While the Minnesota Fringe Festival is often known for comedic or satirical shows, one of the 103 shows at the August arts staple is going to focus on the dark start of the year that many people in Minnesota faced: Operation Metro Surge.
Who We Are: Stories from the Surge is a staged reading created by former Shir Tikvah and Smith Jewish Academy board president Bruce Manning and co-produced by David Hellstrom. The script was developed as first-hand accounts of people’s experiences from a variety of backgrounds.
Hellstrom likened the concept to The Laramie Project, which is a documentary play based on the murder of gay Wyoming teen Matthew Shepard.
“Bruce has that in the back of his mind, and then he’s like, ‘Hey, we have kind of our own Matthew Shepard here. We got Renee. We got Alex. We’ve got this occupation,” Hellstrom said. “We could do our own version of that.”
The show is one of 11 being staged at the Open Eye Theater (504 E. 24th St., Minneapolis). Tickets, dates and times are available online.
With Who We Are, Hellstrom said there are no liberties taken in writing the script – he said that was a “red line” in developing the project.
“We are only going to use the actual words of the people that we either interview,” Hellstrom said. “And then this is the big thing that got Bruce involved: There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of sworn testimony. There’s story after story after story that nobody’s ever hearing about people really getting messed up by ICE, and Bruce is like, those stories have to be told too.”
The show also includes stories from people in the community who stepped up to help others. Kathryn Klibanoff, a member of the Twin Cities Jewish community and longtime friend of Manning, was one of those people.
“It’s a multi-ethnic, multiracial cast, with people playing multiple parts,” Klibanoff said. “There’s lots of themes about Judaism, but also themes of religion woven throughout [and] different characters speak about their faith.”
The real names of the people mentioned in the stories have been changed.
Klibanoff’s own experiences in helping stretched across the metro area. She stood outside a mosque in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood on several Friday afternoons as people were heading inside for one of their daily prayers.
“We were standing outside with our whistles and greeting everyone as they came, and being offered tea and sambusas by everybody,” she said. “There was real solidarity. And letting them know I’m Jewish and that we’re so happy to be able to stand by them. It was pretty incredible, and it was negative 10 degrees. It was freezing.”
Her main volunteer work was in St. Paul and Inver Grove Heights, two areas that she said she had never explored, working with the Latino community that she didn’t know at all.
“My main story [in the show] is my story of going to a mercado that needed help delivering groceries,” she said. “I’d never been in that area of St. Paul. I don’t know any Latino people. I just went [in] cold, and then developed relationships that are still very dear to me.”
The hardest part of developing any Fringe Festival show is the time constraint. Shows are – at a maximum – 55 minutes. It got even harder to stick to once Manning started going through the pages of court transcripts.
“We’re talking hundreds of pages and every one of them is a story where you’re like ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe that happened,’” Hellstrom said. “The Fringe is like, at minute 60, we’re turning your lights off.”
Every night during Fringe, there are showtimes at 4, 5:30, 7, 8:30 and 10 p.m. Every show gets five showings during the Aug. 6-16 festival – one at each of the five time slots.
“When you’re done, you’ve got 10 minutes to get out and the next group’s got 10 minutes to get in and we do it again,” Hellstrom said. “And they are not kidding around and they will cut the lights.”
Klibanoff said the editing process has been challenging for Manning.
“These stories all have merit. They all are instructive,” she said. “They all are documenting different aspects of everything. They had a lot of trouble culling it down to 55 minutes.”
Both Klibanoff and Hellstrom said that Manning is planning a much longer version of the show.
“Bruce said there’s going to be a two-hour version of this someday because of the things we cut or had to shorten,” Hellstrom said.
Said Klibanoff: “If it goes well at the Fringe, he could expand it [and] it could then be a script that college theater troupes and high schools and others around the country might want to put on and learn from.”
As someone who spoke with Bruce and contributed stories from the Surge to the play, I am incredibly excited to see this production. And Bruce did tell me directly that he is hoping for a longer version of the play in 2027, which I also cannot wait to see.
Me too! 100% agree with you Mark!