Playful Spirits

If Dean Seal has his way, the days of boring church-basement morality plays will come to an end this month. Seal, who was once listed in this magazine’s “100 to Watch” list, has been a busy man since he left his post as the Minnesota Fringe Festival’s executive director in 2002. He’s earned both a master of divinity degree and a masters in theology and the arts, written a book called Church & Stage, and founded a new theater festival called the Manna Fest, which will run concurrently with this year’s Fringe Festival.

The Manna Fest isn’t officially affiliated with the Fringe, but it has the Fringe’s blessing to exist, and it shares a similar laissez faire attitude toward style and content. Unlike the Fringe, however, Manna shows do have one important requirement—they must deal with spiritual or ethical issues in some way. No naughty language is allowed either. But other than those minor restrictions, almost anything goes.

“A lot of people find ethics and morality through their spiritual or religious life,” says Seal—and, as it happens, many artists grapple with these issues in their work. As head of the Fringe Festival for so many years, Seal long ago noticed that spiritual themes cropped up quite often. A few years ago, he began recruiting acts that were short-listed for the Fringe and asking friends to contribute material. The result is the Manna Fest, a broad-based collection of performances that address spiritual and ethical issues in an astonishingly wide variety of ways. “It’s not about religion,” says Seal, who is also the Manna’s artistic director. “It’s about how we, as humans, deal with the spiritual aspect of our existence and the challenges of ethics and morality.”

The twenty-four Manna shows are presented at Augsburg College, and the roster of performers reads like a Twin Cities theater community “best of.” Acclaimed performance artist Heidi Arneson debuts her work Potato Chip Head, about a twenty-first-century whirling dervish whose iPod transmits voices of the dead. “She offers an alternative to consumerism and gives gifts to passersby,” says Arneson. “She was inspired by a real homeless person.” Mrs. Man of God, starring improv veterans Beth Gilleland and Dane Stauffer, is about a man who is married to a man who is married to the church. World-renowned storyteller Jim Stowell talks about Belfast in The Most Bombed Hotel in the World, and Marcie Rendon brings a Native American perspective with Return of the Native Rave.

Seal became interested in theology after several years in show business. “The further I’d gotten in television and theater, the more I wanted to get out of it,” he says. After working as a hospital chaplain and reading Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail—“He could have holed himself up in a university and made a million dollars, but instead he went out and put his ass on the line”—Seal realized he wanted to help people tell stories with meaning.

“A [festival like this] can be done anywhere, not just in a church,” he says. “These shows are about how spirituality is lived, Christian or not. You don’t have to be religious to have ethics. If you have religion, you might be very unethical. Gandhi said he might have become a Christian if he hadn’t met so many of them,” Seal says with a chuckle.

What Gandhi would think of the Manna Fest is open to debate, but if Seal has his way, at the very least Gandhi would not be bored. August 3–12. 2211 Riverside Ave. S., Mpls., 651-209-6799

Contact Jaime Kleiman at jaime@jaimekleiman.com.