The Wake

A shimmering beam of white light has arrived, guaranteed to brighten your life. Electric Arc, a serial radio show with a collaboration of writers from Minneapolis’ Lit 6 Project, has joined with Creative Electric Studios and successfully produced a radio show that is also fun to watch. Electric Arc is so original, so hilarious and unheard of, that trying to find a comparison for it would be like picking your favorite color – on acid.

The Lit 6 Project, spawned from the minds of four dissenter of normalcy, is a group of creatives that has picked up their own torch- and run with it. They are writing and writing and drinking and writing, living their fiction together in a South Minneapolis house. Every so often they resurface and broadcast these memoirs of their lives to any and all. And you need to see it.

For the last year and a half, the foursome have been sharing their lives, touring the city and performing for a growing mix of friends and fans. The show is also posted online through their Web site, www.lit6project.com. Currently beginning their third season, the troupe is beginning to pick up speed. This fall they will be touring through New York as well as Chicago before coming back to finish up the last shows in Minneapolis this December. The show’s growing popularity has also attracted new sponsors, a musical act scheduled to accompany each show, and even created some buzz as to whether Electric Arc will be put on broadcast radio.

The Wake had the opportunity to witness first hand this season’s opener at eh Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis. The show was accompanied by serveral song from the group Big Trouble, a collection of Minneapolis musicians, including two members of Twin Cities’ own Heiruspecs. Big Trouble, who bunked in the Lit 6 Project’s house for a week before the show, was intertwined into the performance, serving as a powerful musical guest. Electric Arc’s core writers, Sam Osterhout, Stephanie Wilbur Ash, Brady Bergeson and Geoff Herbach, are as unique as they are entertaining, each fitting an integral niche in the show’s increasngly sporadic narrative. The format, loosely, is a collection of monologues and confessions by the four housemates, tied together through narration and clever dialogue against the backdrop of the show’s spaghetti western/bluegrass house musicians. Throw in random guest cameos (Bjork, Oscar Wilde, Alan Greenspan) and you’ve got yourself a modern Red Skelton. Only drunker.

The Lit 6 Project was born out of a yearning to create a literary environment where everyone was welcome— authors and alcoholics alike. The idea was that they would break free from the rules and stuffiness of formal readings and have fun, all while throwing back one (or two or three) with friends. “These readings were like drunken orgies,” confessed Osterhout, when describing early shows. “And it worked.” The stories, he continues, are more like the inebriated conversations you have with friends across barstools than formal prose.

After a few bar readings and a growing following, the four writers moved in together, teamed up with their friends at Creative Electric Studios, an art gallery rated the best in Minneapolis by City Pages in 2005, and Electric Arc radio station began.

Now two seasons later, the cast is still writing, growing, and performing. But above all, they’re having fun. The show has grown to include the hilarious voices of fake celebrities: a prepubescent paperboy, a faded southern liquor store clerk, and Paul Dickinson, a Minneapolis-based poet who serves as the crew’s punk rock guru neighbor. This is the genius of Electric Arc: it doesn’t try to do anything up front, besides entertain. It serves to help people remember that good writing and performance can be both simple and wonderful, even outside of academia.

All in all, to see an Electric Arc radio show is to make a conscious decision to become a part of something that still dares to matter and doesn’t fail to entertain.