Minnesota Theatre

The Divorce Revolution

2011-08-06T09:55:00.001-05:00

By Alison DeNio; directed by David Coral
Presented at Valencia’s Academy Theatre, Winona, MN

The Divorce Revolution played to a small but enthusiastic audience in the black box space at Valencia Academy last night. The play has several objectives. One of them is to increase people’s awareness that there are possibilities of life after divorce—to rewrite the narrative about divorce, as DeNio writes—not just for the adults, but for the Children involved as well. Another objective is to present a strong, work of theater. And this play meets both of these objectives.

DeNio, left, and Hamilton during a rehearsal for Divorce Revolution.

The finely-written and inventive script provides a nested narrative that is able to tell a complex story in a short space, using an honesty that allows the audience to see both the humor and the possible tragedy in the all-too-human failings in marriage and in separation.

The story is a fictionalized telling of the marriage and divorce of DeNio and her parenting partner Wes Hamilton. Hamilton was involved in the writing and production and plays himself across from DeNio. While a good number of the audience members know DeNio and Hamilton, I’m convinced that this play will hold up nicely as a play as it moves on to locations beyond Winona.

Along with DeNio’s script, the production benefits from a number of talented managers and designers, headed by director David Coral. Coral just finished his second season with GRSF and a prominent role in the Commonweal’s Ibsen offering, Enemy of the People this past spring.

Tonight is the last scheduled performance in Winona, and while the play is likely to see more productions here later on, I highly recommend seeing this one tonight if you can.

For more information onThe Divorce Revolution, visit www.divorce-revolution.com/.
The Divorce Revolution plays Saturday, August 6, 2011 at Valencia Academy, Winona, MN, 7:00 p.m.
It runs 1 hour, with a panel discussion after a short intermission.

Sylvia

2011-07-12T12:49:00.002-05:00

A.R. Gurney, Dir. By Alan Bailey
Commonweal Theatre (July 11, 2011)

The premise of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia is pretty simple: A middle-aged man whose kids have moved off to college and whose job has lost its purpose and whose wife has filled her life with a new profession finds a stray dog in Central Park and falls terribly in love with it, placing stress on the relationship with his wife.

It’s always dangerous to bring either kids or animals on stage because the audience can move into the oh cute mode. In fact, when a picture of a real dog is displayed at the end of the play, the audience gives a collective “oh cute.” But Sylvia largely stays above this emotive realm by representing Sylvia as a human being, not a person in a dog suit.

Adrienne Sweeney and Phil Losacker in the Commonweal’s Sylvia
(Photo by Jason Underferth as seen in American Theatre)

Adrienne Sweeney handles the role of the stray dog, and it is her performance that makes the play stay on the right side of the oh cute line. Sweeney plays the role on two feet and largely as a human being. Yet, she offers enough subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) moves that anyone who has spent any time with animals would see her as a dog. In fact, by the end of the play, Sweeney has become the dog. When that picture of the real dog is displayed at the final scene of the play, I think the audience is a little surprised to see an actual dog and not Sweeney in the portrait.

Sylvia speaks, in English. In fact, the dog has the first lines of the play. If having an animal on stage risks pushing a play over the edge, an anthropomorphic animal—a Snoopy or Garfield—could doom a play. But somehow, Sweeney and her surrogate family, Greg (played by Phil Losacker) and Kate (played by Laura Depta the night I saw the play) are able to keep the conceit working: Sweeney is still the dog. The play’s notes suggest Gurney’s strategy for the talking dog: the dog speaks largely what the people around her expect her to say and sometimes what the people around her are thinking. While this may not always be the case, the talking dog motif works because the dog does seem to reflect what the people feel and what people expect the dog to feel. And this seems to be one of Gurney’s main observations: people interact with their pets with a both a frankness and affection that is therapeutic.

This therapeutic effectiveness of pet ownership is contrasted with the three advice-offering characters that Scott Dixon plays in Sylvia. (This seems to be a recurrent talent of Scott Dixon—playing a large number of the supporting characters in a play. I’m not sure if this is written into the play as it was in Jeffery Hatcher’s adaptation of Turn of the Screw last fall or if this is a Commonweal invention. But it is fun to watch). Dixon plays the recurring role of Tom, a New York tough who is strangely in touch with the complex relationship between man and dog and husband and wife. (Tom’s dog is named Buster, a much safer name for a man’s dog than the gendered Sylvia, he warns.) In each appearance, Tom has read another pop psychology book and has another insight into the relationship between a man and his wife and a man and his dog. Greg seems to find Tom’s insights helpful, but mostly his accidental meetings with Tom give Greg the opportunity to talk openly about his relationship with his dog. Tom’s thinking certainly is more substantial than the other two characters Dixon plays: Kate’s former college classmate and self-proclaimed expert on New York society and Kate’s androgynous and self-obsessed therapist, Leslie.

While Dixon plays these two cross-dressing roles effectively and to many of the play’s biggest laughs, these two characters move the play outside of what an audience can accept as real. This is a bit of irony: the anthropomorphic dog plays like realism while the socialite driven to the scotch decanter by an over-friendly dog plays like a bad sitcom; the pet seems a living character while the therapist languishes as a caricature.

The strength of Gurney’s play, and the strength of this production, lies with the ability to make Sweeney’s character feel like a living character—a dog. A human playing a dog is certainly a comedic element, but I find it a satisfyingly comedic element rich in its subtly and physicality. I’m not as satisfied with the play’s willingness to embrace the cheap laugh, the laugh that seems to be the staple of all too many summer comedies. Of course, this type of comedy wouldn’t be used if it did not resonate with play-goers. On the way out of the theater, people were talking about Sylvia, about their own pets, but mostly about Dixon’s portrayal of Leslie the therapist. One fellow patron declared that his favorite character in the play was the therapist.

Sylvia plays in repertory with Little Shop of Horrors through August 19.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre (www.commonwealtheatre.org)

Sylvia

2011-05-19T12:37:00.001-05:00

By A.R. Gurney; directed by Alan Bailey
Commonweal Theatre

The Commonweal Theatre Company opens A.R. Gurney’s comedy Sylvia, Saturday, May 21. The title character is a stray dog that meets Greg, a middle-aged financial trader in the midst of questioning where his career and his life have taken him. This chance meeting with Sylvia turns Greg’s entire world upside-down. This outrageous comedy challenges everything we think we know about love, sex, relationships, and the meaning of life.

Sylvia’s director, Alan Bailey says, “What sets Sylvia apart and makes it memorable and fun is that an actress plays Sylvia, a poodle-lab mix. But this isn’t an attempt at a faithful recreation of a dog, but an artist using her human body and voice and expressions to convey Sylvia as a full-realized character in the play.” [For commentary on the success of this “fully-realized character,” check out Sylvia’s trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnVne6JgYAQ

Phil Losacker (Greg) and Kirby Bennett (Kate). Photo by Jason Underferth.

Pet-lovers will undoubtedly recognize how powerful a force for change “Sylvia” proves to be in this play. “Without question, pets have the ability to change our lives,” Bailey adds. “If you invite your pet to truly be a member of your family - and increasingly, many of us invite pets into our homes to fill larger and more meaningful roles - then they absolutely become friends and confidantes and combatants.”

The love triangle in Sylvia features Twin Cities acting duo Phil Losacker and Kirby Bennett as Greg and his much-irked wife Kate with Commonweal Resident Artist Adrienne Sweeney as the titular Sylvia, who provides sudden competition with Kate for Greg’s time and affection. The cast is joined by Commonweal Resident Artist Scott Dixon playing triple roles of a fellow dog-lover in the park, an old college friend of Kate’s, and a marriage counselor.

Sylvia plays in Repertory with Enemey of the People through June 10 and with Little Shop of Horrors through August 19.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

I am Ann Frank

2011-05-19T11:50:00.000-05:00

May 20, 21, 27, and 28
Libretto by Enid Futterman; Music by Michael Cohen; Stage direction and design by Ben Krywosz
Nautilus Music-Theater (at the Jon Hassler Theater, Plainview)

Nautilus Music-Theater’s Ivey award-winning production of I Am Anne Frank opens this weekend at the Jon Hassler Theater for a four-night run. This musical adaption of Anne Frank’s famous diary, according to the producers, is the story of a young girl standing tip-toe on the edge of her future during a time of hatred and intolerance. The play combines spoken excerpts from Anne’s diary with songs that reveal the power of her inner life. Fully faithful to its source material, Anne’s famous chronicle of two Jewish families secreted in a cramped garret in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation is still as suspenseful and moving as ever. Her writing is propelled by an undying faith in the goodness of people. This heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting story stirs our deepest emotions as it insists upon honoring the endurance of the human spirit. Vanessa Gamble portrays Anne Frank in this production.

New York critics called Futterman and Cohen’s work “A moving, poignant, and in every sense tasteful piece of musical theatre... beautiful, flawless... this is what theater is all about.” Nautilus’ production earned rave reviews from critics and audiences alike when it premiered in 2006. The production won a coveted Ivey award, which noted that “the impressive artistic contributions of the talented cast, combined with the matchless vision of the directors, made Nautilus production of I Am Anne Frank a stunning collaboration of fine acting, sharp stage direction, effective lighting, and gorgeous music—a wonderful blend of music and acting, and an innovative way of telling an important story.”

Visit the Jon Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

14thAnnual Ibsen Festival

2011-04-12T23:17:00.000-05:00

Featuring Jeffery Hatcher’s adaption of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People at the Commonweal

The Ibsen festival marks both spring and the beginning of the area’s professional theater season. The centerpiece of the weekend will be the Commonweal’s production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. This will mark the second Ibsen play adapted by playwright Jeffery Hatcher. Last year’s Commonweal season featured Hatcher’s first run at Ibsen with John Gabriel Borkman as well as Hatcher’s take on Turn of the Screw. Scott Dixon Directs the Ibsen classic.

The weekend is full of food and cultural events. Below is a partial listing of events. For a full listing, download the festival brocure.

Weekend Highlights:

Friday April 15

Film
Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story
7:30 pm; Free Will Donation; St. Mane Theatre
Presented by the Lanesboro Arts Center with support from Lanesboro Local, the film traces the development of America’s heartland and its effect on the legendary river. The film offers fresh ideas and concrete solutions to the river’s troubles. Following the film there will be a discussion with sustainable agricultural specialist Loni Kemp. For more information visit www.lanesboroarts.org.

Theatre
An Enemy of the People
7:30 pm; Commonweal Theatre
Newly discovered health springs offer prosperity to a struggling town, until a local doctor realizes the waters are dangerously polluted. How far will a community go to turn a blind eye when the truth will bring about their personal ruin? This final preview performance features a post-show discussion. Reservations recommended.

Saturday, April 16

Book Signing
11:00 am to 3:00 pm; Lanesboro Local Publisher and author Deb Nelson Gourley was raised on her family’s ancestral Norwegian farm in Amherst, Minnesota. The author of Astri My Astri, Deb takes inspiration for her stories from her Norwegian ancestors.

Lecture
For the Love of Lakes
Darby Nelson
11:00 am; FREE; Commonweal Theatre
Minnesota – the land of 10,000 Lakes! But there is much more to a lake than meets the eye. With Thoreau’s ghost over his shoulder, Darby Nelson (President of Conservation Minnesota) explores the natural history of lakes and our relationship with these alluring bodies of water that are so much a part of our lives.

Artist Demonstration: Debra Ganglehoff
1:00 pm to 4:00 pm; Lanesboro Arts Center
Taking her inspiration from the beauty in nature, fiber artist Debra Gangelhoff works with felting, appliqué, and stitchery to make beautiful, useful items for the home.

Lecture
Ibsen Our Contemporary
Richard Hornby
1:00 pm; FREE; Commonweal Theatre
Chair of the Theater Department at the University of California at Riverside and theatre critic for the Hudson Review, Professor Hornby will discuss the challenges and opportunities of staging Ibsen for contemporary audiences.

Panel Discussion and Script Signing
Adapting and Staging Ibsen
4:00 pm; FREE; Commonweal Theatre
The Commonweal has commissioned Jeffrey Hatcher — one of America’s premiere playwrights — to adapt five plays from Ibsen’s canon, including An Enemy of the People. Join Jeffrey, director Scott Dixon and Interim Executive Director Hal Cropp as they discuss the many facets that go into creating a contemporary adaptation of a text more than a century old. Immediately following the panel discussion Jeffrey Hatcher will be signing copies of his script.

The Luther Jazz Quintet
6:30 pm; FREE; Commonweal Theatre Events Hall
Plan to arrive early for the show and enjoy an improvisational jazz concert featuring Tom Bourcier and inspired by the themes found in An Enemy of the People.

Theatre
An Enemy of the People
7:30 pm; $30; Commonweal Theatre
Join us for the opening performance of this world-premiere adaptation and stay for a celebration with the cast and crew after the show. Reservations recommended.

Sunday, April 17

Film
Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story
11:00 am; FREE; Commonweal Theatre

Theatre
An Enemy of the People
1:30 pm; $30; Commonweal Theatre

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Arsenic and Old Lace

2011-03-31T17:44:00.000-05:00

By Joseph Kesselring, Directed by Judee Brone
Fountain City River Players

Fountain City, Wisconsin’s community theater troupe will stage their annual spring comedy with a production of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Fountain City Auditorium
42 North Main Street
Fountain City, Wisconsin

Tickets can be purchased at Waumandee State Bank or Kwik Trip in Fountain City, at Midtown Food or Hardt's Music in Winona, or a half hour before each performance at the door. Call (608) 685-7481 to reserve tickets.

Metamorphoses

2011-03-26T17:24:00.000-05:00

By Mary Zimmerman, directed by Daniel Stock
Commonweal Apprentice Company

The Commonweal Theatre Company is in the middle of its 2010-11 Apprentice Company performance: Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman. The play runs March 24 - April 3.

The Apprentice Program, now in its third year, has earned a reputation for bringing exciting and fresh theatre to the Commonweal stage each spring. This year’s offering, Metamorphoses, is a modern adaptation of ten Greek myths. Through vibrant storytelling, the play explores universal themes including the struggle between mortals and the divine, the inevitability of change, and the redemptive power of love.

Originally mounted in Chicago in 1998, Zimmerman’s production electrified the theatre world and subsequently transferred to Broadway, where it was heralded as ”deeply affecting” by Time magazine. ”As the director,” says Daniel Stock, “I am interested in this play because these stories still fascinate us, over two millennia after they were first conceived. I believe we can better control our future by learning from our past. These stories continue to capture and illuminate timeless gifts: being human and being alive.”

The Apprentice Company features Brennan Kelleher, Claire Kenning, Michael van Schoick, Jessie Sherman and Daniel Stock—all seen on the Commonweal mainstage during the 2010 season—and introduces newcomer, Rachel Kuhnle.

The innovative set design can be considered its own character, featuring a 9’ x 9’ pool of water on the stage. The set, sound, costumes and props are designed by the Commonweal Apprentice Company. Company member, Jason Underferth will design the lights.

The 10-month Apprenticeship affords recent graduates a transition into the professional theatre world, providing keen insight into the Artist/Administrator model through regular artistic opportunities and focused time in the areas of Marketing, Development and Production. The apprenticeship culminates in a capstone project that is produced, directed, designed and performed by the Apprentice Company with the resources of the Commonweal and the guidance of the staff.

Metamorphoses has a limited run of 8 shows. All performances are at the Commonweal Theatre in downtown Lanesboro. Tickets are $20.

Metaporphoses runs Thursdays through Sundays, March 24 - April 3
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Great River Shakespeare Festival Preview

2011-03-26T16:07:00.000-05:00

GRSF will unveil their 2011 season with a reception at Signatures Events Center in Winona.

The Preview event features music by Heart Strings Harp Circle light refreshments, cash bar, and raffle prizes. GRSF merchandise will be on sale, and attendees will be able to order tickets and purchase gift certificates for the 2011 season productions. Reservations are recommended but not required (507-474-7900, ext. 118). A $5.00 donation is suggested. The Signatures Event Center is at 22852 County Road 17 in Winona.

For more information go to grsf.org

Land Stewardship Project presenting one-act play

2011-03-25T16:41:00.000-05:00

The Land Stewardship Project has been presenting Doug Nopar’s one act play, Look Who’s Knockin’, at churches, conferences, theaters and other venues throughout Southeastern Minnesota this winter and spring. The play follows a farm couple wrestling with what will happen to their farm after they retire. The play is intended to foster discussion about land ethics and how the next generation of farmers will be able to get started in farming.

Doug Nopar, the Policy Program Organizer for The Land Stewardship Project, is a long time rural organizer as well as the founder of Winona’s Youth Action Theatre. He created the play from numerous interviews and stories from and about new and retiring farmers. Look Who’s Knockin’ is directed by local farmer and regional actor Eva Barr and features a small rotating cast of actors familiar to Southeast Minnesota playgoers.

Upcoming performances include

April 8: The Crossings at Carnegie, Zumbrota, Minn., 7:30 p.m.; 320 E. Avenue, Zumbrota
April 10: Theatre du Mississippi, Masonic Temple, Winona, Minn., 2 p.m.; 251 Main St., Winona

Tickets are $5. For more information, contact Doug Nopar at 507-523-3366 or dnopar@landstewardshipproject.org, or go to LandStewardshipProject.org.

One Person Shows Added to Commonweal Season

2010-08-11T12:38:00.000-05:00

Last night marked the first of four, one-person shows that make up a summer/fall series the theater is calling “Commonweal Presents.” The plays come from regional, national, and international theatres.

Last night’s opening performance of Michelle Myers Berg’s Blue Collar Diaries proved to be an intimate and powerful theatre experience. Myers Berg portrayed characters made up from the working-class St. Paul, Minnesota neighborhood where she grew up. The main thread of the narrative revolves around her relationship with her distant and all-too-often angry father. Myers Berg discovers that her father, and her entire family, lived within the shadow of the Korean War, a war that neither she, nor the country seemed to know much about.

While the road to understanding this shadow holds the play together, Myers Berg’s portrayal of the characters on the periphery of her childhood steal the show—characters many of us know and attitudes about raising children that will feel all-to-familiar to those of us raised towards the end of the baby boom.

This first “Commonweal Presents” offering certainly indicates that these four productions will all be richly rewarding experiences.

Here are the Commonweal’s descriptions of the 4 plays:

Blue Collar Diaries

Written and performed by Michelle Myers Berg
August 10 & 11

Michelle Myers Berg in Blue Collar Diaries.

Michelle Myers offers a glimpse of some of the memorable characters that drifted through her St. Paul blue collar neighborhood in the 60's and 70's. Their personal stories go far beyond the names stitched above their left breast pockets. Exploring both the larger world of the neighborhood around her and the epic silence of her Korean War vet father with humor and poignancy, Myers celebrates the individual inside the uniform in this original one-woman show. Named one of the top ten performances of 2009 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press’ Dominic P. Papatola.

Min Mor (“Mother”)

Dramatised and directed by Anne-Karen Hytten
Performed by Bente Børsum
September 15 - one night only!

Bente Børsum in Min Mor.

Bente Børsum, actress with the National Theatre in Oslo, Norway, presents Min Mor (translated “Mother”), a collection of monologues based on the books, articles, and letters of Lise Børsum, the upper-class-wife, war-prisoner and fighter for human rights, who, in 1943, was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration-camp in Germany. The Commonweal is proud to welcome one of Norway’s most prolific actresses in a piece that has received international recognition. “An incredibly forceful show about a past that repeats itself every single day in every scene of war in our own time.” Arendals Tidende

www.minmor.no/omabout/about-the-show/

Passion of the Hausfrau

Adapted from the novel by Bess Welden, Annette Jolles & Nicole Chaison
Performed by Bess Welden
October 5 & 6

A one-women show about the hilarious misadventures of a mom who discovers that the roller coaster ride of raising young kids is actually the path to creating her own masterpiece. “Bess Welden made it impossible not to laugh, as she dramatized the trials and hysterical tribulations of motherhood . . . Kids or no kids, this energetic woman’s portrayal of the crazy life and conflicting demands of a young mother . . . is comic genius.” The Portland Phoenix

www.thehausfrauplay.com

Lessons from Cancer College

Written by Nancy K. Barry; Directed by Eva Barr
performed by Kristin Underwood
October 19 & 20

Kristin Underwood in Lessons from Cancer College

What happens when a middle-aged college professor finds herself enrolled in a nine-month course of treatment for breast cancer? This one-woman show explores the anxiety and questions that emerge when the teacher becomes the student—of a disease, of a battery of treatments, and of her own changing body. Assuming it will be a manageable task to continue teaching through cancer, she’s is surprised—and ultimately healed—by the revelation that somehow cancer is teaching through her. Kristen Underwood performs this original adaptation that resonates with power and humor.

Visit the Commonweal for more information on Commonweal Presents

Celebrity Sightings at GRSF

2010-07-29T10:06:00.000-05:00

Kim Martin-Cotton, who played many of the lead rolls in the first 4 years of GRSF and swordsman Jacques Roy were in the audience for Tuesday night's Othello as well as Wednesday's production of Titus Andronicus. It feels like having old friends in the house, even though I've never really met either of them outside of the theater. Carla Noack, Rosalind in As You Like It and Kate in Taming of the Shrew, took in the apprentice play yesterday. (I also saw her at Othello earlier in the month.)

Commonweal company members David Hennessey and Eric Bunge took in Tuesday's Othello on their night off from a busy summer season in Lanesboro.

Has it come to this? No reviews at Minnesota Theatre, just gossip? No excuses—I simply haven't gotten the reviews out of my head and on to paper. Below, I have a preview of A comedy of Errors that I wrote in May or June but never got around to posting.

The Great River Shakespeare Festival ends Sunday, August 1.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

A Comedy of Errors—Preview

2010-07-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

In this early comedy Shakespeare plays with twins separated during a shipwreck. This of course is a trope that he will return to in Twelfth Night. But in A Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare uses two sets of identical twins. Here is a brief summary of the setup:

A merchant couple from Syracuse had twin boys, both named Antipholus. At the same time, a poor couple also had twin boys, and the merchant couple naturally purchased the 2nd set of twins to help ease the poverty of the poor couple as well as to provide servants for their own sons. These servant twins also, remarkably, have the same name Dromio.

The family—father, mother, twin one, twin two, servant twin one, and servant twin two—is in a shipwreck. The father , twin one, and servant twin one are saved together and return to Syracuse. Twin two and servant two are saved together and end up in Ephesus. The mother is separated from all of them.

The pair of twins were quite young—babes even—at the time of the shipwreck. The young Antipholus II and Dromio II know little if anything about their families. They probably don't even realize that they have twins somewhere in the world (but somehow, they did know their names and know which one is master and which one is servant).

Many years have passed and both Antipholus I and Antipholus II have established themselves as merchants. Antipholus I (from Syracuse, ) knows of his brother and sets out on a 7 year's voyage to try and find him. After years of searching, he and his servant Dromio I arrive in Ephesus, the home of Antipholus II and his servant Dromio II. Everywhere Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse go in Ephesus they are mistaken for their brothers, even by Antipholus of Ephesus's wife and servants. In fact, they look so much alike that the Antipholuses and Dromios mistake their own master or servant.

But once beyond this set of unlikely coincidences the audience is rewarded with a richly complex play. At every turn it forces the characters and the audience to question reality: when strangers greet you by name and friends, servants, spouses insist that you have done (or omitted to do) things that you have no memory of, sanity and reality become relative.

While the play is certainly funny—Shakespeare has gone to great lengths to set up a series of gags, and from the promo video for the play GRSF intends to play for laughs—a serious cloud hangs over the play as well. The series of mistaken identities will have very real consequences for characters including false imprisonment, the breakup of a marriage and even death. I expect that this weighted mirth will make this both a humorous and significant evening of theatre.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Juggling Identities in a Repertory Company

2010-06-25T12:38:00.000-05:00

The New York Times recently ran an article about New York's Shakespeare in the Park and the difficulties actors can have balancing two shows at the same time: "Shakespearean Juggling in the Park" In southeastern Minnesota, we tend to take these efforts for granted with repertory companies like the Great River Shakespeare Festival and Commonweal Theatre.

Scenes from Shakespeare in the Park (New York) productions of “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Merchant of Venice.” (Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

The Great River Shakespeare Festival gets under full sail tonight with a free concert by Nova Scotia Traditions at 6:30 and Comedy of Errors at 8:00.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Commonweal’s Summer Season is in Full Swing

2010-06-21T12:12:00.000-05:00

The Commonweal has established its summer tradition of two plays in repertory through the summer and into the early Fall. The Steve Martin play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, is already in full swing, and Enchanted April is already in previews.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein chance to meet in a French bar (Lapin Agile—Nimble Rabbit) in 1904. The meeting pre-dates much of their fame, and allows them, and us, to ponder what the new century will hold.

The play is directed by Zach Curtis and features Hal Cropp and Eric Bunge as Einstein and Picasso, respectively.

Einstein meets Picasso (Hal Cropp and Eric Bunge) in the Commonweal’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile. (Photo: Commonweal)

Picasso at the Lapin Agile plays in repertory with Enchanted April through September 25.

Watch the Commonweal’s “Context Video” for Picasso at the Lapin Agile on YouTube.

Enchanted April

Adapted by Matthew Barber from the 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, Enchanted April brings together 4 women who answer an ad to rent an Italian Castle. Director Hal Cropp explains that Enchanted April “is a story that’s captured my heart ever since I first read it. I think it offers a wonderful journey of renewal, not just for the characters but the audience as well.”

The play was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2003. The four women are played by Commonweal veterans Stef Dickens, Adrienne Sweeney, Irene ErkenBrack, and Susan d’Autremont.

Enchanted April plays in repertory with Picasso at the Lapin Agile through October 23.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Jon Hassler’s 11th Season

2010-06-21T11:59:00.000-05:00

The Jon Hassler Theater is already well into its 11th season of bringing professional theater to the small town of Plainview, Minnesota. This week is the final week for Old Man Brunner Country.

Old Man Brunner Country

Old Man Brunner Country is an adaptation of Minnesota Poet Leo Dangel’s poems that sketched the rural world surrounding "Old Man Brunner." The poems are narrated by a younger man who relates the tales of the curmudgingly daring Brunner. The poems are matter of fact, letting the exploits and unconventional bravado of the Old Man speak for itself.

I first came across Dangel’s poems in the mid 1980s as a young volunteer working for the regional magazine The North Country Anvil. Dangel’s book Old Man Brunner Country (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1987) had just come out, and the Anvil reprinted several of the poems. Dangel’s humorous, story-telling style was my first indication that poetry might have some allure for me.

This will be the third production of Old Man Brunner in Plainview, the first performance predates the Jon Hassler. Sally Childs adapted the work for the stage.

Old Man Brunner plays at the Jon Hassler through June 27.
Visit the Jon Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

Flamenco celebration of Lorca at the Jon Hassler this Wednesday

2010-04-19T22:52:00.000-05:00

The Moon’s Desire:
The passionate and imagistic poetry of Federico García Lorca

Presented by Deborah Elias Danza Española with actor Raúl Ramos, dancer Deborah Elias, singer La Conja, guitarist Michael Hauser and discussion with Plainview resident and artist Daniel Miller

The Jon Hassler Theater’s third Wednesday of the month writers round table will begin this Wednesday with a special exploration of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca through dramatic readings and flamenco dance, song, and guitar. The Moon’s Desire is a passionate and imagistic performance of Lorca’s poetry. The evening will be interspersed with discussion and delicious Spanish food.

Wednesday April 21, 2010 , 7:00 pm
Free to the Public

Visit the Jon Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

Ibsen Festival Starts Tonight

2010-04-16T17:13:00.000-05:00

Siobhan Bremer and Adrienne Sweeney in The Commonweal's production of John Gabriel Borkman. Photo and set design by Nayna Ramey

The Commonweal and Lanesboro begin their 13th annual celebration of Henrik Ibsen and all things Scandinavian tonight. The celebration includes food, art, music, and and the world premiere production of Jeffery Hatcher’s adaptation of John Gabriel Borkman.

Borkman finishes its week of preview performances tonight, and it opens Saturday night. Its title character has sequestered himself in the upstairs of his house after serving jail time for a money scam that he engineered while president of a bank. While the banking scandal is in the backdrop, the play is a love story of sorts that centers on the psychological tug of war between three emotionally damaged people: Borkman, his wife, and her twin sister.

The cast features Hal Cropp as Borkman and Adrienne Sweeney and Siobhan Bremer as the twin sisters. Stella Burdt, Sarah Hawkins, Tim Sailer, Laura Depta and David Henssey round out the cast.

Weekend Highlights:

Friday

7:30 pm Diane Jarvi. Scandinavian, folk, and world music
Presented by the Lanesboro Arts Center, Diane Jarvi is a singer, songwriter, guitarist and kantele player (Finnish folk harp.) Known in Finland as Minnesotan Satakieli—The Minnesota Nightingale—Jarvi is a versatile performer of Scandinavian, folk and world music. $12 – St. Mane Theatre

7:30 p.m. John Gabriel Borkman
Final preview performance
$15 – The Commonweal

Saturday

10:00 a.m. Professor Simon Williams. Coming to Terms With The Industrial Revolution.
Williams is Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His talk will illuminate the themes of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman in the aftermath of America’s own recent banking scandals.

1:00 p.m. Henry (Hank) Shea. Confronting the Temptations of Greed, Power and Money in Our Society.
Shea is a Fellow at the University of St. Thomas Law School’s Halloran Center for Ethical Leadership.

3:00 p.m. Panel discussion: Ibsen For a Contemporary Audience
former Guthrie Resident Director Risa Brainin (Director of this production of John Gabriel Borkman)
playwright Jeffrey Hatcher (author of this new adaptation of John Gabriel Borkman.)
Commonweal Theatre’s design team.

7:30 p.m. John Gabriel Borkman
Opening performance
$25 – The Commonweal

Many more events are planned. Download the Ibsen Festival Schedule of Events here.

The Commonweal has prepared this video to offer some perspective on John Gabriel Borkman. It offers thoughts on the play from playwritht Jeffery Hatcher, Director Risa Brainin, and Commonweal Artistic Director Hal Cropp:

For Ibesn Fest information go to ibsenfest.org.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Fountain City River Players present Harvey

2010-04-08T00:48:00.000-05:00

Carew Halleck rehearses his role as Elwood P. Dowd in the in Fountain City River Players' Harvey.
Photo Rory O'Driscoll/Winona Daily News. Read the WDN story.

Harvey by Mary Chase
Directed by Judee Brone, Jasson Passow, and Jeff Hosch.

April 7 - 11
7:30 p.m.; 2:00 p.m. on Sunday

Fountain City Auditorium
42 North Main Street
Fountain City, Wisconsin

WSU presents Alice in Wonderland

2010-04-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

Winona State University’s Department of Theatre and Dance presents the 43rd annual children’s theater performance of Alice in Wonderland, at 7 p.m. Friday, April 9 and 2 p.m. Saturday, April 10, on the Performing Arts Center Main Stage.

Directed by Vivian Fusillo, Alice in Wonderland is a classic tale of a teenage girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world full of unique creatures. This performance is perfect for young audiences. Matinee performances of the show are April 8, 9, 12 and 13 for local elementary schools.

For tickets, visit WSU at www.wsuartstickets.com or call the WSU box office at 507-457-5235 Monday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. On performance dates, the box office opens one hour before each show.

Fusillo Receives Minnesota Lifetime Achievement Award

2010-04-07T22:00:00.001-05:00

Vivian Fusillo

From the WSU Office of University Communications December, 2009

Vivian Fusillo, professor of theatre and dance and longtime director of the Winona State University Children’s Theatre, received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Arts in Minnesota from the Communication and Theatre Association of Minnesota.

Fusillo is in her fourth decade of teaching at WSU, where she has directed more than 75 performances covering the spectrum of styles and subjects.

Each year, Fusillo produces a show for her Children’s Theatre. Since 1969, more than 160,000 children have enjoyed original and classic productions on the WSU campus.

Commonweal Apprentice Company Production Opens Thursday

2010-03-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

Death and the Ploughman
by Johannes Von Sazz,

The 2009-2010 apprentice class at the Commonweal will present its capstone project, Death and the Ploughman this month. The members of the apprentice class have been involved with all aspects of the Commonweal's 2009 season, and their faces will be familiar to Commonweal patrons. The apprentice production, in its second year, marks not only the opening of the theater season in Lansboro, but also a stimulating artistic exploration very worthy of the Commonweal stage.

Death and the Ploughman is an adaptation of a 15th century German story about a farmer who loses his young wife and starts to ask some hard questions about Life—with Death showing up to answer them.

Death and the Ploughman runs for two weeks from March 18 to March 28.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

GRSF Season 7 Preview Event, March 21

2010-03-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

The directors and designers of the Great River Shakespeare Festival will share their plans for the 2010 season at 4:00 on March 21 at Signatures restaurant in Winona. Along with presentations by the artistic and production staff, the event will have "savories & sweets, cash bar, live music, and conversation." There is a $5 suggested donation for the event.

The 2010 GRSF season will include Shakespeare’s Othello and Comdey of Errors, plus Jonathan Gillard Daly’s The Daly News.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Commonweal’s Ibsen Fest April 16 - 18

2010-03-14T09:49:00.000-05:00

The Commonweal is getting set for its 13th annual Ibsen Festival, a celebration of Scandinavian art and culture. At the heart of the celebration will be the production of the Ibsen play, John Gabriel Borkman, a world premiere production of Jeffery Hatcher’s adaptation. John Gabriel Borkman runs April 15 - June 11 with previews April 9, 10, and 11.

The Ibsen Festival is a weekend of food, music, art, lectures, and more. Download a printable schedule here: Ibsen Fest Schedule.

For Ibesn Fest information go to ibsenfest.org.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

A Midnight Dreary

2009-11-12T18:40:00.000-06:00

By Scott Dixon; directed by Harold N. Cropp
Commonweal Theatre, Lannesboro, MN

The Commonweal’s “November Nights” offering is entering the last weekend of its all-to-short run. This play is an engaging look into the writings and persona of Edgar Allen Poe. Jerome Yorke is extremely flexible depicting Poe in a range of ages and emotional states from young child to the tormented mind of a man afraid that his work may not be significant enough to survive him. He is joined by a cast of revolving characters from his past and supported by eerie lighting effects and a lush, nearly non-stop sound track. In A Midnight Dreary, we experience a talented company fully engaged in the process of creating an important work.

Scott Dixon’s play is impressive for both its arrangement of time and its elegant prose that moves back and forth between stage dialog and Poe’s poetry. Dixon creates a vivid picture of what makes Poe an intriguing character and what makes Poe’s work so unique and important to American letters.

While the play merits a full review, these few lines will have to suffice, along with my urging to see play in its final weekend. This world premier production is among the most important and enjoyable works in Southeast Minnesota this year.

A Midnight Dreary runs through November 15
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

UW-L presents Escape from Happiness

2009-10-12T13:13:00.000-05:00

Escape from Happiness by George F. Walker, directed by Walter Elder
Friday October 16 - 18 and Oct 22 - 25
Toland Theatre in UW-L's Center for the Arts
University of Wisconsin La Crosse

See Terry Rindfleisch's ariticle from the La Crosse Tribune

For more tickets and times, visit the UW-L Department of Theatre Arts on the web or call the box office: (608) 785-8522.

Penumbra Theatre Presents August Wilson's Radio Golf

2009-10-05T22:06:00.001-05:00

By August Wilson, Directed by Lou Bellamy

Penumbra’s committment to produce all 10 of Wilson’s Twentieth Century Cycle plays continues with its current production of Radio Golf. Radio Golf is the last play written in the cycle and is the only Wilson play that the company has not yet performed during its more than 30 years of productions. It will be the fourth play, following The Piano Lesson, Gem of the Ocean and Fences, in this current commitment to produce all of the plays in the cycle.

Set in 1997, Wilson uses Radio Golf to continue the themes that evolved during the 10-play cycle and to re-introduce characters—the descendents of characters—from the earlier plays. Wilson also returns to the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where Harmon Wilks hopes his efforts to re-build the Hill District will be the key to becoming Pittsburgh’s first black mayor. But his ambitions must contend with the Hill District’s past and the rich mythology that Wilson has created in the cycle.

Radio Golf plays October 1 - October 25.

Listen to Minnesota Public Radio story on Radio Golf

Visit the Penumbra for schedules and tickets: Penumbra Theatre

The Rainmaker

2009-08-05T16:58:00.001-05:00

by N. Richard Nash, directed by Jamie Horton
Commonweal Theatre (August 3, 2009)

Starbuck thunders into the Curry family’s kitchen midway through the first act of the Commonweal’s production of The Rainmaker and disrupts a heated family argument and instantly heightens the divisions within the family. And once the rainmaker enters their lives, things will not be the same.

The rainmaker character is a familiar trope for modern theater goers: a stranger enters a stable community and shakes things up, leaving the people forever changed. This familiarity with the trope along with the 50 years that have passed since the original staging of he play could certainly work against a successful modern staging of The Rainmaker. But the Commonweal’s staging of the play is compelling and fresh—the story itself may be old, but the fears and insecurities, hopes and dreams have not lost their power to move an audience. And when done well, as the company has done here, audiences are still attracted to a mysterious stranger and the ordinary people who fall under the stranger’s spell.

Adam Whisner’s Starbuck proves both threatening and seductive as his confident and erratic behavior throws the Curry family off guard and, remarkably, prepares them for his sales pitch. Brandishing an ominous, yet ridiculously crude, magic wand, Whisner, as the consummate salesman/con man, sells to what each member of the family needs.

Starbuck has done his homework. He has cased the Curry’s farm and knows what shape the cattle are in and how many have already succumbed to the drought. But he has also assessed the conditions inside the home. While playwright Nash lets the audience know about Starbuck’s external intelligence gathering, the Commonweal production has him eavesdropping outside the kitchen door. Because of the slatted back wall, the audience can see a shadow of a person outside the wall, but until his entrance, the audience isn’t sure if they are seeing a stage hand or just the shadow of another character. But from his vantage outside the door, Starbuck is able to learn that the family has been trying to find a husband for Lizzie, that an expected suitor had not shown up for dinner, that the simple minded Jimmy is regularly bullied by his older brother, and much more. In short, he has gathered enough information to know what motivates his customers. And for a good sales person, knowing a customer’s motivation makes the sale all the more likely.

The play’s main tension is between the outlaw Starbuck and the family’s self anointed keeper, Noah. Nash has drawn Noah as a one dimensional character who uses numbers and logic to shield his family from possible embarrassment and disappointment. Carl Lindberg is able to fill out the role nicely, creating a character fuller than Nash penned and anchoring the hard boiled side of the battle. Named with a bit of irony, Noah represents drought and a lifeless, passionless, and pragmatic life. But Nash has tipped his hand a bit by creating Starbuck as the more dynamic character. While Noah represents the stability of a drought, Starbuck represents the volatility of rain. But the battle between the competing views of life are fought not directly between these two men but within the hearts and minds of Noah’s siblings, Jimmy and Lizzie.

Starbuck sees a repressed life force in both Lizzie and Jimmy, and as the salesman, he is selling to that repression. While Jimmy is an easy sell, Lizzie is much more complicated. She is moving toward an acceptance of what she sees as the hand that life has dealt her. Starbuck is determined that she should strive for more. While the choices and attitudes over a young woman’s imminent spinsterhood have changed considerably over the more than 50 years since the play was written, there is enough that holds true in the cultural attitudes and social realities for Lizzie’s fears to remain powerfully relevant.

Adrienne Sweeney is able to convey the embarrassment of being shopped out by her well-meaning family and the pain of hearing her person discussed like a piece of cattle. Her description of her fate as the spinster aunt is simply heartbreaking in its truth and seeming inevitability.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable and dated (well, perhaps not so dated if it still makes us uncomfortable) message of the play is the empowerment that both Jimmy and Lizzie experience after their individual sexual encounters. Is Nash echoing a boorish male bravado that says a woman simply needs a good roll in the hay to set herself right? Certainly Nash is siding with the belief that natural life forces, including sex, are inherently healthy and that repression of these life forces is unhealthy—and sex is a convenient symbol of this life force. Interestingly, it is only Noah who finds anything objectionable in Lizzie’s late night meeting with Starbuck. Even her father, the laid-back H.C. Curry (played this evening by the even more laid-back Hal Cropp) protects his daughter’s privacy with a man Curry knows to be a con man, probably not “the marrying kind.”

While droughts kills slowly, rains can devastate in an instant. Jimmy seems to have chosen to embrace the storm, whatever it brings, but Lizzie begins to see that she may have other options, options that she may not have been able to see before she learned that she could embrace the storm.

While the audience is most concerned with what will happen to Lizzie, the story of the Rainmaker is Starbuck’s. He has proved the consummate salesman. He has made his sale and has collected his money. But his real thrill comes from watching his own skill at maneuvering people to see that what he is selling is the thing that they most need.

The Commonweal’s The Rainmaker is both a thought provoking drama about human fears and repressions and a playful look at our fascination with men and women who make big promises, feed our biggest dreams, and play on our biggest fears. Most of us are either living in fear that a rainmaker will shake up our life or in hope that our own rainmaker will make us an offer.

The Rainmaker plays in repertory with The Odd Couple through October 24.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Jon Hassler Theater presents its Summer Sampler

2009-08-05T15:44:00.001-05:00

The Jon Hassler is offering four smaller productions for each of the weekends in August under the title the Hassler Summer Sampler: Cool Entertainment to Combat the Late Summer Heat. The first Sampler is a look at Bill Holm's whimsical yet serious look at the boxelder bug. Minneota, Minnesota Bill Holm died this past November and the Hassler is returning to his Boxelder Bug Varriations as a tribute to the poet.

Boxelder Bug Variations: A Tribute to author Bill Holm

August 8th 8:00 p.m.

Bill Holm

Minnesota poet Bill Holm set down his musings on boxelder bugs in both word and music in his 1985 book, Boxelder Bug Variations. Sally Childs first adapted Holm's work to the stage in 1987, incorporating music and dance. This production will be Child's third reworking of the production, and the second for the Jon Hassler.

Boxelder Bug Variations, in its reading format, will feature Twin Cities actors Terry Lynn Carlson, Beth Desotelle and Suzanna Winter who were also featured in the 2001 presentation of the work at the Hassler; Jon Hassler Theater Producer and General Manager Carter Martin (making a rare foray onto the stage), and Childs herself providing narration. Preceding the presentation, poet John Rezmerksi, who works with the Holm estate, will speak on Holm's legacy. Childs will also provide a history of the show's beginnings and will be supported by excerpts from Holm's book of essays, "The Music of Failure" read by Nancy Gormley and Angela Griffin, accompanied by slides of the prairie taken by Nancy Campbell.

Wisecracks From My Father

Leslye Orr

by Leslye Orr
August 14, 15; 8:00 p.m.

Featuring the return of the delightfully zany Leslye Orr with her new one-woman show, Wisecracks from My Father, in which she relates episodes from her father's life—growing up in St. Paul during the Depression era, living at the Angus Hotel, surviving Spam during WWII, and becoming the father of eight kids while delivering 10,000 more as an OBGYN in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

What I Want to Be When I Grow Up!

David Harris

by David Harris
August 22, 7:00 p.m.

David Harris will delight audiences of all ages with this adept and wacky physical comedy show. What I Want to be When I Grow Up! is acrobatic theater in action! Follow the incredible adventures of a would be super-hero, professional bowler, adventure tourist and lasso slinging cowboy. Each adventure is packed with goofy fun, daring stunts, and amazing skill. Watch David dream the dream of becoming anything imaginable. 100% safe for audiences of all ages.

Revelations of Mann

David Mann

by David Man
August 28, 29; 8:00 p.m.

In this comic, compelling one-man show, David recreates his trials and tribulations as a young, somewhat Lutheran theatre teacher in a Catholic high school. Revelations of Mann will appeal to audiences who are still in high school as well as to those who graduated long ago!

Visit the John Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

August Community Theater Calendar

2009-08-05T15:19:00.001-05:00

Brigadoon

August 5-8
Wit's End Theatre
Directed by Joe Chase, featuring bagpipe music by the Rochester Caledonia Pipe Band
Potter Auditorium
Chatfield, Minnesota
Advance ticket sales: Skippy's supermarket, (507) 867-4272
Tickets will be available at the door each performance.
www.sempan.com

Rock Solid Youth Center's production of Once Upon a Mattress. Photo by KC Saxon

Once Upon a mattress

August 6 - 9
Rock Solid Youth Center
Directed by Mark Roeckers; Music Directed by Sue Degallier, Produced by Patrick Marek.
rock Solid youth Center
75 W. 3rd Street
Winona, Minnesota

The Fantastics

August 6 - 16
Words Players--Alumni/College Age Production
Rochester Repertory Theatre
103 7th St. NE
Rochester, Minnesota
http://www.northlandwords.org

The Merlin Players' presentation of Anne of Green Gables. From left, Mackenzie Greiner, Gregory Somers and Jordyn Trnka. Photo by Edward Brown.

Annie of Green Gables

August 7 - 9; 13 - 15
The Merlin Players
Fairbault Paradise Center for the Arts
321 Central Ave
Faribault, Minnesota
Tickets: 507-332-7372
www.merlinplayers.org

How to Talk Minnesotan

August 12 - 15, 7:00 p.m.
Brave Community Theater
Spring Valley Community Center
Spring Valley, Minnesota
Spring Valley Ag Days Schedule

BOOM! An International Lost and Found Family Marching Band

2009-07-25T10:36:00.001-05:00

The Boom! family. Carla Noack, second from right.

(from Lanesboro Arts Council)
Tuesday, July 28, 7:30 p.m.
St. Mane Theatre, Lanesboro

Straight from a hit run of this year’s KC Fringe Festival, the Kansas City theatrical band is playing one night in Lanesboro, MN to share their sad, sad story. Created and directed by UMKC professor Stephanie Roberts the ensemble features Daniel Eichenbaum, Peter Lawless, Grant Prewitt, Heidi Van, Roberts, and Lanesboro’s own Carla Noack.

Boom! is the story of reunited orphans from around the world. Misplaced by their traveling scientist parents, these wayward foundlings magically converged in the heartland where they now seek meaning and healing through mysterious marches and geometrical formations. Come see what Robert Trussell of the Kansas City Star calls, “Joyful, foolish and crazed…agreeably ridiculous!

More about Boom!: www.myspace.com/boominternational
$10 tickets available at the door (doors open at 6:30)

Hamlet

2009-07-23T02:24:00.000-05:00

by William Shakespeare, directed by Rick Barbour
Great River Shakespeare Festival Intern and Apprentice Acting Company (July 22, 2009)

The GRSF production of Hamlet provides a good reminder of what a great play Hamlet is. It’s also a good reminder of how well the entire GRSF company delivers Shakespeare’s texts. WSU’s black box theater exposes the actors on three sides of the stage—just feet away from the audience. There is little in the way of set pieces to hide behind, minimal lighting, minimal costuming, few props, and no exits. In fact, all the actors are on stage for the entire production. In this setting, the success of the play rests on the actors willingness to trust Shakespeare’s text and their ability to make Shakespeare’s language resonate.

Perhaps it is the language that is the strongest part of the apprentice production. Like all of the GRSF productions, these young actors are able to deliver Shakespeare’s lines with a precision and a cadence that is quite beautiful. Even during times when my mind may have wandered from the meaning of the words, I found myself enjoying the sound and the flow of the words—the company has achieved a certain musicality. And while it is easy to take the language for granted—it is Shakespeare after all, and these actors make it sound natural—the musicality must be the result of dedicated work with the text.

In an unusual choice, this production splits the role of Hamlet between four actors. While director Rick Barbour indicated that the decision to break up the role was largely a matter of sharing the work load and making sure that all the acting apprentices had significant roles to work on, the four-person Hamlet actually seemed quite natural. The four, JJ Gatesman, Kate Kremer, Dylan Roberts and Sarah Naughton, hold a certain unity in the role, even as each actor inevitably brings a unique personality to the person of Hamlet. I expected to be distracted by the changing, but like the rest of the play, it simply works, and different actors helped fill out the character. Hamlet is a very complicated and conflicted character—the different actors provided a subtle way to explore this complexity.

The acting in this production is strong from the major roles all the way down to minor characters. In the sixth year of the festival, Winona’s growing theater audience may take it for granted that all of the roles in a play will be played by very good actors. But this isn’t always the case in theater, and especially with Shakespeare’s plays, which tend to have large casts, most productions suffer a drop off in talent in the smaller roles. But because this cast is very talented, even the smaller characters maintain a high level of delivery. For example, Nicholas Munoz plays a powerful Fortinbras, worthy of a conquering general and future king of Denmark. Because Fortinbras’ entrance comes in the final scene of the play as most of the major characters lie dead on the stage, there often is not a powerful actor left to play him. (Munoz and nearly all of the other actors play two or more roles to cover the many and varied persons who appear on stage.)

In keeping with the black box nature of the play, the scenes are created by the actors on stage. Hamlet presents many challenges for settings, and the Intern and Apprentice company use simple and creative methods of meeting these challenges. From the night watch scenes to shipside and the graveyard, the company rises to the challenge of creating enough of an illusion of a space to move the story along. Much of this space and mood is established by on-stage vocalizations and simple instrumentation. This is particularly effective in the scenes where Hamlet’s ghost appears, but these types of sound effects are used effectively throughout the production. Additionally, Stephanie Lambourn’s musical adaptations and enacting of Ophelia’s “mad” songs are effectively disturbing and moving.

The Intern and Apprentice Acting Company’s production allows its audience to experience Hamlet in a way that really lets Hamlet shine. It is also a very good showcase of some young actors who are able to rise to the demands of one of the world’s great plays.

The GRSF Intern and Apprentice Acting Company’s production of Hamlet has three more performances:
Thursday, July 23, 3:00 p.m.
Friday, July 24, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 25, 3:00 p.m.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Community Theater Calendar

2009-07-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Suessical the Musical

July 23 - 25
Words Players -Senior Troupe
Century High School, Rochester,
www.northlandwords.org/wordsplayers

Annie Jr.

July 30 - August 1
Ye Olde Opera House Youth Show
Directed by Bethany Tisthammer
Spring Grove, MN
www.yeoldeoperahouse.org

Guys and Dolls

July 29 - August 2
Fountain City River Players
Fountain City Auditorium
42, North Main Street
Fountain City, Wisconsin.

The Fantastics in Lanesboro

July 30 - 31
Words Players--Alumni/College Age Production
St. Mane Theater
106 Parkway Ave. S
Lanesboro, MN
www.northlandwords.org

The Fantastics in Rochester

August 6 - 16
Words Players--Alumni/College Age Production
Rochester Repertory Theatre
103 7th St. NE
Rochester, MN
www.northlandwords.org

The Tempest

2009-07-16T18:15:00.001-05:00

by William Shakespeare, directed by Alec Wild
Great River Shakespeare Festival (July 8, 2009)

The Tempest has traditionally been a hard play to categorize. It is often placed with a grouping of plays that are unsatisfyingly called romances. Included in this group are The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and Cymbelin, which have all been produced by GRSF in the past years. Yet what can make these plays feel unsettling cannot be attributed entirely to their failure to follow structural expectations about comedy or tragedy. The romances ask an audience to suspend reality—using heavy doses of magic to move the plot. The Endings are often happy, if one can be satisfied with delayed happiness or too many lost years. And romances tend not to make a clear delineation between good and evil—evil often goes unpunished and characters are allowed to evolve and repent of their misdeeds. In contrast, in plays like Macbeth and Richard III, the protagonists are driven to evil by a lust for power. The audience can admire the plotting and action for their sheer audacity, yet the audience also understands that these men have reached too far and will get what they deserve.

The Tempest is surrounded by evil with the inclusion of a brother usurping a brother for a dukedom, a brother plotting against another brother for the crown, a plot for revenge, and the presence of witches, spirits, monsters, and magic. And yet, the audience doesn’t enjoy the clear satisfaction of knowing what or who is evil or of being assured that the evil characters will not prevail.

Michael Fitzpatrick as Stephano(eft) and Doug Scholz-Carlson as Tinculo in the Great River Shakespere Festival’s The Tempest.

Orchestrating the action of The Tempest stands Jonathan Gillard Daly as Prospero. Since being shipwrecked on the island 12 years earlier, Prospero has ruled the Island with an iron hand. He has enslaved the only inhabitant of the island as well as the spirits and nymphs who play and make music there. Through magic and diligence, Prospero controls time and circumstance. Daly’s role as Prospero is reminiscent of his powerful portrayal of Richard III in the GRSF’s second year. Like Richard, Prospero seems to relish the power inherent in manipulating people and events. Yet Daly’s Richard made the audience a conspirator in his clearly evil plot. While Daly’s Prospero makes similar confederacy with the audience, his motives and plans are more complex and harder for the audience to understand.

For example, Daly is not only the absolute ruler of the island, he is also the lone parent of the 15-year-old Miranda. And in the second scene where Prospero reveals to Miranda her birth identity, one wonders about his motives. Why has he waited all these years to tell her? Why does he check to see that she has little memory of Milan before telling his story? Why does he use magic to put her to sleep before finishing his tale? Is his affection for his daughter feigned like the affection Richard shows Lady Anne in Richard III? Does he love her, or is she just one more pawn to move in his complex plot?

The play begins under the spell of a tempest that Prospero has conjured to waylay the passing ship containing both King of Naples and Prospero’s brother. The shadow projection of the storm and the waves is both effective and delightful. The storm as well as the unlikely rescue from the storm are carried out by the island’s nymphs and spirits who are in Prospero’s service. These nymphs and spirits add a haunting feel to the play as they are always present, usually propped expressionless in the shadows of the set platforms wearing colorless body suits. Like Prospero, the nymphs and spirits seem menacing, yet they aren’t exactly evil. They are led by the spirit Ariel who is played by Tarah Flanagan. Flanagan presides over Prospero’s scheme as she flies over the island observing and intervening as necessary. On this set, Flanagan, with white hair flaming from her head, flies on the top of a tower near the center of the stage, even remaining aloft during intermission. While she is clearly in Prospero’s service—she is anxious to gain her promised freedom—there is a close bond between the man and spirit. Yet one wonders the same about Prospero’s feelings toward Areal as toward Miranda: does he really love this spirit, or is Areiel just one more pawn in his plans?

The set itself is made of cold metal and is usually darkly lit and inhabited by nymphs. The set platforms leave their steel trusses exposed and move on a cold steel rail. Even the island’s trees and plants are represented by metal pipes, which also serve as weapons. While this island is more like a prison to Prospero than a vacation resort, it seems a bit odd that an enchanted Mediterranean island, which has sustained Prospero and his daughter for 12 years, is presented as a cold, prison-like environment. The environment is a purposeful decision; the production clearly doesn’t want the audience to see the island as an appealing, pastoral setting.

One area where the island is allowed to lose its cool edge (while still maintaining its mysticism) is with music. Shakespeare has the spirits providing unexpected and often joyful music that both amazes and pleases the recently shipwrecked wanderers of the island. Composer Daniel Kallman brings these songs to life with a musical compositions that go beyond setting songs to music. The actors double as orchestra playing a wide variety of instruments, including rain drum, flute, viola, and hand bells. The music so perfectly fits the play that one easily forgets that it is not simply part of the air—even with the actors playing and singing on stage or in the semi-darkened upstage area. The music creates the storm, accompanies the singers, and helps to create the magic of the island.

Special note must be made of Caliban who often serves as a lightning rod for heated discussion about the play. Christopher Gerson answers the question of whether or not Caliban is human or monster with an almost unequivocal “monster” portrayal. Yet what is truly remarkable is that he convinces the audience that he is not human without use of any sort of monster costume (in fact, he is naked to the waist and wears no wig or mask). He seems unable to walk on two legs, seems to be in great pain when he speaks, and displays some unusually double jointed shoulder blades. And while the audience is likely to feel some sympathy for him, the slight deformities displayed by Gerson are enough evidence for Prospero, the new visitors to the island, and the audience that he is not human. Perhaps this is a good indication of how little deviation from the norm people are willing to allow before disavowing someone else’s humanity.

Sharing the stage with Caliban for much of the play is the jester, Doug Scholz-Carlson, and the drunk butler, Michael Fitzpatrick. Scholz-Carlson and Fitzpatrick display much of the same delightful impertinent playfulness that they showed in nearly identical roles in Twelfth Night in 2006 as the clown Feste, and Sir Toby Belch. Equally funny, but on the other end of the spectrum, Nicole Rodenburg plays Miranda with a devotion to her father and a winning innocence that matches Nick Demeris’s sudden and delirious devotion to her (despite the fact that he has just lost his father to the storm, he doesn’t know where he is, and Miranda’s father seems a bit mad.)

In his romances, Shakespeare asks his audience to be satisfied that happiness delayed—sometimes years later—is still worth while, that people can learn from the mistakes of their past, and that people can, after a time, forgive. But these requests are hard for an audience expecting a more timely revenge or repayment. The questions of who is good and who is evil still linger unanswered, and the play ends on the melancholy side of happiness. Even Prospero must remain on stage to ask the audience to be satisfied with the story and the ending, in short, to be satisfied with the fine acting, the powerful music, and the spectacular production. It’s not hard to follow Prospero’s injunction to “release me from my bands/ with the help of your good hands” and applaud at the conclusion of The Tempest (Epilogue 9 - 10). But long after leaving the theater, I’m still applauding the production for telling such a compelling story.

The Tempest plays in repertory with Love’s Labour’s Lost through July 26.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Minnesota Theatre Preview of Love's Labour's Lost

More Summer Musicals

2009-07-12T20:27:00.001-05:00

This week, two well-established Southeast Minnesota community theater troupes present their summer musicals. With companies marking 29 and 30 years, Rushford area Society of the Arts will stage Honk!, and Ye Olde Opra House will offer Lucky Stiff.

Lucky Stiff

Presented by Ye Olde Opera House
Book by Lynn Ahrens, music by Stephen Flaherty, Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.
Directed by Scott Solberg.

Lucky Stiff marks the 30th outdoor musical for Ye Olde Opera House, which presents an ambitious annual season of community theater in Spring Grove, Minnesota. Lucky Stiff is presented at “Ye Olde Gray Barn” just east of Spring Grove, and it includes an optional pre-show dinner under the stars. (Dinner served 6:30; performance; at 8:30)

July 15 - 19, 8:30 p.m.
Ye Olde Grey Barn, Spring Grove, Minnesota

For ticket and other information visit www.yeoldeoperahouse.org

Honk!

Presented by the Rushford Area Society of the Arts (RASA)
music by George Styles, Book and Lyrics by Anthny Drewe

RASA has been producing theater and other activities in Rushford, Minnesota for 29 years, with the annual summer musical emerging as one of the area's strongest community theater productions. Tickets generally go fast.

July 15, 16, and 17 at 7:00 PM
July 18 and 19 at 2:00 PM
Rushford-Peterson High School Theater, Rushford,Minnesota

Tickets on sale at Rushford Foods
More info at (507)251-9599

Love’s Labour’s Lost

2009-07-08T17:21:00.001-05:00

By William Shakespeare, directed by Paul Barnes
Great River Shakespeare Festival (July 7, 2009)

In many ways, Love’s Labour’s Lost may be a risky play for Great River Shakespeare Festival to take on. Shakespeare’s verbal gymnastics must hold the audience because there is little in the way of action or plot. Small, familiar plot devices serve merely as diversions: mixed up letters, love sonnets that fall into the wrong hands, a party where the revelers are masked, for example. But this production stands strongly on its verse, and Shakespeare’s verbal power and this company’s skill and charisma rise to the occasion and make Love’s Labour’s Lost a rousing success.

Chris Mixon (top) as Berowne and Andrew Carlson as Longaville in the GRSF production of Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost could be a Shakespeare skeptic’s worst nightmare: a play with seemingly endless Shakespearian speeches: no murders, no fights, no plotting for power, no forbidden love. And yet even a skeptic could quickly be drawn into the language of this production. Nearly all the dialog is in verse, and while the audience isn’t likely to recognize the sonnets and other poetry forms as they fly by, the incessant rhymes serve as constant reminders that the speeches and word play are largely constructions that allow the speakers to admire their own voices and their own wit. The sonneteers labor at their love with pen and tongue, yet they are more in love with themselves and their words than with the supposed objects of their affection.

At first blush, the GRSF staging of Love’s Labour’s Lost suggests the play will be a romp in the park. A lush green grass covers the center circle of the stage, and a simulated tree with pastel colored parasols for branches provides a fanciful pastoral setting. (And in bit of even more fancy, the parasols open early in the play and later close when the pastoral sporting must be set aside).

But while the King of Navarre and his court do their best to maintain their mirth and lover’s play, the seriousness of death surrounds the play. The bare, cold staging that surrounds the green of Navarre’s garden reminds the audience of the limits of play. The persistence of death is further reinforced by an interesting portrayal of the ill King of France personally handing his daughter the papers that she is to deliver to Navarre. This exchange happens quickly, in a pantomime that takes place as part of a sequence of song and character introductions before Shakespeare’s dialog begins. (The King of France never appears in Shakespeare’s play, yet the announcement of his death near the end serves as a critical turning point and a reminder of Navarre’s desire to defeat death by achieving fame in this life.)

Doug Scholz-Carlson as the King of Navarre tries to summon a seriousness that will meet death’s presence head on. Yet there is nothing about Scholz-Carlson and his followers that suggest seriousness—despite their serious oaths. They are dressed for sport in bright colors (in what seems to me to be a sort of 1900s country club look) even as they vow to three year’s study, fasting, and celibacy. Before the ink is dry on their vows, the men are bored and ready for diversions.

The diversion comes in two forms. The first diversion is the blundering verbosity of Christopher Gerson as the visiting Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado. Gerson’s Spanish persona—complete with musketeer costume, sword and wig—does not disappoint. The other diversion comes by way of the Princess of France, Tara Flanagan, and her three attendants. Quickly, the King and his three men abandon their oaths and begin composing love sonnets in secret.

Chris Mixon as Berowne, one of the King’s men, does a wonderful job as perhaps the most verbal character in the play. His early speech explaining why it is unnatural to join the King’s school of fasting and celibacy temporarily alienates him from the King, but allys him to audience. He quickly appeases the King and agrees to sign with another poetical flourish punctuated with another rhyming couplet: “Give me paper, let me read the same, / And to the strictest decrees I’ll write my name” (I.i. 116-117).

While Mixon and the other men are serious about their sonneteering, Rosaline (Shanara Gabrielle) recognizes that these earnest men are not serious. Reprimanding Berowne, she tells him, “A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it” (V.ii. 861-863) For once in the play, Berowne is humbled and speechless. Berowne and the rest have clearly been jesting for their own amusement and making love oaths for the love of the sound of them.

And the same could be said for Shakespeare, since the incessant word play is his. This production of Love’s Labour’s Lost consorts with its audience to enjoy the irony inherent in Shakespeare’s overly verbose warning of the dangers of poetry and speechifying.

Love’s Labour’s Lost plays in repertory with The Tempest through July 26.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

GRSF Extra: The Daly News

2009-07-06T14:03:00.001-05:00

Great River Shakespeare Festival actor Jonathan Gillard Daly, known to GRSF audiences for his work as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the title role in Richard III, among many others, will bring his play with music, The Daly News, to Winona for a special performance on Monday, July 13. All proceeds will benefit GRSF. This season Daly plays Prospero in The Tempest and Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Gregg Coffin, composer of Love’s Labour’s Lost as well as 2005’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, collaborated on the music for The Daly News with Daly and Santa Maria, CA composer, Larry Delinger.

The Daly News tells the story of Martin Daly, Gillard Daly’s grandfather, who was a well-known Milwaukee banker. To keep his four sons connected to the family while they were serving in the military in World War II, Martin retired to the basement of the family home in Milwaukee each week where he edited and published a newsletter he called The Daly News. From 1943 to 1946, Martin mailed his weekly compilation of Milwaukee news and excerpts from his sons’ letters home to friends and other members of the family. Gillard Daly came across the newsletters years later and set to work turning them into a theatre piece, which was first performed at PCPA Theaterfest in California and later refined and adapted for production in the his family’s hometown, Milwaukee, WI.

July 13, 7:00 p.m. The Daly News: book and lyrics by Jonathan Gillard Daly, music by Gregg Coffin, Larry Delinger and Daly.

GRSF Apprentice and Intern Company: Hamlet

Another production to put on your calendar is the annual Apprentice and Intern production of Hamlet. The Apprentice and Intern Company play has been a popular ticket since its single performance in year one of the festival. In 2009, its production has expanded to five shows. The play is staged in WSU’s blackbox theater during the festival’s final week.

Hamlet

Tuesday, July 21, 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, July 22, 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, July 23, 3:00 p.m.
Friday, July 24, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 25, 3:00 p.m.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Dear James

2009-07-06T12:42:00.000-05:00

Adapted by Sally Childs from the Novel by Jon Hassler; directed by Sally Childs.
John Hassler Theater (June 25, 2009)

The subject matter of Dear James is a bit unusual for drama: the thoughts and desires of a retired small town teacher and a retired Catholic priest. But this type of drama may have been just what the Jon Hassler had in mind when the collaboration between Sally Child’s Lyric Theater and the town of Plainview began 10 years ago. Bringing to life rich and full characters from small town Minnesota was the mark of Hassler’s fiction; the challenge for a Hassler staging is to place the complex web of relationships and generations and time into two hours on a single stage. In many ways this staging of Dear James does an extraordinary job of reducing the novel to its most important relationships: Agatha McGee’s relationship with a Catholic priest and her relationship to Staggerford, Minnesota, the town populated almost entirely by her former students or classmates.

Agatha, played by Cheryl Frarck, has found a kindred spirit in the way of a pen pal from Ireland named James. The exchange of letters between the two has forged a relationship, perhaps the most important relationship in either of the characters’ long lives. The similarities of their lives in somewhat insular, small-town Catholic communities helps to create the bond; but it is the limitations that each feels within their home life that makes the letter exchanges so important. The relationship is at a stand still at the opening of the play because Agatha unexpectedly traveled to Ireland to meet her pen pal only to discover that he is a priest. Robert Gardner’s soft brogue and gentle manner as the Irish priest are winning to both Agatha and the audience. His reason for failing to mention his vocation to Agatha is both understandable and completely inadequate. He says he never expected to meet her in person because he simply isn’t used to people picking up and traveling all over the world.

Time takes care of this withholding of information, which is one of the problems with this central relationship of the play. There is the potential for conflict over this betrayal and the potential for inner conflict over crossing the taboos of a relationship between a woman and a priest. There is also the potential for a public scandal in each of the small towns where private lives are hard to keep private. Even some of the advertising for the play suggest that this potential scandal along with Agatha’s anguish over being a companion to a priest will be central. But the play doesn’t really deal with these issues. Agatha and James meet in Rome and re-start the relationship. Later, James has an uneventful visit to Staggerford. There are no conflicts, no scandals, no personal anguish, and no drama.

The real conflict of the play is between Agatha and the town. One of Agatha’s former students, played deliciously by the scheming Coralee Grebe, finds James’ letters to Agatha which exhibit Agatha’s attitudes and opinions of the town and the townspeople. Grebe’s character broadcasts the contents of these letters, and when Agatha returns from her pilgrimage to Rome, she is met with a cold shoulder by the townspeople who feel betrayed by one of their most upstanding citizens.

The only satisfying confrontation is a delightful phone conversation between Frarck and Grebe where Frarck confronts her former student, and Grebe responds with the bold, faked innocence that she likely perfected as a student in Stagggerford’s schools. While the lack of direct conflict may disappoint a theater audience, perhaps this is the way it is, both inside and outside of a small town: problems aren’t resolved by direct conflict but by the passing of time and the placing of recent hurts and betrayals into a long perspective that life lived in one place provides. The audience is asked to accept that the town and Agatha have forgiven each other. But I’m not convinced; the long perspective can just as easily mean a long memory over a perceived wrong.

The acting in the play is very strong. I especially enjoyed Eric Knutson’s portrayal of the child-like Vietnam vet French, who, even as one of the town’s eccentrics, stands in as a representative of Staggerford. He wants to please, is easily distracted from what is important, yet is unwilling to be pushed into to doing something that he doesn’t want to do. The single set stage does a nice job of creating the different spaces where action happens. I found the screen and lighting that creates James’ study in Ireland particularly effective.

Dear James plays at the Jon Hassler Theater through July 12.

Visit the John Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

Shakespeare Preview: Love’s Labour’s Lost

2009-06-30T13:24:00.000-05:00

A comedy that shares much with A Midsummer Nights Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost begins with a group of men worried about the short span of their lives. Determined to offset an individual’s ephemeral presence on the earth, King Ferdinand decides that the way to immortality is through significant achievement that will warrant remembrance in ages to come. His strategy for achievement is a curious one: his court will become a temporary hermitage where study and fasting will gain him the fame he seeks. Ferdinand is sure in his strategy:

Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art. I.i.12-14

As part of this edict, women will not be allowed near the court (with punishment worse for the woman who comes within a mile of court than the man who consorts with a woman). But even as the three lords attending the King swear to abide by the three-year’s fasting and study, the King is reminded of the expected arrival of the King of France’s daughter on a matter of serious state business.

Predictably, the Princess arrives with three attending ladies (nicely matching up with the three fasting lords) and ultimately exposing the academe as the silly bit of hubris that it is.

Aside from the matched lords and ladies, Shakespeare populates the play with a number of stock characters and situations for amusements, distractions, and merriment: a clown, a country wench, a conceited foreign fantastic, a play within a play performed by local rustics, and extensive word play.

But Shakespeare pulls back from providing the comedy that seems inevitable from the opening scene and uses the entrance of the women to shine a bit of reality on hasty oaths and the intrusion of death to re-examine insincere attempt at immortality. Instead of the ending the King and his men desire, Shakespeare provides the ending that they, and perhaps we, need.

Love’s Labour’s Lost plays in repetory with The Tempest through July 26.
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Shakespeare Preview: The Tempest

2009-06-29T23:34:00.001-05:00

As the Great River Shakespeare Festival points out in an article printed in the program (and included on its website), Shakespeare generally provides just about all of the relevant information required to enjoy the play in the opening scenes. This is certainly true in the Tempest’s opening scenes. But much of this information comes in a lengthy monologue given by Prospero to his daughter—a monologue that even Prospero senses could prove challenging to follow. Another challenge for the audience is keeping track of the large number of characters who enter the stage (and the previously sparsely populated island.) Having a general idea of who the characters are and how they are related to each other could be helpful. (The GRSF program lists the characters alphabetically by cast members last name. This practice is more egalitarian than the traditional hierarchy in a Shakespearean cast of characters: male royalty in order of title—king, dukes, then lords—the rest of the men, female royalty, the rest of the females. But the alphabetical list provides little help in grouping together characters on stage in any meaningful way.)

Following are groupings of the characters as they appear in the play:

Island Inhabitants

Prospero (Jonathan Gillard Daley) and Ariel (Tara Flanagan) in the Great River Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest.

Prospero (former Duke of Milan)
Miranda (Prospero’s teenaged daughter)
Caliban (An island native, slave to Prospero)
Ariel (an “airy spirit”)
Other spirits/nymphs

Prospero and Miranda took shelter on this tropical Island after a shipwreck, 12 years before the action of the play. Prospero had been the Duke of Milan, but was forced out by his brother (Antonio) with help from the King of Naples (Alonso). Prospero became “lord” of the island by freeing the spirit Ariel who had been imprisoned by a sorceress’s spell. The sorceress, Sycorax, had died before Prospero and Miranda arrived. Sycorax left a son, Caliban.

Survivors of Shipwreck—group 1

Ferdinand

The survivors of the shipwreck are separated during the wreck and come to the island believing that they are the only survivors. Ferdinand is the son of the King of Naples and is instantly attracted to Miranda (who is attracted to him as well).

Survivors of Shipwreck—group 2

Alonso (King of Naples)
Sebastion (the King’s brother)
Antonio (Prospero’s brother, now Duke of Milan)
Gonzalo (and old counselor to Antonio-had been counselor to Prospero)
Adrian (lord from Naples)
Francisco (lord from Naples)

The royalty wander the island believing that they are the only survivors from the ship and the only humans on the island. These royals were sailing home from the marriage of the King’s daughter to the King of Tunis. Now the king believes his son, and heir to the thrown, has drowned. Conveniently, all of Prospero’s enemies have landed on his island.

Survivors of Shipwreck—group 3

Trinculo (a jester)
Stephano (a drunken butler)

These two characters do little to further the plot of the play, yet they provide much in the way of Shakespearean humor. Besides, someone has to keep tabs on the ship’s stock of wine.

The Tempest and Colonialism

The Great River Shakespeare Festival’s production of the Tempest doesn’t deal with issues of slavery and colonialism according to the article in the program: “Some people hold that these [Colonialism and slavery] are the themes inherent in Shakespeare’s play; we don’t, but even if they were, you wouldn’t need to know much about them to have a rich and satisfying experience in the theatre.” And while it is true that a colonial (or post colonial) perspective is not necessary for a fine production of the play, this play may be Shakespeare’s only connection with those of us living in the western hemisphere, so it may be worth exploring this connection a bit.

The Tempest was written late in Shakespeare’s career, with the earliest performance on record in 1611.¹ By this time, English exploration by sea was well under way and the stories of interactions with native peoples were finding their way back to England. The Jamestown colony was established in 1607, and a 1609 shipwreck off the Bermuda Islands of a ship heading for Jamestown may form part of the story for The Tempest. Much of the crew survived the wreck, spent a year on an island in the Bermudas, re-built two ships, and made it to Jamestown.² It is likely that Shakespeare read the published accounts of the voyage and its year-long adventure on the island, including a description of the island that seems echoed in the play: “country so abundantly fruitful of all fit necessaries for the sustenation and preservation of a man’s life.”³

In addition to the stories of islands, Shakespeare would have known about captured Native Americans displayed in Europe as savages. According to Historian Ronald Takaki, English explorers continued Columbus’s practice of kidnapping natives and bringing them to Europe for display. ⁴ This practice is even referenced in The Tempest. When Stephano first discovers Calaban on the island, he alludes to the possibility of bringing the islander to Italy for profit: “If I can recover him and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather.” II.ii.64-67

Earlier in the scene, Trinculo comes upon the hiding Calaban and refers to the practice of making money from displaying natives, even using the name Indian. “A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” II.ii.27-32.

Because Caliban is most often grouped with the comic duo of Trinculo and Stephano, it’s unlikely that Shakespeare is making much of any type of political or social statement about the abuse of native peoples or the period of colonization that England is embarking on in the early 17th Century. But I do find it fascinating that a historical figure of Shakespeare’s stature, perhaps one of the greatest writers of English, was in some way a witness to the beginning of the clash between European and Native American culture—a clash that has betrayed our own national narrative of fairness and equality and a clash which continues to haunt the continent into the 21st Century.

While there is a connection to the new world of the Western Hemisphere, the Italian royals created by Shakespeare were not likely to travel this far west on their way back from Tunis. Instead the island is more likely located somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Shakespeare leaves Calaban’s ethnicity (and some might argue, humanity) ambiguous.

Notes
¹Hallet Smith. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1997). 1656.
²Gerald Graff and James Phelan, editors. William Shakespeare. The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2000) 116.
³Graff and Phelan, 117
⁴RonaldTakaki “The ‘Tempest’ in the Wilderness,” in Graf and Phelan, 148 - 149.

The Tempest plays in repetory with Love's Labour's Lost through July 26.
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Great River Shakespeare Festival, Season 6

2009-06-29T18:32:00.000-05:00

Winona, Minnesota

The 6th season of the Great River Shakespeare Festival has begun with previews and openings of both plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest, occurring over the past weekend. Neither of these plays are on the list of “Shakespeare blockbusters,” if there were such a list, but they offer intriguing looks at Shakespeare early and late. Each play offers unique creative challenges for the actors, directors, and designers, but as with most Shakespeare, ample opportunity for physical comedy, romance, dramatic tension, clever wordplay, and theatrical spectacle.

In each of the preceding seasons, much local advertising has focused on the accessibility of GRSF’s presentations and the appeal of these plays to a broad cross section of Minnesotans, even to Joe the Plumbers. This seems to be the message again this year as the Festival markets two lesser known plays in a year where the festival has had to significantly cut its production budget. The message is summed up in an article posted on the GRSF website and printed inside the program that declares “You don’t need to know much in advance” to appreciate our productions. A version of this same article was e-mailed to patrons last week. As this article points out, Shakespeare generally provides much of the back story in the opening two scenes, and this back story is all an audience member needs to know.

Much Shakespeare is filled with jokes and references that most of us are not likely to catch—because they are dated, not because we’re not smart! (For example, the expression “hiking the Appalachian Trail” might be culturally witty this month, an interesting reference in a couple of years, but totally meaningless 10 years from now—let alone 400 years.) Scholars can often get to the bottom of dated references in Shakespeare, but the rest of us can simply enjoy what we do find humorous or poignant and not worry about what we might be missing.

Over the past 5 years, the Great River Shakespeare festival has demonstrated its ability and commitment to both remain faithful to the text and to make the plays alive and vibrant for a modern audience. Perhaps in the Festival’s first year I was cautious about urging everyone I knew to attend the play. I was pretty sure that I would enjoy the plays, but I was afraid others might find the plays too hard to follow, too stuffy, too wordy, or too long. But every GRSF production that I’ve seen has convinced me that Shakespeare is meant to be enjoyed by everyone.

The Tempest and Love’s Labour’s Lost play in repertory through July 26
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

The Rainmaker opens at the Commonweal

2009-06-18T14:50:00.001-05:00

The Commonweal will fill out its summer repertory with Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker. The play had its first successful run on Broadway in 1954 with a more recent revival in 1999. It also has seen productions in Film (with Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn), television, and as a musical titled 101 in the Shade. The Rainmaker at the Commonweal begins previews Friday, June 19.

The play takes place on a small ranch in the western U.S. during a drought summer. A father and his three adult children—two sons and a daughter—are trying to survive the drought and discover how much hope is allowed in a seemingly barren world. A major concern, voiced openly by the men, is the diminishing marital prospects for Lizzie who is already into her late 20s. But along with this specific concern, is the larger tension between pragmatism and yearning.

Into the balance (simplistically, two members fall out on the practical side, two on the dreamer side), comes Bill Starbuck, a self proclaimed Rainmaker who promises to bring back the rain and, predictably, disrupts the family’s equilibrium. While all of the men must adjust to the changing barometer, it is Lizzie who bears the brunt of the storm and must ultimately choose whether or not to accept the pragmatic role that she has been preparing herself for or risk the potential foolishness of hope.

The play itself has a lot of potential for a contemporary audience. The seeming conflict between practicality and personal fulfillment has not gone away since the 1950s, nor has the fear of being left alone—a spinster in the nomenclature of the play. Yet much has changed in the intervening 50 years. Most notably, all four family members would have more choices and more opportunities than they had in 1950, and a rainmaker could enter their lives in many ways other ways than walking through the front door. One of the challenges for the Commonweal will be to stay true to the play (which many in the audience are likely to know) without becoming stuck in an historical caricature that is easily dismissed.

The Rainmaker runs in repertory with the Odd Couple through October 24.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

HCO Production of Beauty and the Beast

2009-06-18T12:40:00.000-05:00

Beauty and the Beast finale during dress rehersal

Over the more than 10 years that Winona’s Home and Community Options (HCO) has used a summer musical production as a fundraiser for its work providing residential services to people with developmental disabilities, they’ve developed a reputation for creating a huge theatrical splash. Even with the arrival of the Great River Shakespeare Festival and the Gilmore Creek Summer Theater, HCO has consistently wowed sell-out houses summer after summer. This summer, they’ve even added an additional show for a 7-night run—a long run for a community theater production. While much of the box office success can be attributed to the support HCO has in the Winona area, it is also a result of HCO’s commitment to producing a grand theater experience. In short, they have meet the demands of big musicals by stepping up with a big vision, year after year.

This year’s production of Beauty and the Beast is no different. HCO draws from a talented pool of community actors—some with extensive stage experience. The actors include adults to students from area high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. Included in this mix are many residents of HCO’s area facilities, many of whom are now seasoned actors and stage hands. These actors are supported by a professional pit orchestra, ambitious chorography, spectacular costuming, a tremendous number of volunteers, and a staging that befits a professional house like St. Mary’s Page Theatre.

Beauty and the Beast

June 18 - 24, St. Mary’s University Page Theatre
Music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Asman and Tim Rice, book by Linda Wolverton.
Directed by Bruce Ramsdell, musical direction by Harry Michell, costumes by Janice Turek, Choreography by Jennifer TeBeest, sets by Steve Libera, technical direction by Mitchell Auman.

Tickets available at the Page Theater Box office (507) 547-1715 or online at www.pagetheatre.org.

Hedda Gabler Closes Friday

2009-06-11T12:35:00.000-05:00

Friday is the last chance to see perhaps the strongest play of the season: the Commonweal's Hedda Gabler.

Preview of the Commonweal’s Hedda Gabler
Review of the Commonweal’s Hedda Gabler

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Dear James Opens Saturday at the Jon Hassler

2009-06-11T12:22:00.000-05:00

The Jon Hassler continues its tradition of staging adaptations of Jon Hassler novels with the opening of Dear James Saturday, Jun 13. This will be the third staging of Dear James in Plainview. The first came in 1997 when Minneapolis’s Lyric Theater staged the play in Plainview’s Catholic church. The Lyric’s involvement with Plainview would evolve into the Jon Hassler Theater.

The Jon Hassler Theater provides the following synopsis of Dear James:

Dear James focuses on the character whom author Jon Hassler admitted was closest to his heart, the upright Agatha McGee, who regularly sets her beloved hometown of Staggerford on its ear with her sawtoothed tongue. At age 70, retired, cut adrift from her moorings and depressed, she heads off to Rome, where her old pen pal, Father James O’Hannon, tracks her down after several years of unanswered letters and a life-threatening illness. Back home, French, her only living relative (who doesn’t know it) house-sits and is visited by Imogene, a lonely, loveless childhood friend whose agenda is seduction. While Agatha and James renew their friendship in Rome and Assisi, Imogene ferrets out James’ letters to Agatha and goes public with what was meant to be private, with disastrous results.

Corallee Grebe as Imogene and Eric Knutson as French in Jon Hassler’s Dear James. (Benjamin Hain Photo)
Read Käri Knutson’s story in the Winona Daily News.

Dear James by John Hassler, Directed by Sally Childs

Cheryl Frarck as Agatha McGee
Robert Gardner as Father James Gardner
Coralee Grebe as Imogene
Eric Knutson as French
Joe Ulwelling as Senator Myron Kleinschmidt

Dear James runs June 13 - July 24 (with a sneak preview June 12)

Visit the John Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

Commonweal Opens The Odd Couple Saturday

2009-05-21T20:39:00.000-05:00

Eric Bunge (Felix) and Hall Cropp (Oscar) in the Commonweal’s production of The Odd Couple.

The Commonweal’s summer season opens Saturday (with the final preview performances tonight and Friday) with Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. The Odd Couple was a huge stage success, opening on Broadway in 1965. It ran for 966 performances and won several Tony awards. Simon adapted it into a motion picture in 1969, and the story ran as a television series in the early 70s. Because the play has had these incarnations (plus many performances in professional and community theaters around the globe), most people are already familiar with the basic story: two recently divorced men try and pull their lives together without driving each other insane.

The play is an unlikely success since it starts at the wrong side of the happily-ever-after story that pervades comedy on stage, film, and television. But The Odd Couple is clearly a story that captured the attention of the American public, perhaps because it appeared as many Americans were trying to come to terms with the question of what happens when the 50s ideal of marriage and family doesn’t work out. Many Americans were looking for second chances, and ready and willing to risk laughing in the post happy-ever-after world.

The Commonweal production features its Artistic Director, Hal Cropp and Managing Director Eric Bunge in the lead roles of Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar.

The Odd Couple runs May 15 - October 23
Hedda Gabler runs April 16 - June 12
The Rainmaker runs June 19 - October 24

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Read Terry Rindfleisch’s Winona Daily News Story about the Commonweal’s The Odd Couple.

Jon Hassler 10th Anniversary Season

2009-05-21T11:58:00.000-05:00

The Jon Hassler Theater marks 10 years of outstanding professional theatre in Plainview, Minnesota, boyhood home of Minnesota’s beloved novelist, Jon Hassler. To open a season-long 10th Anniversary Celebration, the Hassler comes full-circle with the return of Dear James, from the novel by Jon Hassler, adapted and directed by Sally Childs.

The Lyric Theater of Minneapolis, under the artistic direction of Sally Childs, brought stage adaptations of Hassler’s novels to Plainview beginning in 1997, when Dear James was presented at St. Joachim’s Catholic Church in front of a standing-room only crowd. Three years later, the Lyric Theater made the newly opened Jon Hassler Theater its permanent home, initiating the first season in 2000 with Grand Opening, followed by Simon’s Night in 2001.

“Ten years is a signal achievement for any non-profit enterprise, especially in view of the turbulent economy,” said Carter Martin, Jon Hassler Theater General Manager. “It’s definitely a milestone worth celebrating, and we could think of no finer vehicle than Dear James, the play that launched the Jon Hassler Theater.”

In its early years, the Theater focused on productions steeped in rural themes, including adaptations not only of Hassler’s novels but also of Boxelder Bug Variations by Bill Holm, Old Man Brunner Country, based on poems by Leo Dangel, and Bordertown Café, by Canadian playwright Kelly Rebar. As time went on, that vision expanded to include musicals in collaboration with Troupe America of Minneapolis, including How to Talk Minnesotan and Guys on Ice; challenging productions including Proof by David Auburn, Edward Albee’s Seascape, and The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh; high comedy as embodied in The Odd Couple by Neil Simon, Rounding Third by Richard Dresser, and Don’t Hug Me by Phil Olson; and Minnesota premieres including Honk! by Anthony Drew and George Stiles and Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol by Tom Mula.

Throughout its first decade, care was taken that the Hassler regularly return to its rural roots. “Our lodestar has always been the world of the small-town,” says Martin. “No matter how far into the wider world we progress, we always remember where our home is.”

The 10th Anniversary Season:

Dear James, by Jon Hassler
June 13 - July 12

The Hassler Summer Sampler:

Boxelder Bug Variations, a Tribute to the Late Minnesota Author, Bill Holm
Saturday, August 8th, 8:00PM

What I Want to Be When I Grow Up! By David Harris
Saturday, August 22nd, 7:00PM

Revelations of Mann by David Mann
Saturday/Sunday, August 28th/29th, 8:00PM

Leaving Iowa, by Time Clue and spike Manton
September 18 - October 18

Don’t Hug Me Christmas Carol, by Phil Olson
November 5 - November 22

Visit the John Hassler Theater online for schedules and tickets: www.jonhasslertheater.org
Phone the Jon Hassler Theater at 507-534-2900.

Hedda Gabler

2009-05-15T22:11:00.000-05:00

by Henrik Ibsen, Directed by Hal Cropp
Commonweal Theatre
April 14

Any production of Hedda Gabler revolves around the character of Hedda Gabler, who is actually Hedda Tesman after her recent marriage. I’m reminded of a comment by Jonathan Gillard Daly about his role as Richard in The Great River Shakespeare Festival’s production of Richard III. Daly realized that for the play to work, his character had to dominate every scene he was in; there could be no coasting, no letting other actors carry the energy. This is what we expect from our great hero/villains like Richard, Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth; it is part of what fascinates us about them. The Commonweal’s Adrienne Sweeny begins the play with this sort of dominance—she bursts onto the stage confident, agitated, and malicious. She insults her new Aunt, her new maid, and her new home with a calculated but seemingly unnecessary spitefulness. But ultimately, the circumstances of the play will prevent Hedda and Sweeney the opportunity of being the great villain; during the course of the play, Hedda is slowly crowded off of her own stage.

With Ibsen’s modernist approach to tragedy, Hedda’s fall from nobility began long before the play begins. At 29, her beauty and social stature are slipping away. That she has married below herself socially is reaffirmed again and again by the other character’s astonishment that she has married George Tesman. The refrain, even from Tesman himself, runs to variations of, “imagine, Hedda Gabler.” Hedda is the daughter of the great General Gabler, whose portrait hangs above the stage (and is lit between scenes, a bit too brightly, as a reminder of her former status). It’s also clear that the marriage is a step down financially. While George has prospects for an appointment at the University, Aunt Julie and Judge Parker both remark on the expense of maintaining a wife like Hedda Gabler. One can assume that her seemingly loveless marriage to George (who adores Hedda, in his detached, clueless manner) was a result of diminishing options for Hedda. Hedda’s fall is not simply a social one; she is losing control over her own life as indicated by the loss of control over her immediate surroundings.

In the Commonweal production, the Tesman drawing room is littered with crates containing Tesman’s research materials. As the play proceeds, more crates are placed on stage, literally and symbolically leaving little room for Hedda. Along with the physical space, the characters who inhabit the space further deflate Hedda by simply ignoring her meanness. Tesman’s Aunt Julie, played by Nancy Carruthers Huisenga, responds to Hedda’s slights with syrupy sweetness. Huisenga displays a slight bit of hurt after Hedda insults her prize hat, a hat she purchased especially to please Hedda, but very quickly moves beyond the insult. Later when Tesman assures Hedda that Aunt Julie has forgotten the incident, it isn’t simply a comforting gesture. Huisenga’s Aunt Julie really seems to have forgotten it, and in forgetting the insult, Hedda becomes even more invisible.

While Hedda has landed in a house that was purchased and furnished to her desires, the space is clearly not hers. Aunt Julie doesn’t live there, but her close relationship with Tesman, played by Scott Dixon, maintains her presence in the house. She is annoyingly selfless: along with giving her personal house keeper to the newlyweds, she has put up her pension to help Tesman secure this new house, she takes care of her invalid sister, and after her sister dies, she looks for another invalid to take care of. Dixon’s childish affection for his aunt (he calls her “Aunty Ju Ju” in this production) is completely genuine, and this relationship adds to the harmony in the house, a harmony that Hedda desperately attempts to disrupt. Dixon plays Tesman as a husband devoted to his new wife, without any expectations of her. He doesn’t expect her to love him, to care about his career, or to take interest in his dying Aunt Rina. He is delighted to be married to Hedda, but beyond that, he is too happy with his own world to take much notice of her. There is no place for a heroic villain in this sea of contented, selfless, bland love.

Dixon, in his brilliant portrayal of the hapless academic Tesman, has a way of ending sentences with an irritating drawn out “hmm” to punctuate his vapid convictions. He wants nothing other than the kind of love he has with his aunt, and his only hint of disapproval of Hedda comes when he asks if she couldn’t try and call his aunt “Aunty Ju Ju” instead of “Miss Tesman,” or when he asks her to visit the deathbed of Aunty Rina. He accepts refusals on both accounts without much sign of disappointment. Later, Tesman is overjoyed when Hedda (mistakenly) reveals a small amount of concern for his position at the university and actually calls him George for the first time. Hedda mockingly responds to Tesman’s euphoria by suggesting that he run and tell Aunty Ju Ju the good news. Tesman misses the insult and assures her that he will do just that. Dixon/Tesman’s inability to be wounded by Hedda makes her malice harmless, and in a sense, it further helps her disappear.

Perhaps it isn’t fair to paint Ibsen’s tragedy in terms of late 20th Century notions of identity politics, as I am certainly doing. And it would be going too far to say that Hedda is simply a victim of her environment and the confining role of women in late 19th Century society. But I think the Commonweal is right to highlight a desperation in Hedda, to underscore that this woman of power and substance has been squeezed into an insipid life with dwindling prospects of being an actor in her own life’s drama. And yet, Sweeney’s Hedda is much more complex than a hapless victim of diminishing options and oppressive circumstances. For all of her outward bravado, at pivotal moments in her life, she has stopped short of the kind of bold action that her forceful persona suggests she would take without hesitation.

Her forceful action during the play is limited to appropriations of the undertakings of the two visitors who operate on a different credo than the insipid one that pervades the Tesman home. The first of those characters is the unhappily married Thea, a timid woman who had been tormented by Hedda when they were school girls. Yet Thea, unlike Hedda, is able to take action despite her outward persona and lower social position. Thea certainly experiences the same societal limitations confronting Hedda, but Thea is able to take steps that Hedda herself would not likely ever risk. The other character is Eilert Lovborg whose last contact with Hedda involved looking at the wrong end of a dueling pistol. While Lovborg seems an unlikely hero for Hedda to attach her hopes to, she does exactly that, pinning her ultimate salvation on his ability to rise above and beyond his personal demons.

The character of Hedda Gabler is missing a couple other characteristics that might allow an audience to identify with a hero/villain. Richard in Richard III, for example, begins the play telling the audience exactly what he is going to do and why. The audience becomes both observer and conspirator in the progression of actions that Richard takes to achieve his goals. But with Hedda, the audience isn’t a conspirator; it doesn’t even understand what Hedda wants. She articulates her motivation in terms of an idealized heroic beauty. Unlike Richard’s clear and tangible goals, Hedda’s is ephemeral and skewed by her father’s understanding of military valor, her inflated sense of entitlement, and her current state of desperation and powerlessness. In short, the audience can’t see where her villainy might lead. The result is a character who is complex, realistic, and far to much like us for us to be comfortable with.

Before I saw the premiere of Hedda Gabler, I had the pleasure of listening to Ibsen Scholar Joan Templeton’s talk “Hedda Gabler, Hedda Gabler: Who Is She?” as part of the Commonweal’s 12th annual Ibsen Festival. Early in her presentation, Templeton offered a sampling from a long line of criticism on the character of Hedda, dating back to the premier performance in 1890. While a handful of reviewers saw in Hedda a strong woman, a complex human being, or a hero championing women’s rights, many reviewers saw Hedda as simply too evil to be allowed on the stage. While audiences are mesmerized by the calculated evil of other heroic villains, they have often felt revulsion for the character of Hedda. We laughed along with Templeton as she read the quotes from reviewers who obviously “didn’t get it,” who missed the oppression that Hedda faced and who clearly had outdated modes of a woman’s role in the home and in society. I think we were laughing with the secure knowledge that from our own enlightened vantage point in 2009, we would be able to see Hedda as the strong and complex character that Ibsen intended. However, after seeing the production, the nagging (and slightly embarrassing) question in my head seemed to match some of the less than enlightened reviewers: “Why does Hedda have to be so mean, especially to Aunty Ju Ju?”

Hedda Gabler plays through June 12
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Shakespeare in the Park

2009-04-17T02:07:00.000-05:00

Wenonah Players
(Drama club from Winona State University)

Wenonah Players annual tribute to/send up of Shakespeare with shorts from slect plays and related material. Shows Saturday and Sunday. Most years, the company parades from the PAC at Winona State to the Gazeebo, which means they are sometimes late. Sit close to better hear the dialog, but be warned, you might become a prop. Make sure to bow to the royalty and say Huzzah a lot.

April 18 & 19, 2 p.m.
at the Gazebo
Winona's Lake Park

Hedda Gabler, Ibsen Fest in Lanesboro

2009-04-15T00:48:00.000-05:00

Hedda Gabler (Adrienne Sweeney--Commonweal photo)

The kickoff to the 2009 professional theater seasons starts this weekend with the much anticipated Ibsen Festival at the Commonweal in Lanesboro, Minnesota. The festival features music, lectures, films, visual art, and of course, a full production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Commonweal. Previews of the play run Thursday and Friday with a Saturday evening opening.

The title character of the play has recently married (much to everyone’s surprise) aspiring academic, George Tesman. As Hedda prepares to settle into the predictable role of wife to a capable, kind, but not exceptional, husband, she remains obsessed with the possibility that someone can live a life of courage and daring. More importantly, she feels the need to pull the strings that facilitate the rise of this heroic person. Perhaps as her own life moves toward the common, she needs to believe that the exceptional is still possible. Like so many of Ibsen’s characters fixated on an ideal, her obsession ripples through the other characters with predictable and unpredictable repercussions. Hedda (the character as well as the play) is a favorite among Ibsen characters for her charm, wit, and shear bravado.

Hedda Gabler runs through June 12
The 2009 Ibsen Festival runs Friday - Sunday, April 17 - 19
Visit the Commonweal for festival details: commonwealtheatre.org
Follow this link for an Ibsen Fest Schedule of Events (PDF file).

A Raisin in the Sun

2009-04-03T11:43:00.000-05:00

by Lorraine Hansberry, directed by Lou Bellamy
Penumbra Theatre Production at the Guthrie Theatre
April 1, 2009

A year ago when I read that Penumbra and the Guthrie would be presenting Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, 50 years after its debut on Broadway, I mentally placed it on my “must see” list. I saw it as an opportunity to see a play that was a breakthrough for Hansberry and for African American writers, directors, and actors, a play that is often mentioned alongside other mid-century giants such as Death of a Salesman and The Glass Menagerie. In short, I was viewing the play as an important piece of American literary history, so I was caught off guard by the power of Penumbra’s staging.

Erika LaVonn (Ruth) and David Alan Anderson (Walter Lee) Photo by Peter Jennings (Penumbra)

I shouldn’t have been surprised. The work carries an electricity even in the reading, and I know from experience with Penumbra’s productions that what is electric on the page becomes almost unbearably real on stage. Even in the waking moments of the play, where members of the Younger family arrise in turn to take their turns in the shared bathroom (shared with other families, not just with other siblings), long held dreams were fading. The impatience evident in the terse derailed conversation between Ruth and Walter Lee let the audience know that this family is on the edge, and that this marriage and family could explode or, sadder yet, simply turn cold and bitter.

Set in post WWII Chicago, a three-generation family lives in a small two bedroom apartment. Lena Younger and her husband Walter moved to this apartment shortly after marrying and vowed that they would move to a real house in the coming years. More than thirty years later, with Big Walter dead, the Younger family still lives in the same apartment: Lena, her son Walter Lee and his wife Ruth and their 10-year-old son Travis, and Lena’s college-aged daughter Beneatha. Theirs is a story of a dream denied: Big Walter and Lena were never able to buy that house, and it still takes three adults working full-time menial jobs to cover the expenses of living in the run-down Southside apartment. Lena and Ruth hold on to the slim dream of moving to a house, a structure that could relieve the claustrophobic stress while holding their family together. Beneatha, whose exposure to ideas at college has kindled her dreams, sees new possibilities: self expression, identity, Africa, medical school. But Walter, 10 years her senior has seen his dreams fade, and on the morning the play opens, he is franticly trying not to miss a last opportunity for creating a better life.

A Raisin in the Sun’s 50 years of success with theater audiences, black and white, may stem from Hansberry’s ability to articulate a sense of accumulated loss and disappointment over missed dreams in a way that many people can identify with on some level. For example, Walter Lee’s impatient and single-minded obsession with his clearly doomed liquor store scheme is irrationally childish and dangerous to the family’s equilibrium. Yet when the deal goes awry and the family’s money is stolen, the audience’s anger at Walter is tempered by empathy because most people have either been that reckless obsessed child or loved a person with that recklessness. As a mark of a good play, it’s easy for the audience to see a part of itself on stage.

Adeoye (Joseph Asagai) and Bakesta King (Beneatha) Photo by Tim Fuller (Penumbra)

Yet, according to actor and playwright Ossie Davis, who replaced Sidney Poitier in the original Broadway production, this identification caused a problem for a play that set out to draw attention to the plight of black Americans at a specific time and place. Davis says, “One of the biggest selling points about Raisin. . .was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family. Some people were ecstatic to find that ‘it didn’t really have to be about Negroes at all!’ It was, rather, a walking, talking, living demonstration of our mythic conviction that, underneath all of us, Americans. . .are pretty much alike” (qtd. in Robert Nemiroff’s 1987 introduction to the play). So while Raisin in the Sun gave many Americans their first glimpse inside a private home of an African-American family, it also seemed to allow middle class white America to gloss over the systemic poverty and powerlessness that Hansberry hopes to expose. Nemiroff continues Davis’ observation: “In many reviews (and later academic studies), the Younger family. . .was transformed into an acceptably ‘middle class’ family. The decision to move became a desire to ‘integrate’ (rather than, as Mamma says simply, ‘to find the nicest house for the least amount of money for my family. . .Them houses they put up for colored in them areas way out always seem to cost twice as much.’)”

This phenomena might also help explain why Penumbra’s production took me by surprise. Perhaps I had not only relegated the play to an important historical artifact, I may have trivialized the characters by limiting their hardships and despair—as well as their wit and playfulness—to my own limited experiences. The reality of their portrayal on the stage was much more vivid and real than I could have imagined. And while I could identify with aspects of the characters, it is clear that the experiences that have brought these characters to this place on stage include subtle and not-so subtle racism and injustice, neither of which are a part of my personal experience.

A Raisin in the Sun does have some trouble spots. A couple of them may have to do with the passage of 50 years. On more than one occasion the audience hooted at a (hopefully dated) sexist comment by Walter or one of Beneatha’s suitors. But near the conclusion of the play, some members of the audience reacted with near rebellion to what surely was meant to be a moving exchange between Walter’s mother and Walter’s wife. Momma Lena expresses her pride over her son’s having stood up to the white neighborhood association representative. She tells Ruth (“Quietly, woman to woman,” according to the stage directions) “He finally come into his manhood today, didn’t he?”

While all of the characters have decisions and personal stands to make, Hansberry does develop a theme of Walter Lee needing to establish his “manhood,” so this last statement doesn’t come entirely out of the blue. Further, this concept of a strong women preventing a man’s growth was likely a prevalent view in mid century; it also likely has adherents today, despite the heckles from the audience. Earlier in the play, Momma Lena offers an assessment of her own role in thwarting Walter Lee’s development by acting as the matriarch, the head of the family. Lenna tells Walter, “Listen to me, now. I say I been wrong, son. That I been doing to you what the rest of the world been doing to you. . . .There ain’t nothing worth holding on to, money, dreams, nothing else—if it means—if it means it’s going to destroy my boy. (She takes an envelope out of her handbag and puts it in front of him, and he watches her without speaking or moving). . .It ain’t much, but it’s all I got in the world and I’m putting it in your hands. I’m telling you to be the head of this family from now on like you supposed to be.”

David Alan Anderson (Walter Lee) and Franchelle Stewart Dorn (Lena) Photo by Peter Jennings (Penumbra)

Little in the play suggests that Walter Lee has earned this new trust, and every seat in the house knows that Walter will loose every dime of that money. While the play does pivot largely on Walter Lee’s transformation, it is the growth and maturation of this family as a whole that provides the more compelling story. It also strikes me that Hansberry may have been more interested in developing this later theme than the manhood one, which may have been an after thought. I think it’s possible that Hansberry includes the manhood theme, not because she particularly found it important, but because it was simply in the air that she breathed and the water that she drank as a black writer. The motif of a black man gaining manhood status by standing up to the white man permeates much of black writing dating back to slave narratives, including Frederick Douglass’s account of his transformation from slave to man. And with this transforming stand, a man reclaims his rightful place as head of himself and his family, a position previously appropriated by wives and mothers. With 50 years of hindsight, it is easy to wonder why the 29-year-old Hansberry couldn’t recognize and challenge this myth. Perhaps she could have had she lived another 50 years. Unfortunately for us, she only had another 6 years.

I’ve made the Penumbra’s A Raisin in the Sun sound like an incredibly serious and heavy play, which, of course, it is. But it is also funny and playful play as the family members chide, and tease, and antagonize each other in a way that only family members can. The cast is simply remarkable in this production. And while the ending is not a happy-ever-after ending, it is an ending of perseverance and pride worthy of the spirits of the 5 generations of Youngers who had dreamed and toiled, laughed, and loved on this continent, preparing the way for the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement to come.

A Raisin in the Sun runs through April 11 at the Guthrie in St. Paul. Visit www.guthrietheater.org for tickets and schedules.

Quotes taken from Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff. Vintage Books: 1994.

Early Spring Productions

2009-03-28T19:01:00.000-05:00

The spring season is already under way in Winona with St. Mary’s University production of A Chorus Line, which runs through Monday. Vivian Fussillo’s take on Moleire’s The Imaginary Invalid plays next week at Winona State University, Thursday through Saturday.

The 17-member kick line rehearses for Saint Mary’s University’s production of A Chorus Line. (photo by Katie Derus/Winona Daily News)

Ryan Hawkins, right, and Ali Dilger in WSU’s The Imaginary Invalid. (photo by Katie Derus/Winona Daily News)

Karen Dulak, left and Ann Kohner rehearse a scene from the dress rehearsal of The Senator Wore Pantyhose. (Photo by Rory O’Driscoll/Winona Daily News)

From left, Chris Bernard, Emily Whitcomb, Derek Sveen, Abbey Quandahl, Hunter Tibor and Emily Quandahl rehearse "You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown."(Photo by Fred Schulze/Winona Daily News)

Next week also has two community theater offerings: The Fountain City Players with The Senator Wore Panythose and Rock Solid Youth Center with You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown.

For the second year, spring also means the Commonweal’s annual Ibsen Festival and production of Ibsen. The Festival runs April 17 - 19 with Hedda Gabler opening April 16 for a two month run. Visit the Commonweal for details.

A Chorus Line

Music by Marvin Hamlisch, Lyrics by Edward Kleban,
Directed by Judy Meyers
St. Mary’s Department of Theater Arts

Mar. 27 - 30
Fri., Sat., Mon. shows at 7:30 pm, Sun. at 3 pm
Page Theatre

See story from Winona Daily News Visit the Page Theatre website for schedule and ticket information.

The Imaginary Invalid

by Moliere, Directed by Vivian Fusillo
Winona State Department of Theatre and Dance
April 2-4, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
WSU Performing Arts Center Mainstage

See story from Winona Daily News.
Visit the Winona State Theater and Dance Department website for schedule and ticket information.

The Senator Wore Panythose

by Billy Van Zandt and jane Milmore, Directed by Juddee Brone

Fountain City River Players
April 1 - 5, 7:30 p.m. (Sunday, 2 p.m.)
Fountain City Auditorium
42 N. Main St., Fountain City, Wisconsin.
608-687-7481

See the story from the Winona Daily News

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

by Clark Gesner, directeed by Sue Degallier
Rock Solid Youth Center
April 2 - 4, 7:30 p.m.
April 5, 4:00 p.m.
75 West 3rd Street, Winona, MN
507 452-2125

See the story from the Winona Daily News

Commonweal Apprentices featured in Private Eyes

2009-03-12T22:33:00.000-05:00

Private Eyes
by Steven Dietz
Commonweal Theatre Apprentice Class

The Commonweal’s first apprentice class culminates their 10 months of study at the Commonweal with a full production of Steven Dietz’s Private Eyes. The apprenticeship program is designed for advanced college and post graduate students seeking more experience in the areas of acting, directing, and theater administration. Apprentices have played important roles on stage and behind the scenes during the 2008 season productions including memorable performances in A Christmas Carol, Ice Maidens, Harvey, and Man of La Mancha. The Commonweal audience has had ample opportunity to come to know and enjoy these talented young artists.

This play only runs this weekend, and the Commonweal strongly suggests reserving tickets.

Here is the commonweal’s play synopsis:

Deceit and intrigue simmer just below the surface in this dark comedy in which five individuals discover what it means to lie to everyone around them, including themselves. Featuring Apprentice Company members Mike Davidovich, David Harmann, Sarah Kathryn Hawkins, Brad Kastendick, and Kimberly Maas.

Private Eyes runs March 12 - March 15

Coming in April at the Commonweal:
2009 Ibsen Festival, April 17 - 19.
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, April 16 - June 12

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

The Long Christmas Ride Home

2009-02-26T15:11:00.000-06:00

Sarah St. Laurent, a Saint Mary’s University theatre major, paints the face of Rebecca, a Japanese Bunraku-inspired puppet Monday at SMU’s Page Theatre. The puppets will be used in "The Long Christmas Ride Home, directed by St. Laurent. (photo by Katie Derus/Winona Daily News) See the Winona Daily News story.

by Paula Vogel; Directed by Sarah St. Laurent
Puppet Design by Preston Lawing, MFA
St. Mary’s University Department of Theatre Arts

St. Mary’s University Department of Theater Arts presents Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home this weekend at Valéncia Arts Center in Winona. American playwright Paula Vogel is best known for her Pulitzer winning play How I Learned to Drive. How I Learned to Drive uses learning to drive as a metaphor for a girl overcoming an incestuous relationship with her uncle. Vogel often deals with controversial and uncomfortable subjects but seems to do it in a way that engages audiences rather than overwhelms them.

In The Long Christmas Ride Home, Vogel includes puppets based on traditional Japanese bunraku puppets. These puppets usually require 2 or three actors to manipulate the puppets. The puppets for the St. Mary’s Production are designed by Preston Lawing of St. Mary’s Art Department.

The Long Christmas Ride Home runs February 26 - March 2
Thur., Fri., Sat., Mon. shows at 7:30 pm, Sun. at 3 pm
Academy Theatre, Valencia Arts Center
1164 W. 10th, Winona.

Visit the Page Theatre web site for schedule and ticket information.

New York Times Image from Disfarmer (Photo: Richard Termine)

Bunraku puppet on Broadway.

View a New York Times review of Dan Hurlin’s play Disfarmer which stars a bunraku puppet playing the role of photographer Mike Disfarmer. Included with the review are several still photos and a 6 minute flash video of the puppet and the puppeteers in action.

View the New York Times Review of Disfarmer

Penumbra Postpones Wilson’s Radio Gulf

2009-02-15T11:16:00.001-06:00

St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre announced this week that it will postpone its production of August Wilson’s Radio Gulf to next Fall. Penumbra had committed to produce all 10 of Wilson’s Twentieth Century Cycle plays over a 5 year period. With the announcement, Penumbra will continue with plans to produce each of the plays but will only take on one per season for the next few years. Radio Golf, the last play written in the cycle, is the only Wilson play that the company has not yet performed during its more than 30 years of productions. It will be the third play, following Gem of the Ocean and Fences, in this new commitment to produce all of the plays in the cycle.

As an unfortunate sign of the time, Penumbra announced that it will cut nearly 25% from its 2009 budget. It will try and maintain its financial footing for the long term while continuing its commitments to the community and the “unrestrained voice of black playwrights and artists.” In its 32nd season, Penumbra has been an important voice of the African American experience and an important part of the Twin Cities Theater community.

A quick look at what is happening at Penumbra Theatre in February and March demonstrates that Penumbra is still a very busy company.

February and March Penumbra Calendar

The Whipping Man
by Matthew Lopez; directed by Lou Bellamy
February 15 - March 8
Penumbra Theatre

A Raisin in the Sun
By Lorraine Hansberry; Directed by Lou Bellamy
March 13 - April 11
Presented by the Guthrie Theater on the McGuire Proscenium Stage

Art exhibit:

Honoring the African American Experience: Penumbra Theatre Stages August Wilson’s 20th Century Cycle
February 2 - 25, 2009
Hennepin County Government Center
300 South Sixth Street, A Level
Minneapolis, MN

Visit the Penumbra for schedules and tickets: PenumbraTheatre.org

Tickets for A Raisin in the Sun are available through the Guthrie Box Office: www.guthrietheater.org/

Ice Maidens

2008-11-04T22:43:00.001-06:00

A World Premiere by Stan Peal
Directed by Scott Dixon
Commonweal Theatre
(November 1, 2008)

First of all, Ice Maidens is much more interesting than Commonweal’s plot synopsis suggests. While it is true that its about a young woman returning for a visit to her Minnesota home and her estranged family, and it is true that her younger sister did fall through the ice and drown when they were girls and that unsettled guilt over the accident haunts each member of the family causing the young woman’s estrangement from her family, I still wasn’t expecting this play. The synopsis conjures up an earnest young women, perhaps fresh from therapy or a spiritual healing, attempting to embrace and reconcile with her past. But I knew this image was all wrong the moment Lisa comes on stage and sticks her head in the hole in what looks like ice and. . .well, I don’t want to spoil the scene for you.

Lisa and her boyfriend are not the middle class, Prius driving, 30-ish, professionals that I expected. Instead they turn out to be. . . . And not only that, they’re also . . ., and they’re headed to California to tour with a group of . . . . I’m starting to see why the Commonewal’s plot synopsis looked so bland; these revelations need to be made from the stage. Perhaps the impact of Lisa’s arrival to her family’s home is best summed up by 16-year-old Mandy who calls her prodigal sister “scalding, like an iron.”

Kimberly Maas, Hal Cropp, and David Harmann rehearse a scene from Ice Maidens. (Photo: Commonweal)

The scalding Lisa, played by Kimberly Maas, and her Atlanta boyfriend, Wes (Mike Davidovich), enter into the Minnesota lake town that is just settling into the refreshing repose of November. It is the time of year when the ground begins to solidify with the frost, offering welcome stability. Writer Stan Peal has filled Ice Maidens with these types of metaphors. The cold refreshes Lisa and awakens a lost part of her. She begins the play “scalding,” tough and angry (and Maas is remarkably tough), but the cold softens her, melting her tough exterior.

But Maas’s character is not the only one who needs melting (or is it freezing?). Lisa’s mother Joanne (Susan D’Autremont) clings to her own ice out of fear of facing the past. Her obvious avoidance of her prodigal daughter is simply chilling. At a pivotal point in the play, when other family members are beginning to soften towards each other, D’Autremont distracts herself by worrying about the impending melting of the polar ice caps. Ice Maidens is rich with metaphors and images that include the ballerina spirit of the drowned sister, the transforming stories of evangelical Christianity, the opening of fragile souls in a Karaoke bar, and the freeing precision of skateboarding and figure skating.

It’s quite possible that Ice Maidens simply has too many metaphors and images “in play.” The ice dam is threatening to take out the bridge (the metaphors are contagious—I can’t help but pile them on). But if the metaphors threaten to implode the play, the characters are jumping up and down on thin ice (there I go again); they too are all “in play.” It seems that every character has a confession to make about the pivotal day when six year old Stephanie plunged through the ice. And every character is in need of his or her own redemption.The coincidences push against the ice dam that holds the play together and combine with the metaphors to make tremendous demands on the play’s ability to ultimately resolve and fulfill.

But the ice only bends and the dam holds, thanks to the will and the skill of the playwright. Peal’s script and director Dixon’s quick pacing keep the play moving forward, sometimes poignantly superimposing two small scenes over the top of each other. Ice Maidens is also extremely funny. The fluid clash of sincerity and cynicism, of heat and cold, provide unexpected levity. And while the underlying family drama is difficult, the characters are having fun, too; after all, there’s Karaoke on Sunday and Wednesday nights in Silver Lake, Minnesota.

Ice Maidens is a strong play and a brilliant production, and Peal and the Commonweal have every right to be extremely proud of it. But it’s also a work in progress, and I’m guessing that more changes will come over the short November run. A few of the irresistible metaphors may have to be saved back for another play. For example, the singing metaphor may be too predictable, like a sugary TV sitcom, distracting from the central them of redemption through cold and ice. And the final scene leaves everyone just a little bit too happy—all the metaphors consummated, all the characters redeemed. Perhaps I simply don’t trust a happy ending; perhpas I’ve lived in Minnesota too long.

While a world premiere brings focus on the play and the playwright, the acting company does a tremendous job of bringing Peal’s play to life. The evolving relationship between the sisters, Kimberly Maas and Stef Dickens, is particularly strong. While Maas has somehow transformed herself into the street tough Lisa, Dickens has somehow moved from the hardened prostitute of this summer’s Man of La Mancha into a very believable teenaged figure skater, complete with pink leg warmers. Kit Mayer and Jason Underferth have again used a simple set and lighting design to beautifully create the indoor and the outdoor, the real and the surreal, helping those of us in Southeast Minnesota embrace the refreshing return of the cold.

Ice Maidens runs through November 16.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

November Nights: The World Premiere of Ice Maidens

2008-10-23T00:27:00.000-05:00

by Stan Peal
directed by Scott Dixon

The Commonweal continues its commitment to staging new works with the world premiere of Stan Peal’s Ice Maiden. The play, which was commissioned by the Commonweal, received a staged reading at the theatre last fall after Peal spent a year of “intermittent weekends” in Lanesboro working with the company. Next week it will receive a full production on the Commonweal stage for a two-week run.

Peal left Minnesota in 2001 to found the Epic Arts Repertory Theatre in Charlotte, North Carolina, but he remembers the cold. Peal uses the cold as a positive metaphor, as something “welcoming and invigorating. . . .Cold is usually a negative metaphor in plays,” says Peal. “I wanted the cold and ice to be positive and explore the idea of a baptism by ice—to see how the cold can purify and bring new life.”

Commonweal Artistic director Hal Cropp believes Peal has succeeded with this exploration and has captured something of Lanesboro. “The script is very much evocative of our region,” says Cropp. It is “filled with glorious imagery and vivid characterizations. I think the story, and Stan’s unique voice will ring true to our community.” The Commonweal bills the play as a moving, humorous, and ultimately heartfelt story.

The plot of the play involves a young woman visiting her Minnesota home. The visit stirs up memories of her sister falling through the ice and drowning during a childhood lake crossing. This memory has driven the young woman away from her home and away from her family, testing Peal’s metaphor of ice and cold as purifying and redemptive elements.

The collaboration between Peal and the Commonweal has been fruitful. Peal describes this collaboration in muted terms, noting that the collaboration is a reminder that the “playwright is not an isolated artist” and at some point the playwright must “let go and send the play through the collective process unique to the Theatre.” Peal feels that the Commonweal company “seems to have a particular sensitivity to the gradual curve of this shake-up process.”

Director Scott Dixon sees the “shake-up process” a little more turbulently: “it’s like handing that new car over to people who will abuse the hell out of it. The director, the designers, the actors—they pull at the seams, twist it as hard as they can, try everything they can think of to break it down before building it back up again.” In the end, Dixon muses, “When a script withstands that kind of workout, then you know you’ve got something.”

Ice Maidens runs November 1 – 16 with Previews October 30 and 31.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

John Hasler Theater fall comedy Don’t Hug Me

2008-10-22T23:59:00.000-05:00

by Phil Olson

The Jon Hassler Theater is entering the second week of its fall production of Phil Olson’s musical comedy Don’t Hug Me. Here is JHT’s description of the play:

Don’t Hug Me takes place in Bunyan Bay, Minnesota. It’s the coldest day of the year and cantankerous bar owner, Gunner Johnson, wants to sell the business and move to Florida. Clara, his wife and former Winter Carnival Bunyan Queen, wants to stay. Bernice Lundstrom, the pretty waitress, wants to pursue a singing career. Her fiance, Kanute Gunderson, wants her to stay home. It’s a battle of wills, and when a fast-talking salesman, Aarvid Gisselsen, promises to bring romance into their lives through the ‘magic’ of karaoke, all heck breaks loose!

It’s Fargo meets The Music Man (without the blood or the trombones).

Don’t Hug Me runs through November 16

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Commonweal Earns International Ibsen Award

2008-08-30T12:24:00.000-05:00

The Commonweal Theatre (Lanesboro, MN) has received a prestigious scholarship award from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture worth $45,000 USD (NOK 250,000). The award is in recognition of the Commonweal’s consistent work promoting the spirit of Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright whose work spans the late 1800s, is regarded as the father of modern, western drama. The Commonweal’s Hal Cropp and Adrianne Sweeney are representing the Commonweal in Oslo at the International Ibsen Awards Conference The award was to be presented Friday.

The scholarships are meant to recognize community-based arts organizations that use Ibsen’s work as “grounds for personal exchange in easily recognized issues concerning all cultures. . .[to] discuss challenging human problems.” With the award, the Norwegian ministry intends to recognize and encourage organizations that focus on “artistic issues in form and content where artists are given the opportunity to communicate something other than what public media is already filled with at any given time.”

The Commonweal is recognized for the entirety of its work, including its six-play season with 200 annual performances, it’s New Play Series that has yielded 12 world premiers, and its annual Ibsen festival. The Ibsen festival is highlighted each year by a production of one of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. The Commonweal staged Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in 2008 and plans to produce Hedda Gabler in 2009.

Jerome Yorke and Stef Dickens in the Commonweal’s Peer Gynt. (photo: Commonweal)

The Commonweal’s Artistic Director Hal Cropp indicated that the scholarship money will be used to enhance the Commonweal’s Ibsen Festival, particularly the Commonweal’s project “Bringing Ibsen to the Rural Midwest.” The award also increases the ties between the Commonweal and the Norwegian National Theater where Ibsen had served as resident playwright.

“The great long term thing for me and for the company is the ability to get to know, and to begin to have conversations with the Norwegian National Theatre, and explore the possibility of getting the Commonweal to go over there and them to come over here on an exchange,” Cropp said.

Along with the Commonweal, the Ministry of Culture presented scholarships to three other organizations: Center for Asian Theatre, Bangladesh; Pen Afghanistan, Afghanistan; and herStay, Norway.

Sources:
Minnesota Public Radio: Lanesboro theater receives international recognition
Ibsen Awards: Scholarships for International Ibsen Projects announced

Penumbra staging August Wilson’s Fences

2008-08-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

With much of the Twin Cities buzz on the Guthrie’s production of Little House on the Prairie, not to mention a certain St. Paul convention group coming to town, Penumbra’s production of Fences could easily slip by unnoticed. But for this season, Fences tops my list of must-see Twin Cities theater.

Fences, Wilson’s second major play, followed closely on the heels of his ground breaking Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It was first staged in 1985 at the Yale Repertory Theater with James Earl Jones playing Troy Maxon, and it moved to Broadway in 1987. It won the Pulitzer for Drama in 1987.

The play would also become the second play in Wilson’s ambitions 10-play cycle which chronicles the the lives of African Americans in the 20th Century. Each of the 10 plays is set in a different decade of the Century with Fences representing the 50s. Wilson wouldn’t realize that he was writing the cycle until his next play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, yet some of the themes and motifs that would characterize the later plays are already present in Fences. For example, Fences introduces a mentally disabled man to stand as a flawed truth teller, chorus, and priest. Troy’s brother Gabriel, living with the consequence of his WWII head injury, is the first of many flawed and sometimes crazy griots that find their way into Wilson’s cycle demanding accountability to a shared community and history.

But what makes Fences so remarkable is the powerful central character of Troy Maxon and his damaged relationship with his son. Troy is both larger than life, serving the role that Arthur Miller might call a modern day tragic hero—highly respected by his friends and family—and heartbreakingly human in his failings.

Penumbra Theatre, which has previously staged all 10 of Wilson’s major plays, is in the second year of a commitment to produce Wilson’s cycle over 5 seasons. Wilson lived in St. Paul and was a company member of Penumbra during the time Fences was written and continued an artistic connection to Penumbra until his death in 2005 at 60. Theater patrons in the upper Midwest are beneficiaries of this unique relationship between company and playwright.

Fences
Penumbra Theatre
Directed by Lou Bellamy
August 21 through September 21
Visit the Penumbra for schedules and tickets: Penumbra Theatre

Twin Cities Reviews of Fences:

Star Tribune’s Rohan Preston: Fences is intimate, powerful
Pioneer Press’ Dominic P. Papatola: Penumbra knocks one out of the park with Fences
City Pages, Quinton Skinner: Home Run

Twin Cities review of Little House on the Prairie

Pioneer Press reviewer Dominic P. Paptola took Little House to task in Earnest ‘Little House’ can’t overcome its many shortcomings.
Star Tribune reviewer Graydon Royce was a bit kinder in his A purple-sky, golden-wheat ode to frontier America.

Little House on the Prairie
Guthrie Theatre
Directed by Francesca Zambello
July 26 - October 19
Visit the Guthrie for schedules and tickets: Guthrie Theatre

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

2008-07-24T10:57:00.001-05:00

by William Shakespeare, directed by Rick Barbour
Great River Shakespeare Festival Apprentice and Intern Company
(July 23, 2008)

Once again the Apprentice Company has provided Winona with another top-notch production in the back waters of the summer Shakespeare Festival. After nearly two months of providing support for the festival's main plays, the group of largely college-aged actors, technicians, and administrative interns took center stage with one of Shakespeare's lesser known romances.

Presented in three-quarter round in Winona State's black box theater, with minimal costuming, sets and props, the company presented the episodic tale of a young noble's search for adventure and romance. During the journey, Pericles gains, and devastatingly loses, title, wife, and daughter. The play is similar to A Winter's Tale (which GRSF performed in its first season) with its final joyous reunion that is clouded by melancholy questions over the years of suffering and the uncertain future.

The play utilizes a narrator—a poet named Gower—to help tie together the acts which move through several kingdoms through a span of more than 15 years. Ricardo Valencia does a marvelous job as Gower, bringing to life lengthy speeches that could easily have dragged down the action of the play. Instead, the interludes felt like natural and necessary elements in the play.

The acting in the production is uniformly strong. Because of the multiple scenes and abundance of characters that populate these scenes, nearly all of the actors play multiple parts, yet no scene or character shows any sign of a let down. It seems as if each scene was treated by the company as if it were pivotal to the entire play. This attention to detail is remarkable considering the short time the company had to bring the production together and the size and complexity of the play itself.

And just to tie the play in to the main stage productions, Pericles, in his late play euphoria, gives his daughter in marriage to a man he doesn't know. Here it seems Pericles has not heeded the example of the Kings whose daughters he himself had wooed as a younger man, confronting the audience with a stark reminder that women, even women revered for virtue, have a limited voice in who or what they will become. But that is an ongoing discussion the twenty-first century is having with Shakespeare, and I'm sure GRSF will visit it again.

Pericles plays Thursday at 7:00 and Friday at 3:00 in the Winona State University's Performing Arts Center Black Box Theater.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

July Has Become Theatre Month in Southeast Minnesota

2008-07-16T13:25:00.000-05:00

These next two weeks may be the busiest theatre weeks of the year in Southeast Minnesota. With the exception of the Jon Hassler Theater, which just finished its summer production, all of the area professional theatres have two or more shows scheduled, and most of them are offering related activities, conversations and performances. In addition, Minnesota has an abundance of community theaters; I've listed a few area productions below, but to be sure, this is only a partial listing.

Please check with the individual theaters for dates, times, and ticket information.

Commonweal Theatre, Lanesboro, Minnesota

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

Great River Shakespeare Festival, Winona Minnesota

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (Minnesota Theatre Review) (Preview: Problem Plays)
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare (Minnesota Theatre Review)
Tuesdays - Sundays, through July 27
Schedules and tickets: Great River Shakespeare Festival

GRSF Apprentice Acting Company

Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare
July 22 - 25
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

Community Theatre

Rushford Area Society for the Arts

The Sensuous Senator by Michael Parker
directed by Daryl Lanz
July 16 - 18 7:30 p.m.
July 19 - 20 2:00 p.m.
Rushford-Peterson High School, Rushford, Minn.
Tickets: 507-864-7525
www.rushfordrasa.org

Ye Olde Opera House

Cinderella by Rodgers and Hammerstiein
Directed by Kay Cross
July 16 - 20 8:30 p.m.
Ye Olde Gray Barn, Hwy 44 East of Spring Grove, Minn.
Tickets: 507-498-JULY
www.yeoldeoperahouse.org

Rochester Repetory Theatre Company

Glass Half Full: 10 Minute Plays
Directed by Becci Berg & Kent Griffin
July 17 - 19; 24 - 26 8:00 p.m.
Rochester Repertory Theatre, 103 Seventh St. N.E., Rochester, Minn.
www.rochesterrep.org

Fountain City Players

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Rupert Holmes
Directed by Judee Brone
July 23 - 26 7:30 p.m.
July 27 2:00 p.m.
Fountain City Auditorium, 42 North Main Street, Fountain City, Wis.
Tickets: 608-687-7481

The Taming of the Shrew

2008-07-15T23:02:00.000-05:00

by William Shakespeare, directed by Alec Wild
Great River Shakespeare Festival (July 9, 2008)

Alec Wild has returned to the Great River Shakespeare Festival with a splash of welcome creativity to offer one of the finest productions yet from the 5-year-old company. Wild and the production company present Italy’s Padua as a sort of circus of mimes, clowns, and minstrels who keep watch over a collection of brightly colored visitors to the city. The entire cast—including the principles—remains onstage for most of the play, populating the steel-truss towers that serve as trapeze supports, prop storage, and repositories for the varied tools of sound effects. Much of the action is exaggerated, utilizing Three Stooges-type physical comedy with feigned violence and pratfalls punctuated by bells, drums, and whistles. Characters supplement the stage action with facial expressions and poses designed to include the audience in the conspiracy. From the very beginning, the audience understands that this will be a production that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Taming of the Shrew abandons the GRSF tradition of starting its plays with the entire cast onstage for a choreographed prologue and instead sends out the lone Biondello (played by Zachary Michael Fine) who, relishing his time in the spotlight, makes several false starts before launching the anticipated prologue.

Carla Noack in The Taming of the Shrew Directed by Alec Wild (Photo: Jared Brown)

The GRSF staging of Taming certainly emphasizes the comedic aspects of the play, and certainly, Shakespeare is witty, cleaver, and playful in this work. But as the recent commemoration of comedian George Carlin should remind us, there is often humor in pushing concepts that make us uncomfortable. And Shakespeare’s play about the roles of men and women in courtship and marriage in the early 1600s likely pushed the envelope. The play poses several tenets of accepted social order: a quiet, obedient women is far preferred to one who uses her tongue and thinks for herself. Marriage arrangements are basically financial exchanges between men. Men have a right and a responsibility to make sure their wives and daughters conform to accepted social norms. Had these norms been universally accepted in 1600, Shakespeare, like Carlin, would have had little use for them as comedic devices.

Earlier I wrote about some of the problems for a modern audience with the concept of a husband “taming” his wife (see Problem Plays: Taming of the Shrew). The physical comedy takes some of the edge off this taming, but so does the stature of the characters playing the roles of tamer and shrew. Carla Noack as Katherine is taller than Christopher Gerson’s Petruchio and would not be a pushover in a physical match. So when Katherine allows Petruchio to dictate her behavior, she does not simply do it out of fear. While she has come to realize that she may not eat or see her family without giving in to Gerson’s Petruchio, she has also come to respect and possibly love Petruchio. Helping further take the edge off the taming, Gerson’s taming is pulled off in part by dumb luck. Despite his confident words, Gerson lets the audience know that his strategy is a bluff, and he certainly seems as surprised as the others when Katherine so quickly chooses to be tamed. And choice seems to be the key here: if the audience believes that Katherine is making a choice to put her lot in with Petruchio—Noack certainly plays Katherine this way—then the transformation seems a little less like brain washing and coercion. But even with fine performances by Noack and Gerson, that is still a bit of a stretch.

The Taming of the Shrew plays in repertory with The Merchant of Venice through July 26.
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Man of La Mancha

2008-07-10T20:22:00.001-05:00

by Dale Wasserman (book), Joe Darion (lyrics), Mitch Leigh (music). Directed by Hal Cropp
Commonweal Theatre (July 7, 2008)

The Commonweal’s summer offering, Man of La Mancha, matches the company’s creative production and acting with a strong and popular musical comedy. The result is a play that builds on this season’s earlier production of Peer Gynt: fast-paced story telling with a small cast that not only portrays multiple characters, it creates the scenes, manufactures important props, plays the chorus, and even handles the orchestra duties. The play is immensely funny and subtly thought-provoking. The cast, director Hal Cropp, and the production team are to be congratulated on a top-notch production.

The success of Man of La Mancha starts with a tried-and-true musical comedy which has seen constant performances since its 1965 Tony Award winning Broadway premiere. But its pedigree dates back even farther, borrowing the title character and its episodes from the classic seventeenth century Spanish novel, Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of an eccentric who sets out to recapture the honor of a long-gone, romanticized era of knights. The episodic novel’s huge success came from its witty ability to lampoon the conventions of popular legends and romance stories, perhaps in the same way that Monty Python lampooned the King Arthur legend in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When Dale Wasserman selected the episodes to include in his 1959 television drama, he not only had the pick of time-tested story lines from one of the pioneering books in world literature, he had a main character in Don Quixote whose lunacy and idealism has long been ingrained in western culture.

The drama takes place entirely in a prison where Cervantes awaits trial before the Spanish Inquisition. But first, his fellow inmates charge Cervantes with being honest, a bad poet, and an idealist. For these crimes, they threaten to take his meager possessions and destroy his manuscript. Desperate to save the manuscript, Cervantes and his servant enact scenes from the life of Don Quixote as a form of defense. With the aid of a few rough props and costumes that he has brought with him, Cervantes transforms into Don Quixote, and his fellow prisoners are enlisted to play the other characters. Their reluctance to join this charade drains away as they become interested in the story and forget the endless tedium of their life in prison.

In the Commonweal’s production, the musical becomes a sort of “non-musical.” While the play features as many songs as most musicals, and the actors do a fine job of singing these songs, the songs seem to naturally fit the story being told on stage; the songs do not upstage the story. I suspect that this is partly due to the play—in Don Quioxte’s world, it could be natural for someone to break out into song—and partly due to choices made by the Commonweal. First, the play does not use an orchestra (or an orchestral recording), so the transition from dialog to song does not include an orchestral swell and a corresponding amplified singer—the actors are able to enter into a song without breaking character. The actors provide the minimal accompaniment. Rick Nance’s character moves to a partially hidden piano for most songs. Additionally, the actors contribute poly-rhythmic instrumentation using muted hand claps or improvised percussion instruments such as rugged eating utensils or rough stage furniture. (Later, David Hennessey told me that Musical Director Stephen Houtz based the rhythms on flamingo). Kimberly Maas occasionally adds accordion for texture and Eric Bunge tells part of a story on guitar. Even “The Impossible Dream” seems like a natural continuation of the theme, not a show-stopping “number.”

The Commonweal’s eight actors rarely leave stage during the 95-minute single act play, moving to the shadows when they are not directly involved in the action. Having one scene to tell a story of this magnitude places a huge burden on the set, blocking, and lighting. Kit Mayer’s seemingly simple set design evokes an iron-cold underworld of lawlessness and despair that physically and emotionally extends beyond the stage’s perimeter. The transitions from dungeon to country-side adventure are created largely by Jason Underferth’s effective lighting design.

Individual performances—and there are many good ones—are overshadowed by the company in this play. Eric Bunge completely transforms into the elderly Quixote character with the aid of a very simple mustache and goatee. Troy Iverson is fun to watch as Quixote’s squire Sancho, and Stef Dickens is brilliant as Quixote’s Lady Dulcinia, as she moves from acceptance of her tough lot in life through confusion and anger at being thought a lady to finally embracing Quixote’s hope and optimism. Her emotional journey reflects the journey of the entire ensemble. But the play’s success is ultimately carried off by the pacing and energy of this ensemble and their ability to spontaneously create the world where the idealism of the foolish knight, Don Quixote, and his unlikely squire, Sancho Panza, seem possible.

The Man of La Mancha plays in repertory with Harvey through October 25.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

The Merchant of Venice

2008-07-06T15:20:00.000-05:00

by William Shakespeare, directed by Paul Barnes
Great River Shakespeare Festival (July 3, 2008)

“Unsettling” was the word that both cast and audience kept using in the post production conversation to describe The Merchant of Venice after Thursday’s performance at the Great River Shakespeare Festival. The plot line that follows the Jewish moneylender Shylock took up most of the conversation. Jonathan Gillard Daly’s portrayal of Shylock is polarizing in the story and mesmerizing to the audience. Daly takes Shakespeare’s caricature of a Jew—godless, money-grubbing miser—and dominates the scenes that he is in. The performance is reminiscent of Daly’s powerful Richard III, but rather than being driven by Richard’s lust for power, Shylock seeks only a single revenge to help ease the pain of a lifetime of slander and injustice.

The evidence of this anti-Semitic slander is abundant, leaving it hard to find a hero amongst the characters the audience is meant to root for. We want Antonio (the merchant of the title, played by Michael Fitzpatrick) to clear his debts, yet his refusal to see Shylock as human and his harsh “mercy” at the end of the play taint our enthusiasm for him and his friends. We are certainly relieved at the turn of events that save Antonio, but we aren’t exactly cheering along with the actors on stage.

A Jew would have been rare in Shakespeare’s London, perhaps as exotic as a Prince from Morocco. So one would guess that Shakespeare’s audience would not have had much reason to question the evil caricature of Shylock, and it likely did cheer his final humiliation. But the play also offers evidence that Shakespeare didn’t believe the black and white, Christian and Jew dichotomy he created. In a well known speech, Shylock proclaims his humanity: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” (III.i.64-66). And in several places in the play, Shakespeare uses Shylock to highlight the questionable actions and values of Christians. But even with these devices at work, the anti-Semitism is dominant. Director Paul Barnes’ decision to leave the text unaltered, to not soften the racism to suit the times, certainly demonstrates his respect of the intelligence of GRSF’s audience. But ironically, leaving the text alone means that we are seeing a significantly different play than Shakespeare’s original audience.

Jonathan Gillard Daly as Shylock in the GRSF production of The Merchant of Venice. (Photo: GRSF)

Another example of this not-so-subtle racism comes in another plot line, where suitors to the rich and beautiful Portia must pass a lottery to win her hand. Before Bassanio (Antonio’s good friend, played by Zachary Michael Fine) arrives to try his luck, two other suitors—The Prince of Morocco (Donte Fitzgerald) and the Prince of Aragon (Bob Fairbrook)—try theirs. These two scenes provide comic relief as both suitors, decked out in culturally exaggerated costumes, speech, movements, and actions, fall prey to their own vanity. But Portia’s comment upon the departure of the saddened Prince of Morocco changes the audience’s perspective of a brilliantly written comedy sketch.

A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so. (II.vii.78-79)

This comment forces a contemporary audience to wonder if its own relief and amusement over Morocco’s failed choice was, after all, based on race. Again Barnes doesn’t let us off the hook; we have to wrestle with the uncertainty inherent in the text.

Unsettling can also be used to describe the final plot development which is clearly intended as humorous. Portia (played by Tarah Flanagan) and her maid (Carla Noack), disguised as men, have induced their new husbands to offer their respective wedding rings as tokens of appreciation for having saved Antonio. When the men return, the women chide the men for so easily parting with their rings. While the trick is clearly funny, it is also clearly manipulative. Portia uses the opportunity to place separation between her new husband Bassanio and his best friend Antonio, and in a sense, to change the ground rules for their marriage. Portia initially sets the ground rules for their marriage in a more traditional manor just after Bassanio has passed the lottery:

Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours
Is now converted. But now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself, and even now, but now,
This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours—my lord’s!—I give them with this ring,
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love,
And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (III.ii.166-174)

Even before the fiasco with the ring, Portia has shown little willingness to submit or even share power with her new husband. While freely giving over her purse to Bassanio, she continues to direct her servants and orchestrates the events that will resolve the play. But it would be hard to find fault with Portia if she is not yet willing to give over her house to Bassanio—Bassanio has done little to prove that he deserves it. He has spent his youth flitting from one adventure to another, exhausting his own fortune and borrowing heavily from his friends. In the play, he is finally choosing to get serious and take responsibility for his debts. His responsible plan: borrow more money and play a lottery to win a wealthy heiress.

The production itself seems top notch. The lighting and staging are both simple and elegant, helping the audience move from the streets of Venice to the court of Belmont to the Venetian courtroom. The three young attendants to Portia (Orion McCullough-Smith, Christopher Bernard, and Mitchell Essar) sing a lovely passage put to music by Daniel Kallman. The acting certainly meets the high quality that we’ve come to expect from the festival. Along with Jonathan Gillard Daly as Shylock, Tarah Flanagan’s Portia controls both the court and her home of Belmont, and Chris Mixon plays a memorable Gratiano, the type of friend you’d rather didn’t come along when meeting your future spouse. Doug Scholz-Carlson seems to have taken over the role of company fool, and here he does a particularly nice job fooling with words as Lancelot Gobbo.

The Great River Shakespeare Festival’s The Merchant of Venice is certainly more thought provoking than satisfying. While a comedy—it abounds in weddings—the humor is often overshadowed by the many unsettling aspects of the play itself. And rather than simply transport an audience to a romantic Venice, the play forces us to explore our own experiences with racism. There may not be another way to honestly play The Merchant of Venice.

The Merchant of Venice plays in reperatory with The Taming of the Shrew through July 27.
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Problem Plays: The Taming of the Shrew

2008-07-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

The Great River Shakespeare Festivals 2008 offerings include two plays that are often described as “problem” plays. These type of problem plays use stereotypes or social attitudes that might seem offensive to contemporary audiences. Both of the GRSF plays this summer, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, have seen periods where theater companies refused to stage them. Luckily, both plays receive regular productions as theaters and audiences welcome the opportunity to enjoy these important works, often by finding ways to confront or diffuse the racism or sexism that contribute significantly to their plot development. I am excited that GRSF has brought these two plays to Southeast Minnesota this summer, and I look forward to seeing them both.

The Plot

The Taming of the Shrew is a Shakespearean comedy, which means an audience can expect a plot driven by coincidence and chance, characters in disguise, clownish characters, and a happy ending replete with multiple marriages. Shrew does not disappoint.

Baptista, a rich gentleman, has two daughters of marriageable age. The younger daughter, Bianca, has attracted several competing suitors, while Katherine has none. Baptista decides that he will not entertain any suits for his younger daughter until a match is found for his older daughter who has a reputation as a “shrew.” This declaration sends the suitors on a search for someone crazy or desperate enough to marry Katherine—a task they view as impossible, even with the generous dowry and their own bounty added to the mix.

Enter the clownish gentleman from Vienna, Petruchio, who not only willingly takes on Katherine, her sizable dowry, her future inheritance, and the payments from Bianca's suitors, but undertakes the seemingly impossible task of “taming” her.

The Problems with the Text

Carla Noack as Kate and Christopher Gerson as Petruchio in the Great River Shakespeare Festival’ The Taming of the Shrew. (Photo: GRSF)

While the play is very funny and very clever, the humor can be dampened by the sexist portrayal of marriage and women in the text. It should make us squirm a bit—and I suppose it might have made some early 17th Century Londoners squirm too. Some scholars point out that the abundance of surviving treatises and sermons dictating the proper role of women in marriage and society suggests that many women were not exactly embracing the role of obedience and servility in the early 1600s.

Katherine is called shrew and devil and freely described as curst and rough. But like derogatory terms used for women today—terms such as bitch, slut, whore, and feminazi—the terms are difficult to define, and they are nearly impossible to refute because of their ambiguous meaning, illogical application, and malicious intent. The function of these words is to bully women into silence and conformity.
Another troubling aspect of the play is that the daughters are not allowed any voice in who they will marry. Even though Bianca has many suitors, her father chooses without consulting Bianca. And in this case, Baptista chooses the highest bidder. One of the suitors, Lucentio, utilizes a two-prong strategy to try and win Bianca. He devises a way to secretly spend time with Bianca while his servant negotiates the financial deal with the father. But the disguised meetings with Bianca are simply for sport; only the financial deal holds any weight in marriage considerations. Another suitor, Hortensio, also disguises himself to meet directly with Bianca. But he fails to enter into negotiations with the father and, therefore, has no chance.

Katherine's marriage is also arranged between suitor and father. But here it is the father (and Bianca's suitors) who makes the payments. Both daughters are traded as property by father and suitors. Petruchio even puts it in words on his wedding day:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field my barn,
My horse my ox my ass my anything. (III.ii.220-222)
A final problem is with the main comic device of the play—the “taming” of Katherine. Petruchio marries Katherine with the assurance that he can turn her from curst devil into a model wife, mild and obedient. His methods are those of a falconer taming a wild bird—and Shakespeare uses rich metaphors from falconry throughout:
My Falcon now is sharp and passing empty
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure. (IV.ii.159-161)

He captures her, removes her from her native place, refuses her food and sleep, then makes sure she knows that she can only get food and clothing through him. And before allowing her to return to her native home, she must accept his word as truth—even going so far as to embrace an old man as a young girl and calling the sun the moon. While the falconry metaphor is brilliantly written, this brainwashing is chilling when applied to a human being.

Playing to a Contemporary Audience

Katherine finally is allowed to speak for herself at the end of the play, and her words lay out the ideal for a loving, obedient wife—a final speech that leaves the play's characters astonished in admiration at her transformation and leaves the reader/audience cringing. It seems to me that this scene can only work for a contemporary audience if a couple of things happen. One, the audience buys into the “shrew” conceit and accepts that Katherine is better off in her new reincarnation. A more likely strategy is to play Katherine so large that she is seen as an equal to Petruchio, despite the limited text Shakespeare gives her to define herself. If the company can achieve this portrayal, the final speech can be viewed as a truce or understanding between equals who hold each other with mutual respect and love.

The text of the play seems starkly oppressive (and I'm contemplating the play entirely from the text here), but the play in production can be very different. Actors, directors, and designers are able to make choices that allow the audience to enjoy Shakespeare's keen wit while allowing Katherine to have a voice. The choice of Carla Noack as Katherine in the Great River Shakespeare Festival's production is a good indication that Katherine's voice will be heard. I expect that most theater companies who undertake this play will find ways to make the play work for an audience without asking them to accept a view of women as property to be exchanged between men.

The Taming of the Shrew plays in reperatory with The Merchant of Venice through July 27.
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: grsf.org

Summer Theatre Season in Full Swing

2008-06-28T13:52:00.000-05:00

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

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

2008-06-28T13:49:00.000-05:00

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

2008-06-16T15:37:00.000-05:00

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

Peer Gynt

2008-05-13T15:53:00.000-05:00

by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Hal Cropp
Commonweal Theatre (May 9, 2008)

The audience at the Commonweal’s staging of Peer Gynt is tipped off right away that Peer Gynt will be different from the Ibsen plays staged in the past few years. First of all, the stage is not an interior of a turn of the century wealthy household. Instead, the empty stage suggests a rustic barnyard. Secondly, the program includes an insert with a 15-paragraph plot synopsis. But reading the synopsis is not required to follow the rather straight forward movement of the play: a young man, easily swayed by the pleasures of the world, sets off to find himself. This synopsis serves as a warning of the wild ride that Ibsen and the Commonweal have prepared.

The lanky Jerome Yorke plays the childishly impatient Peer who, on the one hand, follows every fancy that falls his way and, on the other hand, strives to be true to his guiding principle: “to thyself be true.” Driven by a belief that he is destined for greatness, Peer enthusiastically blunders through his self-absorbed journey, abandoning his mother and his true love to poverty and loneliness. His carelessness is illustrated by his willing amendment to his life principle for the opportunity to marry the lovely Troll Princess and the possibility of inheriting the Troll kingdom. “Be true to yourself-ish” becomes his new, troll mantra. Yet with all of Peer’s faults, Yorke’s Peer is charming and lovable throughout his clueless journey of lusting after women, wealth, piety, power, and respect.

While Yorke portrays Peer, the other 5 actors portray everyone and everything else. The breadth of the characters that Jill Underwood, Irene ErkenBrack, Stef Dickens, Scott Dixon, and David Hennessey assume during the course of the play truly makes the entire work unforgettable. They appear as the drably dressed villagers in one scene and spew out of a trap door in another as the humorously hideous troll family. Later, with the help of a billowy cloth, the cast becomes the shapeless and ever-changing mythical creature known as the Boyd.

Perhaps the cloth itself should have received placement in the cast list. This simple, colorless cloth plays a small creek as well as a stormy ocean. With simple manipulation it becomes a pillow, a partition, a deathbed blanket, a shroud, the Boyd, and amazingly enough, the Sphinx.

Dixon’s grim portrayal of the Button Moulder—a devil at the crossroads character—and Dickens seductive portrayal of the Egyptian dancer Anitra relieving Peer of his worldly possessions are particularly memorable performances amid the numerous fine individual and collective character portrayals in Peer Gynt. While individual performances stand out, the success of this play is clearly a company effort; the creativity of director, cast, and production team carries Ibsen’s farcical early work. Yet amid all of the absurdity, Ibsen still finds room to explore the central questions about what it means to be human.

Peer Gynt runs through May 18.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

The Piano Lesson

2008-03-22T17:44:00.000-05:00

By August Wilson, directed by Lou Bellamy
Penumbra Theatre, St. Paul, Minnesota
March 19, 2008

August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play begins with a 5:00 A.M. pounding on the door, but Penumbra appropriately begins its production a generation before Wilson’s 1936 setting with a brief, wordless sketch. A woman polishes the family piano which is decorated with folk art carvings and then encourages her young girl to play. This prelude ends with a freight train thundering through the set. This opening emphasizes that while the play takes place over the course of 5 summer days in 1936 Pittsburgh, its real story starts much earlier.

The present day tension of the play is between Berniece, who has moved north to Pittsburgh with her young daughter, and her brother Boy Willie. The overbearing Boy Willie plans to sell the family’s heirloom piano in order to buy land from the family that once owned their ancestors. He sees this as an appropriate way to use the family heirloom. He firmly believes that if he owns land, he will then have something tangible to pass down to his children—something his father and grandfather could not do.

Berniece has brought the piano north with her because it carries the symbolic heritage of her family. It had, at one time, been traded for her great-grandmother and grandfather (the price of the piano was 1 and 1/2 slaves—a mother and child). Carved on its surface are the images of this great grandmother and son, along with scenes depicting the sale and other events marking the family’s history. Berniece will not allow her brother to sell it. Through the course of the play, the audience learns the history of the piano and the family, a history that includes murder, loss, and a tradition of imprisonment that suggests the existence of a system of indentured servitude long after slavery’s abolition.

In one of the most powerful scenes of the play, Boy Willie and his friend Lymon share the stage with Boy Willie’s two Uncles: Doaker and Winning Boy. The younger men have recently served time in a prison farm—Parchment Farm. Many years earlier, the older men had served hard time in this same prison. Boy Willie and Lymon begin singing a work song they learned at the prison, and the older men join in the spirited song, mimicking the fall of the pick by stamping their feet and banging on the table. While this scene highlights the shared experience of these two generations of men—almost a shared rite of passage—the men one by one withdraw from the singing in a painful recognition of grief and loss until Boy Willie is left alone singing and slamming his hands on the table, unaware he is the only man remaining in the song, desperately beating back the demons that have marked his personal and family history.

This powerful rendition of this scene is evidence that Penumbra is the perfect place for Wilson’s drama: not only was Wilson a friend and company member, he shares Penumbra’s commitment to presenting the lives of black people and culture with all of its complexity on the American stage.

The Penumbra Theatre’s production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize drama The Piano Lesson has been extended through March 30.

Visit the Penumbra for schedules and tickets: Penumbra Theatre

The Penumbra’s Gem of the Ocean to open on the Guthrie stage

2008-03-22T17:07:00.000-05:00

by August Wilson, Directed by Lou Bellamy
Penumbra Theatre and Guthrie Theatre

Gem of the Ocean begins August Wilson’s journey through his 10-play cycle dramatizing black life in America in each decade of the 20th Century. Wilson was able to complete this ambitious cycle before his death in 2005. Penumbra Theatre, a long time collaborator of Wilson’s, will take this same journey, presenting all 10 of Wilson’s major plays in the next 5 years. Penumbra has previously performed eight of the 10, several of them more than once.

In the 2007-2008 season, Penumbra’s presented the Pulitzer Prize winning The Piano Lesson. They will end the season with Gem of the Ocean.

Gem of the Ocean, while the 9th play written in the cycle, serves as the opening to the cycle. It is set 1904 Pittsburgh and becomes a “prequel” of sorts, introducing characters and the ancestors of characters who will populate later plays. By the time he wrote Gem of the Ocean, Wilson had reached a clarity about his main themes and purposes for the cycle. The play is a powerful drama that captures the culmination of Wilson’s thinking about the black experience in America.

This regional premiere of Gem of the Ocean is a joint venture between Penumbra Theatre and The Guthrie and will be presented at the Guthrie Theater on the McGuire Proscenium Stage.

Gem of the Ocean runs April 25 - May 18.

Visit the Penumbra for schedules and tickets: Penumbra Theatre

John Hassler, Minnesota Novelist, Playwright Dies

2008-03-20T15:39:00.000-05:00

Minnesota novelist and the namesake of Plainview’s professional theater Jon Hassler died earlier today. Hassler retired from his post as writer in residence at St. John’s University of Minnesota in 1997 and was instrumental in starting the The Jon Hassler Theater and Rural America Writer’s Center in Plainview, Minnesota where Hassler lived during his middle school and high school years. Hassler adapted several of his books for the Plainview stage, including Grand Opening, which is set in Plum Minnesota, a pseudonym for Plainview.

Hasler was the author of numerous novels, most set in Minnesota including, Staggerford, Simon’s Night, Grand Opening, North of Hope, and The Love Hunter. In addition to St. John’s University, he taught at Bemidji State University and Brainerd Community College. Hassler was 74. His death is reported in the St. Paul Pioneer Press online service.

Gunsmoke Monologues

2008-03-18T13:03:00.000-05:00

I hadn’t thought about the recent surge in community theater productions at bars and taverns across the state as a concern for Minnesota Theater until a recent comment (from the limey) questioned the need for the theater exemption to the smoking ban. His (or her) solution to the problem of the loophole that the bars are exploiting is to eliminate the loophole for theaters as well. He asks why theaters need to use live cigarettes. Certainly cigarette props could be used in scenes that call for cigarettes.

While the limey raises some interesting questions, my thinking is moving in a different direction. First of all, I kind of admire the creativity and the gumption of bar owners finding and using the loophole, even though I am in favor of the law banning smoking in restaurants and bars. I guess at a very basic level I’m suspicious of laws that impinge on an individual’s activities. But I especially resist any government restrictions on the arts. It seems to me that a healthy Theater requires the freedom to express itself in whatever way is necessary. That includes using nudity, foul language, gunshots, violence, and cigarettes. Like any other prop, technique, or subject matter, cigarettes should be part of the tool bag for directors and producers.

I recently attended the St. Mary’s University production of When You Coming Back Red Ryder? The play is set in an early 70s roadside dinner. I believe the decision to use cigarettes in the play certainly helped create the overall scene. Yes, they could have eliminated the cigarettes, left them unlit, or used fake cigarette smoke, but I don’t think any of those would have been near as effective as the real cigarettes. Smoking, talking, and eating are the main activities of the patrons of a 70s roadside dinner. The play was enhanced by the use of real cigarettes, just as it was enhanced by real sausages frying on a greasy grill and a very realistic gunshot (though admittedly, not a real bullet).

I’m sure the state of Minnesota will do something to address the Gunsmoke Monologue issue. But in the meantime, this may be an opportunity to expand the interest in theater. When people willingly step on a stage, no matter how small, and call themselves actors, no matter how tongue-in-cheek, there’s a good chance that some of them may be living out some desire for a life on the stage. The Monologues aren’t theater, but they might be workshops.

As for the limey’s request that Minnesota Theater take a stand on the issue, here is the official stand:

Minnestota Theater does not review community theater productions, works in progress, or theater workshops. Minnesota Theatre will consider listing upcoming community theater productions, including Gunsmoke Monologues, if the pertinent information is submitted in a timely manner.

Commonweal Season Begins in April

2008-03-16T21:06:00.000-05:00

Each year as I attend the Commonweal’s annual holiday production my enjoyment of the play is followed by the sad realization that I’ll have to wait until February for the next season’s opening. A couple of things changed that experience this winter/spring. First of all, I waited until the last weekend to see the Commonweal production of Inspecting Carol, and a winter storm prevented me from attending. So rather than feeling melancholy about having to wait two long months for the return of professional theater, I was mad at myself for waiting until the last minute and missing December’s offering. The other change is that the wait for the Commonweal’s Ibsen production is longer this year: Peer Gynt doesn’t open until April 26 (with previews starting April 18). The Ibsen festival will take place May 2 - 4.

In a meeting with local business owners last summer (as reported in the Preston Republican-Leader), Executive Director Hal Cropp and Managing Director Erick Bunge explained the condensed season (April - December rather than February - December) from several angles. First of all, with the new, larger theater, the Commonweal has the ability to fill more seats with fewer performances. By shortening the season, the company is trying to keep from overextending itself by having too many performances for its audience base. Presumably, fewer performances will save costs as the company cautiously incorporates the new expenses of owning and paying for a new building.

Cropp also pointed out that the Ibsen production is not always well attended beyond the opening week. And because much of the Commonweal’s audience must travel to get to Lanesboro, bad weather can further impact attendance as the picturesque roads that wind their way to Lanesboro can quickly turn treacherous. Ultimately, the theater’s board hopes that, for now, starting the season in late April will better financially serve the theater with larger, more predictable audiences.

It always seemed appropriate to consider Ibsen in February when the snow and darkness reflect Ibsen’s Norway. But Ibsen didn’t necessarily see his dramas as emanating from near the Arctic Circle. In the Introduction to his translation of Peer Gynt, Rolf Fjelde identifies a change in Ibsen’s work which dates to his first crossing of the Alps three years before writing Peer Gynt. Fjelde sees Ibsen metaphorically leaving the “Gothic North” with its “grinding poverty in cheerless, wintry towns,” to enter the “Mediterranean South.” Ibsen describes this Alps crossing as a turning point: “a wonderful soft brightness, shining like white marble, was suddenly revealed to me and was destined to set its stamp on all my later production, even if that production was not all beauty.”

Just as the revelation of a warmer south set Ibsen on the path of writing Peer Gynt and most of the Ibsen canon, perhaps the Ibsen Fest’s move to spring will allow us to look at Ibsen in a different light. But just to be sure, I’m not going to wait until the last weekend to see Peer Gynt; I don’t want to get snowed out again.

Peer Gynt

By Henrick Ibsen, Directed by Hal Cropp
Previews: April 18
Runs April 26 - May 18

2008 Commonweal Season

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen
Harvey by Mary Chase
Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman
(A new American work, to be announced)
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
New times:
Plays now run Thursday - Monday
Evening curtain: 7:30
Matinee curtain: 1:30

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Upcoming Performances: Taxes and Greeks

2008-03-16T21:00:00.000-05:00

The Fountain City River Players turn their attention toward tax day while both Winona Universities turn towards the Greek. Vivian Fusillo directs Medea at Winona State in early April while Steven Bouler directs Euripedes’ Iphingenia at Aulis later in the month.

April 2 - 6 Love, Sex, and the I.R.S.: A Comedy in Three Acts

By Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore, Directed by Judee Brone
Fountain City River Players
7:30pm April 2 - 5; 2:00pm April 6
Fountain City Auditorium
42 N. Main St.
Fountain City, Wisconsin
(608) 687-7174.

April 3 - 5 Medea

Directed by Vivian Fusillo
Winona State Department of Theater and Dance
Winona, Minnesota

From WSU Online Calandar:

Medea is a story of betrayal, revenge and murder from Greek mythology.

Medea is a woman who has given up her home and family in Corinth to help Jason and the Argonauts capture the Golden Fleece. Upon their return to Corinth, Medea and Jason wed and have two sons. However, Jason is unable to resist when Creon, the king of Corinth, offers his daughter to Jason if he will divorce and banish Medea, who is suspected of being a barbarian sorceress. Jason agrees in hopes of one-day becoming king. Medea is given one day to leave Corinth, and one day is all she needs to exact her revenge.

Medea is intended for mature audiences.

Visit the Winona State Theater and Dance Department website for schedule and ticket information.

April 18 - 21 Iphigenia at Aulis

By Euripides, Directed by Dr. Steven Bouler
St. Mary's University Department of Theater Arts
Winona, Minnesota

Description from St. Mary's Page Theater website:

The Greek fleet waits in the bay of Aulis in readiness to launch an attack on Troy, but the wind suddenly drops and the ships stand idle. The army blames its leader, Agamemnon, who, in danger of losing his command, is told by the oracle the only solution: sacrifice his teenage daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods, in return for a favorable wind and ultimate victory. As relevant today as it was over 2,000 years ago, this contemporary translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia (set prior to the Iraqi War) explores patriotism, war fever, and how far a leader will go to secure a military victory in the East.

Visit the Page Theatre website for schedule and ticket information.

When You Comin’ Back Red Ryder?

2008-02-27T20:27:00.000-06:00

by Mark Medoff
Directed by Dr. Gary Diomandes

Starting off the 2008 Southeast Minnesota theatre calendar, St. Mary’s Department of Theatre Arts presents Mark Medoff's 1973 play When You Comin’ Back Red Ryder? February 28 - March 3 at the Academy Theatre, Valencia Arts Center.

This fast-paced drama by Medoff starts off innocently enough with a group of people going about their daily lives at a small New Mexico diner. The arrival of a too-friendly tourist quickly turns antagonistic, then violent, and the staff and customers suddenly find themselves held hostage by an armed madman. As they fight him and play out his demands, their brittle lives shatter, and no one escapes unscathed.

See St. Mary's Campus Notes for more information.

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008 - 7:30 p.m.
Friday, Feb. 29, 2008 - 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 1, 2008 - 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 2, 2008 - 3 p.m.
Monday, March 3, 2008 - 7:30 p.m.
Academy Theatre, Valencia Arts Center
1164 W. 10th

Visit the Page Theatre website for schedule and ticket information.

Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol

2007-12-14T09:37:00.000-06:00

By Tom Mula, Directed by Jon Ferguson
John Hassler Theater, November 29, 2007

(As Jacob Marley learns, time can move very fast or stand very still, especially around Christmas. I’ve been kindling my Christmas spirit by playing my own version of Bob Cratchit these past weeks. That’s my apology for the lateness of this review.)

I thoroughly enjoyed Tom Mula’s version of the Dickens’ holiday classic at the Jon Hassler Theater. The story is a great mix between what we know (the visits by Christmas spirits to the miserly Scrooge) and what we don’t know: the surprising twists and turns in the otherworld that lead to Scrooge’s annual change of heart. Mula takes the audience on this playful journey while staying true to a Dickens’ formal yet playfully satiric voice.

The Jon Hassler production utilizes four actors who move seamlessly between characters and onstage narration, a technique that works very well. In fact, rather than breaking up the story, the characters’ self-narration makes the audience co-conspirators in the unfolding events of this particular Christmas Eve. This works particularly well for the Bogle (a sprite played by Jane Schranz) who gleefully gossips with the audience over the hapless Marley (played by Charles Fraser) as she guides him through the confusing world of spirits. In a unique twist, this narration often asks the audience to imagine the special effects that a story of the supernatural demands: sometimes this narration is simply humorous; sometimes it’s amazingly effective at creating the illusion of spirits, costumes, crowds, and travel in the other world.

With simple lighting, some simulated wind, and sparse sound effects, the production effectively creates this otherworld. Ralph Ruan’s set utilizes the theater’s wide stage area to good effect, using cantilevered platforms to create the image of a world suspended by chains. The Jon Hassler’s wide performance space can cause problems for the designer (and a “tennis match” experience for the audience); here, as in Mercy of a Storm, Ryan’s design utilizes the space well. In a particularly nice turn of staging, the counting house where Scrooge and Marley spent their accounting days becomes the counting house where Marley must account for his actions as a mortal. Fraser’s Marley is humbled to sit on a stack of ledgers in the counting house&emdash;the same ledgers he piled on Bob Cratchit on Christmas eve.

With a sparse staging and only four actors, the success of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol depends on the actors. All four play several characters, including themselves as bumbling actors. For example, they unprofessionally peer at the audience from back stage before acts and even during scenes, and they seemingly can’t remember how scenes are blocked. And yet all four are able to conjure convincing versions of Dickens’s (and Mula’s)characters when the play requires it.

The end result is a production that re-tells Dickens’s classic with ample humor and playfulness as it moves the audience toward the expected catharsis with respect for both the story and the audience intact.

Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol runs through December 23

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Holiday Productions

2007-11-29T02:08:00.000-06:00

I have to admit to being a bit of a Scrooge about holiday theater, particularly about A Christmas Carol. I’ve always felt that the first ghost is quite enough and that the following ghosts simply add to the suffering—of the audience. Much of that humbug feeling melted away while attending the Commonweal’s 2003 production. It’s likely that up until that appearance of Ghosts Past, Present, and Future, I’d simply never seen a production that handled Dickens with the humor, warmth, and inventiveness of a fine company like the Commonweal.

While no one is ever likely to say of me, “he knew how to keep Christmas well,” I have found myself enjoying A Christmas Carol and other holiday productions the past few Decembers. I realize that I’m the odd one; for many, a holiday-themed production may be the only theater they see all year. And that’s why theaters big and small produce holiday shows; it’s a dependable way to fill the seats and cover some of the year’s operating costs. And A Christmas Carol is the most dependable of the holiday plays.

This season, Southeast Minnesota Theater goers have the opportunity to see two A Christmas Carol “spin offs”: Inspecting Carol at the Commonweal and Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol at the Jon Hassler Theater. (Of course there’s sure to be many productions of the traditional version, including one at the Guthrie Theatre.)

Inspecting Carol

By Daniel Sullivan, Directed by Alan Bailey
Commonweal Theatre, Lansboro

In Daniel Sullivan’s Inspecting Carol, which is running at the Commonweal Theatre in Lanesboro this season, a non-profit theater is staging the holiday classic in hopes of staving off financial ruin. Unfortunately—for the fictitious company—everything that can go wrong in a production goes wrong. The play good naturedly lampoons actors, directors, arts administrators, subscribers and even the National Endowment for the Arts. Sullivan, one of the most sought after directors in the country, created Inspecting Carol while serving as the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s resident director, and the play was developed along with the Rep’s actors, who are in a pretty good position to know what’s funny behind the scene.

Inspecting Carol runs through December 23.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol

By Tom Mula, Directed by Jon Ferguson
Jon Hassler Theater, Plainview

Dickens opens A Christmas Carol with him: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” Tom Mula has taken the “to begin with” and spun a tale that he claims is the real story behind A Christmas Carol: “the story of Jacob Marley’s heroic behind-the-scenes efforts to save old Scrooge’s soul.” The result is a unique and humorous (irreverent, funny, and ultimately, deeply moving, says the publisher) take on the holiday classic.

Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol runs through December 23

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Proof is worth taking in

2007-11-28T23:10:00.000-06:00

Winona State’s production of David Auburn's Proof is well worth taking in. I just returned from the opening night performance, and I was impressed by Auburn’s script and the WSU staging and acting. It’s a very engaging play, and it’s also the first play I’ve been to that has turned to the Philosophy department for program notes.

Proof also marks the final play at WSU for Director David Bratt who has taught in the Theater Department at Winona State for more than 30 years. Kari Knutson did a nice story about Bratt for the Winona Daily News today.

See below for more on WSU's production of Proof.

Proof

2007-11-24T17:16:00.000-06:00

by David Auburn, directed by David Bratt
Winona State University Theatre and Dance Department

This Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play explores the elusiveness of genius, presenting the difficulty of a mathematical proof as a metaphor for the uncertainties of love, trust, and integrity.

Presented in the Dorothy B. Magnus Blackbox theater in the WSU Performing Arst Center. Tickets are limited, so advanced purchase is highly recommended.

Performances run November 28 - December 2, 2007 at 7:00pm
Winona State Performing Arts Center
$7.00 General Admission
Box office: 507-457-5235

WSU Theatre and Dance Page.

Yerma

2007-11-05T11:21:00.001-06:00

by Federico Garcia Lorca
Directed by Judy Myers, M.F.A.

St. Mary’s Department of Theatere Arts presents Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma November 9 - 12 at the St. Mary's Page Theatre.

See St. Mary's Campus Notes for more information.

Friday, Nov. 9, 2007 - 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007 - 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007 - 3 p.m.
Monday, Nov. 12, 2007 - 7:30 p.m.

Visit the Page Theatre website for schedule and ticket information.

Last chance to see a few great performances

2007-10-19T21:07:00.001-05:00

Commonweal Theatre

Only one more week to see the Commonweal's Wait Until Dark. The Commonweal's summer thriller closes October 28.
Review: Wait Until Dark

Uncle Vanya plays through November 11.
Preview: Uncle Vanya
Review: Uncle Vanya

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Jon Hassler Theater

Tuesdays with Morrie closes Sunday October 21.
Preview: Tuesdays with Morrie

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Uncle Vanya

2007-10-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

By Anton Chekhov, directed by Lisa Weaver
Commonweal Theatre

It seems like it has been a long time since we’ve seen Commonweal’s Executive Director Hal Cropp on stage, and his portrayal of the desperate Vanya is another gem. Vanya has come to the realization that his life may have been totally wasted: he’s toiled for 25 years managing the home estate of his deceased sister, sending the proceeds to support his brother-in-law, the esteemed Professor. In fact the entire household—Vanya, Sonya, Vanya’s mother, the household staff—have lived their lives vicariously through the success of the professor. The discontent arises when the professor retires to the home estate bringing home his new young bride.

Vanya is shaken from his reverence for the professor by the reality of the professor in the day-to-day flesh. Perhaps it’s jealousy that precipitates the change: a contemporary of Vanya’s, the professor has taken nearly all the income produced by the estate to live a lavish, celebrity lifestyle, and now in retirement he has come home with a young beautiful wife (played by Amanda Davis). Vanya on the other hand has lived a frugal, dispassionate life, and with the appearance of Yeliena, his life and future seem very lonely and very celibate. Cropp is able to capture this anguish in his pronouncement that not only is the professor a whining nuisance, but his intellectual production is also void of any original thought. Cropp’s Vanya sums up his new understanding of the professor by declaring him a “lump.” (Which would work better if the professor wasn’t played by the lanky Stephen Houtz, but Houtz makes up for his stature by confirming Vanya’s assertions.)

“Lump” is a good reminder that Chekhov wrote this play as a comedy, and there is much to laugh at in this production: irony, twisted logic, childish idealism, outlandish behavior. But audiences have been reluctant to laugh because of the anguish underneath the humor. (At some points in the play, I may have been the only one laughing.) This production, while not seeming to play to the laugh lines, certainly provides ample opportunity for laughter.

The underlying pace of Uncle Vanya plods with dialog that often goes nowhere. Characters engage in irrelevant banter about tea, crops, household routines, hereditary sweat disorders—while underneath, characters are tumultuously re-evaluating their lives and finding their current paths meaningless. Each of the main characters will break out of the slow pace to make a desperate attempt to salvage some possibility of happiness. These acts seem too large, too clumsy, and uncharacteristically too passionate.

Jill Underwood as Sonya and Hal Cropp as Uncle Vanya. Photo: Commonweal

While this is the first production of Uncle Vanya I’ve seen, I expected these desperate acts to be executed clumsily, yet within the Russian reserve that runs through Checkov’s plays—I imagine this reserve as being similar to “Minnesota nice.” Yet the Commonweal’s characters scream with passion in a way that makes a Minnesota audience squirm. I left the theater thinking that the acting was too passionate for Chekhov: Jill Underwood’s Sonya, who runs the estate with staid efficiency and stability, becomes an insecure adolescent when she confesses her secret love for the doctor; mustachioed Erick Knutson abandons his medical demeanor and his life’s work of reforestation to make sexual advances to the professor’s young wife; Vanya weeps openly and often, loudly professes his anger and disillusionment to anyone who will listen, and makes his own advances on Yeliena.

While these passionate outbursts may seem out of character for Chekhov, director Lisa Weaver is presenting exactly what passionate expression might feel like to a person who has spent a lifetime avoiding passion. This exaggerated passion allows the audience to feel the internal terror a dispassionate person might experience over even the smallest expression of passion. Sometimes this internal experience moves into the surreal: Vanya’s attempt to shoot the professor seems comic rather then terrifying. Afterwards, Vanya wonders aloud if the shooting was even real: “It’s queer! Here I’ve tried to commit a murder, and yet no one arrests me, no one charges me with anything…It must mean they think I’m a madman.” (trans. Elisaveta Fen).

Come to see Uncle Vanya prepared to laugh, prepared to squirm at the un-Minnesota attempts at passion, and prepared to explore your own missed opportunities and deferred aspirations. Cropp, Underwood, Davis, and Knutson turn in powerful performances that add to the impressive body of work of the Commonweal.

Uncle Vanya plays through November 11.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Tales Told 'Round the World

2007-10-17T15:03:00.001-05:00

By Forest Musselman
Directed by Vivian Fusillo

Vivian Fusillo and the Winona State University Department of Theatre and Dance present Tales Told ‘Round the World this weekend. Tales marks the 40th annual Children's production for WSU and Fusillo, and it's the first of these productions specifically written for WSU.

Written by local poet/dramatist and WSU grad Forest Mussleman, Tales Told ‘Round the World, is a collection of stories and music specially selected for younger theatre-goers.

See Scott Bestul's article about the Tales Told ‘Round the World from the Winona Post.

Performances run October 19-20, 2007 at 7:00pm
Winona State Performing Arts Center
$7.00 General Admission
Box office: 507-457-5235

WSU Theatre and Dance Page.

St. Mary’s Department of Theatere Arts presents: Art

2007-09-26T15:32:00.000-05:00

by Yasmina Reza
Directed by Dr. Steven Bouler

Yasimina Reza’s Art premiered in Paris in 1995, London’s West End in 1996, and Broadway in 1998—with each production winning major awards. It’s been translated into more than 25 languages and has become a favorite of actors and audiences around the world for its sometimes whimsical look inside the workings of friendship and inside the minds of three individuals who,for better or worse, think a lot like us.

Three long-time friends must re-evaluate their friendship when one of the men, Serge, purchases a very expensive painting, a white landscape (which may or may not have a hint of colorful or white stripes). While the painting does make an appearance, in Art, art serves as a backdrop for an examination of character and relationship. Each of these men display flaws that are at times, irritating, humorous, and fascinating. But most of all, these exposed flaws find uncomfortably fertile ground among theater goers.

The play is strong and engaging. The action is confined to the interactions between the three characters, with interesting freeze-frame asides that further explore the workings of the human mind. I first saw Reza’s Art in 2001 in a Commonweal production that was spell binding—a result of brilliant acting by the company and a tremendous play. Winona State students presented a strong production of Art a few years later. SMU's production offers a welcome opportunity to see another production of Art in Winona.

St. Mary’s production of Art runs September 28 - October 1.

Visit the Page Theatre website for schedule and ticket information.

Commonweal to Stage Readings of New Plays

2007-09-15T16:46:00.000-05:00

September 18, 7:00 pm: The Seventh Seal
September 25, 7:00 pm: Ice Maidens

The Commonweal Theatre Company continues its new play development program with two public staged readings on September 18 and 25. Admission is pay-what-you-can with all proceeds benefitting the victims of recent flooding.

“We are very excited to share with our audiences the brand new work by these two gifted and inspired theatre artists,” said Commonweal Executive Director Hal Cropp. “And we are equally grateful for the opportunity to help our neighbors who sustained significant damage from the floods.”

Featured in the September readings are a theatrical adaptation of the late Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal on September 18th and the original drama, Ice Maidens on September 25th.

The Seventh Seal has been adapted for the stage by Charlie Oates, chair of the University of California San Diego Theatre & Dance department. Mr. Oates has created and performed interdisciplinary theatre events all over the world, and has taught several master classes for the Commonweal company over the last five years.

According to playwright Stan Peal, most native Midwesterners have stories about falling through the ice. His Commonweal-commissioned play, Ice Maidens, deals with one such story. Peal is an actor, playwright and musician who currently makes his home in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Both readings will be held on the stage of the new Commonweal Theatre at 7:00 p.m. with refreshments to follow. The audience is invited to provide feedback after the readings, and one or both of the plays may be chosen for a full production in the future.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Jon Hassler Theater: Tuesdays with Morrie

2007-09-15T16:31:00.001-05:00

Opens Saturday, September 22; runs through October 21.

Tuesdays with Morrie
by Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom

This true story about the love between a professor and his pupil reminds us of the affection and gratitude that many of us still feel for the significant mentors of our past. Adapted by playwright Jeff Hatcher from the best-selling novel by Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie recounts the author's weekly visits with his terminally ill mentor, one-of-a-kind professor Morrie Schwartz, who, even on his deathbed, imports lessons on the power and joy of living life to its fullest.

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Rochester Rep: Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming

2007-09-15T16:12:00.001-05:00

Now in its 24th Season, the Rochester Repertory Theatre presents Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming, which plays through October 6.

Smoke on the Mountain Homecoming
A Musical Written by Connie Ray; Conceived by Alan Bailey, with Musical Arrangements by Mike Craver.

It's October, 1945, and the gospel-singing Sanders Family is back together again. The war is over and America's years of prosperity are just beginning. But there's another kind of rite of passage at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, where Reverent Mervin Oglethorpe is giving his last service. He's been called to preach in Texas, and he's already bought a ten-gallon hat and is preparing to ride into the sunset with his wife June, who is eight months pregnant. Tomorrow morning, young Dennis Sanders takes over as Mount Pleasant's pastor. Join the Sanders Family as they send Mervin and June off in style, with hilarious and touching stories and twenty-five toe-tapping Bluegrass Gospel favorites.

For tickets, visit the Rep online: www.rochesterrep.org

Commonweal Presents Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya

2007-09-12T21:41:00.000-05:00

Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya opened last weekend at the Commonweal Theatre Company in Lansboro, marking the company’s first production of Chekhov.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860 - 1904) lived in a transitional Russia, between the abolition of serfdom and the upheaval of the revolution to come. His major plays portray a Russia caught between centuries of tradition and a modern, egalitarian Russia, a transition that seems to leave both the peasants and the aristocracy displaced and disconcerted. While Chekhov treats his falling aristocratic characters with tenderness, their own foolishness serves to condemn the system that maintained their ancestors’ leisure luxuries.

Chekhov does not romanticize the past, nor does he extol the future with its “picture of gradual and unquestionable degeneration.” Nor does Chekhov romanticize the rural estate he portrays in Uncle Vanya. The beautiful summer countryside gives way to the cold and grey, and the professor knows that he will not be able to suffer the tedium of the country during the fast approaching winter.

The professor, retired, portentous and idle, returns to his estate with his beautiful young wife, Yelena. For many years, the professor’s daughter, Sonya, and her Uncle Vanya have sent the farm’s proceeds to the professor, receiving only a small salary in return.

Both Vanya and the local doctor, Astrov, fall in love with Yelena, Sonya is in love with Astrov, and Vanya gets so fed up with the professor he decides to take drastic action.

“All the characters want love,” observed the play’s director, Lisa Weaver. “And they are all so rich and complex. I’m also impressed by the many, still relevant ideas in the play about the environment, men’s and women’s roles in society, and what it means to be a success.”

Chekhov became the beloved principle dramatist for Stanislavsky’s experimental Moscow Art Theatre which premiered in 1898 and included Chekhov’s The Seagull in their inaugural season. His plays have been have been performed continually ever since and have had a profound influence on theater around the globe.

Director Lisa Weaver is a Commonweal Resident Company Member. She has also directed When We Dead Awaken, Lonely Planet and the world premiere of Marguerite Bonet.

The cast features Resident Company Members Hal Cropp, Amanda Davis, Eric Knutson and Jill Underwood as Vanya, Yelena, Astrov and Sonya, respectively.

Twin Cities-based actors Lavina Erickson and Stephen Houtz make their Commonweal debuts as Sonya’s nurse, Marina, and the professor Serebryakov. Rounding out the cast are Gail Fraser as the professor’s mother, Mariya and Milton Papageorge as Sonya’s godfather, Telyegin.

The show is designed by St. Mary’s University’s Kit Mayer (set) and Luther College’s Lisa Lantz (costume), with lighting by Jason Underferth, properties by recent Viterbo graduate, Troy Iverson, and sound by “Over the Back Fence” Artistic Director Stela Burdt.

Uncle Vanya plays in repertory with Wait Until Dark through November.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Community Theater Productions

2007-08-16T23:16:00.000-05:00

If you know of an upcoming production, let me know the pertinent information by e-mailing Minnesota Theatre at rjstuber@gmail.com, or post a comment below.

Glengarry Glen Ross

By David Mamet, directed by Nicholas Dibble
Presented by Theater Du Jour
August 17, 18; 8:00pm
August 19, 2:00 pm
Chateau Theater
3450 E Circle Drive NE
Rochester, Minnesota
www.theaterdujour.com

Sunshine Boys

By Neil Simon, directed by Jeff Thauwald
Presented by Brave Community Theatre
August 15, 16, 17, 18; 7:30 pm
Spring Valley Community Center
Spring Valley, Minnesota

Brave Community Theatre of Spring Valley, Minnesota has produced shows for 34 years, entertaining southeast Minnesota at the Spring Valley Community Center and in area Arts Centers. Visit www.bravecommunitytheatre.org

Fiddler on the Roof

Presented by Pine Island People for the Arts
August 23, 24, 25; 7:30 pm
August 26; 2 pm
Pine Island High School Auditorium
Pine Island, Minnesota
Tickets are $10 for ages 13 and older, $5 for ages 3-12.

The Veggie Villain, or He Had a Steak in It

Presented by Lanesboro Community Theater
August 25; 1 pm and 5 pm
Sylvan Park
Lanesboro, Minnesota
There is no admission charge, but donations are welcome. Bring your own lawn chairs and blankets.

Mercy of a Storm

2007-08-15T13:37:00.000-05:00

By Jeff Hatcher, directed by Matt Sciple
Jon Hassler Theater, August 9, 2007

While the door to the pool house gaped open revealing the snow storm beyond, the Minnesota audience squirmed noticeably as they watched the heat rush out into the winter night—even while sitting in an air conditioned theater in August. When George Holmberg finally shut the door, an audible sigh of relief filled the theater. Perhaps this a testament to the effectiveness of the set and lighting design at representing the snowy winter night of New Year’s eve 1945. But it also reflects an audience that knows the danger of winter and understands the cost of heating fuel. It will take much of the play before the audience will care about the storm brewing inside as much as the snow falling outside.

Mercy of a Storm takes place entirely in a pool house, a small building beside the pool of a private club somewhere in industrial Ohio. The pool house provides a secluded location for the illicit meeting of George, played by Phil Kilbourne, and the much younger Zanovia Chestovich, playded by Lindsay Hinman.

Yet things aren’t exactly what they seem. This secret meeting is between an estranged husband and wife who are meeting, against the advice of their lawyers, to arrive at a settlement for their upcoming divorce or, as the play progresses, to take one more attempt to save their marriage.

Mercy of a Storm derives most of it’s charm from the slow unveiling and unraveling of the world that surrounds George and Zanovia. Among these revelations: The couple had been married only one year, she had been the daughter of George and his late first wife’s house keeper, she is working class Polish Catholic, he is Episcopalian and a member of the Country Club set, their romance had been steamy (and continues to be steamy), and they continually battled over their differences of age and class. The revelations are delicious providing a series of “ah ha” moments as the sometimes shocking details of their lives become clear.

George has just returned from a State Department trip designed to show American industrial leaders the results of their work—the defeat of Nazi Germany. He feels an ownership of the success of Ohio’s steel mills and factories’ contributions to the war effort—though Zanovia points out that as an insurance agent, he didn’t actually contribute all that much.

George is particularly taken by what was not destroyed—by the restraint of the Allies once it was clear that Hitler was going to lose. George sees this as evidence of rules of conduct that must be followed, even in warfare—an acknowledgement that war is not forever and people need to be able to pick up their lives once the fighting stops. He’s comforted by the thought of this decorum, particularly in the city of Dresden, where remarkably, many buildings still stand. But Dresden is flawed evidence of restraint in war. It had remained untouched through most of the war only to be fire bombed into rubble by the British and Americans. Some historians argue that this bombing, one of the most destructive in history, came after the outcome of the war was already inevitable.

George has made elaborate preparations for his own all—out war, with the confidence that he can follow an honorable decorum once it’s clear he has achieved his objectives—a “do no more harm than necessary plan.” But Zanovia can’t see the honor of this “restraint.” She sees that a man willing to make the preparations for a total assault might as well be the man that carries through with them.

The challenge for the director and actors of Mercy of a Storm is to make the audience care more about the characters on stage than the valuable warm air escaping through the carelessly left open door. Carelessness could summarize all of what the audience knows about George and Zanovia’s life—and carelessness can rub a Midwest audience the wrong way. In addition, the social stigma of the marriage presents more impediments to the audience caring about the relationship. From the outside, a man married to a woman the same age as his daughter will always look unbalanced. From the outside, a marriage between a man with a cool country club decorum and a working class woman who speaks with a bitingly honest tongue will seem out of place.

On the one hand, it is a credit to Kilbourne and Hinman that they don’t take any short cuts toward winning the audience. For much of the play, Kilbourne is a stiff and detached fifty-eight-year-old man. He offers few clues to what might have attracted Zonovia in the first place. And Hinman’s Zanovia is crass, superficial, and unpredictable. Her youth and beauty seem to be the only magnetism for George.

But on the other hand, the audience spends most of the play like the rest of the country club crowd, watching the lives of their friends unfold with detached fascination and smug civility. Mercy of a Storm holds the audience at arms length for most of the play hoping to win it over by play’s conclusion. While this may work for some, other audience members are still too worried about the snow and cold, about Zanovia entering the snow with high heels, to worry about the possible fire bombing of the couple’s marriage.

Mercy of a Storm plays Thursdays through Sundays until September 2.

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Community Theater Productions

2007-08-06T22:51:00.001-05:00

If you know of an upcoming production, let me know the pertinent information by e-mailing Minnesota Theatre at rjstuber@gmail.com, or post a comment below.

The Music Man

By Meredith Willson
Presented by Wit's End Theatre
August 8, 9, 10
Potter Auditorium
Chatfield, Minnesota

"The Music Man" is the fourth annual production of the Wit's End Theatre. For more information, see Wit's End Theatre page at SEMPAN.

The Sound of Music

Music by Richard Rogers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
Presented by Rock Solid Youth Center
August 9, 10, 11; 7:30 pm
August 12; 4:00 pm
Rock Solid Youth Center
75 West Third Street
Winona, Minnesota
507-457-2125

Glengarry Glen Ross

By David Mamet, directed by Nicholas Dibble
Presented by Theater Du Jour
August 10, 11; 8:00pm
August 12; 2:00pm
August 17, 18; 8:00pm
August 19, 2:00 pm
Chateau Theater
3450 E Circle Drive NE
Rochester, Minnesota
www.theaterdujour.com

Sunshine Boys

By Neil Simon, directed by Jeff Thauwald
Presented by Brave Community Theatre
August 15, 16, 17, 18; 7:30 pm
Spring Valley Community Center
Spring Valley, Minnesota

Jon Hassler Theater opens Mercy of a Storm Friday

2007-08-02T12:49:00.001-05:00

The Jon Hassler Theatre will offer a sneak preview of their new offering, Mercy of a Storm, on Friday, August 3. The play opens on Saturday and plays Thursdays through Sundays until September 2.

Written by Minnesotan Jeffery Hatcher and directed by Matt Sciple, Mercy of a Storm is set on New Year’s eve in 1945. Jon Hassler Theater offers a synopsis on their web page. (Click the link and scroll down for the summary.) Peggy Sue Dunigan offers a brief thematic summary in her review of New York’s Next Act Theatre company production of the play:

“Romance vs. love. Cold outside (the winter weather) vs. warm inside (the summer pool house). Wealth vs. working class. Old vs. young. Divorce vs. marriage. This play is a study in contrasts that give the play contemporary meaning in a period setting. Jeffrey Hatcher, an accomplished playwright whose work has previously been produced on Milwaukee stages, subtly captures the conflicts of each contrast, with little resolution, through cleverly and passionately written dialogue. Everything is filtered through the personalities of George and Zanovia, both flawed and hurting, as Hatcher creates characters that he and the audience care about.” Vital Source Magazine.

Phil Kilbourn and Linsay Hinman in Jeffery Hatcher's Mercy of a Storm. (Photo: Jon Hassler Theater)

This two-person play features Lindsay Hinman as Zanovia and Phil Kilbourn as George. Both actors come to the Jon Hassler with extensive acting credits in the Twin Cities and beyond. Hinman has appeared with the Illusion Theater and Jungle Theater in Minneapolis, and she starred in the award winning independent film Firefly. Kilbourne has worked extensively in the Twin Cities as an actor and director, including appearances at the Jungle Theater, Penumbra Theatre, and the Frank Theatre. He was named City Pages “Best of the Twin Cities” Actor in 2005.

Visit the John Hassler Theater for schedules and tickets: Jon Hassler Theater

Wait Until Dark

2007-08-01T17:02:00.000-05:00

By Frederick Knott, Directed by Jamie Horton
Commonweal Theater, July 25, 2007

The Commonweal has inaugurated its new stage with a thriller that takes advantage of the increased staging and improved lighting, ironically, to better portray the dark. Frederick Knott’s tightly constructed story has breathtaking twists and turns of plot and metaphor. Light and dark metaphors become complex as, for example, the on stage photo darkroom turns film negatives into print positives. The Commonweal has meet the challenge of Knott’s play with convincing performances by the entire cast, with a particularly beautiful portrayal of the lead role by Commonweal veteran Adrienne Sweeney.

The play utilizes two thematic arcs. The first follows the sophisticated scam perpetrated on a young blind woman by three con men. Continuing with the light and dark metaphor, these three men begin the play in the light: they see the layout, and they have the advantage of knowing how the swindle will work on the trusting Susy Hendrix. As the play moves toward its climax—which as the title suggests, happens in the dark—the con men’s advantage diminishes and the physical danger increases.

Adrienne Sweeney is Susy Hendrix and Milton Papageorge plays Harry Roat, Jr. in Commonweal's Wait Until Dark.
(Photo: Commonweal)

Scott Dixon and David Hennessey play petty criminals who are coerced into taking on the “job.” They begin the play as men who think they know the score, yet their flawed displays of criminal bravado early in the play help explain why each has recently been to prison. Their transformation from petty criminals to sophisticated con men is a little harder to explain. The two pull off a complicated scheme by acting as characters with more sophistication than either seem to possess. For example, Dixon moves too easily from the rough thug of the opening scene to the middle-class professional his character portrays in the con. Aside from that small complaint, these two characters make the scam work, and the scam is fascinating to watch unfold. Dixon plays the “concerned friend” seamlessly, persuading Susy that he is there to help and protect her. Hennessey plays “bad cop” with conviction and with a bit of a hint of the petty criminal. While these two are serious about the job, they are not killers. Milton Papageorge is.

In the company conversation after the play, an audience member asked 12-year-old Katie Bowler (who plays the troubled upstairs neighbor Gloria, alternating performances with Addison Cross) if she wasn’t scared to be in this production. Bowler responded, “With all these really nice people [indicating the other actors], how can I be scared?” But the audience was still a bit scared of Papageorge—even out of character. He is the sophisticated criminal that Dixon and Hennessey’s characters imagine themselves: he is smart, calculating, and in control. Yet his cold-blooded ruthlessness rattles even these hardened criminals.

The second arc of the play follows Sweeney’s character Susy, who is on a metaphoric journey from dark to light. She has recently lost her sight, and is still re-learning how to interact with the world as a sightless person. Sweeney moves easily and unaffectedly about her apartment to the point where the audience can forget that she is blind, yet she doesn’t stop to pick up a note that has blown from the phone stand into her line of vision (a sighted character would impulsively and nonchalantly pick up the misplaced prop and return it to its place), and she runs into an out of place chair so hard that the audience winces in sympathy for the impact with her shins. Yet even with this competence, Susy still becomes easily frustrated with the out-of-place chair, the refrigerator door left ajar, and the “lost” wastebasket, and she is wary of the world outside of the apartment. During the course of the play, She grows in confidence, which causes the advantage to shift her way. By embracing “the dark” of her new world, she has, ironically, helped illuminate her desperate situation in the scam and gained the knowledge and confidence to enter the dark promised by the play’s title.

While having lost some of their early advantage to Susy, the con men are still the experts in the world of darkness, and Wait Until Dark makes the audience wait until the very end to find out who will prevail in the dark.

The Commonweal’s Wait Until Dark is a stunning work on many levels: story, character development, theme, action, suspense. It treads on territory usually reserved for suspense novels and movies. To see this type of thriller acted so convincingly by real people 15 or 20 feet away is very unusual, and very powerful. So powerful, the audience has to take a moment to unclench fists and relax tense legs before standing up. And yet it is not suspense for suspense sake. It’s not a simple story about bad guys picking on a blind woman and a little girl. It’s a story of empowerment and discovery—the white knuckles are an extra bonus.

Wait Until Dark plays in repertory with The Mystery of Irma Vep through October.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre

Julius Caesar

2007-07-26T18:52:00.001-05:00

By William Shakespeare, Directed by Rick Barbour
Great River Shakespeare Festival Apprentice Acting and Intern Company
July 24, 2007

The now traditional introduction of the cast of characters that begins all Great River Shakespeare Festival productions seemed as if it would never conclude on Tuesday night as the Apprentice Acting and Intern Company presented Julius Caesar for the first of two performances. The cast of Senators, conspirators, soldiers, and citizens—with many actors taking on two, and three roles told the the story of the plotting and successful murder of Julius Caesar and the ensuing fight for control of Rome that takes place after his grizzly death. The story is full of clasping of hands and heart-felt declarations of love and loyalty to each other and to Rome. It also contains delicious deceit and political betrayal.

Philip Zimmermann as Julius Caesar and Caesar’s ghost, and even Caesar’s statue, carries the name of the play well, though his character is involved little with the development of the plot—he is the unwitting object of it. Led by the tenacious Anna Sundberg as Caius Cassius, a group of Senators plots against Caesar to prevent him from becoming “too strong.” Like all politicians, they assure themselves that their motives are not for personal gain, but for love of country. And to this end, and for political cover, they mus convince the honorable Brutus to join the conspiracy. David Utter plays the honest friend of Caesar and the recipient of Caesar’s famous words, “Et tu, Brute?”

Julius Caesar has an amazing amount of words, words that have entered the day to day lexicon of modern America and words put together in speeches lengthy, bold, and pretentious. These Apprentices and Interns had to learn all of these words while understudying the main festival productions, putting up posters, setting up tents, selling coffee and cookies, directing traffic, lifting barges, and toting bales. Anyone involved with the festival will tell you that these young actors, stage hands, and technicians have been working hard this summer.

Julius Caesar depicts a politics familiar to anyone following American politics—though the falling on swords and spilling of blood are generally metaphoric in today’s picture. Mark Anthony’s funeral speech for Caesar—“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!”—signals a turn in the play by using a brilliant rhetorical device that has often been imitated. Stepping up after Brutus has convinced the citizens of Rome that Caesar’s death was necessary to protect Rome, Chris Lysy as Mark Anthony turns their affection back against Brutus with his humble repetition of Brutus’s honor:

He was my friend, faithful and just to me;
But Brutus says he was ambitions,
And Brutus is an honorable man. (III.ii.84-86)

Along with the blood, nearly every character is smeared with politics in the hand clasps, oaths, and love of country. My anthology calls this The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. But it’s more truly Brutus’s tragedy, and even more truly, it’s the tragedy of those who mistake political ends for moral ends. It might be a preview of the upcoming presidential elections.

This is a production that you’ll want to skip work on Friday afternoon to see. It’s great acting, great production, and great theater. Congratulations to the Apprentices and Interns for a job well done.

Julius Caesar plays Friday at 3:00 p.m.

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules: Great River Shakespeare Festival

Shakespeare Festival Events this Week

2007-07-24T12:52:00.000-05:00

The Great River Shakespeare Festival enters the last week of season 4 with a very full slate of events, including two performances by the the apprentice company, a free Prelude Concert, and a company talent show.

Tuesday, July 24

7:30 pm: Julius Caesar Apprentice/Intern Project

(Talent Show/prelude moved to Friday, 2:00)

Wednesday, July 25

1:00 pm: Reading of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia by members of the Acting Company

7:30 pm: As You Like It (Company conversation following performance)

Thursday, July 26

7:30 pm: Macbeth (Company conversation follows performance.)

11:00 pm Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) Performance of a new one man show by GRSF Acting Company member Jacques Roy. (Note: due to mature subject matter, this performance may not be appropriate for all audiences.)

Friday, July 27

2:00 pm: Company Talent Show/prelude Concert. On the WSU green, free.

3:00 pm: Julius Caesar (Apprentice/Intern Project)

8:00 pm: As You Like It

Saturday, July 28

10:00 am: Festival Morning conversation at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse.

3:00 pm: As You Like It

6:30 pm: Prelude Concert: Chris Koza, on the WSU green, free.

8:00 pm: Macbeth

Plus, Theatre du Mississippi’s "Drops and Drama III" at 1:00 and 3:00 pm.

Sunday, July 29

1:00 pm: Front Porch Conversation with Michael Gerson.

4:30 pm: As You Like It (Season Farewell Ceremony immediately following)

Minnesota Theatre Shakespeare synopses and reviews

Synopsis: The Tragedy of Macbeth: A Primer
Review: The Tragedy of Macbeth

Synopsis: As You Like It: A Primer
Review: As You Like It

Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules and tickets: Great River Shakespeare Festival.

Community Theater Productions

2007-07-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

If you know of an upcoming production, let me know the pertinent information by e-mailing Minnesota Theater at rjstuber@gmail.com, or post a comment below.

Thoroughly Modern Millie

Music by Jeanine Tesori, lyrics by Dick Scanlan, book by Richard Morris and Dick Scanlan. Directed by Judy Brone.
Fountain City River Players
July 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; 7:30 p.m.
July 29; 2 p.m
Fountain City Auditorium
Fountain City, Wisconsin

The Fountain City Players have built a reputation for putting on great summer musicals utilizing the area’s best young actors. Modern Millie is guaranteed to be a lot of fun.

Tickets available at Hardt’s Music, Midtown Foods (at the Winona Mall), Fountain City Kwick Trip and Waumandee State Bank, or by calling (608) 687-7174.

The Music Man

By Meredith Wilson
Phoenix Theatre production
July 19 – 21; 7:00 p.m.
July 21; 2:00 p.m.
July 26 – 29; 7:00 p.m.
July 29; 2:00 p.m.
Sheldon Theatre
443 West 3rd Street
Red Wing, Minnesota

Tickets at 800-899-5759

Two Summer Productions at the New Commonweal

2007-07-19T14:04:00.001-05:00

The Commonweal opened it’s beautiful new theater building on July 7 with a new summer thriller, Wait Until Dark. Written in 1964, and produced as a movie starring Audrey Hepburn in 1967, the play tells the story of a blind woman who becomes entangled in a scheme to procure her seemingly ordinary doll. Thinking she'll be an easy target, the three con men underestimate Susy's resourcefulness. (Read more about Wait Until Dark from the Commonweal.)

The Mystery of Irma Vep has made the transition from the St. Maine theater to the new Commonweal. Read Minnesota Theatre’s review of Irma Vep.

Irma Vep plays Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, through Sepetmeber 2
Wait Until Dark plays Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays through October 28.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules: Commonweal Theatre

Minnesota Theatre

The Divorce Revolution

Sylvia

Sylvia

I am Ann Frank

14thAnnual Ibsen Festival

Weekend Highlights:

Friday April 15

Saturday, April 16

Sunday, April 17

Arsenic and Old Lace

Metamorphoses

Great River Shakespeare Festival Preview

Land Stewardship Project presenting one-act play

Upcoming performances include

One Person Shows Added to Commonweal Season

Blue Collar Diaries

Min Mor (“Mother”)

Passion of the Hausfrau

Lessons from Cancer College

Celebrity Sightings at GRSF

A Comedy of Errors—Preview

Juggling Identities in a Repertory Company

Commonweal’s Summer Season is in Full Swing

Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Enchanted April

Jon Hassler’s 11th Season

Old Man Brunner Country

Flamenco celebration of Lorca at the Jon Hassler this Wednesday

The Moon’s Desire: The passionate and imagistic poetry of Federico García Lorca

Ibsen Festival Starts Tonight

Weekend Highlights:

Friday

Saturday

Fountain City River Players present Harvey

WSU presents Alice in Wonderland

Fusillo Receives Minnesota Lifetime Achievement Award

Commonweal Apprentice Company Production Opens Thursday

GRSF Season 7 Preview Event, March 21

Commonweal’s Ibsen Fest April 16 - 18

A Midnight Dreary

UW-L presents Escape from Happiness

Penumbra Theatre Presents August Wilson's Radio Golf

The Rainmaker

Jon Hassler Theater presents its Summer Sampler

Boxelder Bug Variations: A Tribute to author Bill Holm

Wisecracks From My Father

What I Want to Be When I Grow Up!

Revelations of Mann

August Community Theater Calendar

Brigadoon

Once Upon a mattress

The Fantastics

Annie of Green Gables

How to Talk Minnesotan

BOOM! An International Lost and Found Family Marching Band

Hamlet

Community Theater Calendar

Suessical the Musical

Annie Jr.

Guys and Dolls

The Fantastics in Lanesboro

The Fantastics in Rochester

The Tempest

More Summer Musicals

Lucky Stiff

Honk!

Love’s Labour’s Lost

GRSF Extra: The Daly News

GRSF Apprentice and Intern Company: Hamlet

Dear James

Shakespeare Preview: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Shakespeare Preview: The Tempest

Island Inhabitants

Survivors of Shipwreck—group 1

Survivors of Shipwreck—group 2

Survivors of Shipwreck—group 3

The Tempest and Colonialism

Great River Shakespeare Festival, Season 6

The Rainmaker opens at the Commonweal

The Moon’s Desire:
The passionate and imagistic poetry of Federico García Lorca