Minnesota Fringe Festival 2026: "the statue of liberty is nora in a doll's house by henrik ibsen"

Day: 5

Show: 16

Title: the statue of liberty is nora in a doll's house by henrik ibsen

Category: Comedy / Drama / Musical Theater / Physical Theater

By: Supermoon

Created by: Supermoon

Location: Rarig Stoll Thrust

Summary: Henrik Ibsen's ground-breaking 1879 play A Doll's House, in which a housewife leaves her family to find herself, with Nora played by the Statue of Liberty.

Highlights: On one level, this is a great and fun and very Fringey version of a classic play, using live film projected onto a screen, and actual dolls acting out some of the scenes. On another level it's a startling and disturbing commentary on the state of our country, as we watch Lady Liberty literally dismantled before our eyes. I'm not entirely certain how those two things fit together, but I will be ruminating on it for a while. Mads Plonski plays Liberty/Nora, beginning the show standing on a platform clutching a copy of A Doll's House, her raised arm holding a corded light. Then she descends from her pedestal (much as Nora metaphorically does in the play), and the story begins, with all of the major plot points of the story playing out in abbreviated form (Nora forged her father's signature to take out a loan to save her husband's life, and is now facing scandal because a woman is not allowed to take out a loan), with Michael Torsch as her husband Torvald and Caleb Byers as the banker about to explode the scandal. A camera is trained on the stage, with the live feed projected on a screen, including close-ups of dolls that enact some of the scenes, the actors speaking in exaggerated doll voices. We also occasionally see images of the Statue of Liberty in pieces and behind scaffolding during installation, which curiously was less than ten years after A Doll's House premiered. In addition to the use of lighting and live film, there's also an interesting use of music and sound, with Josh Leininger providing a live score on electric guitar, and Mads singing the Lana Del Ray song "Arcadia." As usual from this team, this is a thoughtful, thorny, weird, funny, absurd, engrossing piece of theater.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here. 

"In The Backroom" by Michael Torsch at the Southern Theater

The Minnesota Fringe Festival schedule was just announced, but if you want a preview of the sort of adventurous, inventive, outside-the-box art you will see in August, check out In the Backroom by Michael Torsh at the Southern Theater this weekend. A new show on a holiday weekend? That's right, and that's intentional. From the press release: "This performance considers the complicated nature of celebrating America's 250th anniversary, the effects of imperialism on the individual, and how we might eulogize all those killed during wartime. By constructing an environment to collectively meditate on our societal grief, In The Backroom is an antidote to the unrestricted hypernationalism propagated by the current administration." Since I will be off the grid at a lake this weekend, I attended the final run-through of the show before performances begin tonight, and it was all of those things and more. It's very meta and fourth-wall breaking, thoughtfully constructed to bring together many different ideas, cleverly uses recorded video and projections, and is incredibly thought-provoking without providing any easy answers. If you saw Michael's Fringe show last year, All Your Shimmering Gold, it's a similar vibe. If you're in town this weekend and feeling conflicted about America's 250th birthday and the way it's being celebrated, sold, and marketed, this is the show for you. There are 7pm performances Thurs-Sat, with a 4pm show on Sun, and it's only 70 minutes long so you can get back to your barbeques and fireworks.

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2025: "All Your Shimmering Gold"

Day: 5

Show: 18

Title: All Your Shimmering Gold

Category: Comedy / Drama / Horror / Musical Theater / Opera / Physical Theater / Literary adaptation / Political content

By: SUPERMOON

Created by: Michael Torsch

Location: Rarig Thrust

Summary: The defense contractor Northrop Grumman accidentally ends up in the middle of the Minnesota Fringe Festival with their presentation about their massive nuclear defense plans, so they perform Wagner's Das Rheingold to make it more theatrical for this audience.

Highlights: Friends, this one is weird, in the best and fringiest sense of the word. Michael Torsch makes the most unique entrance to a fringe show you will see this year, and then speaks to the audience as an executive from Northrup Grumman. He explains to us what our tax dollars are buying, a huge and extensive and terrifying plan for nuclear defense, describing what happens when one of these nuclear missiles go off, aided by a video playing on small screens above an arch. But since he knows we're a theater audience, he and his fellow employees put on a performance of Das Rheingold, about a greedy man who steals gold from the Rhine River, guarded by some river nymphs, and makes a ring to gain all of the power. Which leaves us to draw the parallels for ourselves. Michael and the cast (Mads Granlund, Caleb Byers, Simone Bernadette, and Genevieve Waterbury, one of whom actually sings) lip synch to the recorded opera, dressed in beautiful costumes, while the video of the opera plays on the screens. It's all just so bizarre and fascinating and not a little disturbing, and I'll be thinking about it for a while.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.