The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Like all of Samuel Beckett's plays, Endgame, now being produced by the Ten Thousand Things company, is an odd piece. The author tended to write claustrophobic plays in which a few people bother each other over and over again; the most famous of these is, of course, Waiting for Godot, in which two bored men spend the entire play waiting for the titular character, who (spoiler alert!) never arrives.

Hitchcock Blonde by Terry Johnson, currently playing at the Jungle Theater, isn't what you would call a critical darling. I didn't read any of the other reviews before I went to see it, but I read them afterward, and they have the same complaints I did. The script is sprawling and overlong, in part because Johnson is obviously a playwright who has fallen madly in love with his own dialogue. Lines that could be short and sharp are long and blunted as a result.

Snowman, the latest play at the Open Eye Figure Theatre, takes place in a land filled with impossible, unexplained transformations. It is set in a vaguely Scandinavian town that is buried in snow, and has been for quite a long time, and will continue to be so, as far as anybody can tell, forever. With the snow came change: The opening scene of the play consists of a bawdy, chummy dialogue between two crows, who, it turns out, were once men.