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A Pepco power outage in the H Street NE neighborhood Sunday night struck directly in the heart of Fringetown, resulting in four cancelled shows.

The call to cancel the shows came from Fringe headquarters, according to an employee at The Argonaut, one of the venues affected by the outage. Power was lost shortly after 7 p.m. and came back on just after 9 p.m. People who had purchased tickets were encouraged to go to the box office for a refund or replacement ticket, according to Capital Fringe press contact Laura Gross, who confirmed the cancellations.

The bar’s loss of power occurred midway through a performance: Pamela Meek’s one-woman show How to Be a Good Mom… When You’ve Got a Schizophrenic Mother for a Role Model. Meek was able to complete her performance by the window light and with no air conditioning, as witnessed by our own reviewer Molly Simoneau, who was in attendance. The Argonaut’s final two shows of the evening, Michael Burgos’s sold-out The Eulogy and David Kessler’s Wombat Drool, were both cancelled.

The Twitter account for The Eulogy also cited the evening’s high temperatures (north of 90 degrees Fahrenheit) as reason for the cancellation. “It was nice to speak with many of you person-to-person on the sidewalks of H St. and commiserate together,” the show’s account wrote over a series of tweets last night. “Hopefully something good, if not great, will come out of this.”

The other two cancelled shows were at the nearby Tree House Lounge: Tim Trueheart‘s 8:00 performance of his one-man show Trueheart: Live and Matthew Vaky’s 9:35 performance of his one-man show ROGER (Not His Real Name). Since his show is about a conspiracy theorist, Vaky took the opportunity to hash out some theories on Twitter.

The Atlas Performing Arts Center, another Fringe venue, was unaffected. Never Never director Kevin O’Connell, whose show was unfolding there when the outage occurred, said he was unaware of the loss of power until he left the theater.

Also unaffected was the hardware store W.S. Jenks & Son, on nearby Bladensburg Road. The store’s show that evening, Interviews With…, continued on schedule, according to director Brett Abelman (also a Fringeworthy reviewer).

Photo by Darrow Montgomery