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Sometimes, when a community throws a celebration of its past, it gets more than it expected. That's the basis of a new satire by The Moving Company, opening Friday at The Lab Theater in Minneapolis.


"Liberty Falls 54321" is written for laughs, but it digs at some of the uncomfortable truths in our history.


Actor Steve Epp plays Liberty Rose Johnson. On the occasion of her 105th birthday, her hometown Liberty Falls, Wis., decides to throw her a party.


"She is the last living remnant of the founders of the town," Epp said. "She is a little senile, so she doesn't remember everything correctly, but she has a lot of opinions about a lot of things." 


The town prepares a pageant, looking back on her life and even further back. However, it becomes clear that when the townspeople who prepared the historical script were unsure of the facts, they just made their best guess. History gets garbled. 


"Back before the United States was American," intones the narrator. "Back before they put the 'sin' in Wisconsin. Back before they put the 'Man' in Manitowoc and it was just 'Itowoc.' Way back, back, back. Before cheese." 


Epp said Liberty Falls is a microcosm that allows The Moving Company to poke fun at some bigger issues.


"It's kind of a way of looking at the underbelly of where we come from, how we got here, how people got to thinking the way they think," he said. "It also deals with race, which is something we're always dealing with in this country. It's the big elephant in the room."

The Moving Company was formed by some members of Theatre de la Jeune Lune after that group disbanded. In recent years it has created original shows, often with drama schools around the country. But this play came out of the state of public debate on important issues, according to Dominique Serrand, who is directing "Liberty Falls."


"In the last two, three years, we have heard a lot of stupidities," he said. "Especially when we watch the elections, which are interminable. And [when] we hear the stupidities we hear, we thought, 'We've got to do a show about this.'" 


Serrand, Epp and actor Nathan Keepers all worked on the script. Central to the play is Liberty Rose Johnson, and her age.


"She had to have lived some important historical moments," said Serrand. "So it ended up being 105. It could have been 97."


"We kind of wanted her to span 20th century America," said Keepers.


"Because she's got to embody the whole thing that we come out of," said Epp. 


Liberty Rose has lived through the important historical moments of the 20th century, but she gets them confused. She may have had a few brushes with history, including with a certain Communist-hunting member of Congress. 


"Well, she used to whisper into Joe McCarthy's ear," Serrand said. He asked Epp: "What did she use to whisper?" 


"Are you now or have you ever been ... ?" Epp replied, slipping into Liberty Rose's voice. 
 
  
Liberty Rose can be outrageous, and says things that many people wouldn't say. She's decided the schools just need fewer teachers and more guns. In creating her character, Epp said, he and his colleagues are using a technique perfected by a playwright whose work they have performed time and again. 


"That's what Moliere would do," he said. "It's the type of character he would create to get at the core of something." 


Members of The Moving Company say the idea is to get people to laugh hard at the absurdities of life. At some point, Serrand said, people realize they are laughing at themselves. 


"And say, 'I better change my mind. This is really stupid. This is not a way to look at things.' And I think that if anything that's very contemporary, to really look at a problem, and say, 'Can we relax and look at it and say it is a problem, we have a problem, can we solve it?'" 

Serrand said that as a Frenchman he knows the challenges facing reasoned debate are universal.


"So it would be difficult to do the show today in Paris," he said. "But I wish I could do it in Paris tomorrow, or next week." 


But for the moment, Minneapolis presents its own opportunity for debate.

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The Moving Company invents a Wisconsin town to poke fun at the way Americans think.

If Moliere had visited Wisconsin, he'd have written 'Liberty Falls'

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