Mpls.St.Paul Magazine - Out + About - Theater

A New Take on Streetcar

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:22:31 GMT

Ten Thousand Things’ production of A Streetcar Named Desire is a radical reinterpretation of the Tennessee Williams play. It eliminates all but four of the characters and casts Blanche and Stella as African Americans (Austene Van and Elizabeth Grullon), Stanley as a European American (Kris L. Nelson), and Mitch as a Korean American (Kurt Kwan).

“This is a different take on Williams,” says director Randy Reyes. “I want to bring out the universal themes in the play, shine a light on it through the lens of a different culture.”

The production will not alter the play, other than cutting it. Reyes acknowledges certain dissonances between the text and the casting. For instance, the scene when Blanche is describing her life on a plantation could raise some eyebrows. “Lines might ring false for a second, but they’re small things. If the audience is invested in the characters, they’ll follow,” the director insists.

Still, Reyes admits that he’s not quite sure how people will react to his interpretation. “It’s a social, cultural, and theatrical experiment,” he says. “This is not how you expect Williams to be. I’m excited about it.” May 3–26. Various locations, 612-203-9502, tenthousandthings.org

Drastic Change

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:14:21 GMT

Playwright Ethan Boatner was in his early 60s when he began his gender transition. “I was a slow starter,” he jokes. Growing up in the late 1940s, “I didn’t have the vocabulary,” he says. “All I knew was that I didn’t want to be what I was.” He just always thought of himself as a “guy,” he says, then later in life as a “gay guy” who has “always gone around dressed as I am now.”

Boatner has transformed his history into three semiautobiographical one-act plays under the title of Changes in Time, which receives its world premiere this month by 20% Theatre Company. “Wishes” is the story of Rain, a 14-year-old tomboy that another girl at camp had a crush on. In “Dresses,” Lorraine, now in her mid-30s, is attending a wedding and argues with her mother about wearing a dress. And finally, in “Changes,” set in the present, Laurence confronts his father after the death of his mother.

“Wishes” won a contest sponsored by Stages, the National Transgender Theatre Festival, and was given a reading in NYC in 2003. “Every individual is inextricably bound to the context of his/her time and society,” Boatner explains. “I wanted to show a character who doesn’t know what’s going on in her/his own head. She/he’s just trying to get along.”

In the Twin Cities, Boatner was a fixture in the gay community for more than 10 years as a contributor and editor of Lavender, the GLBT newsmagazine. He retired in 2009. May 11–25. Minneapolis Theatre Garage, 711 Franklin Ave. W., Mpls., 612-870-0723, tctwentypercent.org

Alice in Wonderland

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:04:41 GMT

Every time the Children’s Theatre Company mounts a production of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, it inevitably redefines whatever boundaries of imagination and artistry are left to explore down that particular rabbit hole. This year is no different. Raising the bar on the spectacular, iconic shows of yore, CTC is once again reimagining the story from the bottom up, likely redefining it for a new generation of Twin Citians. Anna Evans plays Alice, and all four company actors will be performing as well. The emphasis is on magic and humor, says director Peter C. Brosius—though there will of course be a whiffling, burbling Jabberwock for the ages. April 30–June 15. Children’s Theatre Company, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls., 612-874-0400, childrenstheatre.org

Paradise Tossed

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:29:31 GMT

History Theatre artistic director Ron Peluso was trolling the Internet looking for possible plays when he came across This Side of Paradise, a musical about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. “I thought it had incredible potential,” he says. “I contacted the writers and, even though it had already had a run off-Broadway, we were on the same page about trying some new things. This production will have a slightly different point of view.”

The musical is set in the mental institution where Zelda spent the last eight years of her life. The story is told in flashbacks as she struggles to discover what went wrong in her relationship with Scott. Was she his downfall or his muse?

The book is by playwright and director Will Pomeranz and the score by Nancy Harrow, a jazz singer from the 1960s who has now turned to composition. “It’s not quite in a Broadway musical style,” Peluso says. “There is a hint of the 1920s, but mostly it’s in her own style, with an early ’60s jazz feel.”

April 20–May 19. History Theatre, 30 E. 10th St., St. Paul, 651-292-4323, historytheatre.com

Rebel Sisters

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:28:50 GMT

Playwright Caridad Svich returns to Mixed Blood Theatre this month for the area premiere of In the Time of the Butterflies, an adaptation of the popular historical novel by Julia Alvarez. It tells the true story of the Dominican Republic’s Mirabal sisters, whose underground resistance led to the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo, a brutal dictator responsible for killing more than 50,000 people. “The sisters are national heroes,” Svich says.

Audiences may remember Svich from Mixed Blood’s 2010 production of The House of the Spirits, her adaptation based on the novel by Isabel Allende. She sees the works as sharing the same themes: “They’re both female-centered, about activism and resistance. But this one is internal and more intimate.”

For her novel, Alvarez went to the Dominican Republic to conduct interviews with survivors and crafted a fiction rooted in history. “It’s a challenge to deal with history,” Svich says. “I feel the weight of it especially with women who’ve been martyred. I’ve written a meditation and reflection of these women’s lives, an elegy and a celebration.”

Alvarez helped Svich during the writing process. “She read each draft and gave me notes,” says the playwright. “My play is a response to the novel, not a riff on it. I’m trying to capture the essence of what it feels like to read the book. It’s inspired by the facts, but it’s not a docudrama.”

The original production, which has been running in New York for more than two years, is in Spanish. At a request from Jack Reuler, Mixed Blood artistic director, Svich has done a bilingual version for this production that will be accompanied by supertitles in both languages. April 5–27. Mixed Blood Theatre, 1501 S. 4th St., Mpls., 612-338-6131, mixedblood.com

SPUNK

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:40:12 GMT

Congratulations to Penumbra Theatre artistic director Lou Bellamy and his team for finding a way out of the financial morass that forced the cancellation of Penumbra’s fall season. Bolstered by $359,000 in contributions from 1,400 individuals and corporations, the theater relaunches this month with SPUNK, a play by George C. Wolfe based on Three Tales by Zora Neale Hurston.

“All of our work will continue to have a social justice component,” says Bellamy. “We do good work—acting, production values. But that’s just the opening gambit. There has to be a deeper element. That won’t change.”

SPUNK is set during the Harlem Renaissance, but, he says, “There’s a rural component to it. It’s about the journey that came to be called the Great Migration [1910–1930, when 1.3 million blacks came north]. They changed city life and brought music. They even changed the language.”

Directed by Atlanta-based director/ choreographer Patdro Harris, this mixture of storytelling, dance, and the blues features a roster of Penumbra regulars, including Jevetta Steele, Dennis W. Spears, T. Mychael Rambo, and Austene Van.

“Our work needs to become more multifaceted,” Bellamy says about the challenges going forward. “We need to maintain our honest look at the world. But we have to make it more popular and sell it. That’s the challenge with any social justice theater.” March 14–April 7. Penumbra Theatre, 270 N. Kent St., St. Paul, 651-224-3180, penumbratheatre.org

Serving Justice

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:19:47 GMT

It’s hard to believe that two of the 20th century’s greatest Supreme Court justices grew up as best friends in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood of St. Paul. And they turned out to occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum: Harry Blackmun was the great liberal, and Warren Burger a staunch conservative. But that’s the truth behind Courting Harry, a new play by Lee Blessing that gets its world premiere at History Theatre.

A New York producer commissioned Blessing to adapt Becoming Justice Blackmun, by Linda Greenhouse. “Then he died and his family wasn’t interested,” says History Theatre artistic director Ron Peluso. “I grabbed it up. It’s a perfect History Theatre match.”

The play takes place in the afterlife, when Blackmun comes back to talk about Burger. But Burger won’t let him. Joel Sass directs, with Clyde Lund as Blackmun and Nathaniel Fuller as Burger.

The play is being staged during the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, for which Blackmun wrote the opinion—which tore apart their relationship. (They had been best man at each other’s weddings.) “The play is less about politics and more about friendship,” Peluso says. March 2–24. History Theatre, 30 E. 10th St., St. Paul, 651-292-4323, historytheatre.com—W.R.B.

"Or" at Park Square Theatre

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:57:21 GMT

According to director Leah Cooper, Lynn Durry Adams’s play Or “is a slamming-door sex farce and a Shakespearean lyrical ode to free love.” Set in 1666 Restoration England, the play is a fictional imagining of a love threesome between Aphra Behn, England’s first woman playwright, King Charles II, and Nell Gwyn, the lead actress of the day.

Behn’s plays are getting wider circulation these days, but she is still relatively unknown, “probably because she’s a woman,” Cooper says. “She’s a must for fans of Restoration comedy.”

Historically, the mid-1600s was a time of great freedom in England. When Charles II was restored to the throne, after the repressive regime of Oliver Cromwell, he created a cultural environment that made it possible for Behn to become a professional playwright. It was also something of a post-apocalyptic world, following the great plague and the fire of London—a time, says Cooper, “when everything was up for grabs, and you could rethink a new world.” Feb. 22–March 17. Park Square Theatre, 20 W. 7th Place, St. Paul, 651-291-7005, parksquaretheatre.org

"The Seven" from Ten Thousand Things

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:46:12 GMT

Following her stunning production of In the Next Room at the Jungle, South Dakota native Sarah Rasmussen has returned to stage The Seven, Will Power’s hip-hop retelling of Aeschylus’s The Seven Against Thebes, for Ten Thousand Things. Artistic director Michelle Hensley feels the story—of two brothers who try to rule their kingdom peacefully despite their father’s curse—will resonate with both the theater’s traditional audience and the one it plays to in prisons and homeless shelters.

“The tragedy is a universal human story,” she says. “The sons of Oedipus are cursed by a bad parent to fight, and they try to find ways not to. That’s an issue for our non-traditional audiences and for our traditional audiences as well. It is a huge question for our world right now.”

Power’s hip-hop approach gives the play a contemporary, street-wise energy, in part because hip-hop and Shakespeare have more in common than one might suppose. “[When we do Shakespeare] we ask our non-traditional audiences to come into a linguistic universe that traditional audiences are comfortable with. I’m excited to ask our traditional audiences to do the same thing through [the linguistics of] hip-hop.”

In each case, language is the door through which the audience accesses the play, and mining the nuances of language is what Ten Thousand Things does best. “Hip-hop is just an extension of what we find in verse plays of 400 years ago,” says Hensley. “There’s a real understanding of the rhythms of poetic speaking. That elevated sense of language helps audiences plummet to the depths of the tragedy.” Feb. 15–March 10. Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Mpls., 800-838-3006, tenthousandthings.org

"The Book of Mormon" at the Orpheum Theatre

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:19:08 GMT

Having won practically every Tony Award possible in 2011, including Best Musical, The Book of Mormon is the most talked-about hit Broadway has produced since The Lion King—but for very different reasons. Conceived by the creators of the irreverent TV cartoon South Park, the show is full of hilarious blasphemy, as you’d expect, but it also manages the delicate trick of satirizing organized religion without completely condemning it. The hoary conventions of musical theater also take a satirical beating, as does pretty much anything and everyone else. Feb. 5–17. Orpheum Theatre, 910 Hennepin Ave., Mpls., 612-339-7007, hennepintheatretrust.org