2010 Minnesota Fringe Festival: First quick look at the slate of shows

By Quinton Skinner Fri., Jun. 4 2010 at 8:00 AM

Categories: Theater

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Love at a knife's edge: "Kill Will" at the 2010 Minnesota Fringe

A quick visit to the offices of the Minnesota Fringe Festival in Northeast Minneapolis this week saw the staff settling into its new, relatively spacious digs. And more pertinently, we came away with the roster of shows comprising this summer's slate. The short show descriptions that accompany the list are always tremendous: some amazingly literal and succinct, some evocative, some confusing, some outright Dada. Here are some early favorites:

Kill Will by Joshua Brown and Kelly Elliott:

"Murder. Revenge. Suicide. Cannibalism. The new Tarantino movie? No, it's Shakespeare! A riotous romp through the canon that asks, "How many characters can you kill in one hour?'"

Show Goons by One of a Kind Productions:

"Four men have found themselves in rough patches in their lives. Answering classified ads they stumble on the chance of a lifetime: Becoming a henchman for Robocalypse, a well known and dangerous supervillain."

Superlatives of Excellence: A Jamboree of Breviloquent Masterworks by Josef Evans by Bedlam Theatre:

"A self-proclaimed genius performs odd plays in his grandparents' garage. Interlopers disrupt his plans; rampant peculiarities ensue. From the folks who brought you '06 Encore hit Love in a Time of Rinderpest."

There Is No Isabelle by Dylan Lamb:

"A college dropout comes home after years away to tell his out-of-work father and pill-popping mother that he is going to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Isabelle. 'Wait, but I thought the title was . . . '"

That Sara Aziz! by Saval Players:

"Do Prada shoes clash with a hijab? Is Sara an anorexic nymphomaniac? Four stylish, successful sophisticates answer these questions and more in less time than it takes a cougar to score her next morsel."

Now: we're just scratching the surface here, and this is more or less a random sample. But reading those descriptions, don't you think: hmm, those could be pretty good? The Fringe awaits.