Karen Bovard - Page 4

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.

In keeping with their tradition of honoring the ancestors and artistic leaders of past generations, Penumbra Theatre is opening this season by revisiting Ntozake Shange's groundbreaking iconoclastic work, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, which won an Obie in 1976 for its Broadway run, which I saw. Let's pause to note that it was the first Broadway show written by a Black woman since Lorraine Hansberry's RAISIN IN THE SUN in 1959.

30 years ago, Minneapolis based playwright Barbara Field penned an adaptation of Mary Shelley's famous novel for the Guthrie. Now, on the 200th anniversary of the novel's composition, the Guthrie is opening their season with a new production of Field's script, titled FRANKENSTEIN-PLAYING WITH FIRE. Beautifully designed, as ever on Guthrie main stages, the script is quite postmodern in that different moments in the chronological sequence interpenetrate. Despite strong work by skilled actors in the six roles, the whole somehow falls short.

Women making comedy can be a radical act. The best moments of SOMETIMES THERE'S WINE at Park Square Theatre in Saint Paul are truly funny and border on radical, by offering glimpses of how real women sometimes talk to each other when no one else is listening. For theatergoers who never have access to such moments, it may be revelatory or discomfiting or embarrassing; but it will likely make others laugh in identification, as it did during the final preview I saw.

For the opening of her third season as Artistic Director at Minneapolis' spunky Jungle Theater, Sarah Rasmussen and her team commissioned a new adaptation of LITTLE WOMEN from Kate Hamill in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the novel's publication. Kate Hamill is an actor who has, of late, gained notice for her skillful adaptations of classic novels for the stage (several Austen works, Vanity Fair, etc.), to the point that she was one of the 10 most frequently produced playwrights in the US last season.

Flying Foot Forum is one of the Twin Cities' most original performing companies. What they do-full evenings of original percussive dance, often with a historical or cultural jumping off point, and always with a big dose of humor-is unique. FRENCH TWIST (or parts of it) has been in their repertoire since 2008. A revival with new bits plays just through July 15 at Park Square Theatre's basement space in Saint Paul, as the company celebrates its 25th experimental season.

This one character philosophical scavenger hunt of a play has been staged all over the US and Europe since it premiered in 2001. It follows a fictional Dutch librarian who tries to track down the patron who returned a book to the overnight slot 113 year late. Her starting clues include hand written marginalia in the book and a dry cleaning ticket used as a bookmark. That leads her to a pair of abandoned trousers in London. These furnish another hint, and so on….

Twin Cities native Thomasina Petrus and legendary director Marion McClinton have teamed up to mount a definitive production of this famous concert show about the great jazz singer Billie Holiday. The show is structured as a club performance late in Holiday's career in a small Philadelphia venue, after she was barred from performing in New York nightclubs due to multiple drug convictions. Her voice has lost some of its power and flexibility. She is worn out by a hard life of multiple childhood traumas, abusive lovers and subsequent addiction made even harder by the endemic racism in the United States. It's March 1959. Her heyday is well behind her. Death will come in a matter of months, when she is just 44.

The History Theatre is having fun this month, with a world premiere by the popular writing duo known as 'Hatchling': Jeffrey Hatcher (book) and Chan Poling (music and lyrics). LORD GORDON GORDON is a romp of a musical in the tradition of con man stories like THE MUSIC MAN. It's based on little known true events in Minnesota and New York in the 1870s-events that eventually led to the fleecing of a bunch of investors (including the wealthy robber baron Jay Gould) and a Minnesota militia marching on Canada.

The plot of AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE seems ripped from today's headlines: think Flint, think Detroit. Of course, Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (an iconoclast in his day, generally regarded as "The Father of Social Realism" in western theater history) penned this prescient piece back in 1882. What the Guthrie is producing is a new adaptation by Brad Birch, first staged in 2016 in Wales. It's undergone further revision for this production. Birch's adaptation is most welcome. The familiar story is lifted up to a whole new level by the striking visuals and swift, intriguing transitions devised by director Lyndsey Turner and her design team.

In this 50th anniversary year of the Loving vs. State of Virginia Supreme Court case that made interracial marriage legal in all 50 states, it is right that the renowned Penumbra Theatre, which puts questions of social justice at the center of its artistic mission, should take up gay rights. THIS BITTER EARTH centers on a love affair between two men, one black, one white.