On the fringes of The Fringe

WHAT: The Minnesota Fringe Festival
WHEN: July 30 - Aug. 9
WHERE: Various Twin Cities locations

It’s time for the annual Minnesota Fringe Festival, the 11-day theater extravaganza that doles out stages by lottery rather than jury. That means a show about animal cracker genocide is just as likely to find a stage as a version of “Alice in Wonderland ” in bondage (both are plays showing this year). For an idea of what this year’s lineup looks like, A&E interviewed the creators of three of the most thought/laugh-inducing shows.

“Horace Greeley the Lesser: On the Isle of Misfit Toys”
CREATED BY: J Roth
WHEN: 8:30 p.m., July 30; 4 p.m., Aug. 1; 7 p.m., Aug. 5; 8:30 p.m., Aug. 7; 4:30 p.m., Aug. 8
WHERE: Augsburg Mainstage

“You may wanna tell people it’s kind of scary ‘cause there’s an evil dictator who takes over the island. He’s not very nice at all,” warns J Roth, creator and star of “Horace Greeley the Lesser: On the Isle of Misfit Toys.” As he climbs in and out of a small washtub and metallic fighting gear, he also switches between two personalities: Roth, the man behind the play, and Horace, the star.
Putting on a large pair of black rimmed glasses and a flying helmet, he turns into Horace and goes on to explain the premise. The Isle of Misfit Toys is a concept created in the 1964 TV film “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” which also deals with “the land of defect sends,” the island where mal-manufactured toys like trains with square wheels and “Charlies-in-the-Box” are sent.
“There’s a lot of culpability in the land of the correct sends for what’s going on out there,” he explains. “But people don’t want to hear that; they don’t want to be preached to.”
Horace takes out a Speak N’ Spell named Fu, who could probably be considered the lead supporting actor. Fu takes the journey with him to The Isle of Misfit Toys, although “he doesn’t want to go back.”
“He speaks in his own language,” Horace demonstrates, pressing some letter buttons. “He can say things like ‘I am’ and ‘u r a y’ … that is, ‘you are crazy.’ He has trouble with sounds like ‘cr.’ ”
Switching back to Roth, he explains that about eight people contributed to the creation of the play, but counting the role played by several toys, the show has 13 members.
“Horace Greeley” is a production of Walking Boxes, a theater group that operates out of Roth and his cousin’s neighboring houses. While the two cousins now share creative ideas, they weren’t into making Christmas plays of their own in their childhood.
“We’ve been playing music together since high school. My earliest memory of him is that we were having a baseball bat fight. He knocked my thumbnail off. We used to battle together,” Roth said.
But rather than violent war scenes, the battles in “Horace Greeley” are musical battles.
“What’s important for me is to not use violence to fight but to use music,” he says as Horace.
“Every being has a resonating frequency, and if you can find theirs, you can calm them down. When I fight with these toys I’m trying to find a frequency that will calm them down. I don’t want to kill them or anything. Although … there is some killing in this play.”

“Rumspringa the Musical”
CREATED BY: Jake Scott
WHEN: 7 p.m., Aug. 1; 10 p.m., Aug. 2; 7 p.m. Aug. 3; 5:30 p.m., Aug. 6; 10 p.m., Aug. 8
WHERE: Augsburg Studio

“We just wanted to think of some kind of romance that would be the most ridiculous and unexpected romance to ever happen. Amish people and robots, how different can you be?” Jake Scott, creator of “Rumspringa the Musical,” said.
The play centers on the rite of passage in the Amish culture that is Rumspringa, where a young adult gets to enter into regular culture and decide whether or not they want to commit to the Amish way of life.
“Rumspringa” is a comic take on the ritual, featuring 14 musical numbers inspired by everything from “Grease” to the plays of Andrew Lloyd Webber, but taking the most inspiration from the Disney classics that Scott and his friends grew up watching.
The lyrics feature plenty of love themes and the occasional recitation of the digits in pi. Scott’s favorite line is when the robot says, “It’s strange. I can’t be certain, but I think I’m developing feelings. This does not compute.”
“Rumpringa” was originally a film that Scott and his friends entered into a film festival at the University of Minnesota-Morris, where they all attended college. After it won several awards, they decided to bring it to The Fringe Festival.
“I think it’s rare that Amish people go on Rumspringa and decide not to be Amish,” Scott said. But that was before serenading robots entered the scene.

“Oops”
CREATED BY: Jasmine Rush and Colin Waitt
WHEN: 7 p.m., July 31; 8:30 p.m., Aug. 2; 5:30 p.m., Aug. 5; 10 p.m., Aug. 6; 1 p.m., Aug. 8
WHERE: Minneapolis Theatre Garage

The preview for “Oops” features one of the best Doritos Late Night Taco placements in history, as female lead and University of Minnesota alumnus in theater Jasmine Rush drunkenly asks “Do you wanna eat my taco at midnight?” and her gay friend replies, “Only if you’ll eat my summer sausage.”
This excerpt isn’t part of the actual play, but was part of a teaser/preclude that the group made for The Fringe’s website. A series of still frames with dialogue, the video is a taste of the eclectic and edgy humor in their story of a gay guy who accidentally gets his best friend pregnant in a night of drunken reverie.
Rush explains that when Colin Waitt, co-creator and fellow University theater alumnus, wrote the script, he was “really thinking about what would just not be good right now in our places in life.”
Despite trends of accidental pregnancies in modern cinema (“Juno,” “Knocked Up,” “Saved!”), Rush insists that “Oops” isn’t trying to add any kind of angle to the public dialogue.
“We’re not trying to make a political statement or anything like that. Granted it is a black straight woman and a gay white male,” she explains, “It really goes into what it is to grow up and assume responsibility of your actions.”
While that starts to sound heavy, the play tends to focus more on witty cultural dialogue, like different names for the vagina and what exactly “that’s so gay” just might mean.