FronteraFest Short Fringe Highlights: "They're Coming To Get You" and The Bitter Poet [Theater]

Frontera Fest

Frontera Fest Short Fringe Festival
Tuesday, January 18 - Saturday February 12
Hyde Park Theatre (511 W. 43rd. Street)
8pm
[info] | [tickets]

Hyde Park Theater's prestigious Frontera Fest got kicked off last week! That means this past Saturday was the first Best of Week showcase for the festival’s Short Fringe where every night is a grab bag of monologues, poetry, standup and improv comics and a healthy dose of miscellaneous. This Saturday’s sausage fest (seriously, not one woman?) turned out to be a good indication of why the Short Fringe has become so popular.

The most exciting piece of the evening was the Lowell Bartholomee-written and directed, Robert S. Fisher-performed "They’re Coming to Get You!" The monologue is about a man working through his relationship with his father, who conveniently became a religious fanatic and lost his mind a month or two before he took his son to see Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Bartholomee ruins the endings to Body Snatchers and The Thing to show us the tragic world we get, the world we hope for and the painful in-between space. This darkly comic monologue simply deserves to be seen again.

Kevin Draine, who is apparently the voice for Animal Planet’s Cats 101, blew the Short Fringe audience away with his Bitter Poet persona. There was not much of a recognizable overarching narrative to his performance piece, except that Draine seems to be in a relationship that is going reasonably well right now the subjects of the the relentless love song after love poem after love song were past relationships? Getting it did not seem to be the point since this Bitter poet left unexplained his truly bizarre velvet jacket, ruffly shirt and pleather pants. Draine’s character is as sympathetic as he is hi-larious and to his credit he does not use the subjects of his poems and songs as a flimsy excuse to crack some lame jokes about women and relationships. No, this poet is sincerely in love and, of course, sincerely bitter.

Tickets for the Short Fringe nights are on sale now. This theater is tiny and the demand for tickets will be much greater than the number of seats. There will be plenty of things you'll hear about that you wish you hadn't missed, we promise.