan-B Theatre blog post, “Juan Jose is an amalgamation of myself as a kid, my critiques of Harry Potter as an adult, and boosting my culture and background, combining them to create a ridiculous (yet hilarious) narrative.” Flores is a teaching artist with Plan-B Theatre and will join the company’s Theatre Artists of Color Writing Workshop this fall.
The show will have six performances at Fringe, between July 25 and Aug. 3. For more information about this Plan-B production, see here.
Plan-B Theatre also is connected to two other shows on this year’s Fringe slate:
My Brother Was a Vampire
Premiered in 2022 by Plan-B Theatre, Morag Shepherd’s My Brother Was A Vampire has been revised and compacted into a Fringe version that will be presented next month in 10 performances at the OG of all Fringes: Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. Other than a benefit performance that was presented earlier this week (watch The Utah Review for a review later this week), GSLF audiences will have three opportunities during the July 25-27 weekend to see the show before it heads across the pond.
As for the play’s first international run, Shepherd said in an interview with The Utah Review that planning for the Edinburgh Fringe has been “a hell of a mammoth undertaking, with handling the fees, staging considerations for the venue, organizing publicity around the rules about what you are allowed to do in the space and revising the play to bring it down to 50 minutes.” The latest production is a collaboration of Immigrant’s Daughter Theatre and Lil Poppet Productions.
The Utah entourage will perform the play during the first two weeks of the Edinburgh Fringe, which has 2,500 shows scheduled. With the competition to draw potential audience members, Shepherd said, “we’ll be pedaling the show and handing out fliers every day when performances are scheduled. Directed by Stephanie Stroud and stage managed by David Knoell, the two-hander features actors Ariana Farber and Tyler Fox, choreography by Meghan Durham-Wall and original sound design by Griffin Irish.
The following is an updated version of a preview originally published at The Utah Review on October 27, 2022.
In the 2004 novel, Let the Right One In, by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, which later was adapted into Swedish and American films as well as a theatrical production, a preteen boy becomes friends with a new neighbor, whom he realizes is a vampire. It is a fine example of a story that bridges motifs melded from horror, coming-of-age stories and socio-psychological drama. For example, the girl, who is a vampire, is initially enigmatic regarding the shell to protect her secrets even as she gradually opens up to the boy. Also, her gender identity is fluid and more ambiguous than what is suggested at the narrative’s outset. The boy’s emerging friendship with the girl eases the emotional burdens he carries. The adults in the boy’s life have failed him – his father, for example, is an alcoholic – doing nothing to confront or rectify the relentless hounding and teasing he experiences at school. Left along to cope with his problems, he occasionally acts out violently.
Meanwhile, the young vampire epitomizes a bleak solitude, practically as disconnected as the boy. She also can be dangerous, which underscores the story’s horror elements. When the boy asks if she is a vampire, she says plainly, “I live on blood.” Nevertheless, horror is not the narrative’s primary driver. The story takes the young protagonists from their isolation to an empowering friendship of mutual support, although it does not come without a hefty volume of tense, complicated moments.
In My Brother Was A Vampire, the playwright’s love of and intimate memories of this genre-hybrid Swedish story were ingredients for the creative starter dough for the two-hander script. It also was a departure from Shepherd’s earlier works, which are usually characterized as abstract journeys in discovering their respective epiphanies.
Seven years ago, Shepherd co-directed the Utah premiere of Jack Thorne’s stage adaptation of Let the Right One In with Christopher Clark, one of the area’s most respected theatrical artists, who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2020. “I loved working on that project and it stayed with me,” Shepherd recalled, in an interview with The Utah Review. “It was just the feeling that I had never had so much fun working on a project as I did with Chris [Clark]. It was rewarding to figure out how to stage the horror and psychological parts through the dialogue and the experience was something I wanted to keep trying to do.”
Shepherd said that writing My Brother Was A Vampire was one of the easiest, smoothest flowing projects that the Utah playwright has penned. Every emotion and script element are distilled in the script. “At first, it was hard because some of the topics are very personal for me,” Shepherd explained. “But, then I could open up and give up my self protection in the fiction of this play.” With that, the vampire’s story from Let the Right One In serves an apt creative springboard for how this play unfolds. This play also pays respect in a general sense to a university mentor, the late Eric Samuelsen, the legendary Utah playwright, who was fearless in penning plays which dug deep emotionally. He also had a knack for writing devilishly good, wry and deadpan humor.
The two characters in My Brother Was A Vampire are brother and sister: Callum is three years older than Skye. The play is told in reverse chronology. “At first, the scenes I wrote were all over the place and I had not yet decided on the possibility of the trajectory going backwards,” Shepherd said. “Before I had finished all of the scenes, I knew that it would be nice knowing what the ending would be like and then going through that arc to see where it started from.”
In the most recent interview, Shepherd said she sees the 2025 version as darker, rawer and more emotional than the original rendering and the horror elements are intensified, in part due to the fact that the two actors cast for the Fringe production are considerably older than the pair of actors who performed in the Plan-B Theatre premiere.
In the first scene, the brother (Callum) is 38 and Skye is 35 and in each successive scene, they are five years younger. The first scene (“the ending”) shows Callum appearing starved and gravely ill, while Skye seems in perfect health. Likewise, they are often at opposing ends of the emotional spectrum in that scene. Meanwhile, in the last scene, both are in the childhood years and this encompasses the play’s most dramatic and stark emotional moments. The moods of horror and suspense are portrayed through sound design so the persistent supernatural aura could be achieved with similar nuance and hybrid character that made Let the Right One In so compelling.
The play’s comedy drips in deadpan sarcasm, which anchors the sibling relationship as realistic. In the script, Shepherd suggested specifics about timing and cadence for the actors as well as the production team. On paper, the script moves like a rapid-paced page turner but in reality the beats, rests and points of suspension amplify the dialogue’s full punch, whether it is in the deadpan sarcasm or in stunning emotionally charged moments. “When the characters cry, go ahead and do that if it comes, but the rest of the time it’s something else,” Shepherd advised in the script. “When there is a pause, really pause, and the rest of the dialogue should fly. Scene changes can take their time and can be as exposed as possible. These characters know each other and go for the jugular, and then are extremely tender and sweet.”
“I had so much fun writing the banter between the brother and the sister,” Shepherd explained. “You might be afraid to go there, which is what makes sarcasm work so well, and when they really go for the jugular and are brutal to each other, it heightens the scary moments. There is that whiplash feeling that is so familiar in family and emotions but I also used humor to balance out the emotional tensions to avoid becoming too indulgent. But, yeah, in their younger years, it becomes more tragic so then it makes sense to be a little more indulgent in portraying and representing the trauma. The point is to really fly and be as honest as possible.”
The Priesthood
Written by actor and playwright Carleton Bluford, The Priesthood will be staged by MadKing Productions,featuring a cast that includes Tyson Baker, Jarvis Cullimore, Kaplan Keener and Jordan Briggs. The story is set in 1978, when a gay failing Mormon and a Black kid meet up after the church’s decision to allow Blacks to hold the priesthood. The play was developed by Plan-B Theatre in several private table readings and as part of that company’s Script-In-Hand Series in 2017.
The Words at the Door
A company that came into its own after appearing at the first GSLF in 2015, a reconstituted Sackerson returns this year with The Words at the Door, a love story written by Jesse Nepivoda. This production team features two well-known Utah playwrights, with Matthew Ivan Bennett as director and Morag Shepherd as producer. The two-hander features actors Jason Hackney and Kristina Shearer.
OTHER 2025 SHOWS:
Presented by Running With Scissors, 5^2: Twenty Five Plays in Fifty Minutes is a sketch comedy revue where 25 original plays are performed by a five-member ensemble, with themes taken from musicals, magic, puppets, mystery, romance and other genres.
Ants Go Marching, by Pendulous Productions, comprising thetaer students from Salt Lake Community College, is a play about a sentimental boy who reminisces about a journal he kept in order to abide the cynicism of his older sister after she broke up with his best friend and to guide him in the difficult decision he has to make.
Monologues have always been popular at GSLF and Book of Ego: A Sacred Parody, by Irene Loy, joins the canon. Developed from improvisation, Loy has expanded a version she premiered at Alliance Theater last September. Book of Ego is one woman’s take on her own beliefs and major life events so far, approaching them with enough distance to grieve, to celebrate, and to have a good, loving laugh at herself — while encouraging audience members to reflect on what they believe and what they have experienced in a compassionate light as well.
Gonzo Rising Fringe, a Scixxy’s Greater Shows production, is a series of variety shows featuring strange, unusual acts of SLC, focused on offering people stage time who often would struggle to have such an opportunity.
A Haircut in Salt Lake City, presented by Ricks/Bay Productions, and written by Max Ricks, is about a customer who has not had a haircut for some time but when he chats with his barber, he is surprised to see how much their life experiences have parallels in their queer identities, complicated family relationships and their Mormon upbringing.
A free show perfect for kids that will be presented on the second weekend of Fringe, Hook vs. Pan: A Battle for Neverland, by Salt Lake Children’s Theatre and written by Mindy Curtis, is a riff on the classic children’s tale. Peter Pan and Tinkerbell outsmart the bumbling Captain Hook and Smee in a hilarious battle for the Lost Boys’ Tree House.
Improv Salt Lake Presents will offer fresh material during each Fringe performance, highlighting work from their team of comedic actors who are based locally.
OVEREMPLOYED: A Remotely Functional Farce, by Rambelotle, is about a man who realizes that he overreached when he attempts to juggle working remotely multiple full-time jobs.
Park Bench Royalty, produced by Salt Monster Theatre Co., unfolds as a homeless man has claimed a piece of property as his kingdom. It is a one-actor show with a puppet dog.
A certified crowd pleaser last year, Puppet Up! Puppet Karaoke, by Puppets in the City, returns, which gives audience members not only the opportunity to select the songs but also to become puppeteers. The mix of songs includes recent and classic warhorses in the pop and rock catalogs.
The Rest is Silence: A Support Group for the Dramatically Damaged, presented by New World Shakespeare Company, has an intriguing premise: several survivors of Shakespeare’s tragedies gather in group therapy led by Horatio. Making its first GSLF appearance, the company will feature a dramedy by award-winning playwright Élise C. Hanson. In 2015, Hanson’s script received The David Fetzer Award for Emerging Artists in 2015 and a full-length version of the play was produced by New World Shakespeare Company in 2021. The compact Fringe adaptation, directed by Blayne Wiley, features a cast of five, including the playwright.
Another monologue show, Second Grade Problems, by Cache Dexter, features the performer sharing their childhood doll collection and recalling how the dolls were instrumental in dealing with the pressures of second grade, along with “bowling alley saints, gurus, and mystical desert creatures.”
Still Life…, by Beth Anne Martin and Tami Anderson, centers on a pair of vivacious empty nest divorcees who embark on an adventure or take a class annually to embrace new experiences and have fun. This year, their chosen adventure is a wine and paint night, where they delve into an unexpected whirlwind of self-discovery and laughter. “With each brushstroke and sip of wine, they confront their pasts, dreams, and the beautiful chaos of life itself. Amidst the colors and camaraderie, they experience an existential crisis, working to find acceptance with the life they have versus the life they once envisioned.”
To Be Frank…, presented by eight actors in Salt Lake Community College’s theater program, is inspired by The NeoFuturists,the show is a whirlwind of interactive theatre, dance, slam poetry, song, improv, games and other activities. Created in two weeks, the show features eight actors who have created 25 original pieces rooted in ‘a moment of truth’. They will attempt to perform all 25 with 1 catch: the audience gets to choose which piece they want to see next.
Welcome to Fat School, presented by Fat & More Than OK, is a show premised on unpacking fatphobia, “one of the last socially acceptable prejudices in America: fatphobia.” The two-woman show blends comedy, current research, and personal storytelling to confront anti-fatness. Described as “part TED Talk, part sketch show, and entirely unfiltered, Welcome to Fat School invites audiences to rethink everything they’ve been taught about bodies.
BRING-YOUR-OWN-VENUE SHOWS:
Dungeons of Misrule is a new theatrical concept from a familiar performing arts group that has appeared at Fringe, Lords of Misrule Theatre Co. With the popularity of tabletop games such as Dungeons and Dragons, the theater company builds upon it, featuring a cast of three improvisers playing misanthropic adventurers, decided randomly by drawing a character from a pile of cards. Four additional improvisers serve as monsters and NPCs for the players to interact with, and a game master paints the scenes through narration and game mechanics. The game being played is Mork Borg, a pitch-black, doom-metal inspired fantasy setting.
Dungeons of Misrule is a full cast production, so the Game Master doesn’t voice every non-player character, which will be played by an actor. The audience members will also take turns rolling the dice whenever the players test their fate. Most notably, though, are the curses and boons the audience can bestow upon the players to alter the trajectory of their adventure. The audience can donate to summon additional monsters, give the players a little extra luck on their dice rolls, or inject insanity into the personalities of the NPCs and players alike. For example, the audience can donate to force a character to speak in only one-syllable words, or else they will lose hit points and potentially die.
Profits from the donations will be given to Genderbands, a nonprofit that assists transgender people with gender affirming care and associated costs.
Improv Avenue, who will be presenting their Fringe performances at The Beehive at 666 S. State Street, has two shows. LIFE SUCKS: An Improvised Board Game (July 24 and July 27, 7 p.m.) is as its title suggests. Audience members can roll for the players and their suggestions for life events change the course of the show. As the description indicates, “Watch characters have children, get abducted by aliens, lose all their credit, or whatever other sick outcomes you can imagine! See these characters’ relationships develop over time as they navigate the treacherous board game of life!”
The group will also present Experimental Post-Christian Industrial Eurasian Acid Jazz Punk Labrador Mix Improvisation (July 30 7 p.m.) This is a unique experience featuring a mix of experimental, post-Christian, industrial, Eurasian, acid jazz, punk and Labrador musical influences, highlighted by the collaboration between the improvisation band [CONFIDENTIAL] and Improv Avenue.