Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - American School of Storytelling

 

 

 

Speaking of the American School of Storytelling venue, they’re also producing their own show with a rotating roster of storytellers, collectively called “More Better Stories” - the folks behind this venue are some of the best storytellers in town and created some very enjoyable storytelling shows in Fringes past, so whatever they’ve got on the schedule is always a returning favorite

Description: 
Storytellers Jon Carlson, Vianna Isbister, Bernadine Joselyn, Hank Roubicek - each tell three times, and Erin Ferdinand, Kory May, Christopher Nelson, Laura Packer, and Anne Wiborg do "one off's" with stories for adults.
Venue - American School of Storytelling
Content Warnings - Adult Language, Sexual Content
Genre and Content - Comedy, Drama, Solo Show, Storytelling, LGBTQIA+ Content, Political Content, Religious Content
Ages 16 and up

The press packet materials have the following extra detail:

“The American School of Storytelling is the most intimate venue in the Twin Cities and for the third year as an Independent Producer on the "fringe of the Fringe" we are offering eight storytellers from around the country sharing adult tales of love, obsession, adventure, humor and horror on our 8'x8' stage.  Railroad engineer Jon Carlson, Tennessee based Vianna Isbister, Bernadine Joselyn coming from Grand Rapids (MN) and Houston based Hank Roubicek each tell three times while Erin Ferdinand, Christopher Nelson, Laura Packer, and Anne Wiborg will do “one off’s” for this year’s More Better Stories.”

If you check out their Cast and Crew tab on their show page on the Fringe website, you can find a rundown of who’s doing what when.  Here’s a quick summary of the titles on offer:

Three performances for:
Jon Carlson - Oz-America - The contrasting energies of my work and my polity inspire me, artistically, to alchemize both MAGA rage and the rage that animates The Resistance. Not only can Imagination and Humor dance with Rage, they desire to do so for the sake of the soul's liberation and human solidarity.
Vianna Isbister - Leaking (The Wolves are Everywhere) - invites audiences into liminal spaces where shadows stir, voices linger, and imagination takes on a life of its own.
Bernadine Joselyn - War & Peace in My 20th Century Life - What’s Worth Fighting For? - Imagination and longing led her from her childhood home in a first-ring Minneapolis suburb to India, the Soviet Union (later Russia), New York City and rural Itasca County, giving up building civil society for tree planting and tending along the way.
Hank Roubicek - Learning What? - With over 4 decades of teaching, he reveals emotional truths about education, learning, and the stuff that matters most.

One shots for:
Erin Ferdinand - My Dog Died (and All I Got was This Lousy Miracle) - author of "The Ghost Dog Diaries", a collection of essays and advice about life after death and our life, in general; debuting supernatural stories
Kory May - The Exact Moment I Became Someone Else - Kory May tells stories to make sense of the world—and since the world refuses to make sense, he keeps telling them - a Moth Mainstage performer and two-time Moth GrandSlam winner.
Christopher Nelson - Growing Up Small in a Mid-Sized Town - Come learn how balled-up socks, radishes and cow eyeballs are about the same size, but which one is good for throwing in self defense?
Laura Packer - Mermaids, Monsters, and Mysterious Strangers: Stories of the Unknown and Unexpected - Not everything can be explained. Not all strangers are who they seem. Not every monster is what you expect.
Annie Wiborg - Tell Me Again - Her days are full of reading, friends, family, volunteering, walking the dog, camping, working out – while frequently eavesdropping - at the gym.


One of the things I regret not doing in last year’s festival is getting out to the American School of Storytelling and taking in a show in this new-ish venue.  I’ll be trying to rectify that error this year - and there are even more promising presentations out there this time to make it worth a trip.

 

 

Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - Ben San Del - Apologies for the Late Reply

Ben has a video short that makes the case for his comedy in less than a minute much better than I could by just typing the words “Trust me, Ben is a very funny guy” so just quick watch that here.

Ben took his new show “Apologies for the Late Reply” out for a test run at the Kansas City Fringe last year and ended up winning the Best of Venue encore performance there, and now he’s bringing the show back home to Minneapolis.

Description: 
Stand-up comedy about salvaging sanity in our age of crazy presented by four-time Minnesota Fringe encore winning producer and Acme Comedy Co.'s Funniest Person in the Twin Cities title holder Ben San Del.
Venue - American School of Storytelling
Content Warnings - Adult language, Crude Humor, Mental Illness, Suicidal ideation/Self-harm
Genre and Content - Comedy, Solo Show
Ages 16 and Up

According to the press materials, Ben’s been on a bit of a journey since we last saw him at the Minnesota Fringe Festival back in 2017 (haven’t we all? and if you haven’t, good for you I guess :)  As usual, Ben makes a better, more amusing, case for himself than I ever could, so I’ll just step aside:

“Floundering to hold himself together as the world falls apart, a four-time Minnesota Fringe Festival encore winner returns to the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the first time in nine years with a stand-up comedy show about maintaining mental health as so much chaos closing in.

After 12 years in the scene, Ben San Del walked away from stand-up comedy in 2018. Untreated anxiety, ADHD, and depression had taken their toll. Touring as a stand-up comedian was only making things worse. After quitting comedy to salvage his sanity, Ben found a job that provided health insurance and got himself some therapy and medications and started to get better. During the 2024 election season, Ben recognized the same signs of anxiety, executive dysfunction, and depression that he had been experiencing becoming increasingly common among the general population, particularly people whose mental health had been perfectly stable up to that point.

After seven years away, he decided to return to stand-up comedy and focus specifically on making people laugh about and amid the exhausting chaos and dark absurdity of post-Covid life. But with fart jokes. For Ben, for the first time ever, stand-up comedy became a salve for poor mental health, not a contributor to it. With this new mindset, Ben built an hour of material that he felt would be perfect for a Fringe Festival audience at this moment in time, and was determined to produce a show even if the Fringe lottery did not smile upon him. 

This will be Ben San Del's 10th MN Fringe show, the first in nearly decade, and very first show produced as an independent producer. San Del is a past winner of Acme Comedy Co.’s Funniest Person in the Twin Cities contest. He has opened for Tig Notaro, Maria Bamford, Emo Phillips, and Ali Wong, among dozens of other national headliners. His one-person show "Spec" won "Best Storytelling Performance" by audience vote at the 2017 Victoria, Canada, Fringe Festival, and he's a four-time winner of a bonus encore performance at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, where he has previously produced and directed three plays and three stand-up comedy performances. For the last two years, he has taught "Stand-up Comedy for Beginners" for Minneapolis Community Education.

Oh, also, Ben's very sorry it took him so long to respond to your email and/or text and/or Teams message and/or Signal chat, and/or social media outreach, and/or all of the above. He foolishly allowed himself to get distracted by the impending collapse of civilization. It won't happen again. Until it does.”

If you really need more convincing to get out to the American School of Storytelling and see a show at an independent venue, here’s a link to a post with links to all my five-star reviews of all of Ben’s previous Fringe shows, whether he was doing stand-up himself or writing a hilarious play for other people to perform.

Ben was on my pre-Fringe Top 10 list all the way back in 2006 with his very first stand-up show at the Fringe, “Mittens for Fat Kids” and I’ve returned to his Fringe shows every year since because Ben’a an astute observer of the absurdity of every day life, and there’s a lot of that to go around these days.  Might as well take a break for an hour, sit down and laugh about it all.  Ben’s got you covered.  I’m very glad he’s back.

 

 

Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - Third Space Theater - Be Not Afraid

Third Space Theater is yet another example of why it’s so important to find the right collaborators.

When Alex Church (pre theater company name) landed at #3 on my pre-Fringe Top 10 List back in 2023, the mix of artists he was working with was… problematic, shall we say.  A lot of behind the scenes upheaval, leading to a performer leaving in the middle of the run during the festival so… yikes.  Really the less said the better for all concerned.  But what a wild upward trajectory from there over the next two Minnesota Fringe Festival seasons.

Alex bounced right back the next year with “Dutch: Made In America,” the darkest of absurdist comedies meditating on the forces that shaped the young actor who would one day grow up to be President Ronald Reagan.  It was a great gathering of fellow artists bringing the new script to life.

And then last year, under the banner of Third Space Theater, the right group of folks came together and created the unsettling seafaring adventure “Breach,” packing in the crowds through enthusiastic word of mouth around the Fringe, and getting both the Venue Pick and Artists Pick at the Golden Lanyard Awards at the end of the festival for their efforts.  At the time I wrote: “fantastic use of TRP space, all its levels and corners, light, shadow and sound, to create a fishing vessel on a high pressure job, with weather and tempers threatening to undo the crew; great script, cast, direction; plus a giant hallucinatory monster crab - 5 stars”

Then that same group of collaborators started my 2026 theater year off right with a stellar 5-star production of Will Arbery’s wild new play “Plano.”

And now they’re back again with a new script penned by Mariabella Sorini and Alex Church, both of whom also co-wrote last year’s “Breach.”  This time it’s a land-based tale of misfortune called “Be Not Afraid” (so, of course, you should be afraid - besides, it has nearly all the content warnings so…)

Description: 
2012. A struggling farm in a northwestern North Dakota town transformed by the oil boom is given a warning. A savior is coming.
Venue - Southern Theater
Content Warnings - Abuse/Physical Violence, Adult Language, Blood, Crude Humor, Drug Content, Flashing Lights, Gun/Weapon Usage, Loud Noises, Mental Illness, Sexual Violence, Violence, Other Divisive Content
Genre and Content - Comedy, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Original Music, Physical Theater, Storytelling
Ages 16 and Up

A portion of proceeds will be donated to the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center - learn more about them and their essential work here, https://www.miwrc.org/

The press packet also includes these nuggets of info:

“The oil boom turns a North Dakota town into a modern Sodom & Gomorra.”

Well, okay then…

“North Dakota, 2012. A struggling farm in a town transformed by the oil boom is given a warning: a savior is coming. TST's newest original work places audiences at the edge of a nightmare on the plains. A motley crew of listless men, irate locals, and desperate neighbors fight for security and autonomy in a midwestern gothic of biblical proportions. As the heat rises and hope dries up. ‘Be Not Afraid’ explores what holds us together when the world is falling apart. “

They got the band back together from “Breach” adding on some folks from “Plano” and some additional new artists of promise for this go-round.  Building on the good that has come before.

Am I a fan of horror and violence in the my entertainment diet?  Not normally.

Would I trust these people to take me there for an hour?  Absolutely.  I can balance it all out with something funny and uplifting afterward.  The Fringe has everything.  Also, “Be Not Afraid” doesn’t open until Saturday on opening weekend, so I have some time to fortify myself for a good jolt.

Third Space Theater has found its Fringe audience, so they hardly need my help, but I’m recommending them anyway.

 

 

Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - One T Productions - After The End

Scot Froelich (he of the one T in Scot) has been spinning ingenious and affecting tales of heartbreak both before and after I flagged him back in 2013 as #5 on my pre-Fringe Top 10 list that year.

The end of the world and/or humanity, one could argue, is just a different kind of heartbreak.  So while I’m not much for dystopian scenarios, if Scot’s telling the story and playing the guitar, I’ll go.

After The End
Description: 
Following a devastating global pandemic, Jeff is left to fend for himself. Twelve years later, he’s built a farm, a solar array, and – to pass the time - a hobby of playing guitar for the audience in his head.
Venue - Mixed Blood
Content Warnings - Adult language, Suicidal ideation/self-harm, No late seating allowed
Genre and Content - Comedy, Drama, Musical Theater, Solo Show
Ages 12 to 15 and Up

No late seating allowed.  
Don’t want to disrupt the vibe of the end of the world by showing up late :)

The More Information tab and press packet provide additional context:

“We've all contemplated questions like, "What's your desert island playlist?" or "If you only had one day to live, what would you do?" and considered the decisions around finality and isolation. Luckily for Jeff, he doesn't have to think of answers. He's had twelve years to live them. There's a meticulous garden, a glorious solar array, the world's most magnificent vinyl collection, and a wide variety of canine companions.

As time stretched on, though, he had to find a true hobby. A way to express himself. Enter: YOU. Thank you for being Jeff's imaginary audience. The solar generator only has enough juice for 60 minutes of performance, though, so make sure to get there early.

The human population has been reduced to... Jeff. He’s learned guitar, but who is his audience?

25-season Fringe veteran Scot Froelich returns to the stage with a question: If you were the last person on earth, what would you do? How would you grieve the loss? How would you remain joyful? How many dogs would you keep? And what keeps you going? After a global pandemic reduces the population to... Jeff, he is left to ponder these questions while learning gardening, hunting, and guitar. But why is he still here and what does he intend to do with his time?”

I do also appreciate that they hired a human (Hannah Boehme) to do the artwork for the show’s publicity.  (In a dystopia, we humans need to stick together and not just submit fully to the computers, which if of course harder and harder to do every day, he says, typing on a laptop and posting to the internet…)

The show has Mike Mellas as director, Nicole Wilder as Music Director, and Sheree Froelich (who helmed recent Fringe shows I quite enjoyed - The Wind Phone in 2024 and My Empty Arms in 2022) as stage manager on this one so we’re in good hands all around here.

 

 

Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - SUPERMOON - the statue of liberty is nora in a doll’s house by henrik ibsen

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.

 

 

Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - Tyler West - Small Minded

Back in 2018, when Tyler West’s traveling mime show “Abeyance” landed on my pre-Fringe Top 20 list at #13, we were only his third Fringe appearance, about which I wrote:

“Tyler West's combination of mime, comedy, self-generated live sound FX, and interaction with audience members on and off stage is a delight - 5 stars”

But that was a whole pandemic and two ancient presidents ago so, it’s been a minute, and I was very happy to see he was returning with a new show, Small Minded.

The Minnesota Fringe website being a living, breathing, evolving organism throughout the month of July, the first time I culled information on the show, its description said this:

“When Tyler was a little boy he wanted to grow up and be a clown. Come to find out it was a lot harder to achieve the former, than the latter. 'Small Minded' features magic, juggling, clowning, and much more!”

When I went back to double check and see if more information had been posted, I found this new description:

“Is being a dwarf clown REALLY half the size, but double the fun? Or is Tyler West just Small Minded? Either way, this show features juggling, magic, Shakespeare, story-telling, and some Ha-Ha's! from the heart.”

Both these descriptions are part of the press packet for the show, so it seems OK to post them both.  More context is always helpful.

Small Minded
Created by Tyler West
Directed by Cleo DeOrio
Venue - Southern Theater
Content Warnings - Adult Language 
Genre and Content - Clowning, Magic, Solo Show, Comedy, Physical Theater, Audience Participation, Storytelling, Shakespearian Elements
Ages 12 to 15 and Up

There’s not a lot else on the show’s Fringe website page, but there is a video trailer:



And Tyler has a YouTube page with other samples of his work to watch.

Also, I noticed that back in the day an anonymous poster actually took the time to post a comment on my pre-Fringe blog post on Tyler’s show “Abeyance” to share:

“Fun fact: Minnesota is only Tyler's third fringe, but at his second, San Diego, Tyler won one of the two cultural exchanges that SD Fringe has with other festivals. As as result, he has been offered a slot at Sydney Fringe. (Full disclosure: I am the logistics coordinator for San Diego and I'm a house manager at MinnFringe.)”

It’s weird to find a post on a blog entry that isn’t spam, and also pretty cool that Tyler’s show inspired someone to share more information.  I shouldn’t be surprised, really.  It was a fun show.

And I expect no less from this one.

So if Tyler’s last show was before your time, or you missed him back in 2018, now’s your chance.  I feel very safe in promising you will be entertained.  Small Minded is on my schedule so perhaps I’ll see you there.  

In fact, if you want to start your Fringe on a fun note, Tyler’s show is the first slot, 5:30pm, on the first day of the festival, Thursday 8/6. Can’t go wrong with that.  Trust me. (And it’s a Bring a Friend to Fringe (BFF) performance, too, so you can buy a ticket and get an extra for free to bring someone with you.) 

 

 

Fringe 2026 - Returning Favorites - Dolly Who - Doozy

An embarrassing pattern has developed.  When I tagged Destiny Davison (aka, Dolly Who) as #7 on my Top 10 list back in 2023 for her show “DollyWho,” my Fringe-going schedule that year jumbled things around so that I ended up catching Destiny’s very last performance, which was also the very last slot in the festival on closing night.  So it was right from there to the closing night party and I never even typed so much as a mini-review online on the fly, like I try to do, even for the last show.  Fell down on the job there.

Last year, when she returned with “Dolly Who’s Holiday Horror Show” I did a little better.  This time it was the next to last day of the festival when I finally caught the show, and at least managed to post the following:

“MN Fringe show #44: Dolly Who’s Holiday Horror Show - Destiny Davison’s cartoons are adorably goofy, and creating a new holiday improv-style as a crowd amidst her established bits was a great communal experience; joy is in short supply so this was a real tonic :) - 5 stars”

So the goal this year is to see her new show “Doozy” sometime opening weekend(?) and actually write a proper review finally.

Description: 
A good friend never forgets. Too bad, Dolly did. But no worries, it's her day off! No agenda, no script, no work...and all the time in the world for a little sweet, sweet revenge.
Venue - Open Eye Theatre
Content Warnings - Flashing Lights, Loud Noises
Genre and Content - Puppetry, Improv, Comedy, Original Music, Physical Theater, Kid Friendly
Ages 12 to 15 and Up

Destiny Davison is both a talented improv comedian (part of the roster at Blackout Improv, among other improviser gigs) and a talented cartoonist, and as Dolly Who she blends the two into delightfully quirky shows with both comedy and cartoons conjured up on the spot with the help of some audience suggestion.

It’s hard to adequately describe the look and feel of a Dolly Who show.

The video trailer for Doozy helps:


As does Destiny/Dolly Who’s website

And Instagram account.

So check out all that art and performance archiving to get a sampling of what’s in store for this year’s Fringe.

And maybe I’ll finally write more than fifty words about it this time :)

Whether I manage to write or not, trust that if Destiny Davison’s Dolly Who is in the Fringe, I will find a way to see it.

We’re woefully low on whimsy these days, so Doozy is much needed.

If you need more convincing, here’s a bit more background from the Fringe show page for Doozy:

“DOLLY WHO? (cartoonist, perpetually exhausted millennial, and part-time, semi-professional “Learner”) is taking the day off! But nobody's resting easy, no siree, Bob. Things are about to get real. Featuring puppets, a giant remote, improvised chaos, and a Best Friend Forever hell-bent on revenge, DOOZY is an equal parts heartwarming and heart-wrenching story of friendship for the whole family, but mostly made for the friend (s) in your life that could use a reminder on how to be better one.

Featuring Britt Johnson as DOOZY, Cody Madison as DOOZY, Destiny Davison as DOOZY, Deanna Pistono as DOOZY, Alsa Bruno as DOOZY, Ross Flores as DOOZY, Jill Bernard as DOOZY, Alexandria Davison as DOOZY, Xylophone as DOOZY, Big Remote as DOOZY, Father Time as DOOZY, and DOOZY as DOOZY.

About DOLLY WHO?
DOLLY WHO? is Destiny Davison (she/they) a Minneapolis-based multi-media artist, cartoonist, and performer. Her work explores the real, the unreal, and the in-between. Right now, she is most concerned with how to stay human in a world of chaos and hurt, being a friend, and snails with fragile, bottomless hearts. Destiny has appeared on stages across Minnesota, including The Ordway, The Jungle Theater, Pangea World Theatre, Strike Theater, the Brave New Workshop, and more. Destiny's first appearance as DOLLY WHO? was at the 2023 Minnesota Fringe Festival. And in 2026, Destiny premiered their first ever puppet show “DOLLY WHO?'S FOR DINNER” at Open Eye Theatre’s Puppet Lab Festival. Destiny's artwork has been commissioned by Apple TV, Planned Parenthood, the Minnesota Star Tribune, TPT Almanac, the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association (NEMAA), and the Minnesota Billboard Project.”