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pegkerr) wrote2025-08-15 12:50 pm
pegkerr) wrote2025-08-15 12:50 pm
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2025 52 Card Project: Week 32: Fringe
This past week's Year of Adventure event was to attend two Minnesota Fringe Festival shows as a guest of naomikritzer and her husband Ed. If you're not familiar with the Fringe Festival, it's a week in which local theater venues and actors (amateur and professional) put on forty or fifty of shows over the course of about a week, some written entirely for the occasion. The festival has been running for years.
We saw "The Book of Mordor," (Lord of the Rings crossed with The Book of Mormon) and a parody of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," entitled "Our Zombie Town." We went out to dinner together between the two shows.
I've attended a couple of Fringe shows previously with Fiona, but it has been years. I enjoyed both performances.
I have never seen The Book of Mormon, but from what I know about the story, the crossover worked surprisingly well. There were funny bits of stage business, and the performance was satisfying.
As for the other show, I've been in Our Town myself, and I enjoyed this parody. Some parts were ragged, but the final image (the people of the town sitting in separate chairs, each glued to their phones, their faces illuminated only by the phone light) has stuck with me since I've seen the show. It's a perfect parody of the last act (in which people in the chairs represented the dead in the graveyard) and a sly response to what has always seemed to me to be the most important line in the last act of the original: "Let's look at one another!"
Good theater makes you think as well as laugh, and that final image will stick with me.
Image description: Top: Promotional picture for Fringe show 'Our Zombie Town,' a parody of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Four people stare as if hypnotized at their phones, ignoring the viewer, their faces lit by the phone screen. Semi-transparent stage lights are overlaid over this picture, giving the picture a greenish cast. Bottom: Promotional picture for Fringe Show 'The Book of Mordor' (Frodo holds up the ring on a chain). Center: a Fringe 2025 button. Right a Fringe line flag.
Fringe
Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
naomikritzer and her husband Ed. If you're not familiar with the Fringe Festival, it's a week in which local theater venues and actors (amateur and professional) put on forty or fifty of shows over the course of about a week, some written entirely for the occasion. The festival has been running for years. We saw "The Book of Mordor," (Lord of the Rings crossed with The Book of Mormon) and a parody of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," entitled "Our Zombie Town." We went out to dinner together between the two shows.
I've attended a couple of Fringe shows previously with Fiona, but it has been years. I enjoyed both performances.
I have never seen The Book of Mormon, but from what I know about the story, the crossover worked surprisingly well. There were funny bits of stage business, and the performance was satisfying.
As for the other show, I've been in Our Town myself, and I enjoyed this parody. Some parts were ragged, but the final image (the people of the town sitting in separate chairs, each glued to their phones, their faces illuminated only by the phone light) has stuck with me since I've seen the show. It's a perfect parody of the last act (in which people in the chairs represented the dead in the graveyard) and a sly response to what has always seemed to me to be the most important line in the last act of the original: "Let's look at one another!"
Good theater makes you think as well as laugh, and that final image will stick with me.
Image description: Top: Promotional picture for Fringe show 'Our Zombie Town,' a parody of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Four people stare as if hypnotized at their phones, ignoring the viewer, their faces lit by the phone screen. Semi-transparent stage lights are overlaid over this picture, giving the picture a greenish cast. Bottom: Promotional picture for Fringe Show 'The Book of Mordor' (Frodo holds up the ring on a chain). Center: a Fringe 2025 button. Right a Fringe line flag.
Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
