tweet review - #mnfringe show 3: Climbing My Family Tree, so good to finally see this show live and not just online; Les' quest to find the forgotten branches of his family tree (and of course their wild stories) is even better in person; wouldn't be a proper Fringe without him - 5 stars
If you’re interested in catching Climbing My Family Tree, your last chance for this show is tomorrow, Tuesday 8/8 because Les can’t stick around for the whole festival this year. He’s heading back to California because a theater company there is mounting a full production of his fantastic one-person show from last year’s Fringe, The Real Black Swann, Confessions of America’s First Black Drag Queen. Very exciting opportunity for him, but it means that we will sadly be seeing less of him this time around.
“At Aunt Virginia's funeral, they noticed there was a large group of white men in suits and sunglasses. They were FBI. Turns out Aunt Virginia was one of the founders of the Black Panthers in New Orleans."
This feels a bit like cheating but the show is largely the same and my reaction is largely the same as the first time I saw Les Kurkendaal-Barrett perform “Climbing My Family Tree” three years ago in the first of the two online pandemic Minnesota Fringe Festivals. At least for the recap portions of the review, I may do a little recycling, fair warning. My response to the show being live and in person is, of course, the new material.
(newfound cousin asks:) “Do you ever make it to Minneapolis?
And let’s start there: Les is just great at engaging a crowd. He knows a great many of the artists and other Fringe regulars who come to his shows year after year, and so while the pre-show announcement was playing he was making eye contact and waving to folks from the stage. And if during the course of the show, an audience member (known or unknown to him) has a strong reaction to a reference to a place or pop culture, he will ride that wave of recognition, maybe even engage in a little back and forth from the stage, all while not letting it derail the story he’s telling, but rather to give it an extra boost.
“We had almost a hundred years of gossip to catch up on.”
Another thing that’s different this time is the audiovisuals. In the context of a close-up camera shot, supporting materials could be shared and viewed quite easily. In a live stage show, all the materials needed to be enlarged to poster size and then shown in turn to each of the three sides of the audience in the thrust space at the Rarig Center. But again, Les didn’t allow this to slow the story down, he’d just continue narrating while also making sure the whole audience got a chance to see pictures of relatives, a family tree chart, or a slave auction ledger. The translation of the show from recorded online version back to the live performance it was always meant to be happened without a hiccup.
“Then my father died, and life got dark. Then my mother died, and life got darker.”
In Climbing My Family Tree, Les is investigating his roots, whether that’s meeting his 99 year-old grandfather for the very first time over the Christmas holiday, or meeting up with newly discovered cousins he was introduced to by Ancestry.com. The structure of this production revolves around the grandfather's confession that he once killed a white man.
“I’m a descendant of French nobility? That explains so much.”
The meetings with cousins, and the revelations of all their own genealogical research into the family history, are spaced between the various cliffhangers in the grandfather's story. After all, how does a black man kill a white man in the American South of the 1930s, in front of a crowd of witnesses, get taken away by the sheriff, and then somehow still live to be the 99 year-old man telling Les this story?
“Instead of having family foisted on me, I got to choose them myself.”
I don't want to give too much away. Half the fun of the story, as usual, is its twists and turns. Suffice it to say that some of Les' cousins are quite unexpectedly white. The practice of "passing" if you were a light-skinned black person of a certain era also proves to be a key element in several ways. There's French nobility, there's a lot of story throughout the decades with the vibrant backdrop of New Orleans, and a slaveholder up in Canada with some surprisingly "enlightened" views about blacks having opportunity for a real education, and to purchase freedom for themselves and their families.
“At the end of the day, you never know who you’re related to.”
Climbing My Family Tree is yet another in Les Kurkendaal-Barrett’s long line of entertaining, amusing and insightful stories pulled from his own very colorful and eclectic life experience. I continue to marvel at how he’s able to so effortlessly process his life into these solo shows. In a Fringe awash in one-person presentations, it can be easy to take good storytelling like this for granted. Don’t make that mistake. Go see Climbing My Family Tree for yourself. You’ll be happy you did.
5 Stars - Very Highly Recommended
Here's some handy links to a rundown of 5 and 4.5 Star shows I've seen this year, also the 4 and 3.5 Star shows, and the rest, plus this year's Top 10 list, and Top 11-20 List, and the full list of all returning favorites in the 2023 Fringe, plus a link to all the 2023 Minnesota Fringe Festival coverage.
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