Fringe Festival focus: HOME

Ben San Del was just trying to avoid skidding on the ice as he slowed down to pull into a gas station one winter morning. But the driver behind San Del leaned on the horn and swerved. San Del responded with a middle finger.

To his dismay, "Flipping someone off loses bite when you're wearing mittens."

Realizing that his insult attempt looked more like he was waving hello, he laughed at himself.

"It was such a Minnesota moment," he said.

Thus, he wrote "Minnesota Middle Finger," a play about three passive-aggressive Minnesota (Nice) neighbors who crash at a host's house after a party, then wake up to find themselves caught in the snowstorm of the apocalypse.

San Del's comedy adds to the unusually large number of Minnesota-centered pieces in this year's Minnesota Fringe Festival, said Matthew Foster, Fringe communications director. The festival, which began Thursday, runs through Aug. 14.

While Fringe plays often are written with ambiguous settings, 14 of this year's 168 shows are either set in Minnesota (or the Twin Cities, more specifically), or they focus on Minnesota history and historical characters.

Executive Director Robin Gillette said personal memoir, the structure of many of the plays set in Minnesota, helps playwrights use their everyday lives as inspiration.

"It gives them a base, a starting point of a story, and lets them take that story and bend it in whatever direction suits their purposes," she said.

Like San Del, other playwrights say that Minnesota moments helped inspire their Fringe submissions.

Gillette said that focus on Minnesota is only one trend emerging in this year's Fringe. Among the more serious topics are death and religion. "No Change of Address" by Mike Price, in which a psych-ward veteran reflects on a failed suicide attempt, and "Improvidence!" by Izzy Waid, in which two stoners accidentally create a faith system and try to recruit believers through social media, are two examples.

"There are so many serious things happening now -- between the Minnesota government [shutdown] and the federal government and the economic recession in general," Gillette said. "It's provoking a lot of people to see change in their own life and ... in other people's lives."

Here's a look at a few Minnesota-themed selections:

• Jane Olson, 63, said she doesn't like to read -- she keeps busy rather than sitting down with books -- but at a friend's suggestion, she agreed to write. In her 50-minute, one-woman show, "I Think ... I Remember ... " Olson shares with the audience lessons she learned growing up in 1950s Minneapolis, like "how to speak cow," she said. "And actually seagull and frog, too."

In other plot points, she conjures memories of Minneapolis streetcars, reminisces about how nobody had air conditioning back then, and raves about the arsenal of weapons they had as kids for their favorite game, Cowboys and Indians.

• "Minnesota: Finally Famous" captures a showdown: A character named Minneapolis has been crowned the gayest, the hipster-est, the biking-est place of them all. But his newfound fame is challenged when former champs San Francisco (Francis, in the play), New York and Portland look to reclaim their glory.

Both 22, playwrights Daniel Ducharme and Mercedes Plendl met while attending the University of Minnesota, and experienced nonstop laughter when this idea came up in a brainstorm, Ducharme said. They thought the audience might laugh, too.

He dramatizes the trauma of those excursions, when he would sit terrified in the car as they raced back, his lactose-intolerant mom sure to become sick but hell-bent on eating the ice cream anyway.

When Morris, now 24, went away to Augsburg College in Minneapolis, their new over-the-phone relationship proved a difficult adjustment for him. Eccentricities or not, he needed her.

"It's that realization of, 'I'm in a big city and Mom's in a ridiculously small town,'" he said. "Mom can't take care of me anymore."

• Derek "The Duck" Washington is producing "The 612," a show where visual and performance artists collaborate on pieces that comment on Twin Cities life.

Washington's play, for example, shows a boyfriend-girlfriend quarrel on whether the drive from sunny California to the snows of Minnesota is worth it. "It stemmed out of my love-hate relationship with the cities," Washington said. "I love the people, the culture. I absolutely hate the weather."

In the first, "St. Anthony and Main," a young couple get lost on their way to the movies and discover there's a lot more to St. Anthony Main than they thought (think "Twilight Zone"). In "The Art Project," a St. Paul artist sculpts the lover she lost in the 35W bridge collapse.

• In "Uptown: The Musical," a group of Uptown coffee-shop patrons hear that a super-chain grocery store will be moving in next to the local food co-op, and they engage in musical protest. Co-playwrights and lyricists Adam Sharp and Bethany Simmons recognized the show's commercial potential based on the Fringe's location, but became more invested in the material as they fleshed out the plot and characters, Sharp said.