Ten artists I haven't seen before

by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low • July 30, 2008 • …but whose work sure sounds interesting. Once again, the Rarig is a well-represented venue: you’ve got Adam Sharp putting on 10.10 Post 9.11: Laughter in the Aftermath and Top Hat Theatre doing Robin Hood The Musical!, both of which have caught my attention in previews. I haven’t seen any of Courtney Roche in Stupid Face, or of Rampleseed in Reincarnation: Another Chance at Failure, but both have fans who just plain won’t shut the fuck up about them to me.

Womb With a View is the blog of Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, one of five bloggers covering the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the Daily Planet.

Over at Intermedia Arts, Jared Reise is producing a show called Among the Oats. I worked with him briefly last year, in a role in which he really didn’t get the chance to spread his wings: but he impressed me in the few conversations we had backstage, and I’m curious to see what he’ll produce when he’s given a blank canvas. I have a similar sense of the intellect of Katherine Glover, who’ll be producing her first show No Stranger Than Home in the same venue.

At Mixed Blood, you have puppet show JACK by Eric van Wyk and political comedy Orange by Questionable Company Theatre, two shows that have been ridiculously – and admirably – aggressive in pimping themselves to a new audience.

For those who are into faery tales, Atomic Lotus & Invocatio is doing a Gothic ballet based on “Hansel and Gretel” (and that’s something I’m curious to see, successful or otherwise) call HafenGeist. A more thoughtful storytelling experience can be had from Klatch Productions, doing My War: From Bismarck to Britain and Back, an epistolary performance based on WWII records. And last but not least, newcomer Mother/Destroyer seems to have a notable flair for language in their maiden voyage, Skunkape Sexkult.

Whew! That’s it, until the Festival proper starts — but these last three entries cover most of the shows that have caught my attention. As for everything else — well, I’m looking forward to being surprised.

Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theatre critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theatre troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.