Resilience was the theme Saturday at Catharsis Time. A relaxed, mental-health Rochester Fringe Festival show – is “show” the right word? – at School of the Arts.

This was the fourth year for these Catharsis confessionals. And sure, this evening opened as a show, with High Strung, the ukulele duo of Sara Zavacki-Moore and Christa Marshall. Yet the music was also the introduction to guests with some heavy thoughts on personal resilience. As Zavacki-Moore noted, “Too many years I’ve been wasting my thoughts on the wrong things.”

Starting with psychotherapist and improvisational wiseass Laura Fleming recalling, after some teenage misbehavior, the evening the cops escorted her son home. Leading to a parent-child understanding Fleming labeled as “Radical Acceptance.”

The catharsis moments continued to unfold with Luane Davis Haggerty, sharing her dyslexic ways, in “The Write Way.” Patty Farneth’s “Peace Garden” veered off in a tribute to Kamala Harris before she shared her own youthful resilience as “an attention-getting device.”

Tricia Campbell, a longtime Fringe performer, pointed out that the calendar can always be your savior in “Wake Me Up When F*cking September Ends.” Peter Haggerty coined a theme for the evening: “Long live resilience in whatever form it takes.”

Laura Taylor shared her weight struggles as a child: she survived that trauma nicely, although some issues may remain in her role a host of local murder mystery dinner theater shows.

In Matt Moore’s “Weird Resilience,” the playwright, cartoonist and the show’s co-creator noted the seriousness carried within resilience: “If we believe absurdities, we will accept atrocities.”

Penny Sterling, a familiar face on the local theater scene, revealed an unfamiliar aspect of herself. In “Balance,” she stood on one foot, like a stork. Storks are good with balance. Then she sat, rolled up a pants leg, and showed how she had lost the lower part of that leg in an elevator accident. “Every step we take,” Sterling said, reflecting on her lost leg, and life in general, “is a leap of faith.”

Catharsis Time returns, with some of the same cast members, and a few different ones, at 7 p.m. Sept. 26 at School of the Arts, 45 Prince St. And, a bonus: some of the Catharsis Time cast will be at the Henrietta Public Library, 625 Calkins Road, presenting a free expressive writing workshop from noon to 1 p.m. on Oct. 3.

Jeff Spevak, a former sportswriter, a former arts writer, a former radio commentator, can be reached at jeffspevakwriter@gmail.com.