Summer Theatre Season in Full Swing

Summer theatre in southeast Minnesota is in full swing with four professional companies staging eight different productions. This weekend marks the opening of the fifth season of the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona with a free after-play concert by Chicago rhythm and blues artist James Armstrong at Levee park (Saturday, July 28). The Jon Hassler Theater's summer offering, The Good Doctor, started in mid June, and The Commonweal's production of Harvey started the summer season in late May. The Gilmore Creek Summer Theater begins the second week of July with the creepy musical The Little Shop of Horrors. In its second season, Gilmore Creek has added a children's selection to their two-play summer series.

Jonathan Gillard Daly as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (photo: GRSF)

Here is a brief listing of summer offerings. Please check with the individual theaters for dates, times, and ticket information.

Jon Hassler Theater, Plainview, Minnesota

The Good Doctor by Neil Simon
Thursdays - Sundays, through July 13
Schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Commonweal Theatre, Lanesboro, Minnesota

Harvey by Mary Chase
Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman
Thursdays - Mondays, through October 25
Schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Great River Shakespeare Festival, Winona Minnesota

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Tuesdays - Sundays, through July 27
Schedules and tickets: Great River Shakespeare Festival

Gilmore Creek Summer Theatre, St. Mary's Page Theater, Winona, Minnesota

Little Shop of Horrors by Ashman & Mencken (opens July 10)
The Foreigner by Larry Shue (opens July 17)
Thursdays - Sundays, through August 3
Schedules and tickets: Gilmore Creek Summer Theatre

Gilmore Creek Children's Theatre

Mouse Expedition by Erin Malcolm and Brian Blankenship
Five performances July 19 - August 2
Schedules and tickets: Gilmore Creek Summer Theatre

Theater Tips: Lanesboro

Seating

The seating in the new Commonweal is general admission, which means patrons choose their seats on a first-come, first-served basis. (As a perk, season ticket holders are allowed into the theater first.) Because of the thrust seating, all of the seats are close to the stage, but I think the larger section directly facing the stage offers the best theatre experience. For example, I spent the first half of Harvey in the second row on the house left side of the stage. After intermission, I moved to a comparable seat in the center section and noticed a definite increase in "energy." I think the extra energy came largely from the actors playing more to the front of the room, but it also ccame from sitting in a section with more people (the side sections only have a few rows, while the center section has many.) Hearing others around me laugh increased my enjoyment of the play. At the Commonweal, patrons don't have to pay extra for the best seats, they just have to be timely.

Food

Lanesboro has several great restaurants, and eating before a performance is an important part of the Lanesboro theatre experience. With plays starting one half hour earlier (7:30 p.m.), it's a bit harder to make the trip to Lanesboro and still have time for a relaxing meal. This summer, several of the restaurants in town have made accommodations for the earlier time by staying open later on weekends. (In the past, the three bars were the only places to socialize after the plays.) While not an exhaustive list, the Vintage Restaurant (right next to the Commonweal) and Riverside on the Root both offer limited menus after the play. Additionally, Riverside often has live acoustic music on their outdoor deck. That means that theatre goers won't starve if they skip dinner to make the show, and they now have places to go after the play to extend the theatre experience.

Harvey

by Mary Chase, Directed by Alan Bailey
Commonweal Theatre (June 6, 2008)

Harvey is a play that asks its audience to reconsider the assumptions about what is normal and what is important in the day-to-day life of business and society. Its main character, Elwood P. Dowd, joins a long line of outcasts whose life outside of the mainstream stands as an indictment of the status quo: beats, hippis, punks, and freegans, for example. Dowd’s philosophy is simple and to the point: he’d rather be pleasant than normal. He refuses to conform to the social climbing efforts of his sister, Veta Louise, the financial world of his attorney, Judge Omar Gaffney, or the ponderings of renowned psychiatrist William Chumley. Dowd’s social resistance remains quite social and seems restricted to drinking in as many bars and clubs as possible with his pal, a giant invisible rabbit named Harvey and whoever he can get to join him.

Harvey follows what has become a staple Hollywood formula. A simple, childlike person allows those around him or her to come to terms with what is really important in life. And in case the audience has missed the message, a cab driver comes on stage in the last moments of the play to sum it up. Rain Man, Forest Gump and Stuart Little fit the same mold. It’s a feel-good formula, but Harvey doesn’t seem to have much fresh to add to the formula.

To be fair, Harvey pre-dates Forest Gump and the others by a couple of generations and may well remain a classic while the others fade. Written in the 1940s when the middle class and its values were being stretched to include the returning GIs and their quickly growing families, Harvey’s long run on Broadway, Pulitzer Prize, and the blockbuster movie starring James Stewart certainly suggest that it captured something essential and important in the 40s and 50s. Unfortunately, Harvey seems less like a challenge to the insipid values that inform our work and social life today and more of an interesting trip down memory lane.

While the story isn’t compelling, the acting is. It’s simply fun to watch Adrienne Sweeney as Dowd’s Sister compulsively and increasingly caress her fur stole as the tension rises and Stela Burdt, Dowd’s niece whose social life has been compromised by the imaginary rabbit, preen and flirt with her cat-eye glasses. Hal Cropp is perfect as the famous Freudian doctor, who, like most of the characters, suffers from his own neurosis. Mary Chase surely had fun tweaking the psychiatric establishment.

Eric Bunge’s “aw shucks” Elwood P. Dowd feels like Jimmy Stewart, which is probably necessary for this play. (I’ve never seen the Jimmy Steward movie, but the intermission buzz suggests that Bunge played the part just like Stewart.) The romantic tension between nurse Ruth Kelly (Jill Underwood) and the self-absorbed junior Psychiatrist Lymann Sanderson (Scott Dixon) add an interesting side story. Tom Berger’s set design, especially the sanitarium (Chumley’s Rest), and the choreographed set changes are worth the price of admission in themselves.

For those who have an attachment to Harvey the movie, and that surely includes a lot of summer visitors to Lanesboro, this Harvey will not disappoint. But others, like me, will leave the theater wondering why such a talented company would expend its efforts on this play.

Harvey plays in repertory with Man of La Mancha through October 25.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre