Karen Bovard - Page 2

Playwriting can be a form of thinking, and plays can be thought-experiments. That's true of Jordan Harrison's four actor, 80 minute play MARJORIE PRIME (a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize), set in 2062 and beyond. He's investigating whether advances in artificial intelligence might enable new means of care-giving for older adults losing their memories. Along the way, intriguing questions arise. Though I don't think the play works all that well despite strong work from the actors, I admire Harrison's audacious choice of subject. He's a bold artist, currently writing for Netflix's "Orange is the New Black."

'Bodies' is the first word spoken in Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, and it's the physicality of the story telling that makes this show such a theatrical pleasure. First developed with students at Northwestern, the production went pro and opened on Broadway in 2002 at Circle in the Square. There it created quite a splash, literally: the first two rows of audience were supplied with disposable raincoats. Yes, that's right: METAMORPHOSES is staged in and around a pool.

Sometimes all the pieces come together: story, language, visuals, performance, staging.  That's the case with the superb production of the French classic CYRANO DE BERGERAC currently playing on the proscenium stage at the Guthrie.  Artistic director Joseph Haj first created his own adaptation in 2006, and he's tweaked it here. The result is quite faithful to the original but tighter, a little less flowery, and more in keeping with modern notions about female agency.

Do you find it hard to imagine how to engage, directly but civilly, with people who hold views you emphatically oppose? If so, make a beeline for History Theater in Saint Paul to see SISTERS OF PEACE. This new play models that very thing several times, even within a nuclear family.

INTO THE WOODS is new artistic director Marcela Lorca's debut directorial outing for Ten Thousand Things after the retirement of renowned artist and social change agent Michelle Hensley, the founder of the company. Seeing this Sondheim masterpiece up close and stripped of pretentiousness is a treat.

Ifa Bayeza's (lower case titled) benevolence, the second play in her trilogy revolving around Emmett Till, the 14 year old Chicago boy brutally murdered in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, is hard to watch. It's also important, because it takes us beyond what we think we know to detail the aftermath of Till's violent death on two couples, one white, one black, all real historical figures. Penumbra Theatre in Saint Paul is mounting the world premiere under Talvin Wilks' direction.

Director Lavina Jadhwani had a clear intention underlying casting and concept in the Guthrie's current production of AS YOU LIKE IT: to enable audience members from many different heritages and sexualities to see themselves represented on stage. Her intent was fueled, in part, by her own memories of going to theater as a child, and loving it, but never seeing someone who looked like her on stage; she is of South Asian descent. This production is, in Jadhwani's words, meant to be "hereish and nowish" and is informed by a deliberately intersectional feminist lens.

Briskly written and dynamically staged, this world premiere tells a complicated, true, little known story with wit and economy. From the early days of commercial airlines, stewardesses were hired based on looks, required to pass weekly weight checks, forbidden to wear glasses or marry, and fired automatically when they reached age 32. They were also not allowed to apply for the higher paying bursar jobs. Though it took decades, literally, a stewardess named Mary Pat Laffey got all that to change, persisting with a lawsuit under Equal Employment statutes that derive directly from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Let's remember: Antigone was a teenager. This 90 minute intermissionless ANTIGONE is calibrated to work beautifully as a week day field trip for high school students, and succeeds equally well for adult audiences who may be a little rusty on the ancient Greek tale of Oedipus and his offspring. Some 2,500 students will see this show up close: the basement thrust stage is quite intimate. You can't be more than a few rows from the action. Thus lots of teenagers will be confronted with one of the world's great plays, one that turns on themes of family loyalty, ethics, leadership and fate. Creative high school teachers can spin lessons off this for days, in all manner of directions, including the legal and historic grounding for contemporary human rights law.

Opening disclosure: I love this script! I think it's one of American theater's great treasures. It's remarkably timely despite being written in the 1940s. Penned by Thornton Wilder after OUR TOWN, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. It's hugely inventive, theatrically bold rather than narrowly realistic, meta before meta was a thing, about truly big issues (e.g., the survival of the human race) and wickedly funny to boot. It should be noted that not everyone agrees, and there were some folks in the opening night audience in Saint Paul who left in the second intermission.

The Guthrie's 9th floor experimental black box space, where all tickets are always just $9, is one of the best deals in town. Currently, it hosts a festival called "Get Used To It: A Celebration of Queer Artistry" and the initial offering is a real coup. The famed duo of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, founders of Split Britches and the feminist/queer performance space WOW Cafe in New York, have brought their intermissionless 90 minute participatory performance piece UNEXPLODED ORDNANCES (UXO) to the Twin Cities.

Theater Latte Da's well-cast production of Sondheim's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC is gorgeous to look at and sweet on the ear. Like many great musicals, it depends on the master narrative of romance, but in Sondheim's hands that narrative gets a wider treatment than usual: not only are some of the lovers well beyond their ingenue years, but the characters are also by turns cynical, nostalgic, randy, anguished, manipulative, ecstatic, and resigned.

Lauren Yee is a talented playwright, with an ear for fast dialogue and a knack for creating pithy lines that work on several levels. This skill is clear in the title of her cross-cultural play now on the big proscenium stage at the Guthrie, and also pops up periodically through the two-act show. While the piece traverses some promising thematic terrain, it is too choppy and a little too predictable to work fully.

Under Sarah Rasmussen as Artistic Director, the 150 seat Jungle Theater in Minneapolis punches above its weight frequently, mounting finely tuned productions of important new works. They've done it again with the current show: a play for grownups called THE CHILDREN, the first production in the US after the Broadway run. Three accomplished veteran actors with Twin Cities roots, working under Casey Stangl's direction, drop us into a contemporary apocalyptic twist on a 'kitchen sink' play. Only here, environmental disaster has established a new normal where water and food are rationed, electricity is spotty, and questions of morality and mortality are immediate and intertwined.

Florian Zeller's adventurous script, winner of the 2014 Moliere Prize for best new play in France, takes up questions that are (or will be!) central for many of us: how do we care for aging parents who are losing their memories, disappearing into dementia, and (perhaps) undergoing personality changes to boot? And how do we--if we are the unfortunate elder in decline--keep a grip on our own identity, track what's happening around us, and bear the weight of the unrelenting disaster underway?

There are lots of holiday offerings in the performance-rich Twin Cities. One of the new ones this year was CHILL, an hour-long danced-through performance to the famous score of the CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS television special, played live by a small jazz combo sharing the stage with the ensemble of 9 dancers. Colorful, infectious, and accessible, the performance played to sell out crowds, including many rapt children, over a recent weekend in a downtown Saint Paul bar.

Ten Thousand Things is a treasure: a company dedicated to bringing live theater to marginalized and underserved audiences for free. Founding Director Michelle Hensley retired in June of 2018. So this production is the first in new Artistic Director Marcela Lorca's inaugural season, and is directed by Randy Reyes, who is Artistic Director of Theater Mu locally. The mission of TTT is clearly in safe hands, especially given the extant structure of the Artist Core, a group of veteran performers who provide guidance and active advice to the organization.

Tira Palmquist's TWO DEGREES could not be more timely. Written in 2014, it centers on a woman paleoclimatologist, Emma, as she is called to Washington to testify before a hostile Senate committee about climate change-a committee that, she is told, is "easily bored by facts." She's been invited by her old college friend, Louise, now a powerful senator.

Pearce Bunting delivers a visceral gut punch as Lyndon B. Johnson in THE GREAT SOCIETY. Rarely in 50 years of serious theater going have I seen a more fully inhabited physical performance. It's masterful. Menacing and charming by turns, Bunting channels LBJ's ability to manipulate people into positions they didn't originally intend. The arc he travels is long: beginning brash and aggressive, we see him move incrementally into weariness and eventually descend to emotional exhaustion. And all of it is credible.

Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony were friends for 45 years through tumultuous times. The strategic interests of their respective causes did not always align, which caused rifts between them. In AGITATORS, Playwright Mat Smart has mined this rich terrain to create an episodic examination of their relationship, fully aware of the relevance it has to the present.