Eagan Playwright Reflects on Experience at the Minnesota Fringe Festival

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Kevin Bowen was at a dead end.

Bowen, an Eagan resident, was tracing his family's ancestry as part of a personal geneaology project. He knew that his Irish ancestors had immigrated to America before the Civil War. But Bowen couldn't find any information about their lives in Ireland—in part because of the poor record-keeping of the time.

Stymied in his efforts, Bowen took his search in a new, more creative direction: To bring his ancestors' history to life, he and colleague James Lundy wrote a musical.

Entitled "The Red Tureen", the show debuted in 2009 at the Minnesota Fringe Festival—and eventually became one of the most popular performances at the festival that year, Bowen said. This year, the Fringe Festival runs from Aug. 2 to Aug. 12, and will feature 165 shows spanning several genres and media.

Bowen, a graphic designer by day, had never co-written a musical before—much less produced a performance for one of the largest theater festivals in the state.

After spending four years writing and re-writing the script and music for the two-hour production, Bowen and Lundy had a handful of weeks to find a director and actors for the show and cut out half of the production to fit it into the festival's required 55-minute running time.

Set in Ireland during the potato famine, the musical revolves around the reconciliation of two brothers whose father was imprisoned for burning down a British army barracks. Bowen wrote 25 original songs for the production.

Prepping for the Fringe Festival was a whirlwind of casting, editing and marketing, Bowen remembers. But the process was also personally rewarding for newly-minted playwright, who said he nearly broke down the first time a lead actors in the show sang one of his songs.

"It was so moving just to hear him sing it the way it was supposed to be sung," Bowen said.

Bowen's production was performed five times over a 10-day span at the Fringe Festival.

The attention surrounding the festival and Bowen's musical was a new experience for actress Emily Thorkildson, a newcomer to the Fringe Festival who played one of the lead female roles in "The Red Tureen".

"To be able to read the reviews online and see how they ranked us, that was fun," said Thorkildson, an Eagan resident. "I was just out of college and it was fun to see things you're in in the paper."

Bowen also helped stage another performance of "The Red Tureen" in 2011 at a Plymouth church. This time, the actors performed the full, two-hour version of the musical with a orchestral accompaniment.

This time, Bowen had the help of another Eagan resident, Martha Davis, who worked with Bowen to orchestrate and revise his original music. Together, the pair worked late into the evenings on the show's musical numbers.

"This was huge, I'd never done anything this extensive," said Davis, a performing musician and piano teacher. "Especially when you have someone you're working with, you realize there's so much you're capable of doing."

Bringing his musical to life on stage opened an artistic door for Bowen, who said the festival has given him greater appreciation for playwrights and theater performers.

"When I go to a show now, I just have so much more of an appreciation for it," Bowen said. "You're looking at two to five years of a person's life on the stage. It's somebody's sacrifice, and they've put their sweat and their blood and their tears into this thing."

"It was wonderful, it was challenging, and it was scary," Bowen said of his own experience. "At the end of the day it was fulfilling because we actually pulled it off."