GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES Mixed Blood Theatre has opened an ambitious three-play series they call Center of the Margins with the goal of “exploring the complex world of disability,” the publicity explains. The first play, Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries has a somewhat misleading title; the most “gruesome” injuries did not happen on a playground;...
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Playwright Katie Hae Leo presents us with a pleasantly breezy and vivacious narrator in her lovely Four Destinies (Mu Performing Arts at Mixed Blood Theatre, through Oct 30). The narrator is named Katie Leo. This Katie is a playwright and her aim is modesty itself: to answer once and for all the vexing question,...
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Mixed Blood has opened their season with an outrageous play and an equally outrageous concept, and I am equally impressed with both. The play is Neighbors by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a biting satire of every Black stereotype you’ve ever heard of; the concept is Radical Hospitality, offering their shows free – no strings – “Revolutionizing...
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Agnes Under The Big Top (Mixed Blood Theater, through March 6) is like the New York City subway on which much of it is set: dark, scary, echoey, pulsing, with sudden flashes of bright and harsh illumination. Playwright/director Aditi Kapil calls her piece “a tall tale” and that Agnes most certainly is, a fragmented...
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It’s entirely appropriate that WTF – excellent title – by Katie Ka Vang (Mu Performing Arts, at Mixed Blood Theatre, through Feb 6) is being produced in the midst of our nastiest winter in years. WTF is bleak, hallucinatory and intense, sprawling and long (nearly 3 hours), a hip-hip inflected piece that alternately thrills...
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Mixed Blood Theatre once again takes us someplace we haven’t been before with The House of Spirits, a bilingual adaptation by Caridad Svich of Isabel Allende’s acclaimed novel. Using the tragedy of Chile’s 20th century politics as a backdrop for the more personal story of three generations of the Trueba family, we are carefully...
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In 1959, a young writer, Lorraine Hansberry, premiered, on Broadway, A Raisin In The Sun. The play tapped a vein of intense yearning and became an instant classic. It features one of the great American heroes: an old-fashioned yet powerful African-American woman, Mama Younger, who struggles to hold her family together in the face...
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Mixed Blood may just have the most eclectic tastes of any theater I’ve reviewed in the Twin Cities, finding little gems that beautifully reflect their larger mission, while providing us with fine entertainment. With The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity they’ve launched a play about wrestlers that even I totally enjoyed. To explain. I...
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Deranged starlet Sheena Keener flees the Surf Awards (“All those eyes”), stumbles out of her limo, rolls down a bebrambled freeway embankment and now with a photogenic scrape on her pampered forehead pounds on the wobbly door of Loli’s cinderblock L.A. apartment. Loli has just been laid off and is down to her last $37. Still,...
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