"devoured: notes on love and enmeshment" at The Southern Theater

devoured: notes on love and enmeshment is a meditation on codependency through three queer intimate relationships. Weaving text and movement, it explores complicated relationship dynamics between people who are struggling to love and be loved, but can't help but hurt each other in the process." This description of the new play by Playwrights' Center's Many Voices Fellow Liqing Xu is apt, but doesn't cover how beautiful, funny, and moving it is. Over the course of 70 minutes, we see three different relationships play out, with no happy ending in sight. But perhaps a bit of personal growth. There are only three more chances to see this fascinating, innovative, and thoughtful new work at the Southern Theater.

"Words Do Move" by Sandbox Theatre at the Crane Theater

Words Do Move. Or in this case, words, music, movement, images, and the combination thereof move. Sandbox Theatre's latest ensemble-created work is a series of poems, stories, songs, and dances about relationships, identity, grief, joy, and life. It is, indeed, moving, as the five-person ensemble and one-person band share their stories and their souls with the audience. Words Do Move is unique and lovely and just over an hour long, all good things, and plays through November 17 at the Crane Theater in Northeast Minneapolis.

Fringe Festival 2015: "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

Day: 4

Show: 17

Title: Total Eclipse of the Heart

Category: Comedy

By: The Peanut Butter Factory

Directed by: Christopher Kehoe

Location: Illusion Theater

Summary: A high melodrama of a soap opera inspired by the '80s ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Highlights: I have no idea how this relates to the song, but here's what happened. In a soap opera called Total Eclipse of the Heart (a great name for a soap), a group of people meet in an art museum. There is a wealthy brother and sister, the twin brother of her former fiance turned pop star, a diva, a museum worker, and a young woman searching for clues to her parentage in the artwork. Prefaced by "previously on" and concluded with "next time on," this is just one episode of highly melodramatic moment followed by highly melodramatic moment. It's not at all what I expected (see Collyard/Nelson's explanation of an expectation review), and I found it quite bizarre. But the cast is game for the ride, consistent across the board in their commitment to the overly soapy tone of the show, which provides for some amusing moments.