With their previous entries into the Minnesota Fringe all selling out by the end of their respective festivals, the Four Humors troupe has become something of an August favorite in Minnesota theater. This will be their fourth year participating in the Fringe, and the group is affiliated with three shows that will be playing around town through August 10th.
The Spaceman Chronicles is something they’ve been carrying in their pockets since 2006; they developed Mortem Capiendum earlier this year, and have been touring it at various festivals throughout North America; and Shift was written in the two months leading up to this summer’s Minnesota Fringe. The assortment of plays represents a solid cross-section of what the troupe has been producing since joining together, showcasing the talent that has prompted critics to say they "offer up such wit and hilarity that audience members will be doubled over in their seats" (Star Tribune). The Rake had a chat with three of the four artistic directors – Nick Ryan, Jason Ballweber, and Brant Miller – to talk a bit about their recent work.
The Rake: What was it like touring Mortem Capiendum?
Brant: This is actually Four Humors’ first road show. It was kind of an experiment, just to see what it would be like. I don’t think any of us have ever done a tour before, in any capacity. So this is a first. What was it like touring? It’s a lot of work. In Minneapolis, people actually know us. We know we’re not huge, but in the community we’re known of. In every city you go to, though – Toronto, Winnipeg, Cincinnati – You’ve got to introduce yourself, and get people to come see your show, give you a try. It’s kind of like starting over. It would be like starting in Minneapolis all over again.
Jason: Except for without the friends and family.
The Rake: Did you use those festivals as sort of previews to hone the show?
Jason: Yes. We used Cincinnati very heavily as a preview. We had minimal rehearsal time before we went there, so a lot of Cincinnati was spent working out, you know, the basics of the show. Like whose character’s doing what, and what’s the real big picture that we have going on here. So Cincinnati is what we call our workshop city, and we still had a lot of fun, and had a lot of fun with the show that we put up. And I think that the audiences liked it, but we really used that as a learning experience for what the show was going to become.
The Rake: Will it change at all from performance to performance?
Jason: Yes. A lot. It’s a much more open show than what we usually do. We usually include the audience a whole lot, but this one of the first productions where we are directly asking the audience questions, and treating them as if they are an audience that’s sitting before us. The conceit is that it’s a medicine show, and so [the characters] are trying to sell something to the audience. So when we ask questions – we expect an answer back, if we don’t get one that’s fine – but if they do answer, we’re able to talk back. We’ve had a few performances that have really been shaped by how the audience was taking it and what they were giving us. And it’s just the three of us on stage the whole time, and we’re three people who are very comfortable with each other on stage, and we’re able to play a whole lot together. I couldn’t say that any two performances of this show are similar, even.
Brant: Also, I think we’re going to have done thirty-one performances over the summer? Which is the most we’ve ever done of any show of ours. And we like to keep it fresh for ourselves. It keeps us having fun, and stops it from getting stale.
The Rake: Was it written collaboratively, and in general, what sort of process do you have for writing together?
Nick: Well with Mortem Capiendum, it was written collaboratively, and it’s a bit of a change in direction from the shows that Four Humors has been doing. Up to this point, I’ve kind of written the script, and it’s been handed off to Jason, who would direct it, and that was kind of how we’ve done at least our Fringe shows for the last three years. With this one, though, we really wanted it to have been a collaboration between the four artistic directors of Four Humors, and just have us all discussing, and bringing ideas to the table from the beginning, and really have it shaped by the writing table atmosphere.
Jason: To Nick’s credit, even when he does hand over a script, he’s been very open to our additions, and different actors adding things to what he’s written. So there’s already been a collaborative nature to how we work. This has just been the most unclear roles. We never sat down and said, "You are the writer. I’m the director. You guys are actors." It’s just been, "Let’s do a show."
Nick: Everybody feels like they own the show in some manner. It wasn’t one person driving it to where it is.
The Rake: Have there been any bad but preposterously funny reactions to the play as you toured?
Nick: While Brant and Jason and Matt (Spring — the fourth artistic director) were in Winnipeg and Toronto, I was back here in Minneapolis, and I was checking online for any reviews of Mortem Capiendum. And there was one from the Winnipeg Free Press, and their basic premise was that our show was exactly like There Will Be Blood, in tone if not content, and that Daniel Day-Lewis shouldn’t lose any sleep over our performance. Basically, they were very upset that we weren’t as good as Daniel Day-Lewis.
Brant: I’d also like to point out that I don’t think Daniel Day-Lewis loses sleep over any Fringe shows that are going on in the world.
The Rake: Have been any good but preposterously wrong reactions?
Nick: There was one woman in Cincinnati, who was apparently a mainstay at their Fringe. She was there every single night. And she saw the show. Jason and Matt and Brant play out to the audience a lot, so you can get a very good sense of whether the audience is enjoying it or not. And it was pretty clear that this woman was not enjoying it at all. And she came over to us and spoke to us at the Fringe headquarters. And she kept saying it was too much like the "Three Stooges." And I kept wondering why that was a bad thing. "Three Stooges" are fantastic to me. So we had this conversation, where she was saying it was too much like the "Three Stooges," and I kept saying thank you, and she said, "No, it was too much like the ‘Three Stooges.’" And I kept saying, "Thank you!" So she was upset that we didn’t hold the "Three Stooges" in the low opinion that she did.
The Rake: Would you talk a bit about how Shift got into the Festival?
Nick: Because Mortem Capiendum was going to be opened in Cincinnati at the beginning of June, my work as co-writer and outside eye was done by then. So I had a two-month block before the Fringe where I had nothing going on. A friend of mine, Jonas Gaslow, had a Fringe slot, and I approached him about collaborating on a one-man show. For the last few years I’ve been writing fairly exclusively for Four Humors, and I kind of took this opportunity to write something that Four Humors wouldn’t do. To try a show of a slightly different style. And Jonas comes from a very different theater background than I do, and the idea germinated from a numb
er of conversations that we had together. We just met and talked about what sort of show we wanted to do. It morphed out of a few snippets of writing that I’d done before that, but it really blossomed into the show that it is when the conversation between Jonah and me started.
The Rake: And how about Spaceman Chronicles?
Nick: Again, because I knew that Mortem Capiendum was going finished in May, and that I would have this time, before I approached Jonas about Shift I had another slot in the festival lottery, that didn’t get into the general lottery, and I ended up on a waiting list. And I was fairly far down on the list. It wasn’t likely I’d get in. But about a week and a half ago we got a call from the Fringe main office, and they said they had a slot for us, if we wanted. We’ve had this show Spaceman Chronicles for a couple years, and it’s a very fun show, and we just decided let’s do it, let’s put it up as fast as we can, and it’s gotten very good responses so far. All three actors from Mortem Capiendum are involved, as well as myself.
Jason: And the main confusion there is that you can’t have two shows under one production company name at the Fringe.
Nick: That’s why we didn’t put the Four Humors name on it.
The Rake: Have the Minnesota Fringe Festivals helped you to establish yourselves around town?
Nick: It has really helped get the Four Humors name out. We’ve built a very good audience at the Fringe Festival. Basically all of our write-ups from the major papers in this city are from our Fringe shows. Though right now we’ve found it a bit challenging to take that success that we’ve had in the Fringe, and bridge it over to producing shows outside the festival in the larger Minneapolis community. While the Fringe has been great, we’re still making that leap into selling as well as we do at the Fringe, when we’re not at the Fringe.
The Rake: Your stuff often deals with sort of higher entities (gods, devils, afterlife, metaphysics) — do you see any continuity in the shows you write from scratch?
Jason: As a theater company, we like to take older myths and rework them. We’re a bit, um, post-modernist? We have the belief that there’s nothing new, and that you can take an old story and just re-tell it. I think there are, what, twelve stories in the entire world, and it’s just about how you tell them. Also, there’s the old mainstays. Poets keep writing poems about love because no one’s ever been able to explain it. Same with death. We’re interested with grand emotions, as well as the every day. Even if your shoelace breaks, in theater you have to treat it like it’s the end of the world. On stage it’s too mundane if it’s presented any other way. I guess post-modernistic…melodramatic…
Nick and Brant: Comedy!
Jason: That would be our main throughway — our interest in the humor of all these grand emotions.
The Rake: Is there a certain type of show Four Humors likes to put up?
Brant: We’ve been saying lately that the kind of theater we like to put on is the kind of theater we like to watch. So, that really sums it up. Stuff that engages the audience, and really brings them along, instead of just a fourth wall, feeling disconnected.
Nick: And we’ve been operating under our mission statement for the last six months or so — we make the beautiful foolish, and the foolish beautiful.
Jason: Also a little tag on: what we say as artistic directors is, "never treat the audience like idiots."
Brant: Amen.
The Rake: What’s harder – putting on a play, or trying to get status as a legitimate Minnesotan business?
Brant: Well, for us – an assumed-name partnership is officially what we are, with a fiscal agent – just doing the paperwork was a big thing because we’re such artists that the business stuff isn’t right up our alley, we’re not as used to it as we are to creating a new piece of work.
Jason: Which is not to say that putting up a show is easy.
Brant: Not at all.
Nick: We’ve just been honing that skill for a lot longer than we have keeping books and filling out paperwork and meeting deadlines.
Jason: And just like any business, we’re going to have to consistently put out good shows for people to give us any money to continue putting on good shows. So one will lead into the other.
See the Minnesota Fringe Festival website for complete listings of remaining showtimes for all the Four Humors’ works.
To read John Erwin’s Inside the Fringe: Installment One, click here.
To read Jill Yablonski’s Inside the Fringe: Installment Two, click here.
To read Andrew Newman’s Inside the Fringe: Installment Three, click here.
To read Brandon Root’s Inside the Fringe: Installment Four, click here.