Acting Minnesotan

I had intended for this installment to be a sober (you can see where it’s going wrong already, can’t you?) and thoughtful examination of the influence of the greater Minnesota experience on our theater scene. I’m talking the bumper sticker and T-shirt stuff here: bomber hats, cheap beer, plaid shirts, frostbite, church suppers, church, polka dancing, small town living, nuns, big-hearted liberals and wacky conservatives, snowplows, funny accents. Because let’s face it, whether you love it or hate it, whether it’s subtle or all up in your face, there’s a lot of that stuff on stages around here. Though I think it’s also very Minnesotan not to admit it—which you know, if you’ve had that conversation about the way people talk in the movie Fargo where you deny that people around here talk that way. Instead, I have a new game we can all play: Jeff Hatcher, a Minnesota playwright who’s way up on a lot of people’s funniest person alive list, answered my Minnesota style question like this: “Whenever I think of Minnesota-style theater, I picture a standing ovation for a performer who looks like the illegitimate child of [fill in the blank] and [fill in the blank], wearing only a lumberjack shirt and false modesty.” Now, he put names in there. Really, really funny names. But Jeff is a man of exquisite sensitivity as well as a lover of cruel jokes, so he wrote me back pretty quickly and changed the original names to some other names that were equally hilarious. I don’t know if he thought the replacements were less likely to sue or kill themselves, but I’m sure he has a much better sense of things like that than I do (having not been raised by wolves). Anyway, I think it’s more fun to fill in your own set of names. It’s a great joke no matter who you put into it, but I think it’s best if you choose a performer with explicitly Minnesotan characteristics in the first blank and someone blatantly non-Minnesotan (yet currently working here) in the second. That was the spirit of the original, and I’ve tried endless pairs of names over the last few days with excellent results. You can also be more abstract, putting in the names of shows or organizations that fit the requirements. For example, try ". . . the illegitimate child of We Gotta Bingo and The Seafarer.” It’s even pretty funny if you drop the illegitimate child part. That Jeff Hatcher kills me. Go away now and try it for a while. I’d offer to host a contest for the best results but I don’t know how, I’m lazy, and I don’t have anything to give away. So, like nearly everything else in life, you’re going to have to do this for your own amusement. There. Wasn’t that fun? And you’ve generated a couple of great lists that we can work with for the rest of this installment. The second list will be artists who mostly came here from elsewhere, were lured here somehow, and stayed on to become part of the scene. The funniest names on this list will be maybe a little pretentious, intellectual, complicated. When you’ve heard them talk about what they do on public radio, it’s been very exciting and you feel like you’re right there with them at the time, but later while talking to people at the bar, you find yourself unable to explain what they said. Like when you’ve read one of those Stephen Hawking books. Or a Tom Stoppard play. On the other list are people who really exploit their Minnesotan qualities, like "professional" Minnesotans. When I first moved here from Texas, I recognized the similarity right away. Texans love to play at being Texans. Lots of them line dance and drive pickup trucks and eat fried testicles (look it up if you must, Mountain Oysters, but I’m not kidding) and dress like they are prepared to drive a herd of two thousand cattle to Mexico at a moment’s notice. Or shoot you with a legally concealed handgun. Even my elderly Aunt Dorothy packed heat in Texas. This Texan pseudo-personality is a lot of fun. At least I enjoyed it, and it serves as a kind of low-level ironic resistance to the Malling of the world, those forces of consumerization which will inevitably place four Bed Bath & Beyond’s at the four corners of The Mall of Afghanistan in a suburb of Kabul exactly like the four in the Mall of America in Bloomington. I’m willing to accept that there are a few genuinely unironic, shit-kicking, mean-ass, big-hatted Texans scattered around that vast and desolate landscape. But they are an endangered species. And they will tell you this themselves if you run into one who actually speaks. There are also probably some Minnesotans left who wear the funny hats and eat head cheese (go ahead and look that one up) and lutefish and talk that way without irony--I’ll buy that. I just won’t buy that the unironic ones are theater folk. The elephant in the room is A Prairie Home Companion, the retailing giant of all things Minnesotan. My mother died believing that if she came to visit me here she would find Garrison Keillor whittlin' and spittin' by the stove in the general store in Lake Wobegon. Ma, I told her, don’t come, it’ll break your heart. I’d say that playing Minnesotan is part of the Minnesota style of theater, to a degree that playing local is probably not in the Delaware or Idaho scene. And I’d say that it carries with it a good dose of nostalgia, a gentle goofiness, lots of Sears and Dickie work clothes, hat hair, and a feeling of not being exactly put together, hip, or slick. With the understanding of course that the person underneath the Minnesotan may be very put together, hip, and slick indeed. Just don’t wait for any of them to admit it. A brief final note on Jeff’s joke: He mentions the amazing Minnesota standing ovation. If you just walked in, let me assure you that Minnesota audiences have no peer at standing and ovating. They do it more and faster and longer than anybody else anywhere ever. The Minnesota standing ovation is so extraordinary that I have come to suspect that Minnesota audiences are somehow all descended from the mysterious Spring Heeled Jack (please, please, look this one up, he’s wonderful). That’s it for this edition of "Elements of Style," Minnesota Edition. Do your homework. I’m just going to pretend you’re all standing now.