Show: 18
Title: Small Minded
Category: Clowning / Comedy / Magic / Physical Theater / Solo Show / Storytelling / Audience participation / Shakespearian elements
By: Tyler West
Created by: Tyler West and Cleo DeOrio
Location: Southern Theater
Summary: A solo storytelling show by an actor with dwarfism, about his career, the roles he's forced to play, and how it intersects with disability.
Highlights: Currently on a break from touring with Water for Elephants (which stopped in Minneapolis earlier this year), touring artist Tyler West brings his funny and moving show to the Minnesota Fringe. It's an eye-opening story about an actor with dwarfism. With the exception of the actor referred to in the show as Deter Pinklage, actors with dwarfism often play the clown, the fool, the entertainment. Tyler talks about his personal journey through life and performing, finding comfort on the stage where people are supposed to be looking at him and laughing, as opposed to the stares and cruel comments on the street. In his BFA program, he wanted to play serious roles, but was only offered the role of the fool or the jester. He moved to NYC and found work in cabarets and variety shows, playing into the comic role, and studied clowning, which he utilizes in this show to great effect, with physical comedy, pratfalls, juggling, and a delightful entirely silent sequence as a cop who playfully terrorizes the audience. But through the writing of Dr. Erin Pritchard, "a leading academic expert in the field of dwarfism and a passionate advocate for disability awareness and inclusion," he comes to realized that "midget entertainment" is not unlike minstrel shows - Black people performing in blackface for White people's amusement, little people performing comedy for able-bodied people's enjoyment. He descends into a fever dream, where he is confronted with Oompa-Loompas, Munchkins, Ewoks, Yoda, and the Seven Dwarves, but ends the show by noting little people with serious accomplishments, doctors and lawyers and scholars, whom most of us have never heard of. Small Minded is funny, moving, educational, and well-constructed with a great use of props and costumes (directed and co-written by Cleo DeOrio). This is the reason that Fringe Festivals exists, for artists who are pigeon-holed into one thing to have an opportunity make their own art, play the roles they want, and tell their own stories in their own voices.
