"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.

"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.

"Next to Normal" by Wildwood Theatre at the Capri Theater

"The Wildwood Theatre unravels the stigma of mental health and mental illness by creating safe spaces where individuals can feel comfortable to ask personal questions, explore feelings, investigate social norms, and excavate truth." I'm not sure there's a better musical for this newish #TCTheater company to tackle than Next to Normal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical about a family dealing with mental illness. I was lucky enough to see a preview of Next to Normal on Broadway in 2009, and was blown away. I've loved it ever since, and seen several local productions, but it's been over seven years since I've seen it on stage. Wildwood's new production is so lovely and heartfelt, with beautifully sincere performances from the talented (and mostly unknown to me) cast, and the Tony-winning rock score sounds fantastic as played by the seven-person orchestra. It's playing for two weekends only at Capri Theater in North Minneapolis.