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Once again, the Minnesota Fringe Festival has been unleashed, conjuring a crazed cornucopia of artistic visions throughout the Twin Cities. The annual event has become something of a proving ground for performance based artists, both locally based and from all points beyond. Whether amateurs staging their first show or seasoned veterans honing their craft, the Fringe Fest offers eleven days of wildly versatile styles and skills. Such eclecticism allows for an astonishing range of expression and a rare opportunity for public experimentation. This year’s festival boasts of an enormous slate of 169 productions, offering enticing prospects for even the most eccentric tastes. Here’s how I spent my first go-round:
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The Damn Audition
Few productions at this year’s Fringe carry as much buzz as Joking Envelope’s latest, The Damn Audition. Starting with this show is, in a sense, stacking the critical deck. Over the last year, Joking Envelope – along with its principal creative force, the writer/director/performer, Joseph Scrimshaw - has emerged as the source of some of the most consistently hilarious original works in the Twin Cities. Scrimshaw possesses a rare talent for deriving uproarious laughs from the daily mundane, skewering character quirks and situational absurdities to remark upon our own lives. Even the most carefully calibrated humor, of course, requires a cast gifted enough to indulge farcicality without faltering to caricature. Thankfully The Damn Audition features one of the most exceptional casts of the Fest, including John Middleton, David Mann, and Randy Reyes as three aspiring actors auditioning for a lucrative starring role as the demonic title character in an insipid new sitcom, What’s Up, Satan? Middleton is the washed up former child star, Mann a struggling background actor desperate for a starring role, and Reyes the naively optimistic new arrival to L.A., convinced he can maintain his wholesome Minnesotan virtues even in the pursuit of Hollywood glory. Catering to the erratic whims of an egotistical producer (played with charmingly degraded gusto by Scrimshaw) and his jaded assistant (Maggie Chestovich wielding a fiercely jaded wit), the three actors stumble across a moral minefield all for the sake of scoring a patently horrible role. True to form, Joking Envelope’s The Damn Audition employs its wickedly observant humor toward uproarious satire. And unlike the many Fringe productions that best resemble works-in-progress, The Damn Audition feels fully developed out the gate, a scathing comedy fit to launch a full season. The only trouble with The Damn Audition is that it sets the bar so damn high for the other Fringe productions to follow.
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Fruitcake
Before embarking onto a life as a stand-up poet/comedian, Rob Gee worked eleven years as a licensed psychiatric nurse throughout England, Scotland, and Australia. Such an unusual background richly informs his one man show, Fruitcake: Ten Commandments from the Psych Ward. Projecting a crisp, charged delivery, Gee recounts tales of disorders, drugs, and general derangement – both from his certified patients and fellow medical personnel. With his lived-though details set to a fluid cadence, Gee proves a compelling storyteller. His stories alternate between the hysterical and the heartfelt, from pharmaceutical delusions to sobering insights. Through it all, Gee depicts the central figures in his warped tales as real people, struggling with relatable demons, and suggesting that we all tread closer to the precipice of mental slippage than we care to admit. Aside from some unfortunate audio difficulties during a closing song, Gee’s performance was an unforeseen highlight, a convulsively funny and surprisingly moving tribute to humanity’s collective psychosis.
The Jack Chick Plays
Years ago, while riding a bus from Minneapolis to St. Paul, I discovered a small tract on the seat beside me. Flipping through the comic drawings, I found myself enjoying the cautionary tale of a partygoer whose refusal to forsake a life of debauchery led to eternal torment in a lake of fire. Little did I know it at the time, but I had just experienced my first Jack Chick publication. Each of Jack Chick’s morality tales revolve around sin and salvation – as understood by fundamentalist Christianity. Finding unintended hilarity in the stories, Duluth’s Colder by the Lake hits upon an inspired notion – to adapt six Jack Chick tales using verbatim dialogue. The result is a comic experience of the most delightfully bizarre. Colder by the Lake approaches the material with enough straight-faced solemnity to allow the inherent ridiculousness to speak for itself. For the most part the approach pays off, producing the fantastically dire consequences of such sinful behavior as scientific belief. (Did you know that believing in evolution can cause egomaniacal delusions of being a demigod?) And though the novelty does at times threaten to wear thin, the energetic cast of Gary Kruchowski, Jess McCullough, Chris Nollet, Cathy Podeszwa, Christa Schulz, and Cheryl Skafte keep the material moving at an engagingly breezy clip. If anything else, audiences will leave with a newfound, albeit ironic, appreciation for the works of Mr. Chick.
The Princeton Seventh
Billed as a “sad comedy in two scenes,” The Princeton Seventh imagines two scenarios in which alternate versions of the same characters meet, seemingly by chance, in a hotel bar. The connection between these characters seems tenuous – each is attending a tribute to a deceased poet. But as conversations ensue, a vague mystery emerges in the shape of a shared past that entangles their present. Not having witnessed the initial run of The Princeton Seventh at the 2005 Fringe Festival, I cannot speak to any subsequent changes. But judging solely from this production, it’s easy to understand why the original was a breakout hit at that year’s Fringe. The inventive premise developed by writer/director James Vculek is not only intriguing, but delivered with an utterly disarming humor. Toward that end, the much lauded cast of Ari Hoptman, Alex Cole, Alayne Hopkins, and Richard Ooms all bring precise comic mastery to each of the two scenes, exhilarating in the dynamic power shifts that drive the work. Intricately arranged, endlessly fascinating, and persistently witty, The Princeton Seventh is simply a must see.
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