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FronteraFest Short Fringe Highlights: Ben Prager, Firth & Arjet, Purgatory for Pansies [Theater]
Wednesday, Feb 2 - Saturday February 12
Hyde Park Theatre (511 W. 43rd. Street)
8pm
[info] | [tickets]
Frontera Fest’s Long Fringe festival is over, but the wildly popular short fringe soldiers on! Every Tuesday through Friday there are shows of 5 short plays, then every Saturday the best of the week is selected for an encore performance. This is the last week of debuting new short fringe shows. Next week, the Best of the Festival will have its victory lap.
If last night’s shows were any indication, there are still plenty of great performances yet to see. Three time Best of Fest winner, Ben Prager, took a pretty huge departure from last year’s trio of monologues and just read a new short story about a discontented father taking a trip to the pool. It turned out that this was not a stretch at all for Prager, because the audience was with him every second. It was fun and painful, like the best of the fringe festival.
Firth & Arjet are a promising improv duo who work with the Institution Theater. They do a fairly loose style of improv that may or may not be partially scripted, but the comediennes were sharp anyway. The performance moved well and kept the audience surprised.
But the real highlight of the evening was Michael Slefinger’s Purgatory for Pansies. (editor's note: Michael Slefinger is also a regular contributor to the Encyclopedia Show, which is hosted by this review's author.) Slefinger is trying to work as an actor, but has found himself stuck in a job he cares about too much: teaching fine art classes to kindergarteners and 5th graders. He shares the hilarious and the painful stories from his classrooms and explains that this isn’t where he saw himself ending up, no matter how thankful he is for the opportunity. Every artist who's found themselves accidentally happy with a day job will understand.
There are still plenty of tickets available for the festival and for the Best of Fest showcases. These shows are the future of Austin theater, and the future is bright.
