This should be one of the shorter blog posts.
Partly because the group SUPERMOON (collaborators Caleb Matthew Byers, Claudia Errickson, Mads Plonski, and Michael Torsch) is deliberately cagey about the details of their shows, so you go in as blind as possible and just experience the performance without a preconceived notion of what you’re walking into.
Partly because, well, they kind of blew the doors off the place in last year’s Fringe with their production “All Your Shimmering Gold” (a mash-up of a weapons contractor client presentation and the opera “Das Rheingold”). Anyone who saw that doesn’t need any additional convincing from me. (Honestly, it’s a little embarrassing in hindsight that they were only #14 on my pre-Fringe Top 20 list last year, but there was little detail, as there is this time, so it was hard to do anything more than go with my gut feeling.)
My review of their Fringe show last year is i believe the first time I’ve ever used the phrase “This show f*cks so hard.”
Some less colorful commentary included:
“Like a lot of the best live theater, All Your Shimmering Gold is fairly resistant to being summarized. You really have to see it for yourself… [The show] is spectacle meant to be seen with your own eyes, felt personally in real time, not constrained or limited by someone else’s words. But words are all I have so, I’m going to use them to best of my ability to give you some reasons to go see the show in the theater.
[It’s] is big, both in literal size, and in its ambitions. It takes some really big swings creatively… It’s exactly the kind of crazy risk a framework like the Minnesota Fringe Festival was created to support.
The quiet genius of [the show] is that it doesn’t hold your hand and walk you through what everything means. It merely places all the elements before you, and trusts the brains of the audience to work it all out for themselves… It’s a stunning, surprising, mesmerizing, unsettling, really wild piece of live performance.”
Having seen a couple of their productions now, the above is not a bad attempt at me fumbling toward an understanding of SUPERMOON’s mission statement.
SUPERMOON is doing a new Fringe show. It should be on your list.
The title is almost all we’re getting but it does lay down some markers:
“the statue of liberty is nora in a doll’s house by henrik ibsen”
When I first checked the Fringe site, the show description said:
"the statue of liberty prepares for and performs a doll's house."
When I check more recently it had changed to:
“The title describes exactly what happens (obviously other things happen too).”
The press packet serves up the following:
“This is a performance about doors, lies, and the American meaning of liberty.
The Statue of Liberty prepares for and performs Nora in A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen. This performance is about doors, lies, and the morphed American definition/concept of liberty. It's an Americana kaleidoscopic ritual praying for a miracle.”
Venue - Rarig Thrust
Content Warnings - Flashing Lights
Genre and Content - Comedy, Drama, Musical Theater, Physical Theater
Ages 12 to 15 and Up
I just saw SUPERMOON’s production over the 4th of July weekend “In The Backroom” - another genre-busting meditation on the meaning and identity of America through the lens of deconstructing the life and reputation of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle (and also, tangentially, Land Del Rey’s song “There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard”) - a spectacle of sound, projected dialogue, video, microphone and lip syncing work, and stunning images of (fake) assault rifles, American flags, and 160 boxes - while skewering and exploiting every theatrical convention they can get their hands on. So I’m all primed for another dose of Americana when the Statue of Liberty tackles Ibsen.
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