The Walker's Out There 2010 series breaks theater out of the box

Twin Cities theater fans are spoiled with options, though it doesn't necessarily seem that way in January. The holiday shows are over, and the Fringe Festival is but a fleeting memory. Thankfully, the Walker shrewdly capitalizes on this dry spell, unleashing a month of works by boundary-exploring artists. Out There 2010 marks the venerable museum's 22nd season and promises to be one of its most interesting.

Call Cutta In A Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play
IDS Tower, Jan. 8-31, $20
Rimini Protokoll takes the concept of the world being a stage very seriously. The three-piece German collective has made a habit of avoiding traditional theater spaces since its inception almost 10 years ago, preferring to use more unconventional stages, like a moving truck or a Daimler shareholders' meeting. Call Cutta In A Box is no different, requiring an appointment to arrive at an IDS Tower office for a hour-long conversation with an Indian call center worker, forcing the would-be audience member to become a player. Plot-heavy? Maybe not, but it's guaranteed to be the best seat you're going to get all year.

Whatever, Heaven Allows
Walker Arts Center, Jan. 14-16, $18
A world-première work is exciting to begin with, but if there's one thing that makes a brand-new piece of theater even more exciting, it's the knowledge that the people behind it have previously  employed an audiospotlight, a device that focuses sound on a select group of people. Appropriating crazy technology normally used by giant corporations for advertising is but one of the amazing aspects of Radiohole that make their homage to Douglas Sirk films and Paradise Lost a must-see event. The group’s reputation for the non-traditional fits perfectly with the attitudes lauded in Sirk's masterpiece All That Heaven Allows.

The Watts Tower Project
Walker Arts Center, Jan. 21-23, $18
Roger Guenveur Smith might be best known as an actor in Spike Lee movies, but the artist has also received great acclaim for his theater work, including his most recent piece, Juan And John. This one-man show centers on the Los Angeles artist Simon Rodia and his iconic Watts Towers, arguably the greatest work of outsider art in America. The use of a single actor is a perfect fit for Smith's show, which focuses more on the experience of growing up in the tumultuous city than on the nearby towers pieced together from found objects and broken glass. Smith's abilities are exponentially magnified by a dense, flickering sound score created by his longtime collaborator, Marc Anthony Thompson, a.k.a. Chocolate Genius. Here's an excerpt from an earlier performance of the show:

The Great War
Walker Arts Center, Jan. 28-30, $18
While some theater innovators play with elements of the stage, actors, and technology to bring about new ideas, Hotel Modern removes the theater itself, making and moving intricate models around a long table in real time to create an experience that feels closer to film than live theater. Letters from World War I form a dark, haunting script that's disturbing on its own, but in combination with the incredible sound effects, the experience is visceral and shockingly realistic.