This year's Prague Fringe tackles hot topics with powerful performances

The Prague Fringe Festival (May 24-June 1) is an annual theater event that locals look forward to and theater enthusiasts fly in for, a must on the spring calendar of anyone looking to catch internationally renowned players on Prague’s most intimate stages.

While the Fringe program has traditionally put the focus on bombastic comedians and bawdy storytellers, there’s nothing “fringe” about the contemporary issues the festival brings to the forefront.

From gender politics to climate change, the 2019 lineup tackles all that’s trending with plenty of Fringe pizzazz, presented in tight edgy formats that are just right for the Twitter age.

Brilliant, hilarious, and talented women are a big part of the 2019 Fringe lineup. Canary focuses on a motley crew of workers doing their part for the war effort in a factory in World War I England.

Inspired by the stories of ‘The Canary Girls’ a group of women that worked with toxic chemicals, filling shell cases with TNT, the show portrays the fascinating lives of the women who went to work in munitions factories.

They have Asian features, but Czech passports. Two cultures intertwined in one body. A text-based physical piece on the issue of identity by second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in the Czech Republic.

The idea for the show stems from creator Vi and Ňun’s personal experiences being viewed as foreigners in a country, Czechia,  that they consider home. Selected for the Fresh Blood on the Scene 2019 program by Nová síť, the play not only presents the situation of the third biggest minority in Czechia — the Vietnamese — but a closer look into migration.

A pilot crashes in the Arctic. A polar bear kills its cub. Two men in lounge suits are eating snow cones in a cheap Vegas motel room. Doppelgangster’s Cold War is a thrilling, hypnotic, phantasmagoric spectacle set at the dusk of the climate crisis.

A love story loosely based on the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, this play is set in an airport at 4 am. Without the ensuing sex and stabbing, the show offers fast-paced dialogue, the occasional camel, and the ending that Juliet deserved.