Arsenic and Old Lace

Joseph Kesselring, Directed by Tod Peterson
Commonweal Theater, June 1, 2014

Arsenic and Old Lace is one of those plays that asks the audience to accept a plot driven by coincidences and characters who are over-the-top eccentric. In short, it asks us to suspend what we know of reality to enter into the world the play is creating. While comedy might seem like the most accessible type of theater, both because of our experience with it on television and the seemingly “lightness” of its subject matter, it actually makes great demands upon its audience. By asking us to suspend our sense of reality, to suspend what we know to be true, to suspend how we expect people to act in real life, comedy is asking the ultimate commitment of its audience. In return, a good comedy will reward the audience for accepting happenstance and coincidence for plot. The reward, of course, is the opportunity to laugh, but reward should also include some further engagement, perhaps some insight into the human condition.

A friend of mine once said of a Shakespeare comedy: “it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect the greatest writer in the English Language to include a plot in a work of drama.” While Arsenic and Old Lace has a plot, contrived as it is, the rewards of the play lie elsewhere. And like much of Shakespeare, the rewards for suspending belief are usually worth the trip.

One of the things that makes the Commonweal’s Arsenic and Old Lace worth the trip is the chance to see some great acting. The elderly sisters at the center of the story provide both the lace and the arsenic. Surrounded by Victorian furnishings, Abby and Martha Brewster (played by Patty Mathews and Catherine Glynn), practice a genteel and gracious hospitality that seems to be from a far better past. Mathews and Glynn ooze sweetness: nothing gives them more joy than serving tea to visitors or bringing soup to an ill neighbor. The two actors move together, sharing common gestures and thought patterns that bespeak a lifetime of intimacy. The slow revelation of the arsenic within the lace is delicious, even to the large number in the audience members who clearly have seen this play performed (and laughed freely at the foreshadowing lines).

The audience’s likely familiarity with a play could be a problem: the play can’t rest on its surprise twists of the plot; a successful commonly performed play has to find other ways to engage its audience. The Commonweal’s production really seems to depend on the quality of the acting to bring the play alive. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the production itself, no attempt to make the play “fresh” or modern. The staging looks pretty much like the description Kesselring provides in the play script. If anything, the set is a little less elaborate and a little less Victorian than the playwright describes. This of course is due to the use of a thrust stage rather than the standard proscenium box Kesselring would have been writing for. The play really does stand on the acting. The cast is relatively large, and as we have come to expect at the Commonweal, there is no drop of talent for the smaller roles. Besides the brilliant performances of the Brewster Sisters, the antics of their nephew Teddy prove both enjoyable and historically edifying. (Teddy is played by Nick Ferrucci.) The disfigurement of Jeremy van Meter’s face (playing the prodigal brother-achieved with make-up and extreme facial acting) even gently (or not-so-gently) pokes fun at our own cultural obsession with looking young and the unnaturally rigid faces of our aging rich and famous population.

While not all plays stand up well to repeated performances, Kesselring’s script has certainly held up to repeated viewings (and readings) over the past 75 years. But the best reason to see this play (or see it again, if you’ve seen it before) is to see these characters in the hands of really fine actors. The Commonweal is really strutting its stuff with Arsenic and Old Lace.

Arsenic and Old Lace plays in repertory through September 8.

Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre (www.commonwealtheatre.org)

Twelfth Night

Directed by Paul Mason Barnes, Music by Jack Forbes Wilson
Great River Shakespeare Festival

If someone were to ask me what my favorite play is, I would have to place Twelfth Night near the top of my list. It is funny and thought provoking, demonstrating an interesting awareness of the plight of women, centuries before our own women's movement.

Viola survives a shipwreck and has to make her way alone in a strange land. Her first move is to disguise herself as a young man—knowing the danger of being an unprotected female. This danger hangs over the entire play, even as the play follows its comedic twists and turns.

On Shakespeare's stage, Viola would be played by a young male actor. And when the character Viola dresses as Cesario, the Shakespearian audience would have seen a boy playing a woman playing a man. This trope must have guaranteed a laugh as Shakespeare employs it in several of his plays, but nowhere better than in Twelfth Night. Another comedic element used by Shakespeare is that of separated twins. Viola's brother, assumed to have been lost, also lands in the same country and is, of course, mistaken for Viola's male form. Tarah Flanagan does a nice job playing Viola playing Cesario.

Perhaps the most memorable characters of Twelfth Night develop on side stories outside of the main plot of the odd love triangle that develops between Viola, Olivia, and Orsino. The part of Malvolio—the prudish servant to Olivia—tends to be one of the characters that gets remembered. Christopher Gerson gets the role in this production and handles it with humor and empathy. Malvolio's humiliation puts a damper on the play's ending festivities.

Twelfth Night also offers the trio of late night revelers, Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, and Maria, played by Michael Fitzpatrick, Chris Mixon, and Laura Jacobs, who are also Malvolio's tormentors. The play allows these three talented actors to show off their comic prowess.

But the production is not just good because of strong individual performances, the production, as it does in Henry V, works as a whole. The lighting creates a rich set that reflects the leisurely indulgence of melancholy that exists in both Olivia and Orsino's dwellings. Olivia is playing at mourning her lost brother, and Orsino is playing at mourning his unrequited love for Olivia. The mood is supported with music,composed by the fabulous Jack Forbes Wilson. The music makes sense of Orsino's opening lines:

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it: that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and Giving odor. (I.i.1-7)

Corey Allen recites the line, reclining backwards to face the audience, with the singers poised to resume their song, and I quickly scribbled in my notebook: “Corey Allen is quickly becoming my favorite actor.” Everything works in that moment, saving the play from a confusing and clumsy prologue.

The Great River Shakespeare Festival is down to its last three days. For schedules and tickets for Twelfth Night, Henry V and Macbeth, visit GRSF.org.

Pillars of Society

By Henrik Ibsen, Adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Hal Cropp
Commonweal Theatre (April 14, 2012)

Only a few weeks remain to see Commonweal’s Ibsen offering, Pillars of Society, the season’s best area offering of 2012 to date. (Pillars plays Thursday and Fridays through June 8).

Pillars of Society, one of Ibsen’s lesser performed plays, marks the beginning of Ibsen’s move from the melodrama that dominated theater of the 19th Century to the realism that marks the drama of the 20th Century. The play predates his ground breaking A Doll’s House, and can seem more clumsy and forced than the later plays. However, there is something about this production that gets beyond this clumsiness, bringing Ibsen’s exploration of the public and private lives to the center of the production. The success of the Commonweal production has a lot to do with Jeffery Hatcher’s adaptation of the script. In his third adaptation of Ibsen’s work for the Commonweal, Hatcher again demonstrates his ability to get to the heart of Ibsen’s story and the familial, economic, and political tensions that drive Ibsen’s work.

The public theme of the play centers around Karsten Bernick, the owner of a large ship-building company and a self-described leader or “pillar” of the community. Scott Dixon plays Bernick as a devout servant to his community-yes he has profited from the ship yards and his position in the community, but it is all for the greater good of society. Bernick feels he has sacrificed for the community and is deserving of the town’s accolades as well as certain perks that come with responsibility. It is a position that we see all too many corporate executives and politicians caught up in today: because of their perceived personal sacrifices and the overall benefit to society from their deals, trades, and vision, they don’t believe that have to follow the same rules as common people. So complete is their belief in their value to society, they view their excesses not as their just due but as part of their sacrifice on our behalf.

Scott Dixon, Stefanie Dickens Underferth, Catherine Glynn, Jeremy van Meter. Photo Jason Underferth.

While it is hard for Bernick to see the hypocrisy of his position, it is clear that it is his family that he has sacrificed. And perhaps this is the trademark of Ibsen’s modernism: the public persona of an individual must be looked at through the lens of the personal, even if that persona is clueless about the personal as Bernick seems to be in Pillars. As the play evolves, the list of people Bernick has sacrificed for his personal gain (and the betterment of society) continues to grow: spouse, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, past mistress, workers at the ship yard. Yet Ibsen, and this production, don’t simply paint Bernick as the bad guy: he’s a recognizable human who is susceptible to the all-to-human expectations, foibles, and delusions that prevent a person from honestly seeing themselves.

While the story is the Norwegian ship magnet’s, Americans threaten the equilibrium and in many ways steal the show. Off stage, the American sailors in port scandalize the small coastal town. On stage, the arrival of Lona Hessel from her self-imposed exile in America shakes up the ordered Scandinavian household. The tall figure of Catherine Glynn, who makes her Commonweal debut as Lona, dressed in red, sweeps onto the stage, inflaming the past jealousy of her sister and the long buried passion of Karsten Bernick. Glynn plays this pivotal role brilliantly, not only making the Bernick family squirm with her lack of decorum and willingness to confront the truth, but she also causes a bit of discomfort among the Minnesota audience.

Ibsen uses America (the sailors and the returned family members) as a dramatic device to shake up both the town and the Norwegian family depicted in the play. It is also a great bonus for us as we get a glimpse of how Americans were stereotyped by Europeans at the turn of the 19th Century.

Commonweal’s Pillars of Society is a great play. It is full of humor, heartbreak, betrayal, and forgiveness. It’s many ideas and questions are relevant in our own public and private lives; I find myself thinking about the play frequently, many weeks after I saw the production. Unfortunately, we only have a few more weeks to enjoy this production.

Pillars of Society plays in repertory with The 39 Steps through June 8.
Visit the Commonweal for schedules and tickets: Commonweal Theatre (www.commonwealtheatre.org)

The Metal Children

By Adam Rapp, directed by Megan K. Pence
Commonweal Apprentice Company
March 30, 2012

The Commonweal’s apprentice company production has proved to be a rewarding investment of my theater-going time the past 4 years. While The Metal Children may not rank with last year’s Metamorphosis, it remains a compelling piece of theater, doing what art at its best should do: ask the important questions.

In Rapp’s play, a small town in the Midwest is banning a book called The Metal Children, and the High School English teacher who uses the book has invited the author to town to defend the work. This sets up a classic confrontation between the artistic, freedom-of-expression, led by the author, against the small-town evangelical church and the small-minded school board. However this classic standoff doesn’t really take place—the author of the book seems clueless as to how to defend the book.

The play centers on the young adult fiction author Tobin Falmouth, played by Gary Danciu.  Danciu spends most of the play struggling to clear the fog from his head: early it is an alcohol and drug induced haze, later it is a daze caused by cracked ribs and an inability to come to terms with a world where an entire town has taken his fiction seriously. The audience waits for the protagonist to wake up and act heroically. It doesn’t happen.

High school senior, Vera Dundee, played by Rachel Kuhnle, on the other hand, is willing to defend the book and is clear about what the book means and what it calls her to do. Kuhnle has captured the often militant surety of a cause that young adults often embrace. She has hints of adolescent sweetness, but chillingly acts out a zealous response to Falmouth’s book.

Like all good theater, this play has my mind returning to the play in the days since I saw it. Rapp and director Pence keep the meaning ambiguous, not allowing for easy, comfortable compartmentalizing of the play: Is this play about the importance and power of literature? Is the play about censorship? Is the play about the responsibility of the community to guide its youth? Is this a play about the role of religion in the public schools? Rapp seems to keep the audience off balance with a musty controversy that most of the audience likely entered the theater thinking they understood.

When I do think of the play, I often think of the post show conversation with the company more than the play itself. I can’t help but think that the company was a bit disappointed by the questions and comments from those who stayed to discuss the play. One group of questions expressed frustration that Falmouth remained largely detached and missed his opportunities to do the right thing. As audience members, we are hoping for the protagonist to rise to the occasion, but the verisimilitude of the play would make this unlikely. Falmouth does grow in the play: he is able to move from a self-absorbed despondency to a self-absorbed sobriety and productivity. Taking on the full responsibility of an altruistic adult would have been too much to ask in the short arc of the play. Likewise, Vera has significantly matured in the year since the showdown over the book. But she too has only come so far. She is sobered by the impulsive choice she made and is now making adult responses to her situation. Yet she hangs on to her infatuation with Falmouth’s fictional characters. Roberta Cupp (Carla Joseph) speaks eloquently for her church, which is leading the charge against the book. She is able to have brief moments of human connection with Falmouth, but not the breakthrough that the audience longs for.

Another set of audience questions placed the blame on the high school English teacher for not properly guiding the students through a potentially dangerous book. I think this response is an understandable one: to blame the book would be to come down on the side of censorship, so it must be someone’s fault. After all, 40 girls ran away from the small town, many intentionally becoming pregnant, and one girl commits suicide. But if it is the English teacher’s fault that the 40 girls ran away in response to the book, then it must be the religious community’s responsibility that Tami Lake’s understanding of a different book caused her to turn toward suicide.

Rapp’s treatment of the interactions of characters on stage maintains a reliable verisimilitude, even while the play is surrounded by the inconceivable in a way that the audience doesn’t question. For example, a full-sized statue of Tami Lake appears just after she commits suicide. Forty-girls from a small town high school are moved by a work of fiction enough to secure a mortgage on a farm in Montana and move there before any of their parents are able to stop them. And most fantastic of all, everyone in the small town seems to have read the book and knows more about what is in the book than the clueless author. Even those who hate its content readily tell the author what a great writer he is—the vigilante thugs even quote from the book. This tendency of the audience to accept the fantastic perhaps leaves the audience willing to blame someone—the author, the church, the school—for actions that are highly unlikely while missing the point of the teen suicide which is all too common.

While Rap’s play, and presumably Commonweal’s interpretation of the play, doesn’t provide answers to the questions and doesn’t provide us with a feel-good protagonist who saves the day, there is a pivotal scene where the English teacher, Stacey Kinsella (Brandon Grayson), lying on what might be his death bed, asks Falmouth to read a specific passage from his book. In the passage, a girl tells her father that she is pregnant. The scene is full of both fear and hope, as the girl’s future lies with the father’s response. We never learn what the father says, but from what the play does disclose about the book, the father missed his opportunity.

Sylvia

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)

The Rainmaker

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

Hamlet

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

The Tempest

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

Love’s Labour’s Lost

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

Dear James

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.

Hedda Gabler

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

A Raisin in the Sun

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.

Ice Maidens

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

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

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

The Taming of the Shrew

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

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