Upright Egg Theatre Company opens Uranus on Thursday at the Tilsner Artist Co-op (if that didn’t at least make you giggle, you’re reading the wrong blog). Company member Brian O’Neal was nice enough to dedicate a few precious minutes to this week’s FringeFamous Five. What a guy!
First of all, for the readers who are thinking to themselves “Upright who?”, give us the run-down on the Upright Egg Theatre Company.
BRIAN O’NEAL: Upright Egg. It’s many things. The Egg is. A theatre company, A philanthropic organization, A cosmic entity, A mystical hippie commune spaceship — The truth is that The Egg has existed for ages and has now decided to speak. Upright Egg is a spirit. A spirit of community, of play, and of art. It’s as mysterious as it is familiar. It’s about giving, connecting, understanding and questioning.
Upright Egg has been around since the 2006 Fringe, with five full productions to date and the sixth, Uranus, coming up June 12th - 22nd. We’re based out of the Tilsner Artist’s Cooperative in Lowertown Saint Paul, where two of our company members live. This has been a happy move as the philosophies of the building work well with our mission statement. Drumroll please:
“Upright Egg Theatre Company seeks to understand and encourage participation in our collective human experience by creating works driven by a sprit of play, risk and community that embrace the magic of the theatrical event.”
We strive for our work to always come from a group effort. There are no stars in the work we create. Everyone has an equal voice. In the end we hope that actors leave an Upright Egg project saying “Wow that was totally crazy, a ton of work, and SO MUCH FUN!”. We hope our audiences come from our shows saying the exact same thing. Seeing an Upright Egg show you should never expect to sit in a dark room and have everything handed to you. We do ask of our audience, but never more than what we think they will give and always in the form of a gift. It’s an experiment.
Like any theatre company, we hope that everyone from production staff to audience has come out of the experience a wiser person. Not because The Egg gifted us with some new information or insight, but because we all asked a question together and answered it from ourselves and for ourselves.
In your opinion, is there a T.C. theatrical void that Upright Egg is filling?
BO: I think Upright Egg shares a lot of the same goals that other companies have — we’re all looking out for the people that are coming to see our shows, and building a community. Upright Egg’s goal has always been to make theatre a gift for our audiences. One thing that we’re starting to do with this show is to move towards becoming a “green” theatre. Meaning, essentially, that our mindset is changing to reduce our impact on the environment. We are reducing our paper waste, using less energy, finding other ways to stage productions by using resources in a more eco-friendly way. We are setting out to prove that you don’t need a ton of money to tell an entertaining story and you don’t need to fill a dumpster at the end of every show. We’re also committed to training during rehearsals with our casts. We’ve done Viewpoints training with every production, and we’ve also done Rasaboxes, Russian Movement, Suzuki training, etc. We build our ensembles over the course of rehearsal in a way that is unlike any I have experienced in the Twin Cities, and I think it shows in the work we do. We’re all performing in the same world, telling the same story as a cast.
Can you tell us a little bit about Upright Egg’s upcoming show Uranus?
BO: Uranus is an experiment in green theatre. All items used are donated, reused, found or recycled. The play follows three storylines: Two backpackers that are also storytellers that have been magically transported to a planet made entirely of Earth’s waste; the astronomer William Herschel, the person that discovered Uranus, thinks he’s seeing a comet in the sky, and has fallen in love with this celestial object; and Gaea, the mythological mother of all things, who has been made to relive her families’ history on the surface of Uranus. The play follows the three storylines, dealing with the central question — what do we get rid of? The show is big spectacle, with small heartfelt moments, general bedlam and includes enormous phallic objects, guerrilla rebels from outer space, an intergalactic train wreck, and lovely poetry mixed with more poop jokes than you shake a stick at.
How does Upright Egg go about selecting shows to produce?
BO: We start with asking a question we think is big enough and compelling to create a show worth doing. After that we fill the room with wonderful, talented, giving artists and we…jump.
With Uranus, we had the opportunity to work with a director and playwright that we were excited to collaborate with. In this case the question and final script came built-in. But the most important thing is that we always ask ourselves “why this show?” and what is compelling us to do it at this specific time.
It’s been tough going for some small local theatre companies lately. Have you guys been feeling the pinch?
BO: Yes and no. All of our shows are suggested donation…and we’re currently doing a show that’s 90% coming out of a dumpster. We try to make it easy to see an Upright Egg show. If free is what you can afford than free is what you will pay. If we can’t afford to fly a helicopter on stage than we will create the most amazing helicopter out of what we have — even if it’s just our bodies in space.
I think the bigger hurdle is getting people to choose theatre first — to give them something that they can’t get from staying at home or from going to the movies. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think that theatre exists as a medium for a reason. There is something special about the act of sharing that space and that time with other people, whether it’s to see something that is pure spectacle and fun or a really compelling drama.
For us, it’s creating an event and a gift for our audience.
Brian O’Neal is a company member with Upright Egg. He is a Sagittarius, works a day job in an office in the sleepy hamlet of Bloomington and is also an actor around town, having worked with TRP, nimbus, Youth Performance Company, In The Basement, Commedia Beauregard, and so on.
