Best of 2013-2014: These 6 moments

Editor's Note: For the last four years, we've honored the new theater season with a look back at what made for great work in the past theater season. If you enjoy what you read here, please help us pay for more great writing by joining our Indiegogo campaign. I don't get a chance to see a lot of shows. I'm always in production, in rehearsal, in a workshop or on my computer writing something for this magazine, so I don't get to see as much theater as I like. So, I'm probably not the best source for defining what's "best" in Twin Cities theater. When I do go to see theater, I tend to see things at the smaller end of the spectrum. This means that I'm constantly seeing shows that maybe only a few hundred (or a few dozen, or just a few) people have seen. It's hard to talk about things in terms of "best" to people when we haven't all seen enough of the same body of work. There's just no way to make those comparisons work. Instead, what follows is a list of the moments from the past theater season that stuck with me and that I still think about. I won't tell you that everything listed below here is from a play that I would consider to be the "best", but these brief moments are what made theater worthwhile to me in the past year. Four Humors' Lolita: A Three Man Show

Right off the bat, you're probably going to quibble that this play was in the 2013 Fringe Festival and therefore not eligible for inclusion in this season. I'm slipping this one in here through a loophole, though, since I also saw it later at the (sadly) now-defunct Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview. The Moment: An unstoppable daredevil improvised monologue There are so many moments in this show that are worthy of remembering. Nobody in the Twin Cities can pack as many beautifully funny moments into one 45-minute show as these guys can. Which one do I choose? The argument discussion of Shelly Winters vs. Shelly Duvall that descends into a surprising three-man rendition of a song from the Popeye movie? The entire twisted dynamic of Humbert Humbert's relationship with Lolita and her mother played out wordlessly through lewd hand gestures? The last look of confusion/revulsion/embarrassment on the actors' faces just after they realize what a moral trainwreck the movie really is and just before they shut the lights off? For me, it was a brilliant extended monologue fabricated entirely anew each night by Matt Spring for a character that had only two lines in the original movie. I only realized that this bit was improvised after this second chance I got to view the show again down in Plainview. Spring moved boldly through an increasingly bizarre improvisation built upon random thoughts tossed at him by his castmates before the beginning of the show and made it look like flawlessly scripted and acted lunacy. It was the theatrical equivalent of watching a daredevil stunt pilot: I was sure at every moment that it was going to crash and burn, but somehow this extended bit just kept flying, and every bit of it was exciting and hilarious.

First of all, kudos to Swandive for commissioning a new script and going with it without the usual years of workshopping the playwright's work into dust. The text was absolutely insane, and the actors and director committed to it to an impressive degree. Bryan Grosso was a pure force of nature as grandstanding moralizer Cotton Mather, and Adelin Phelps, as the last carrier pigeon Martha Washington, broke my heart on more than one occasion. The Moment: A spectacular set This is kind of a cop out, because the moment that is seared into my brain from this production is not even in the play proper. It was actually the moment I walked into the space and saw the glorious spectacle of the set. With a tiny budget, set designer Ursula K. Bowden, assistant Corinna Knepper Troth and space/prop designer Sean McArdle begged, borrowed and stole just about everything they could get their hands on to construct an elaborate and richly detailed behemoth artpiece for the actors to play on. If you have ever been to the theater at the Cedar-Riverside People's Center, with it's multi-story walkup, you'll get an idea of just how high the difficulty level was for them to pull this off; and it was worth it. This beautiful set created a pocket universe inside the theater that transported me. Sure, the world it took me to was a little demented and nonsensical, but the journey to get there was magic.

If you're at all interested in this thing called "devised theater", you should be watching Jon Ferguson's work. Even those times when his plays feel unfinished, buried in each one of them you will find some of the most gorgeous moments. When Ferguson and Theatre Forever are on really on the ball, though, they can turn out a play like Muy Very Authentico, which starts off with a ridiculous, clownish premise and elevates it to a sublime place without any hitches. The Moment: A beautifully sincere monologue in Spanish Like Lolita above, this play was chock full of moments: Allison Witham's uptight and unflappable tour guide (basically, pick any moment with her) and Alex Hathaway's over-the-top crying/triumphant speech that carried him out into the audience on an extended improvisation were particularly funny. But the absolute killer moment of the show involved no clowning or laughter. It was the moment that Jason Rojas came on stage to deliver the most earnest and sincere monologue I saw all last season. Completely in Spanish (with no translation or subtitles), he recalled the beauty of Michoacan, Mexico when the monarch butterflies arrive in droves to wait out the winter. It was a haunting, longing, speech full of joy and regret, about the authentic beauty of his home. How good was it? It was so damn good you didn't need to understand Spanish to know what he was saying.

Playwright George Brant is starting to hit the big time now. His one-woman show Grounded is now starting to make the rounds of the regional theater circuit, and everyone is oo-ing and aw-ing over its take on a contentious contemporary issue. However, last year, when Pro Rata staged his (I think) far superior play Elephant's Graveyard, no one was really talking about him; which is too bad, because Elephant's Graveyard speaks to so many myths and tragedies of America's past that define us today that it should be required reading in an American history course. The story of an unseen elephant being executed for murder may seem like some kind of joke, but this play handles it with deceptively simple grace. The Moment: A clown who made me cry This was a pretty stellar cast all around, but I have to zero in on one thing, so I'm going to call out one guy. Neal Skoy is an occasional actor around the Twin Cities, but his major line of work is as a professional clown (or maybe you've seen him as the village idiot at the Renaissance Festival); and he's very, very good at it. However, in Elephant's Graveyard, he did not play The Clown. Instead, Skoy portrayed the doomed elephant's trainer, and because of it, he was able to deliver the most wrenching speech I saw last season. In a few heart-shattering minutes, he described the awful moment in which he was forced to misuse the trust he had developed with his beloved elephant over many years to lead the animal to its execution. I'm actually tearing up right now thinking about it. That's how hard that moment kicked me in the chest.

Ryan Underbakke is one the most inventive young directors working in town right now, and he really knows how to man the helm of a devised piece. I'm really looking forward to his upcoming adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at Children's Theatre; but earlier this year he took some time off from that giant project to do a smaller-scale affair at Bedlam Theater's new Lowertown space. It was a grisly little tale of a family feud in a rural Minnesota town that escalated into a full-on massacre, which I got to enjoy while eating a sandwich (Bedlam is a crazy place). It was a Fringe-length piece—and I don't usually say this—but it actually has plenty of room to expand should Underbakke ever decide to pick it up again. The Moment: A grisly, slow motion climax There were plenty of good physical moments in this piece, but most of them were in service to ramping up to the final moment that really brought the house down. In a gloriously extended slow motion sequence, we watched the murderous family at the center of the story run from their burning home and be gunned down one by one by a posse. The audience saw every bullet strike home, saw every moment of pain and grit, saw every final breath, and it was mesmerizing. The level of detail and physical dedication in this one sequence was more than most full-length shows can muster in an entire run.

Out of all the plays on this list, this is the one that I'm sure the least number of people saw, since it was a Fringe show, that did no advertising, from a guy who had never been to the Fringe Festival before. Multidisciplinary performance artist Ryan Dean turned out the most balls-to-the-wall, "what the hell is going on here?", weirdly engaging thing I saw at the 2014 Fringe. It's difficult to explain, but let me try to sum up: a thrash electronic noise dance explosion about a lone man traveling through the depths of space in a junker spaceship in search of the Party Planet with only his obnoxious (and maybe malevolent) invisible robot to accompany him. That really doesn't even do it justice. I hate to sound pretentious about this, but if you weren't there, you missed out, and there's no real way to explain it to you. The Moment: A high octane solo dance to the light of technology Just as the aggressive music and even more aggressive breaking of the fourth wall was about to get old, Dean stepped away from his pile of electronic toys and turned the show into a high octane solo dance piece. It was a muscular, powerful set of motions, mostly lit by the lights of his control console and the random flickering of a TV tuned to static; but the moment that really mattered was the moment right at the end, when an exhausted Dean claws his way across the floor, drawn toward the television static. I am still wrapping my mind around everything that I saw in Lazerjuice, (though guess I could get profound and say that it was about the monumental struggle to find humanity and connection in a world increasingly inundated by impersonal technology), but if this has at all peaked your curiosity, The Live Instructional Video exists outside of the Fringe as a bizarre music/physical performance group that has just released a new LP.