This Body, This Fruit
Description:
This Body, This Fruit is a solo performance in 3 acts: a narrative journey built from poetry bringing the audience into, through, & out of the rage, sorrow, despair, revelation, awakening, & joy of transness.
Venue – Mixed Blood
Content Warnings – Adult Language, Flashing Lights, Loud Noises, Sexual Content, Suicidal Ideation/Self-Harm
Genre and Content – LGBTQIA+ Content, Solo Show, Spoken Word, Drama, Storytelling, Religious Content
Ages 12 to 15 and Up
This one’s an even more last minute addition, replacing another dropout, than either the puppet show or the ukulele gal I’ve previously written up.
Scheduling alert, they also have the very first slot on the festival schedule on Thursday, 8/6 at 5:30pn, so they could use an audience to kick off the Fringe with. It’s also one of the BFF performances, so Bring A Friend to Fringe while you’re at it :) After that, they’ve got a Friday show, and then nothing until their final three performances all on closing weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
And it’s not just recency bias or the idea of a shiny new object appearing in the listings. I am once again immediately drawn to the queerness and poetry of it all.
Davi Gray just got done presenting this show last month at Phoenix Theater, and now it’s crossing town to the Mixed Blood stage for the Fringe.
The More Information tab thankfully has some additional information to go on (as well as a voluminous listing of their countless audience reviews from the Phoenix run, which you can read for yourself if you like, I won’t copy and paste them all here :) - suffice it to say they are all quite glowing, which bodes well):
“A one-person show in three acts, “This Body, This Fruit” is a singular journey through gender transition / revelation. Deeply emotional and personal yet inclusive, the play wrestles with bodily and spiritual questions faced by every human, while embracing transgender lives in all their complexity, sorrow, and joy. The work engages viewers and asks them questions about their own lives, whatever their gender(s), as it moves through the prismatic doors of a lifelong pilgrimage toward the self.
My name is Davi Gray, and my pronouns are she and they. I'm a trans nonbinary woman, and I'm a poet and performer, and I've brought all these things together to build one small world for you to journey through for just under an hour. I hope you haven't already run away at the word "poet" - I know many, maybe most, people have ideas about poetry that may be carried over from bad high school experiences, or an accidental too-slow reading of rhymed couplets about different shades of green beneath flickering lights surrounded by shelves of slightly dusty books, but that is not the poetry I bring here.
It's easy for me to say nice things about my show - I'm the writer, after all - and I don't want you to be afraid of my built-in bias. (If I didn't love this show, I wouldn't be performing it!)”
Gray’s bio provides illumination on the piece from a different angle:
“Davi Gray (she/they) is a queer, trans, nonbinary poet, writer, performer, multihyphenate artist, activist, and abolitionist. They live in Bde Óta Othúŋwe (Minneapolis) on unceded Dakhóta lands, where she works through the ReEntry Lab to connect writers and other artists leaving incarceration with literary and arts communities ready to receive them. Davi has work published in Poetry, Water~Stone Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere, and can often be found performing around the Twin Cities. Her first poetry collection, This Body, This Fruit, will be published by Trio House Press in February 2027. You can find more on Davi and her work, including publications and upcoming events, at DaviGray.com.”
In the current societal climate it takes even more fortitude to put yourself out there that it might have even a year or so ago, so if a trans artist is taking the stage, I want to be supportive. And last minute additions to the festival need more of a boost than most, so they get the #20 slot this year.
Interested in hearing about other artists I recommend based on past outings in the Fringe? Here's a link to a list of all the coverage of returning favorite artists from past pre-Fringe Top 20 lists of mine that are part of this year's Minnesota Fringe Festival. And here's links to the 2026 versions of my pre-Fringe Top 10 list and Top 11 through 20 for the 2026 festival as we ramp up toward the start of the Fringe on August 6th.
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