2023 Audience Reviews

Company: Special When Lit and The Winding Sheet Outfit
Show: Stabby Stab Stab
Venue: Crane Theater

Best Play At The Festival

As theatre artists our job is to embody and reflect the many facets and the depths of the human condition. A play is at its best when speaks to our core, making us more sensitive, more aware and more awake to matters of the heart. It breaks us wide open as we sit with our individual and collective vulnerabilities, and in that space, evolve, grow and miraculously transform. I closed my Fringe experience by watching “Stabby Stab Stab” at The Crane Theatre in Minneapolis. I saved the best for last. In my thirty six years as an actor and the last 20 years as a playwright, never have I seen anything on the stage so truly authentic, aware and sensitive to rarely spoken matters of the heart. This play, based on a true story speaks to the kind of vulnerability and loneliness there simply are not words for, manages to explore the wholeness of the characters hearts and shows what can happen in desperation while unknowingly influenced by heart wrenching forms of mental illness. The playwright, actors, director and musicians contributions flow together so flawlessly in a surreal stream of conscious sort of way that reflect the whole hearts of people and so carefully addresses the realities of schizophrenia in a way I have never seen before. The research of the subject matter was extensive …. The reflection and expression RAW and REAL. This story could have been told in a very one dimensional way, and because of the gifts of those involved it transcended 3 dimensions that pulled the audience out of their out of their seat and into the very center of human vulnerability and the heart. I look forward to seeing more from this group. They have the gift. This play is what theatre is about and is so very very good.