Arsenic and Old Lace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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