2026 Audience Reviews

Company: Jason Schommer
Show: 1985: Relative Chaos!
Venue: Strike Theater

I give 85 stars for 1985: Relative Chaos

Jason Schommer’s "1985: Relative Chaos!" Fringe festival show is an absolute delight. While his meticulously crafted tale might be staged within the formica plane of every struggling 1980s middle class midwestern family’s kitchen, it plays out like a fulfilling buffet of laughter reverberating throughout an audience that was again and again confronted with something of themselves in his personal memories. I went on Tuesday night, Aug. 11, and while I never leave the house on a weeknight, I'm glad I did. While his interwoven moments of childhood left me wondering whether things could have been better, I understood by the end that he is who he is because of who they were, and we may all be the better off for it. Those of us lucky enough to bear witness to his performance (which included the true recollection of his mother attempting to scale a chainlink fence to wrestle a 750 pound bear in Little Falls) were glad to laugh along with him now—and we could not stop laughing. After all, he says of his mother’s philosophy before she passed, laughter is how we move through a world where the joy of living inevitably collides with the pain that comes from being alive. With live piano music and song from stage right, Schommer took us all the way from Minneapolis to Little Falls (with a brief 3 a.m. stop in Wisconsin Dells) — where they continue to refuse to name a street after him. We shared in poignant moments of love and loss punctuated by the occasional one-liner — comic-relief within the nonstop comedy buffet. All I can say is that if you like motifs of committed elephants and demon-possessed daytime television characters, if you like snapping along to The Addams Family theme song one minute and humming The Gambler by Kenny Rogers’ the next — just waiting to be invited to bellow aloud that we must surely by now know when to hold em when to fold em (of course, we never really do) — this is the show for you. I only hope the show lives on long after the fringe comes to a close.