2009 Best of the Decade: CRADLE WILL ROCK, PERFECT PIE (Pioneer Press) 2009 Best of Twin Cities Theatre, PALACE OF THE END (City Pages) 2009 Best Productions 2009: PALACE OF THE END, BY THE BOG OF CATS THEATRE ARTIST OF THE DECADE, Wendy Knox (Lavender) 2009 Favorite Performance of the Year: Taous Khazem in PALACE OF THE END (MinnPost) 2008 BEST SMALL THEATRE, City Pages 2008- Ivey Award for Emotional Impact of our production of Martin McDonagh's THE PILLOWMAN 2007- BEST DIRECTOR: Wendy Knox 2006- BEST INDEPENDENT THEATER: Frank Theatre 2005- BEST ACTOR: Phil Kilbourne 2005- BEST AREA PREMIERE: Fucking A 2004- BEST INDEPENDENT THEATER: Frank Theatre 2002- BEST ACTRESS: Phyllis Wright 2000- BEST ACTOR: Steve Hendrickson 2000- BEST STAGE PRODUCTION: The Threepenny Opera

BEST DIRECTOR: Wendy Knox

Frank Theatre queenpin Wendy Knox has been rightly lauded for bringing us works by Bertolt Brecht, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Sam Shepard in recent years—pieces that we surely wouldn't have seen otherwise. But in addition to her good taste in scripts, Knox has a directorial style that deserves praise. We've long searched for ways to describe the experience of seeing one of her shows. We usually settle on some variation of pedal to the metal. But if we often feel as though we're in a car with no brakes, we also sense
that the lunatic behind the wheel happens to be an exceptionally good driver. Frank's staging of Venus, the story of an African woman made into a Victorian freak show, displayed Knox's capacity for getting a claw into your gut with raw, humorless work. Yet Frank's follow-up, Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, tackled wartime mercenary values with a sense of queasy and reckless humor. Knox's shows crackle and bristle with intellectualism, but also serve up a texture of real emotional danger. The final tribute to
Knox's talent is her ability to attract distinctive actors—such as Shá Cage, Maria Asp, and Grant Richey—to that challenging aesthetic. Actors obviously trust her; audiences should wear their seat belts.”

2006 BEST INDEPENDENT THEATER: Frank Theatre

Though somewhat lost amid the 2005 Twin Cities Greek Revival (we can think of five Greek shows last year, and there were surely more), Wendy Knox's The Women of Troy, a dramatic splicing of Euripides's The Trojan Women and Hecuba, was nonetheless an example of the fevered, intelligent, and uncompromising theater that this itinerant company consistently provides. Plunging deep into historical bondage and injustice, Troy featured an excellent set as well as a Marian Anderson-inspired score by Marya Hart. The clock was considerably moved ahead for The God of Hell, Sam Shepard's scary allegory of contemporary fascism, in which a leering government agent intrudes on the lives of a farm couple for the purpose of exerting unchecked and secret government power. The tone was cranked up high, as always in a Frank show. But in this case, the production managed a surreal alchemy with the historic moment.

Best of the Twin Cities 2006 Volume 27 Issue 1325 April 26, 2006

2005 BEST AREA PREMIERE: Fucking A

Frank Theatre treated this local unveiling of Suzan-Lori Parks's play like the lopsided treasure it was, staging it on the floor of an empty machine shop and applying layers of dread, panic, and tempered affection to a prickly and unforgiving storyline. Sh· Cage was both appealing and frightening as Hester, an abortionist living in a backwoods dystopia and dreaming of freeing her son from prison one day. The imagery came in streams, with a crooked mayor, corrupt vigilantes, and bursts of Brechtian song creating a knife's edge amid the waters of surrealism. Along the way, Gregory Stewart Smith's Butcher provided a crucial innocence that kept things from turning too harsh. This was a perfect wedding between Parks's wild and daring play, Cage's depth and energy, and director Wendy Knox's go-for-it style. Nathaniel Hawthorne had no fucking idea what he was getting himself into.