South High alum Eli Schlatter and French teacher Michele Campbell both put on shows this summer at the Minnesota Fringe Festival.
The Fringe Festival is a festival for Minnesota’s performing arts and consisted of 169 shows this year performing at 15 different venues, said Schlatter. According to the Fringe Festival organization, every performance piece in the festival is 60 minutes or less with a 30 minute break in between each show.
Fringe shows are selected by a lottery system in which applicants enter and a selection of random applications are chosen to be in the festival, according to the Fringe organization. “Anyone at all can enter in the lottery, you don’t need a cast, director, or even a show picked out for the lottery, you just need to have a willing producer” said Schlatter. “The one neat thing about the Minnesota Fringe is the lottery system that decides who is in the festival… In the Minnesota Fringe, it is anything and everything.”
Eli Schlatter, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, and his sister Emma put on a show called Communopoly in this year’s Fringe Festival with Camp Schlatter, a group of 13 other friends, most of them alums from South High. “Essentially, it was a communist takeover of the game of Monopoly,” Schlatter said. “It was very much a satirical comedy, we did not take anything seriously. With pure luck of getting in the first time, we produced and performed Communopoly in the 2010 Minnesota Fringe Festival.”
Communopoly was written by members of Camp Schlatter “just for fun” according to Schlatter. The cast later remounted the show in the Skybox Studio Theater at South as a fundraiser for the South High Theater Department. Together, the cast put on a total of four shows, which all sold out, and raised over $1000 for the theater department, according to Schlatter. “There we got great reception for the show and were told that we should think about submitting it in the Fringe,” said Schlatter. “This was the first thought for us of doing a Fringe show.” Camp Schlatter was on the Fringe waiting list and had to wait for a show to drop out before they were guaranteed a spot in the festival.
South High’s French teacher, Michele Campbell, put on a production in the Fringe Festival called Pardon My French. Campbell’s show was a solo-acted comedy about being a French teacher. “I’m a writer and the majority of the show was comedic about being a French teacher,” Campbell said. Campbell said that she decided to do a solo-act play because she “had a lot more control over the material”. According to Campbell, this was her first year participating in the Fringe Festival. She also said that she is involved in improv classes at Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis.
