Last Saturday's FronteraFest "Best of Week 3" brought us a lot of yin and very little yang. Of the five pieces brought forward, four were solos by actresses.Yang did hold its own. The six "Confidence Guys" who did improvised Mamet gave us that playwright's expletives, elisions, incomplete understoods and macho pushiness to the life. After a quick poll of the audience they played it as salesmen in a failing car dealership. Maybe it was a set-up, but they had the edgy macho attitudes down pat. It could have been City Theatre's 2008 Glengarry Glen Ross if they'd substituted real estate for the automobiles.
Ah, though, the women! They captured my heart.
Melanie Dean was there as Lo, the seamstress from small town Texas, as I had predicted in an ALT review earlier in the week. It was a pleasure to hear the story of Kenneth Wayne Bradley's Seamstress a second time and to appreciate Dean's interpretation of that woman of simple heart and serene confidence.
Seattle performance artist Keira McDonald ended the evening with a wild, wild piece sending up the female astronaut who went nuts back in 2007 and drove across the country to pepper spray a love rival. I did a February 1 review of McDonald's Astronaughty for Austinist.com, part of ALT's outreach for new readers. 
The two other solo monologues were meditations on the search for love. Brash Krissi Reeves and thoughtful Joy Loveall were single women looking at that subject at different ages, from different life stations and with different expectations. Women at different points along the Tao.Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
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