Twin Cities Improv Festival at the Phoenix Theatre

With the closure of HUGE Theater last year, the Twin Cities Improv Festival has a new home - Phoenix Theater in Uptown. For four days, you can watch improv troupes from here in the Twin Cities (and we have a lot of great ones) as well as troupes from around the country and even some from other countries. I attended the first, all-local, night of the festival and had a great time watching some beloved familiar improvisors and some new-to-me improvisors. Each had their own spin on the artform, most started with a suggestion or two from the audience and they took that somewhere unexpected. The Phoenix is a great welcoming location (despite the never-ending construction on Hennepin), with snacks and drinks (including espresso drinks) sold in the cozy lobby. Keep reading for my thoughts on the eight improv troupes I saw (two or three troupes are grouped together in each set, with up to four sets a night), and click here for the schedule of shows continuing through Sunday.

"Sixpack" at Jungle Theater

I'm not really a sports person (with the exception of my Minnesota Twins), but sports is a great metaphor for life, and a great framework to build a play around. Mixed Blood Theatre has done a couple of great ones - Colossal about football, and Safe at Home about baseball in a site-specific production at CHS Field (home of the Twins' Triple-A affiliate team the St. Paul Saints). Even more relevant to this discussion, Jungle Theater has done two productions of The Wolves, about a high school girls' soccer team, and last year Penumbra Theatre staged FLEX, about a high school girls' basketball team. With the growing attention on girls' and women's sports, it's a great time to debut another play in this genre - Katie Ka Vang's Sixpack. Drawing from her own history and culture, Sixpack features a group of Hmong women who play volleyball together (and sometimes against each other). But as with all of these plays, it's not really about volleyball, it's about friendship, mother-daughter relationships, and community. See this funny, real, and ultimately heart-warming world premiere play at Jungle Theater through June 29.

"Mae West and the Trial of Sex" by Walking Shadow Theatre Company at The Crane Theater

Censorship in theater is a hot topic in 2025, with many theaters losing NEA funding for doing plays that allegedly do not align with mandates from this administration. The government is trying to tell artists what kind of plays they can and cannot do, but artists will be artists, and tell the stories they want to tell, even if that has become more difficult. Nearly a hundred years ago, the New York theater scene was also facing censorship, with artists receiving jail time and fines for doing "immoral" plays, and theaters being closed for a year or more. Walking Shadow Theatre Company's new play Mae West and the Trial of Sex chronicles one such battle against censorship, in a story that feels very timely and relevant. See it at the Crane Theater in Northeast Minneapolis through June 22.

"Matt & Ben" at The Hive Collaborative

When friends and #TCTheater artists Serena Brook and Shinah Hey were working at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres on Beautiful last year (Shinah playing songwriter Cynthia Weil, Serena in the ensemble and understudying Carole King), they had the idea to do the play Matt & Ben. Before The Office, Mindy Kaling wrote and starred in Matt & Ben (with Brenda Withers), which became something of a phenomenon and helped her land the job on The Office. It's a perfect 70-minute vehicle for two female actors/friends to play this famous Hollywood friendship. One year later, Serena and Shinah's idea has come to fruition; they recruited friend Derek Prestly to direct, and are collaborating with The Hive on the production (which is all about collaborating with and supporting artists in doing something new). The result is a hilarious buddy comedy about the creative process, celebrity, show business, and friendship. The short two-week run concludes on June 8 - click here for details and to purchase tickets on a sliding scale basis.