At Durango High School, he played a crazy inventor, a caring father, a court attendant and a dancing horse. Last summer, in his first professional production, Misha Fristensky, 25, appeared as the clown in the Merely Players’ production of “The 39 Steps.”
“It was wonderful working again with Mona Wood-Patterson,” he said in a recent telephone interview.
Now the Class of 2006 graduate is about to step into a bigger arena: He’s become part of the professional company at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. In between Durango High and Cedar City, Utah, he studied at the University of Delaware and graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in musical theater.
Cast last year in the educational arm of USF, Fristensky, son of Frank and Victoria Fristensky, inhabited various roles. The company toured “The Taming of the Shrew” through Utah, Arizona and Nevada. In the winter, USF Artistic Directors David Ivers and Brian Vaughan attended a performance, and the next day, Fristensky said, he got a casting call for the summer company.
“I guess that was my audition,” he said. “We were setting up for the show, and David called to ask if I’d be part of the festival.”
Months and many rehearsals later, he is preparing to play Dromio of Ephesus in “The Comedy of Errors.” He also has two smaller roles in “Henry IV, Part I.”
The Utah festival is in its 54th season, a minor miracle for a regional professional theater. With an $8 million budget, USF opens six productions this week. The company will stage four Shakespearean works: “Comedy of Errors,” “Henry IV, Part I,” “Measure for Measure” and “Twelfth Night.” And as its custom, the festival will feature a major musical, “Into the Woods,” and a new play, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
With its big budget, a company brimming with Equity Actors and a reputation for spectacular costume and set designs, USF creates period pieces as well as re-imagined works. You may discover a “Shrew” set in Italy after World War II or Winter’s Tale transported to ’60s America.
For the upcoming “Comedy of Errors,” Director Brad Carroll teleported from Sicily to the American West. Two sets of twins, masters and their servants, are lost in a strange land, California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Unbeknownst to each other, the two pairs arrive at the same time, but they travel separately and wonder why everyone seems to know more about them than they do. Not until the end of the play does the mystery find resolution.
“The setting works well with the language,” Fristensky said. “There are lots of references that fit in with our ideas about the American West.”
He and his Dromio twin, actor Aaron Galligan-Stierle, will stride on stage in matching cowboy outfits to underscore their twinship. Galligan-Stierle is a young but seasoned USF pro with a flair for comic timing.
“For most of the play, we’re in different places,” Fristensky said of his onstage twin. “But at the very end, we’re finally together, and somehow everything gets sorted out. Aaron is an incredible actor. Our styles are similar, and I’m very lucky to work with him.”
What luck that “Comedy” will play in the Adams Theatre, a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the night of July 7. It happens to be Fristensky’s 26th birthday. And he happens to be a twin.
Sounds like a Shakespearean play.
If you go
The Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2014 season opened Monday. Productions will take place through Aug. 30 in the Adams Shakespearean Theatre, Cedar City, Utah. Tickets range from $17 to $73. For information visit www.bard.org or 1-800-752-9849.
