The first weekend of the 11th Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF) is in the books and the numbers look good: as of yesterday, current sales stood at $16,615. Audience numbers reached more than 1,000, with more than 900 tickets sold and complementary tickets included.
Shows for the second weekend resume July 31 and run through Aug. 3 at the Alliance Theater, connected to the Utah Arts Alliance, at Trolley Square, as well as the MadKing Fellowship Theater at The Gateway. The Fringe campus is accessible in the near downtown area, just north of the intersection at 600 South and 600 East, For more information and tickets to the Fringe shows, see the GSLF website. Also, check The Utah Review’s Fringe preview for a summary of all of the shows on the slate.
The Utah Review presents reviews of four shows from the first weekend:
Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos, Pedro Flores, Plan-B Theatre
In an interview during the first Trump administration, award-winning actor, writer and sketch comedian Rick Najera, whose credits include the 2004 Broadway play Latinologues, said, “I’ve become more necessary. … I happen to be in a good position. Latinos are the solution, not the problem. I need to take what I am doing and amplify it. My message is inclusive and good. I am what America does best—America makes Americans.”
In his monologue show, Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos, which has received a rousing premiere during the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival (GSLF), Pedro Flores brilliantly runs the bases with Najera’s kernel of truth, portraying an expelled East LA high school student who saves the day at Hogwarts in the realm of Harry Potter storytelling. The show, produced by Plan-B Theatre, returns to the Fringe stage this coming weekend (July 31-Aug. 3).
Nicely overcoming the triple threat complexities in his latest creative enterprise, Flores is writer, director and actor in one of the funniest half-hours of comedy that has ever graced a GSLF stage. More importantly, Flores has deftly angled his comedy about the paramount significance of how Latinos are portrayed in the media world of television, film and mass culture, especially when one comprehends the inherent propagandistic nature of the media that does not suit artistically authentic and truthful stories. Galvanizing Najera’s point about the “way Latinos are portrayed or seen affects every part of the national debate about Latinos,” Flores telegraphs the message through Juan Jose, who signifies the solution, not the problem, as the character rises above being seen as an outsider and foreigner.
As noted in a preview published at The Utah Review, Flores started from a critique of the Harry Potter film franchise and characters who are marginalized conveniently for the sake of the storyline’s primary protagonists to imagine that if a Mexican wizard character appeared in the Harry Potter stories, the name would have been ‘Juan Jose.’ Avid Harry Potter fans will be pleased by Flores’ handling of the details they know well.
Juan tells us that Hermosa decided to lay low in “in a place full of Latinos!” because she believed that would be the last place the Death Eaters would come looking for her. “That’s how she ended up at my old high school but now, they had tracked her down. That’s why she had me hide her magic palito.” As for asking Hermosa if she had any “foos” to “throw guantes,” Juan learned that she had Harry and Ron. One of many über-sharp passages in this monologue illustrate the point:
Tell me why these foos went from lookin’ like my homies, SadBoy
and Cuete, to the whitest versions of Carlton and Urkel I’ve
ever seen. Turns out Hermosa’s homies were nothing but some
pasty, tea sippin’, white boy, lames, that swapped bodies with
my homies because they were also laying low in the hood. Shit!
At least Carlton had a pistol that one episode! These mothafuckas looked anemic!
The audience soaked up every moment in Flores’ tour-de-force piece. He ices the cake with Juan Jose’s triumph and a full-ride scholarship to Hogwarts in hand. Returning to Najera, “Either we’re included or excluded; if we’re excluded, we become a secondary culture within the U.S. If we are not telling our stories, then we will be on the short end of history.” With Juan Jose, Flores knocks the lesson out of the park with one of the smartest comedy homeruns that one could imagine for making the point.
Still Life…, by Beth Anne Martin and Tami Anderson
A breezy comedy piece that nevertheless brings forward the stark realities of the middle-age years when the routines of life are no longer predictable or stable as once expected, Still Life…, by Beth Anne Martin and Tami Anderson, offers a metaphorical counterpoint of time, nostalgia and the courage to make peace with inevitable chaos of existence.
Two divorced women who also are experiencing empty nest syndrome explore ways of reinvigorating their sense of personal fulfillment. Their latest selection is a class in still life painting, accompanied by wine drinking. While they sip wine, add a few more brushstrokes to their canvases and revel periodically to pop classics, they chat about the events in their lives that have led them to a point of uncertainty they would never have anticipated in their younger years. The little ironies are evident throughout, as both women wonder if there will ever be an adventure that jolts them out of the existential paralysis they feel at the moment.
To Be Frank…, Salt Lake Community College’s theater program
To Be Frank…, presented by eight actors in Salt Lake Community College’s theater program, is inspired by the experimental theatrical underpinnings of The Neo-Futurists. The ideal originated in Italy during the heights of Verismo of creative works and literature during the early 20th century. Within recent decades, Neo-Futurist troupes have been established in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and London.
The ambitious students did a marvelous job in introducing audiences to the three pillars of Neo-Futurists: honesty, rapid pace and brevity. The objective is simple. The actors play themselves and they created an impressively eclectic array 25 pieces, none lasting more than two minutes, which are intended to be performed within the one-hour time limit of Fringe shows. Audience members, who also received a bag contained items connected to some of the pieces, dictated which piece should follow next in the sequence.
During one performance, the troupe managed to get through all of the pieces but one. With the pieces created within two weeks prior to the opening of Fringe, the group featured theater, monologues, slam poetry, dance, improv, games, etc. Everything the actors performed represented something that happened to them. The joy of this type of experimental theater is that both the actors and audiences can easily accept the risk that a particular piece might fail or not land as intended. One series of pieces, in particular, stood out, and, of course, they were not performed in a conventional sequence. There were three The Words I Couldn’t Say pieces representing various times in life: child, reflecting religious trauma; teenager, domestic abuse, mental health stress and suicidal ideation, and adult, current politics and global events. Kudos to this group of eight for flexing their options to give Fringe a welcomed glimpse into an engaging form of experimental theater.
Book of Ego: A Sacred Parody, Irene Loy
Monologues have always been popular at GSLF and the excellent Book of Ego: A Sacred Parody, by Irene Loy, joined the canon. In her tight, well-structured piece that emerged from improvisational origins, Loy generously gave a biographical account of beliefs, the complications of faith, the impractialities and impossibilities of trying to achieve personal perfection, and the ups and downs of life events and the resets that happen along the way.
Directed by Jack Cobabe, Loy skillfully handled the props, staging elements and demands of her own show. Loy picked the right tones in many moments, sometimes self-deprecating in a comedic and even gently awkward manner while in others she balanced them off with fleeting sensations of regrets, frustrations and disappointment. She set the most effective emotional fulcrum in her piece, never allowing bitterness, melodrama or flippancy to shade what became an earnest, elegantly touching portrait.
This Fringe version expanded upon a show she performed last year at the Alliance Theater in September 2024. Loy, a writer and trained improviser, created this piece as part of her work toward completing a practice-based Ph.D. in creative research with Transart Institute and Liverpool John Moores University.