schedule
Mother/Destroyer
Fearsome Critter
Thu., Jul. 30 @ 7:00 p.m.
Sun., Aug. 2 @ 1:00 p.m.
Wed., Aug. 5 @ 7:00 p.m.
Thu., Aug. 6 @ 5:30 p.m.
Sun., Aug. 9 @ 5:30 p.m.
Warning! Violence, Adult language, Loud noises/gunshots
Venue Bryant-Lake Bowl
For ages 16+
Written by Greg Carlson
genres Comedy, Drama
features World premiere
Overall rating
User reviews
Delicious Underbelly
by David Roufs Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
If you are familiar with the underbelly, the uncomfortable side, of your relationship with others, this play should resonate with you. Due to Mr. Millers and their Regulatory Compliance view of things, Fearsome Critters will never be listed along with NO EXIT, but this work traps two in their interpersonal prison with stronger walls.
friends forever?
by david eskelson Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
I enjoyed this show it was funny and sad in how the characters\' relationship ended. The actors did a great job with their character really bringing them to life, I would recommend this show and felt that the audience I was with enjoyed it as well.
S'ok
by Waylon Werner Follow this reviewer
Rating 3 kitties
I greatly enjoyed the Characters and the actors, they did a fantastic job, however the over all show just didn't do it for me. I would have enojoed it more if it were a collection of monologues. It also didn't help that the BLB Theater has a "special" smell that was a tad distracting.
Fearsome Critters
by Ann Meier Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
I thought the show was great! The actors were adept at bringing their fairly dramatic and sad story to life. The banjo playing interludes were brilliant and really tied the whole performance together - while being delightfully morose and kinda creepy :) The story was a little hard to follow at the very beginning, but the actors brought the story alive as they progressively 'imbibed' and dug deeper into the emotions of the plot. Sometimes it was really funny, but so dramatic overall that I didn't know if I could/should laugh. Overall, I thought it was well written and executed and definitely worth spending an afternoon with. If you love what the Fringe is all about - go check out this show.
Fearsome
by Matthew Kelly Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
It was excellent. I performances were great. Taking a great simple relationship, and just exploding on it was wonderful.
Although creepy it had a sense of truth to the story.
I recommend this to anyone.
Huh?
by Joshua Humphrey Follow this reviewer
Rating 2 kitties
I'm going to pull the "I didn't understand this" card. I felt like I'd missed something essential that could have tied this show together for me. It felt like watching two guys get drunk onstage and espouse on their women troubles, with which I felt little-to-no sympathy.
Two kitties are for Kevin and Derek's performances, which were the most engaging part of the show, along with the banjo player. I love banjo music and that was a treat to listen to in the scene changes.
Get reacquainted
by Joseph Halvarson Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
This is a show that grew on me after some rumination. The characters in the show are both well-developed and leave much to chew on. They have pasts that are alluded to, but not given. They have presents that are confounding, but grounded, and despite their brokenness, Jack physically and mentally, Henry emotionally, they both look forward to potential futures that transcend who they are, but ultimately might be unattainable.
Disparate pieces? Yes, unfortunately.
by Derek Miller Follow this reviewer
Rating 2 kitties
In the program for Motherdestroyer's new play, the director/writer Greg Carlson gives the audience a paragraph explaining how he wrote the show over a long weekend in a cabin with a cat and a white rat, drinking cheap Vodka and listening to an 8-track playing the soundtrack from "Xanadu." He sums it up by saying "From such seemingly disparate parts came the play you were kind enough to attend today." That line could be the thesis statement for what went wrong with "Fearsome Critter."
Every part of this show feels cobbled together from disparate elements. At the heart of the story are two former friends, Jack and Henry, who haven't seen each other in years. Henry mysteriously skipped their small northern Minnesota town one night and has arrived again as unannounced as he left. They are in wildly different places. Jack has lost a finger in a work/banjo-related accident and is looking to escape. Henry, who spent his missing years living in Minneapolis, returns, sporting turn-of-the-century farmer's clothes, lugging around a birch-branch walking stick and babbling on about mysterious forces in the woods. Each one of them barrels down his own track, and never, seemingly, do they meet.
Good theater should be about contradictions. It should bring in disparate elements and crash them together. This process should synthesize a new world onstage. It is this last part, the synthesis, that "Fearsome Critter" lacks. All three of the performers play characters who drown in solipsism and thus seem to be performing in radically different plays. Derek Dirlam, as Jack, exists in a comic pseudo-realistic realm. His timing and easy-going characterization is amiable and representational sitcom material. Kevin Chick, as Henry, speaks in a labored baritone and extemporizes as though he were reading experimental poetry of the Beat Generation. His performance is wooden, didactic and presentational. Also, inexplicably, there is a banjo player off to the side of the stage, who mainly just sits there and drinks from a bottle of vodka. He plays his banjo drunkenly, partly to cover unnecessarily-long scene changes, and partly to offer some kind of ironic detachment.
From these different worlds, separately by vast gulfs of space, the play attempts to separately toy with the audience's emotion via Jack, and its intellect via Henry. This is a terrible ploy, to compartmentalize and wall off the characters, lines and actions from each other to such a degree. As a result, these characters never connect with each other on any level at any time, and ultimately, never connect with the audience. Even at the end, in which a violent conflict erupts, never is there the sense that anyone here means anything to anyone else. That may be an interesting philosophical idea, but it makes for terrible theater. Mostly, what we are presented with is two characters talking over the top of one another for an hour, never daring to push their disparate worlds together to create a single play.
Men and wood
by Kelly Brogan Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
This is a story about two different kinds of assholes. And yet, you end feeling compassion for the both of them. Jack, the man who settled for less and wants to escape his paltry existence without being the "bad guy." And Henry, who peaked early and then failed, and has since lost his mind.
"Fearsome Critter" is a tale about friends by default and their antagonistic nature. This isn't a story that gets wrapped up with a happy little bow at the end, but it's thought provoking, entertaining and funny. Interesting, humorous facts are brilliantly intermingled throughout.
The mysterious banjo player weaving his lonesome melody throughout the production was a nice touch too.
The ecstasy
by mark stearns Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
I've seen it twice and am looking forward to seeing it again. I agree with all the wonderful things that have been said in the other review.
SHIM CO
by Nicholas Tillemans Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
After an accident on the job and seeking to escape from the daily grind of manufacturing shims for SHIM CO, beer-guzzling Jack turns to Henry, an old friend of his who has returned to the country from the BIG CITY. Jack tries to convince Henry, now a disillusioned hermit, to steal his wife so he can run away and take up the banjo. They are both forced to deal with their weaknesses.
This is not Carlson’s slapstick Skunkape Sex Cult of 2008. The humor is more subdued. I laughed out loud several times; though I was mostly just delighted by the thoughtful dialogue. The dialogue touches on important psychological puzzles, human anxieties and sociological pressures: for example, the nature of attraction and repulsion, the desire to separate oneself from the past to live again, and the shrinking importance/marginalization of jobs that were once majestic.
I think there are answers to be found in the conclusion of the story. But the diagnosis is gloomy. It’s dismal for a happy ending. But I enjoyed it all the same.
The acting was delightful as the story took its stride. And the banjo-playing was, well, banjo-playing. You can't go wrong with that.
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