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Twin cities arts buzz: Meet the creatives and their productions

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Published on September 17, 2009 at 1:54pm

"We had such a great working experience with Shining City," Sass adds. "It was artistically satisfying and really a big box-office success. That was a good play. This one is even better."

McPherson trades in harrowing psychological drama paired with scattershot, fragmentary dialogue that disarms audiences with a unique style of hyperrealism. Sass declares this play "a new breakthrough" for the playwright, likening it to the work of an "Irish Tennessee Williams."

"It's a riff on the Faust tale, set in Ireland," Sass explains. "Very much a comedy, which you wouldn't expect from a Faust story. It's about a guy, newly sober, in a house full of inveterate drinkers. They're playing cards on Christmas Eve when someone brings home a stranger. It turns out he's the Devil, come to play cards for the soul of the main character."

So much for eggnog and a carol around the family piano. Sass enthuses about his Y-chromosome-laden cast, which includes local heavy hitters such as Stephen Yoakam, Patrick Bailey, and Alan Hamilton.

"So much of the behavior and circumstances of these characters is sort of appalling," Sass says (of the upcoming show, not the actors themselves). "But there's also this definite spirit of fraternal love there, despite their being very unkind to one another."

Sass's enthusiasm is little short of contagious, and his year at the Jungle helm seems to have been invigorating (although he admits the experience has taught him the maniacal, all-consuming nature of trying to fill Boehlke's shoes). Of putting on yet another show, he says the process "becomes more familiar but doesn't really get easier. But there's an energy and spirit inside these plays, and the trick is to activate their magnetism until they levitate, on their own, under their own power."

Back behind Hiawatha, Sass and I had been blissfully digging away, recounting Midwestern childhoods and marveling at what can grow in gravel, as we amassed a stockpile of tall, variegated weeds and blocks of sturdy sod to load into the van. Then a Minneapolis police car with a couple of uniformed officers pulled up slowly. Sass and I stopped what we were doing and leaned on our shovels.

"What are you guys doing?" asked the officer behind the wheel.

"Weeding," Sass replied.

The policeman took a moment to calibrate just how much of a smartass Sass was being, a silence which the Jungle director wisely filled with a more prosaic explanation of our behavior.

"Cool," the cop said with an indulgent smile. "We just thought maybe you guys were harvesting a marijuana crop or something back here."

Two thoughts came to mind: that harvesting a pot crop in the middle of the city might not be the most unfortunate thing to be doing; and, more to the point, not harvesting marijuana in the presence of two MPD officers was an advantageous place to be.

The policemen gave us a friendly and courteous farewell, somewhat tickled by our folly, a sentiment I shared. Shoveling out unwanted weeds to help tell a story about existence and beauty, all things being equal, wasn't such an unrewarding way to spend a late-summer morning. Nor was staying out of jail.

Thinking Big by Thinking Small

By Matthew Smith


Barry Kryshka, photo by Nick Vlcek

THE TWIN CITIES' NEWEST film house probably isn't most people's idea of a movie theater. For one thing, the Trylon is usually open only a couple of days a week. And you won't find the usual gaudy marquee out front—you can easily walk right past the entrance without knowing the theater is there. It doesn't have a spacious lobby—in fact, it has no real lobby at all. Moviegoers enter through a storefront art gallery into a cramped hallway, where they shuffle past a tiny glass case with a few candy bars and a popcorn machine, and take a sharp right through a small door into a disconcertingly tiny, black-curtained theater. With barely more than 50 seats in the place, and a roughly 20-foot diagonal screen, the Trylon feels more like a private screening room than a movie theater.

The barebones cinema has a distinctly homemade feel, but for all of that, it is one of the most intriguing new arts ventures in the metro—and even in the nation. It is one of just a handful of "microcinemas" in the country, small art-house venues dedicated to showing niche movies not likely to draw a mass audience—independent films, foreign films, documentaries, or, in the case of the Trylon, classic movies.

The Trylon screened its first films in July, a three-weekend tribute to silent comedy star Buster Keaton, which drew sold-out audiences to its Friday and Saturday shows. After taking August off for a few finishing touches, the Trylon is back this month with a "crime spree" series (including the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Dog Day Afternoon, and Spike Lee's Inside Man.)

The new theater space was created virtually from scratch by Take-Up Productions, a volunteer organization that for the last three years has shown a single-minded dedication to keeping classic films alive in Twin Cities theaters. The mini cinema was the idea of Barry Kryshka, a 38-year-old veteran of the local repertory film scene and the driving force behind Take-Up.

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