#mnfringe

A powerful production that begs to be watched hits #mnfringe Live Digital Hub

By: Ricky and Dana Young-Howze

Minnesota Fringe Festival

When we heard about this play we felt excited because Dana and I bonded over our love of Basquiat when we first started dating. Basquiat’s work was one of the first that seemed to jump out of the page of the art textbook because it didn’t seem to even belong there. You just knew that his work lived on the walls of a subway in NYC. Little did we know that when we followed the zoom link to the see Ma’at Atkin’s show that we would be just as entranced by this show as we were his art. This show was brought to life by the production team of Ma’at Atkins, Andrea Jacobs, Tondra Mosley, Leanne-Joshua White, and Jaron Hicks and found a permanent home in our hearts and minds.

William Stratford is a free spirit painter that refuses to be caged. As a complicated artist he decides to complicate his life further by joining three relationships that themselves are all equally as complicated.

This is the first time I saw a production use sets and camera angles in a way that totally brought the production to the next level. We absolutely loved their novel idea of using still pictures of outside locations to serve as “bumps” that grounded us in space and time. It was a very interesting and effective choice that we had never seen. It provided a uniformity and aesthetic to the play that seated us in the world of the play.

The director certainly deserves high praise for blocking things in such a way that the camera worked for them. The love scene between William and Shareen could easily have fallen flat. But using creative blocking and camera angles we felt a sexual tension that you could cut with a knife.

Chenzo Samuels as Guy Foreman Kenwood gave us a genuine creepy vibe in any scene he stepped into. I think we all know some creepy business types like that. Micah Bijon as William seemed to have the most difficult time between the accent and being in love with/in need of everyone else. I saw this in his eyes that always seemed to be knowing more than he let on. (Since we’ve started reviewing Zoom plays we’ve noticed that eye “acting” is especially crucial right about now). Leanne-Joshua White as Shareen had the energy and her anger felt so real and palpable it felt like it was coming from real fear and emotional exhaustion. Katt Balsan’s naivete as Robyn in the beginning and emotional arc in the end sold the part to us.

Where everyone’s acting had their high spots we felt that some time doing more character work and getting chemistry down would have been useful. Sometimes it seemed that any dips in actor chemistry seemed to outweigh the extreme highs and connections. Doing character work now to get every moment into the stratosphere would be a great investment.

It took all three writers to come together and create dialogue you could feel like sleet pelting on your face. There are some lines that have a primalness that goes beyond the screen and straight out into the atmosphere. It feels rooted in something deep down in the writers’ souls. However there were some things that felt lacking such as backstory. Dana had big questions like “what is William’s backstory?” and “how did he meet Shareen?” Also what cements William’s job as protagonist except for the fact that he is having a relationship with three of the other characters? What does William want? Some more time developing these kinds of things can be spent to turn this already good play into amasterpiece that stands the test of time.

Dana thought the story was well paced with complicated layers and realistic problems done in a dynamic way. It could have been confusing but the out of order timeline was still easy to follow. We applaud the writers for having the courage of letting the complicated relationships drive the plot forward.

I would beg them to keep the juicy dialogue and the poetic sense of diction and rhythm. I found myself not wanting to watch any more because of this richness of sound that washed over me. However I knew if I shut my eyes I would miss out on the scenes where every frame was a painting.

This is a very professional production with the use of graphics, set design, and music bringing a very high level of polish to the production. It’s very well written and has enough details in the writing that gives clues to the character’s inner monologue. This is the first review we’re given too much stuff to talk about. That’s high praise coming from us.

Our third panel was intended to center around gender, sexuality, and intersectionality, and to a degree, it did. But due to the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, and an officer-involved shooting of a black man in North Minneapolis all happening within 36 hours of the discussion, we changed course.

The discussion included 5 luminaries of local activism: Andrea Jenkins, Marcela Michelle, Taiyon J. Coleman, Erica Fields, and Lisa Stratton. I have never in my life experienced such powerful thoughtfulness as I did during this discussion, and it’s re-framed everything I think about how I interact with people since.

The discussion started with a recounting of the past days’ horrors, and a careful association to white supremacy. Because, even the man who shot his wife and was subsequently shot by Minneapolis police was acting in a way commensurate with white male patriarchy. We take, and when what we want is not given freely, we take by force. This is modeled in every version of white male patriarchy since before the Roman empire.

We talked about how white male supremacist behavior models of giving commands instead of asking politely are mirrored in websites like Google and YouTube. For example, watch a Toby Kieth video, let YouTube play on random, and see how long before you’re at some yahoo’s rando white supremacist video. My news feed is another example of Google’s inherent toxicity. Though I keep telling it never to show my sites like The Federalist, or other ultra-right wing content, it keeps popping back into my feed anyway. If the content were truly algorithm-based as they claim, my preferences would be logged and the pattern of avoiding conservative content would be recognized. But it never is. In the local news feed, follow-up on the above-referenced story of an officer-involved shooting is the 11th story in the feed, after such hard-hitting pieces as the City Pages’ hot take on a real estate agent’s bus advertising.

The panel talked about the fact that the South never truly surrendered or lost the Civil War, and are in fact still fighting it. Also, that Donald Trump’s language (while vile and inciting) is a symptom. For however horrific he may be when it comes to race, justice, gender, etc., he was elected by American citizens. The continued racism of America and the individuals who so staunchly defend it are what elected Donald Trump to office, and it’s important to remember that defeating him in 2020 will not resolve those issues, however important that goal may be.

We developed a metaphor for poor white folks who vote for people like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell (and really anyone who insists on not helping their neighbors). Imagine you’re a white person who has been stepped on by the system - medical bills, job loss, displacement, etc. But you see the media that promised you success simply because you’re white, and you believe you’ve been lied to. At some level, there’s still the hope that you’ll be able to move up. The reality is: this is capitalism. The white men at the top are under no obligation to help you, but your physiological similarities make you kin. This is the nose and the raft. That physiological privilege puts your nose just above water, and while you struggle to survive, it’s easier to push down those drowning to hold yourself up than to reach up and insist on fair treatment from those lounging on the raft.

One of the most important things a white person (and particularly a white man) who cares about the world around them can do, is to recognize their nose is just above water, and that those drowning deserve life as well. What does another human being’s humanity mean to you? Why is it so easy for us to reduce those with whom we are unfamiliar to less-than-human? Never look to others who are suffering to compare your suffering. Look to those who profit from all suffering. They are the ones responsible for not just the harm to people of color, LGBTQIA+, and immigrants, but to you as well.

Speak to the other folks whose noses are just above water. Teach each other about how even that seemingly insignificant amount of privilege saves your children from profiling by police, gets your resume a second look, and avoids erasure in media. You don’t have to be proud of your privilege, or even necessarily grateful for it, but you CAN use it to reduce harm to others.

Thank you all for your patience. A Man’s Guide has been on hiatus for some time as I get my ducks in a row. As I live in Minnesota, they’re technically grey ducks, and I have no idea how to handle that, so it’s been a bit of a quandary.

BUT! We’re jumping out into the real world. And by “we,” I mean me. In one of my other lives, I’m a theatre writer, performer, and producer, so live theatre is my most cultivated language.

As such, I’ve secured a slot in the Minnesota Fringe Festival that runs from August 1 - 11 of this year. Instead of writing a play, however, I’m going to host a discussion series. I know we talk about toxic masculinity a lot around here, and I want to give the men who read this blog a chance to hear how toxic masculinity manifests from experts in the gender zeitgeist.

There will be more to come (including new artwork!), but put these dates and topics on your calendars:

August 1 - 10:00: Street & workplace harassment August 3 - 5:30: Dating August 4 - 8:30: Gender, sexuality, & intersectionality August 10 - 7:00: Violence, incels, & managing expectations August 11 - 1:00: Producing theatre

I’ll ask the participants questions and have them speak from their expertise. At the end, there’ll be a brief period for questions, but the real focus here is on the guests, who will bring volumes of valuable knowledge right to your fingertips. I’ll then post reference materials and info based on those discussions.

Hope to see you there!

This always falls around the time of my BFF’s birthday, and we’ve been attending for at least 9 years. We think this might be the 10th anniversary of ever attending? We are old and have bad memories. Also we are old and blindsided by Beyoncé/Jay-Z concerts. Plus there is a lot of day drinking, but I am pretty sure it’s the “old” part that is playing with our timeline.  In many ways, the festival itself has gotten better and better each year we’ve been going. The move from button and punchcard to day passes and tokens has made queueing up a lot more efficient, and it COULD promote taking more chances on more things, except that the website has gotten steadily more terrible since the halcyon days of the Kitty rating system.  

In years past, we could look up our old reviews to refresh our memories about companies, writers, and performers we’d enjoyed. That went by the wayside a couple of years ago. This year, in addition to the site being INCREDIBLY slow and having a bad interface (the slider rating system, which defaults to “5,” which translates into 2.5 stars out of 5 is just . . . Inner Stage Manager will never be over how terrible that is), the ability to click on an actor/writer/performer’s name to see what else they were in disappeared and we had to recreate accounts from scratch. As a result, we stuck almost entirely to our known quantities and didn’t do a lot of exploring, which is a bit of a bummer. The slider rating system

We’re also mourning the loss of the encore performances in favor of the confusing new “Golden Lanyard “ awards. I assume there’s some kind of reasoning behind the elimination of the last-night encores (maybe all shows get an extra scheduled performance?), but on the surface, it seems like a loss.