#OrdinaryHeroes, Minneapolis Ballet Dancers
I wanted to see some dance, and this, thanks to the hashtag in the title, was first in the alphabetical listing of Fringe shows. The theme was supposed to be heroes; I did not notice this theme actually appearing in the dance numbers, except for maybe one. A lot of it was student work, but there were a few standout numbers, including a woman doing what I can only describe as contortionist art in pointe shoes. It was worth the price of admission for that.
Dungeons and Cabins, Samantha Mae Productions, written by Aaron Vanek
A play about a group of recent high school grads who are snowed in at their cabin get-together, so they get out an old D&D game. The cast was five young actors portraying the players, plus four older actors playing their characters. It was delightful: there was a story told both in and out of the game, and the interplay between the players and their characters was really funny. The play was written by one of the younger actors and produced by one of the older ones, who was also his aunt, and overall it was a very Fringe show in the best way: nerdy, friendly, funny, physically simple and artistically ambitious. It was also sincere, which can be a tricky quality to maintain in comedy/dramas; this company used the comedy while staying committed to the story. This experience was also improved by the fact that I ran into a friend who was only in town for a few days, and we swapped RPG stories in between this and the next show we saw, which was:
Mad as Nell, or, How to Lose a Bly in Ten Days, Rinky Dink Productions
Comedy about Nelly Bly's investigative sojourn in a mental hospital. The other patients in the hospital were treated as comic subjects at first, and I don't feel certain whether that was done in the best way it could have been; but the play turned that around once Nelly came to understand what flimsy excuses had gotten them checked in, and how the institution was driving them out of their minds. They all became quite heroic once given the opportunity. Extra points for the rapid-fire, never-faltering dialogue from everybody involved. (A favorite moment: someone asks about the number of bones in the human body; a patient passes by and says "270 at birth, 206 by adulthood after some of them fuse"; and another patient yells at her, "Stop knowing how many bones there are, Sarah!") It's odd: if I were choosing a way to tell this story, I wouldn't necessarily choose comedy as the medium; but if I were making a comedy, I could do a lot worse than make one with the message that it's important not to treat femaleness as a mental illness.
Cat Confidential: The Secret Lives of the Mothers of Lions, Weggel Productions
Mostly a storytelling show, with some songs and sketches. Sweet, heartfelt, and vulnerable, this was a tribute to what cats bring to people's lives and to the value of opening your heart to something. Some stories were better than others but this was well worth the trip and made me feel like all of us who turned out for it, at 5:30 on a Tuesday, were part of a real community for a little while, especially when we got to pet a real cat at the end.
You Are Cordially Invited to the Life and Death of Edward Lear, The Winding Sheet Outfit
This one is tied for my favorite of the year. It's a tribute to the life of Edward Lear, Victorian artist and nonsense poet, and to the endeavor to pull sense from nonsense (or vice versa). The narrator, company founder Amber Bjork, stood at a lectern and tried in a businesslike way to give Lear a fitting eulogy. Meanwhile the rest of the cast played with their hoopskirts, messed around on various instruments, kicked a hackysack around, and generally refused to take the business as seriously as they were instructed. The actor who played Lear was a standout--all of his lines were taken from Lear's writings, and he pulled deep tenderness from a performance built mostly out of nonsense verse. When I read about this show, I was initially worried it would just be a meta-show that used Lear as a framing device, but it contained quite a lot of his life and work. The company was masterful at pacing, too: they raced full speed ahead on the nonsense but would break for serious moments. There was an impressionistic staging of a seizure--Lear was epileptic, a fact he kept secret--and it imitated not how a seizure looks but how totally it takes control of a body, with the whole cast surrounding and whispering at Lear while he vaguely tried to speak a sentence and couldn't get past the word "existence." By the time Fringe was over I had memorized the description for this show, which was ambitious but perfectly fitting:
There once was a man who drew parrots
And wrote many poems of merit
We'll look in his mirror
And find life is dearer
Existence so sweet none can bear it.
A Confederate Widow in Hell, Breaker/Fixer Productions
This show ties with Lear for my favorite. It's a two-person show in which only one person speaks, the late mistress of a Civil-War-era plantation in Mississippi, who tells the story of her marriage, downfall, and death and then peers into our present to find out how the South is faring. She also plays an accordion, possesses the bodies of several of her descendants, and carries out a frantic dialogue with her husband, who knocks on the door she refuses to answer. This is a searing piece of work. My favorite part was how disdainful the protagonist, Dolores, was of her children and other descendants, who get hung up on the story of the old south and retrench themselves in their Mississippi home, making it a backwater, when she, an heiress from Virginia, saw herself as an international economic player--all of which comes across as an indictment of both Dolores and everyone who picks up the wrong cues in the attempt to honor her legacy. It was also surprisingly funny; when she's telling the story of her house getting burned down, she manages to draw quite sharp comedy from her insistence that this is the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody in any war. A master class in how a theater artist can commit to a role and make it three-dimensional without asking for the audience to sympathize. After the standing ovation, the actor playing the widow took off his dress, stood before us in a t-shirt and underskirt, and asked us to donate to the SPLC and buy a button if we wanted: "There is no ethical consumption under late capitalism, but we do take cash."
Some reviewers on the Fringe site complained about this woman's story being portrayed by a man. I don't think this is a real problem but I've been trying to articulate why. (Analogies aren't helpful--this is not "like blackface" as some would claim because drag has never been performed, attended, created, or viewed in the same way as blackface.) I think it serves a couple purposes: first, it distances us a bit from the idealized, corseted, porcelain femininity that is sometimes associated with this era. And second, it reinforces the kinship between Dolores and ourselves: we are like her to the extent that we benefit from violent and unjust systems, whether or not we identify with her on a superficial level. The actor is as indicted in the system as the audience. Ironically, perhaps, I can't imagine this show being nearly as strong if he'd portrayed a man. A Confederate soldier would have simply gone off to war; this woman (the show argues, convincingly) held the reins of her plantation, and if we want to reckon with the legacy of the confederacy we have to reckon with the violence of its feminine and domestic sphere, whose effects were never limited to women or the home.
Beowulf, adapted by Charlie Bethel, performed by John Heimbuch
Those previous two shows were devised theater, a term I don't know how to define; this one is storytelling, as pure as it comes. One man, a stool, a glass of water. Absolutely spellbinding. Included a few comic asides without ever breaking the spell. In its way, as gripping a meditation on mortality as Edward Lear. Don't know why I am describing it in sentence fragments. Charlie Bethel's translation is blank verse, with enough alliteration to pay tribute to the Old English verse pattern. John Heimbuch's delivery was clean, direct, and committed. I don't go in much for stories of heroes, still less of war heroes, but it was tremendously moving to look back over the thousand years between Beowulf's world and ours and see someone trying to live a life worth remembering.
