The 11th Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF) is in the books. Once again, the venue of the Alliance Theater, connected to the Utah Arts Alliance, at Trolley Square, was ideal for this event, along with the MadKing Fellowship Theater at The Gateway. This year’s edition with 23 shows was the strongest in quality and writing for the event’s 11-year history.
Total attendance was way up over 2024, with 2,631 (not including the three bring-your-own-venue shows), which represents an increase of more than 46%. A total of $19,980 was paid out to the artists for 19 shows. The average payout per show was more than $1,000. The top-selling show in each venue was: Welcome to Fat School (Alliance Main Hall), Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos (Alliance Black Box) and The Resurrection Men (MadKing Fellowship Theatre).
Photo: Ali Lente.
Awards were given for the following:
Community Voting:
Best of F – Hook vs. Pan
Best of FF – TIE: The Priesthood & The Words at the Door
Best of FFF – Welcome to Fat School
Outstanding Ensemble – 5^2
Outstanding One-Person Show – Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos
Outstanding Original Script – The Resurrection Men
Highest Attendance:
Mx. Congeniality – Welcome to Fat School
Fringe Staff Awards:
Fringe Pick – Second Grade Problems
Spirit of Fringe – Overemployed
Friend of Fringe – Gonzo Rising
Face of Fringe – Beth Anne & Tami
Top Volunteer – Bunny B.
The Utah Review offers capsule reviews of five shows from the second weekend. For background about this year’s festival, see here, and for reviews of five shows from the first weekend, see here.
The Priesthood
Written by actor and playwright Carleton Bluford, The Priesthood shines for its double double helix structure, featuring two parallel pairs of religious beliefs and human prejudices ingeniously intertwined about the common axis of human dignity, respect and affirmation.
Making his directorial debut and assisted by Nicole Finney, Bluford excels as usual in giving intellectually intense and emotionally riveting dynamics in intimate spaces for audiences to ponder. In 2022, Plan-B Theatre’s world premiere of his brilliant play The Clean-Up Project was named The Utah Review’s Top Moment of the Utah Enlightenment.
Staged by MadKing Productions, the cast of four — Tyson Baker, Jarvis Cullimore, Kaplan Keener and Jordan Briggs — rose to the emotional stakes embodied in their characters. Bluford set the story in 1978, when Everett, a gay Mormon whose mission was cut short (played by Jordan Briggs) and Adam, a Black teen (played by Kaplan Keener) meet in a cemetery. In a double helix, there is one pair of parallels but, in this instance, Bluford enriches the narrative landscape with a second pair of parallels that become the double double helix. The year is auspicious: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints finally decided to allow Blacks to hold the priesthood.
On one hand, Adam and Everett could not be more different. Adam quickly figures out that Everett is gay. Meanwhile, lacking the confidence to liberate himself to live his true identity, Everett is surprised by Adam’s inquisitive ease in his intellectual curiosity and willingness to step out past the boundaries of the faith by which he was raised. In fact, Adam takes the lead in encouraging Everett to be less tentative and more open about his faith and his authentic identity.
On the other hand, both young men share enormously important dynamics. Their fathers are local religious leaders: Everett’s dad is a Mormon bishop (played by Tyson Baker) and Adam’s father is a Baptist minister (Jarvis Cullimore). Baptists and Mormons are well known for their mutual acrimonious contentions and bitter criticisms, with each side declaring each other’s gospels as false. The mothers are gone and it is clear that both fathers have never fully processed their grief nor do they seem capable of dealing with lingering painful realities.
The actors command their roles with these intertwining structures always in their mind. As for Adam and Everett, each young man finds their own path to personal enlightenment. The Priesthood is a beautiful lesson especially for the current times of unprecedented social polarization.
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 returned this year with The Words at the Door, a love story written by Jesse Nepivoda.
This was a stellar two-hander, with actors Jason Hackney and Kristina Shearer portraying their characters with palpable and credible chemistry. This production team also featured two well-known Utah playwrights, with Matthew Ivan Bennett as director and Morag Shepherd as producer.
Based on a true story involving one of the playwright’s relatives, the play revolves around the complicated highs and lows in the couple’s relationship, as the man deals with schizophrenia. The two genuinely love each other and as much as the woman earnestly does her best to support him, it becomes especially complicated when the man distances himself during the worst episodes of his illness. With utmost gentle sensitivity, Nepivoda gives us a play that a loving relationship does not need to be doomed when one is suffering from schizophrenia. The woman does her best to be as tender as possible and be as considerate and thoughtful a listener as possible, which creates some of the play’s warmest moments. The play shows subtle ways where trust can be cultivated and stigma can be minimized to the point of vanishing.
Photo: Ali Lente.
Welcome to Fat School
A barn-burner of one of the most popular shows ever to be staged at GSLF and a major festival award winner, Welcome to Fat School, presented by Fat & More Than OK, is ready for its national rollout on the prime time stage.
Fat is not a bad word. And, that theme propels a brilliantly structured fast-paced hourlong show, penned by actor, writer, singer Olivia Custodio, and Kelsie Jepsen, a body acceptance coach who has focused on dismantling fatphobia.
Directed by Ali Lente, the show deftly blends together elements of a well-scripted TED talk, an impressive layperson’s distillation of peer-reviewed research, bristling bits of comedy and moments of generously candid and open story sharing by Custodio and Jepsen. The structure of the show is the real genius in this production. The premise of the first day of school for the audience is handled so effortlessly. Custodio and Jepsen manage the pacing and flow so well that never does a moment disrupt the underlying rhythm that in someone else’s hands might have come off as pedantic, emotionally bearing, or trivial. The seemingly disparate elements came together like an easy puzzle to solve.
This show could not have come at a better time. The media and popular obsessions with Ozempic threaten to stall any positive progress on dismantling fatphobia and rejecting the cultural dogma of the idealized body type. The evidence is already apparent just by casually glancing at social media platforms where a disheartening number of people see no problems in commenting critically about someone else’s body.
Thinking about the potency in the epiphanies Custodio and Jepsen presented with authoritative and entertaining impact, one is reminded about why it is important to change our behaviors about the language we use in commenting on social media as well as in our face-to-face communications. Commenting on changes in anyone’s bodies is unwarranted and malicious. Two examples from recent years come to mind. Unrestrained commenters called Black Panther film star Chadwick Boseman “crack panther” when photos of the actor who was much thinner than usual appeared shortly before his death from cancer. Likewise, commenters erroneously attributed Selena Gomez’s weight gain to an undisclosed pregnancy when, in fact, she was experiencing a side effect to a drug used to treat lupus. Hugely entertaining, Welcome to Fat School also proves compellingly that the cause to dismantle fatphobia is neither trivial nor superficial.
The Resurrection Men
Based on a practice that was widely practiced in the U.K. and the U.S. in the 19th century long before people willingly donated their bodies to medical research after their deaths, The Resurrection Men, written by Nicholas Dunn, was presented by Grey Matter Theatre in a production directed by Sara Ragey. With a marvelous, intelligent script with strong cinematic underpinnings, the play features a pair of amateur body snatchers (played by Dunn and Matt Whittaker)— historically known as resurrectionists — who have been contracted by a female doctor to exhume a corpse from a church cemetery grave for scientific purposes.
Dunn’s script cogently introduces the host of ethical and moral issues associated with a prominent dysfunctional underbelly of medicine during the 19th century. While public health authorities in many Central European countries allowed unclaimed remains to be dispatched to medical schools for research, no such protocols existed in the U.S. and the U.K. resorted to robbing graves and body trafficking to achieve their objectives. While considered a crime, it was rarely if ever prosecuted. Meanwhile, accomplished professionals had to maintain Victorian decorum and propriety so the task fell upon the poor and vulnerable who were too naive or unworldly as well as small-time criminals who saw it as an opportunity to make money. The actors did a nice job in amplifying an important angle in Dunn’s script that references a predatory dynamic to this practice, which often involved the remains of those who were economically disadvantaged, and socially downtrodden.
Gonzo Rising
Gonzo Rising, a Scixxy’s Greater Shows production, made a compelling case for ensuring the variety show format should have a more visible presence at events such as Fringe. Some of the strange, unusual acts by local performers, as the group had promoted their show suggested, were raw in the sense that they otherwise might not have the opportunity to showcase themselves. But, there were some very good moments where the performers would shine on many stages. One was evident in vocals sung by Samantha Paredes, a Westminster University graduate who is now working on her master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. Another impressive performance was Judas Rose, a self-described “queer menace,” who is a songwriter, indie musician and drag artist. Comedian Andrea Morton did a fine job as emcee for this weirdly good assortment of weird performers.