Review: Chamber Theatre's Haunting Scripts, Heartwarming Actors and Humor Inspire LOVE STORIES for the Holidays

"I know of only one duty," said George Bernard Shaw, "And that is to love." While Milwaukee Chamber Theatre (MCT) presents a trilogy of one acts titled Love Stories--- including Shaw's short, three-scene play titled "Village Wooing"---next door to the Studio Theatre the Skylight Music Theatre features Shaw's My Fair Lady, a version of Shaw's "Pygmalion," both at the Broadway Theatre Center. Numerous themes echo through these separate shows regarding social class and male/female relationships, particularly those experienced in marriage. Actual life partners and actors Tami Workentin and James Pickering prove to be the genuine actors, true gems in this production, illustrating love inside and outside the theater to the delight of Milwaukee audiences.

Director Paula Suozzi debuts at MCT and constructs an active rehearsal setting to connect the three plays, which also invites the UW-Milwaukee University theater interns Ericka Kirkstein-Zastrow and Robert Knapp to appear as technical stage assistants to the production, and participate in the on-stage performance. The approach works amazingly well, so these three stories shine amid minimal costumes and stage design while Workentin and Pickering divulge their romantic beginnings with candid, heartfelt humor.

In Shaw's "Village Wooing," first written in 1933 and performed a year later, his characters equally direct and honest as in "Pygmalion," portray the shop clerk, Workentin, actually proposing a business deal and marriage to the widower, Pickering, who she met on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise. A man of letters, the widower claims he learned more in "three months of shop keeping," than in three years of writing travel books after he purchases the small mercantile. Eventually, the widower admits he loves this clever and persevering store woman instead of a cultured city lady, and the shop clerk in her persuasion of the widower's affections asks, "How can I be satisfied when I can't lay my hands on you?" How perceptive of Shaw to allow a woman to speak of this desire in an era when this might still be frowned upon, and Workentin and Pickering capture the final scene with poetic charm.

Two other equally famous authors/playwrights authored the remaining two stories. Bertolt Brecht gives the audience a sacrificial portrait of married love in "The Jewish Wife," when she leaves her German husband Fritz so he will be saved from the persecution and then may continue practicing his surgery. The wife realizes she is now "a less valuable person" when seen as Jewish only, instead of a doctor's wife, and believes, "The next man who gets her to [to marry her when she lives in Amsterdam] will be allowed to keep her." Brecht delivers intimate and personal insight into these relationships during the rise of Nazi Germany.

In the third play, Dorothy Parker frequently commented through her writing on the state of male/female relationships, often using biting wit. In "Here We Are," a newly married couple on the eve of their wedding night contemplates "what happens all over the world," the wife repeats, "people do it"---get married and live, the couple thinks, happily ever after the wife means. While the couple sits on the train to their New York honeymoon night at the Biltmore Hotel, they discuss the virtues of the now Mrs.'s hat, among other quirks in their relationship, while Workentin and Pickering create a ambiguous picture of just-married bliss.

Equally touching and truthful, the two actors redo the ending to this play while rehearsing that highlights how actors and directors might influence the audiences perception, the final lines and outcome of this or any play. Workentin and Pickering rehearse the scene alone, sitting on merely two black cubes, representing train seats, and decide to read the final lines over. These two interpretations entirely transform Parker's intended meaning. Or did they?

Whichever ending might be perceived, Pickering and Workentin connect these stories with deep affection and then a life long personal commitment to the theater. This theme transcends the meaning of Love Stores beyond family and friends, to the activities and organizations audience members might believe in passionately. For this production, MCT will be collecting donations for community partner Tippiecanoe Presbyterian Church and their Divine Intervention Ministry, an outreach assisting the the city's homeless, while food and other donations will be welcome for collection in the Broadway Theater lobby.

What could be more inspiring than these Love Stories---completely haunting words written by renowned authors and spoken by two heartwarming actors touched with the humor of their day-to-day lives on and off the stage? This surprising and enchanting theatrical gift invites the audience to keep 'LOVE' forefront and center this season. A time when second chances, do-overs and starting again can happen to anyone willing to risk all for the sake of love. So wonderfully encouraged, audiences may write and then live their personal love stories this December and well into the New Year.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Love Stories in the Studio Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center through December 20. For further information or tickets, please call" 414.291.7800 or www.milwaukeechambertheatre.org.

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