FronteraFest
"Best of the Week Two"
By Sarah Hepola, Fri., Jan. 31, 2003
Hyde Park Theatre, Jan. 25
On a wet and shivering Saturday night, nothing was cooler than Angela Kariotis. A slight, spry woman with a switchblade tongue, Kariotis tells what it's like to be a Greek-American growing up in the Jersey ghetto. It's tough, it's weird. It's cool. MINO whITeY major: OTHER is a segment from Kariotis' Reminiscence of the Ghetto & Other Things That RaiZed Me, the one-woman show she will perform at UT's Winship Drama Building later this year. It is about being stuck in between, too white for black people, too black for white people, too poor for rich people, too rich for poor people.
Kariotis kicks off our anxiety about class and race -- What's a wigger? What's a nigga? (And why doesn't Dr. Dre call this woman?) -- in a dynamic performance that is both serious and seriously funny. But Kariotis was only part of Saturday night's "Best of the Fest." In the unforgettable An Evening With Rory, Ryan Wilsey is the lisping working man with heartbreaking aspirations, writing songs inspired by "you know, Janis Japlin" and "Kevin Cobain." Choreographer Kent De Spain's Elegy, performed with (the five-months-pregnant!) Leslie Dworkin, was like a haunting dance with the shadow world. In Bar Fight, Mike Henry's poems gave us nothing less than a peek at his soul, and Rebecca Schwarz's Heat Wave charmed with a simple chat about chicken-salad sandwiches. On that nasty Saturday night, FronteraFest offered something, finally, to combat the chill outside: the warmth of great performers.
