Salt Lake City, UT—at the 2025 Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival
“A junkyard fable that finds grace in the gutter—Park Bench Royalty is beautiful, broken, and fiercely alive.”
—Rhetorical Review
In Park Bench Royalty, playwright and performer A.B. Harrison conjures a tender, tenacious junkyard fable from the margins. Presented by Salt Monster Theatre Co. at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival, this scrappy, soulful two-hander fuses raw physicality, poetic monologue, and puppetry to honor those we so often overlook.
The setup is deceptively simple: a homeless man lays claim to a forgotten patch of sidewalk. He spreads out a blanket, adjusts a flower, and ties a bandana around his neck. Dressed in muted colors and a comically large nose—part clown, part street prophet—he begins performing the quiet rituals of survival. He pretends he’s in a French bistro, complete with accent. He smokes a found cigarette like a rare indulgence. And he talks to a photograph: “I hope you’re happy wherever you are.”
The world he occupies is both present and imagined, stitched together from city sounds, memories, and ambient audio clips. Disembodied voices bark at him—“Turn off that music!” “You can’t loiter here!”—until they blur into the fabric of his inner monologue. Car horns, screeching tires, radio static, and a child who leaves behind a slice of vanilla cake—all fold into his collage of reverie and resistance.
Then comes the dog.
Rachael Pace’s expressive puppetry and voice work are masterful. The dog—filthy, tongue lolling—isn’t just cute; it’s a force. At first, the man resists: “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.” He sets rules. “No barking. No begging. No licking of the face.” The dog breaks all three. Still, the man doesn’t send it away. He complains, but shares the cake. He scolds, but lets the dog stay. “Temporary roommates,” he decides.
What follows is both a survival story and an unexpected love story—not romantic, but the stubborn, necessary love that grows between two beings who refuse to leave each other. They dig through the trash together. They find a rusty fork (“only minor rust—we love to see it”), a used condom, a golden watch. The man tries to hawk the watch and an old wallet, but no one bites—until a shop owner offers food, if it’s shared with the dog. Even a cop softens at the sight of the mutt. “Cute dog,” he says, before moving them along.
In one of the play’s funniest sequences, the pair put on a street show. The dog flashes signs that say “Laugh” and “Applause.” The man calls him Sir Ruffington of the King’s Court. “Lick your king,” he commands, and then to the crowd: “Tip your servers. Neuter your pets.” He jokes that the dog is secretly reading Karl Marx. After counting their tips he declares to the dog: “For tonight, we feast at McDonald’s.”
But it’s not all laughter. Beneath the absurdity is ache. “The last time I had someone I cared about,” the man confesses, “she left. I won’t let myself be loved again.” And yet, here he is, letting the dog curl beside him as they sleep. Eventually, he removes the bandana from his own neck and ties it gently around the dog’s. The gesture says everything.
Harrison’s writing walks a delicate line between absurd and sacred. It never dips into pity or sentimentality, but insists on the humanity in every discarded thing: a fork, a puppet, a man. The handmade aesthetic—cardboard altars, trash-treasure props, a dog with a dangling pink tongue—amplifies the play’s raw intimacy. Street sounds and ghostly voices layer over each other until you’re unsure what’s real, only that you feel it.
The final scene offers no neat ending. Just a soft, unresolved moment—like life itself. For some, it may feel sudden. But that’s the point. It asks: How quickly do we turn away from others’ pain? How often do we pass by, unmoved?
In a Fringe lineup full of flash, Park Bench Royalty stands apart for its handmade heart, poetic grit, and radical empathy. It’s not poverty porn. It’s not a joke with a punchline. It’s something rarer—a beautiful, broken hymn to survival, companionship, and the stories we build from scraps.
If you catch it, you’ll walk away quietly wrecked—but changed.
Meet the Team
A.B. Harrison
The Man · Playwright & Performer
Writer, director, and founding member of Salt Monster Theatre Co., Harrison brings raw intensity and lyrical storytelling to the role of “The Man”—a character born from scraps, memory, and ritual.
The Dog
Star of the Show
Flea-bitten, soulful, and stitched together from society’s leftovers, this unforgettable puppet companion carries the emotional core of the show with unexpected charm and bite.
Rachael Pace
Puppeteer
A skilled movement artist and puppeteer, Pace animates “The Dog” with empathy and precision—blurring the line between object and emotion in every scene.
Salt Monster Theatre Co.
Production Company
Founded in 2024, Salt Monster is dedicated to fusing puppetry, movement, and radical storytelling into theatre that is strange, scrappy, and beautifully unpolished. They build weird worlds by hand—and Park Bench Royalty is one of their finest.
Tickets & Show Info
Title: Park Bench Royalty
Written & Performed by: A.B. Harrison
Puppeteer: Rachael Pace
Presented by: Salt Monster Theatre Co.
Venue: Alliance Theater – Black Box
Runtime: Approximately 60 minutes
Rating: FF – Fairly Fringe-y (PG-13)
Website: https://www.abharrison.com/park-bench-royalty
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saltmonstertheatreco/
Showtimes
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- Friday, July 25 – 9:00 PM
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- Sunday, July 27 – 1:30 PM
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- Friday, August 1 – 7:30 PM
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- Saturday, August 2 – 10:30 PM
Tickets
General Admission: $15
Available online at:
tickets.greatsaltlakefringe.org
About the Playwright: A. B. Harrison
Playwright · Director · Puppetmaker · Educator
A. B. Harrison is a Salt Lake City–based playwright whose work explores the visceral, the hidden, the tormented-yet-beautiful, and the absurd aspects of human life. Their plays fuse raw emotion with poetic grit, often blending text, movement, and puppetry to create stories that live beyond the page.
Harrison’s writing leans into vulnerability and theatrical risk—favoring characters on the margins and moments that pulse with tension, tenderness, and contradiction. Their direction and dramaturgy bring these same values to the stage, guiding performers through work that is as emotionally charged as it is formally inventive.
Also a puppetmaker and educator, Harrison brings a deep understanding of physical storytelling to the writing process. They craft narratives that challenge expectations, evoke empathy, and refuse to look away from what’s been buried.
Largely self-taught, Harrison studied puppet construction through vintage manuals and countless YouTube tutorials, drawing particular inspiration from the late Adam Kreutinger of the PuppetNerd channel. His handcrafted puppets, often echoing the spirit of Jim Henson, reflect a deep respect for tactile storytelling and character creation. In Park Bench Royalty, Harrison not only wrote and starred in the piece but also built the show’s central puppet—infusing it with soul, texture, and movement. His creative practice continues to honor the craft, mentorship, and playfulness that puppetry inspires.
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