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

Intro text by Juleana Enright, interview by Kate Iverson
Rehearsal photos by Amanda Hanson

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.

It's hard to figure out how many times Romeo and Juliet have died onstage. The plays is four hundred and some odd years old, and one of Shakespeare's most popular, even when the playwright was alive. And so it is that his star-cross'd juvenile lovers get trotted out with great frequency, to sweet talk each other on a balcony and then protractedly dispatch themselves in the Capulet crypt. I suspect more Romeos and Juliets have died onstage than any two other characters in history, with their equally doomed friends and kinsmen Mercutio and Tybalt coming in close behind.

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.

The Bedlam Theatre has created a piece of dinner theater for their Christmas show, which they have named The Turducken, after a rather absurd holiday invention that consists of a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which, in turn, is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken, all of which is then filled with stuffing and sometimes sausage. Sometimes this whole monstrosity of bird meat is then deep fried.

According to actor and storyteller Kevin Kling, Michael Sommers of the Open Eye Figure Theatre always wanted to be the devil.

Kling, looking gnomish in a green winter coat that seems military surplus, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a fur cap, is talking about The Holiday Pageant, the Open eye's annual Christmas show, in which Sommer's actually plays the devil.

Somehow, in 40 years, 12 of them spent as an arts critic, I have managed not to see the Guthrie's production of A Christmas Carol, which is an extraordinary and embarrassing feat. It's sort of like being a New Yorker and never seeing the Yankees play, or being from Los Angeles and never using cocaine. But A Christmas Carol is a tricky subject for an arts critic to write about, for a few reasons.

I could tell jokes about Tsarist Russians all day long, so I'll just leave it to the folks at the Guthrie's Wurtele Thrust Stage, where a new adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's 19th century comedy The Government Inspector runs through August 24.