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Home > Arts > FRINGE FILE #8: INTERVIEW – Phillip Andrew Bennett Low on <em>A Revolution Highly Favorable</em>

FRINGE FILE #8: INTERVIEW – Phillip Andrew Bennett Low on A Revolution Highly Favorable

by Basil Considine -

The official show image for A Revolution Highly Favorable, presented by Maximum Verbosity at the Strike Theater in Northeast Minneapolis from August 8-15, as part of the 2026 Minnesota Fringe Festival.

The United States is currently two years into the America 250 anniversary of the American Revolution, an occasion that has occasioned celebratory, critical, and dynamic explorations of the country’s founding and its legacies. One such exploration is Maximum Verbosity’s production of A Revolution Highly Favorable, the latest work by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low.

Official Show Description
Adapting for the first time 18th-century combat medic, historian, and POW David Ramsay, this fully AI-illustrated show features a different collection of readings each night.

What are some of the things that you do as an artist?

A Revolution Highly Favorable in part delves into the experiences of David Ramsay, whose perspectives as (amongst many other things) an American physician and politician during the war gave him unique insights. Today, he is often remembered as one of the first major historians to write in-depth about the American Revolution, and remains a go-to-reference for aficionados and scholars alike.

The Arts Reader’s Basil Considine spoke with Phillip Low about his art-making and current oeuvre.

Phillip Low in mime makeup.

Like a lot of Fringe-level creatives, I’ve ended up doing a little of everything. I primarily think of myself as a writer, but I also act (I mean, depending on who you ask) and direct. I’m probably best-known as a touring storyteller, but I’m also a mime (I apprenticed under a student of Marceau‘s for a year), I’ve won slam poetry competitions, dabbled in stand-up, and belonged to a puppetry troupe.

I’ve picked up that eclectic collection of skills you get when you spend your teens and twenties declining to say no to anything. Still can’t carry a tune, though.

“An incredible wordsmith and stage talent.”
–Kate Hoff, Twin Cities Daily Planet, “Easy Winners” (2008)

How did you first engage with the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and how has that changed over the years?

I had ambitions of more extensive mime training that were stymied by the sudden onset of an autonomic disorder. I then spent several years blind-submitting my scripts to everyone in the Dramatist’s Sourcebook that didn’t explicitly exclude me, and finally, after a desperate plea in a newsgroup (think Reddit before Reddit, kids) someone mentioned the existence of the Fringe.

I applied [to the Minnesota Fringe] in 2004 with a musical I wrote, directed, and starred in (remember that thing I said about not being able to carry a tune? Yeah, I wasn’t exaggerating. Man, the hubris of youth). We opened to three people (and that has, uh, often not changed over the years). What has changed is that I sort of stumbled backwards into my calling as a storyteller (interminable speeches in my plays should probably have been a clue).

Becoming a stay-at-home dad and homeschooling the kids we can’t seem to stop producing has made directing pretty impossible in recent years, so most of my energy has gone towards developing one-man shows and hiring directors for my ensemble scripts.

“Maximum Verbosity and its often one-man-band leader phillip andrew bennett low are returning favorites not only of mine but also of Mom’s, who had them on her “List of Demands” for shows to see [at the Minnesota] Fringe.”
–Matthew Everett, Single White Fringe Geek, “Review – The Rise of General Arthur” (2009)

Phillip Low on-stage.

What’s a favorite piece of non-Fringe theater that you experienced in the last year, and why?

Off the top of my head, I did drag my eight-year-old to both An Iliad and The Hobbit (because I am apparently that kind of insufferable parent). Enjoyed both, but I feel compelled to give a hat-tip to the frame story of The Hobbit — while I found the dystopian stuff to be a bit heavy-handed, the whole “Oh no, the actors didn’t show up so we have to improvise with what we have laying around” was an inspired way of nodding to the audience that okay, we’re not engaging with the layers of lore here, we’re going to be telling a fun adventure story.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve pored over The Lays of Beleriand, but this pretty adroitly redirected us to remember why we were swept up in this tale in the first place.

Phillip Low is the genius behind Maximum Verbosity, an expansive umbrella for far-ranging, multidisciplinary art-making.

What is your role in bringing this show to the stage?

Writing, performing, and everything those two roles entail.

The vast bulk of my working time in the past two years has gone into research — combing through Ramsay’s body of work over and over, as well as rabbit-holing my way down every weird and underreported corner of the Revolution that I personally found compelling.

In 3-4 sentences, what kinds of things will the audience experience at your show? What is its general aesthetic?

They will experience me standing in front of them, earnestly reading pages of 18th-century text alongside an AI-generated slideshow, and if nothing in that sentence scared you off, you’re probably in the target demographic. I hope they’ll be startled by how modern so much of it is — we’re temporal provincials, perpetually surprised by the fact that the horrors in front of us are ancient, and this is our founding myth, meaning that just about every bitter, bloodstained argument we are currently having is directly descended from theirs.

As for aesthetic, I have made an effort to iterate images whose art styles shift with the various speakers. Early on I attempted to mimic John-Trumbull-esque oil paintings, only to discover that this neatly showcased everything that generative AI is really, really bad at — the more I leaned in to the expressionistic, the more I tried to illustrate the speakers’ inner lives (rather than to illustrate the literal events), the more interesting the results became to me.

A promotional photo for A Revolution Highly Favorable.

What’s a favorite moment in this show, and why?

So the intent is for each show to be a kind of self-contained episode, with a beginning, middle, and end arranged around a different thematic unity. My personal favorite is Evening Four (“To Compleat the Works of Death”), a deep dive into the horrors of the war itself, and my own best effort to undermine our conception of the Revolution as a bunch of dudes in powdered wigs making profound declamations. There’s a section in there dedicated to the Gnaddenhutten Massacre, a particularly nauseating event in which a group of Patriots slaughtered a pacifist native group.

My reasons for devoting so much time to this are not to point and cackle at the hypocrisy of the Patriot cause, but to remind us of the terrible costs of war – hell, texts as far back as the Iliad remind us that we can’t line all the good guys up on one side and the bad guys on the other. Just causes are often immorally led, and heroes have always died in defense of brutes, and it’s worth taking a moment to remember how these conflicts corrupt even the noblest justifications.

I remain the dude who wrote The Rise of General Arthur, and I haven’t forgotten that every man has the capacity to become a monster, and whatever comforting words we choose to say about ourselves, moral codes crumble quickly in foxholes (or breastworks, to be more period-appropriate).

What are two other Fringe shows that you are interested in seeing, and why?

I will make the cowardly pretense that I can’t read instructions and name three! Three that caught my eye, and seem weirdly related:

All revolve around flashpoints in American history, and all are, weirdly, about a century out from the events they’re describing.

Look, I’m convinced that this is a kind of progressive poison all Americans suffer from: the conviction

  • that we are somehow more evolved;
  • that the arc of history bends towards justice;
  • that because Demosthenes didn’t understand air conditioning, our ancestors must be dumber than us.

So we will go see these shows, with their corrupt plutocrats and cruel deportation scandals and naked sexism, and we will be shocked, and we will pretend that we are shocked by how relevant they are, because there is more moral safety in that than admitting that we’re really shocked by the revelation that we are no better, that human nature has not changed since the burning of the Library of Alexandria, and that every political horror staring us in the face is normal.

What’s up next for you creatively?

Alas, creative work cannot be my primary focus right now, and I don’t want to commit to anything when history has shown that I am likely to change my mind about twenty times before hitting the stage – but I’m currently chewing over something involving Norman Thomas, a prominent socialist leader from the twenties to the forties.

Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister and political activist, was a notable conscientious objector during World War 1. He was the Socialist Party of America’s candidate for president in six elections, and founded a predecessor organization to the ACLU.
This October 19, 1927 issue of The New Leader shows Thomas as a candidate for NYC Alderman. Although a charismatic speaker, he was not elected to public office.

Watch this space! Or don’t. Watch another space. JUST WATCH SOMETHING, DAMN IT.

 

Basil Considine
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