It’s May, and in Orlando’s arts and cultural community, that means it’s time for the FRINGE! The Orlando Fringe International Theatre Festival is, here on its 33rd year, the longest-running Fringe fest in the nation.
It’s packed with hundreds of national, international, and local shows of all kinds…and it’s more than just theatre. The two-week arts extravaganza includes visual art, music, kids’ programming, food and more.
The Fringe’s foundations are built on the basic goal of being accessible, uncensored and unjuried, which means there’s no artistic gatekeeping - artists are chosen by a lottery system months before the fest.
I headed down to festival previews to speak with one of the performers – winner of the 2023 San Francisco Fringe’s “Best of Fringe” award, Luca Torrens.
Torrens is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.
They are putting up their one-person show called, “Howdy, Stranger!” It’s a cowboy-themed musical comedy with puppetry, deep questions, queer themes and a deal-making demon. Classic Fringe – unusual and unexpected.
The show begins with Torrens swaggering onstage in full Wild West regalia – ten-gallon hat, riding boots and leather vest, with an acoustic guitar slung over their back. But you quickly learn all is not what it appears – the swagger is a put-on, covering up a sensitive young man trying to mold himself into the macho cowboy stereotype he sees as ideal...just with singing instead of gun-slinging and Buttermilk instead of tequila. Buttermilk the horse, that is, played by a somehow-charming child’s hobby horse that Torrens manipulates as a puppet. (The sound of Buttermilk’s galloping hooves is brought to you by a man backstage banging two halves of a coconut together, in a nod to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”) Shenanigans ensue as the character Jean tries to prove his manliness to the whole mean town, but he soon arrives at a crossroads…literally and figuratively. And I won’t spoil it for you, but brace yourself for a shocking ending.
Torrens is fresh out of college, and they tell me the award-winning show started as a school project in 2022.
“I had to write a one-person show to graduate from my college, New World College of the Arts in Miami,” says Torrens. They say they discarded ideas about playing a robot or a pirate, and finally landed on the cowboy idea when their professor told them to write about something they have passion for, that they could talk about for hours.
Still, the evolution of the story and the show itself was a bit of a surprise for Torrens. “If you would’ve told me I was going to be doing a cowboy/puppet/musical, I would’ve said…what is that? But here I am, doing it,” Torrens says.
And they’re doing it to great reception, too. Torrens performed “Howdy Stranger” for the first time publicly in the 2023 San Francisco Fringe, and galloped into the sunset with the highly-coveted Best of Fringe Award.
“I think I didn’t understand how big [winning the award] was until this Fringe,” Torrens says. “When I got it, I was like, ‘That’s cool, people liked my show, awesome!’ And then when I came to this Fringe, I have people telling me, ‘Ohh, you won Best of Fringe, that’s really good!’ And I was like, ‘Is it? Oh, okay, so I guess it’s good!’” They make a surprised face and laugh. “So, I think I’m just learning it means something in this world I’ve just stepped into.”
