Photo Flash: Tiny Kushner At The Guthrie

Flip Flop Fly! tells the story of a bizarre lunar encounter between two dead women, Lucia Pamela (Mudek) - the fabulous American concert pianist, singer, songwriter, recording star, bandleader and radio personality, who claimed to have made a record album on the moon in 1969 - and Geraldine (Eifrig), the deposed queen of Albania. With one nattering on about her life in entertainment and the other about her life in exile, the two compare the courses of their lives.

Lichtscheidl performs all of the roles in East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis, a piece comprised of short monologues by 16 male characters and seven female characters, about an outrageous 1990s scheme actually used to avoid paying taxes. As a housing detective discovers its success, news of the fraud spreads rapidly, prompting the government to investigate.

Having premiered at the Guthrie Lab as part of Love's Fire, The Acting Company's 1998 production of one-act plays, Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen nicht verloren sein" or Ambivalence features the entire Tiny Kushner cast. Sitting in an office are Esther (Eifrig), an analyst, and her former patient, Hendryk (Cutler), along with their lovers, Dymphna (Mudek) and Billygoat (Lichtscheidl), respectively, as Hendryk, pleads with Esther to take him back as a patient.

In Dr. Arnold A. Hutschneker in Paradise, Metatron (Eifrig), a Recording Angel with a million eyes, is holding a supervisory session with Dr. Hutschneker (Cutler) in an upscale office in heaven. The two discuss how Hutschneker's pains and his denial of mortality could quite possibly be related to his sessions with his own patient, Richard Milhous Nixon, with whom he frequently meets in the afterlife.

The bitingly political satire Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy explores issues of political morality and moral relativity, as now-former First Lady Laura Bush (Eifrig) reads from The Brothers Karamazov to the pajama-clad ghosts of dead Iraqi children, all of whom are watched over by an angel (Mudek).

The artistic staff for Tiny Kushner includes Annie Smart (Set Designer), Anita Yavich (Costume Designer), Alexander V. Nichols (Lighting and Video Designer), Victor Zupanc (Sound Designer), Lauren Ignaut (Dramaturgy), Michele Harms (Stage Manager) and Meaghan Rosenberger (Assistant Stage Manager).

The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963, is an American center for theater performance, production, education and professional training. The Guthrie is dedicated to producing the great works of dramatic literature, developing the work of contemporary playwrights and cultivating the next generation of theater artists. Led by Director Joe Dowling since 1995, the Guthrie opened its new three-theater home on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in June 2006.

The Guthrie is located at 818 South 2nd Street (at Chicago Avenue), in downtown Minneapolis. To purchase tickets or season subscriptions call the Guthrie Box Office at 612.377.2224 or toll-free 877.44.STAGE. For more information, or to purchase tickets online, visit http://www.guthrietheater.org/.

Photo credit: 2009 © Michal Daniel