Theatre in the Round - True West

I am so behind in blogging a few things I wanted to remember I did.  Maybe that's a good sign, that I'm more involved in getting out than in worrying about getting it written down/recorded.  Although I have to say that there's no shortage of video game and television time lately that proves otherwise.

The Friday before last, Jen and I went to True West at Theatre in the Round.  For the most part, it was a two person play.  Plus small appearances by a producer and the mother.  One brother who's a screenwriter house sitting for his mother.  Another brother who's a bit of a grifter who house crashes.  Both of them have something to prove to the other and it slowly, inexorably devolves into awfulness.

Both actors were great, but real props to the guy playing the grifter-ish brother.  He really sold the whole thing.  If you've got a brother, you can intuit a deep understanding for where this play probably came from.

Apparently True West is part of a trilogy or quintopoly of plays, depending on how you look at those things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_West_(play).  I suspect you get a real immersion into dysfunctional families if you double down on Shepard and anything Shirley Jackson-like in your concurrent reading [as I am].  I recommend the play.  It's appropriate that dark precedes comedy in the genre.

Eurydice

Friday night we went to Eurydice over at Theatre in the Round.  I liked The Bookclub Play much better.  I was very familiar with this story, so it was going to be about the different take on a familiar tale.

The last time I heard the story of Eurydice and Orpheus I was in Mythology 101 at the University of Minnesota.  I was probably a Sophomore.  Couple years ago.  Anyway, I had my little sister with me who, at the time, was maybe 10 or 11?  She's quite a bit younger than me.  My mom liked to drop her off for the day to hang with me so she could get some things done, and I definitely didn't mind  It was fun to haul my sister along, particularly if it was a great big lecture hall class where no one even knew there was a stealth student.  However, on that particular day my sister asked if she could have a box of Lemonheads.

"You'll drop them," I said.

"I will not," my sister replied.

"You will," I said.

"I won't," she replied.

I caved and bought her the Lemonheads.  I would have wanted them, and I'm a softy.

So we're in Mythology 101 and it's the day where we're talking about heroes visiting Hades/Hell.  The prof is going on for a while about Orpheus and how he made inanimate objects weep and the gates of hell opened for his music, it was simply that beautiful.  He's leading Eurydice out of Hades and he's nailing it; he's going to get his wife back. But then, what does Orpheus hear....what gives him pause... but the tumble of dozens of Lemonheads rolling down the floor of hell behind him.  Of course he looks back.  And loses Eurydice forever.

The timing was perfect.  It was the moment that Orpheus pauses, the whole auditorium was quiet for a moment, and then the sound of Lemonheads rolling for what seemed like a full minute as all the other students tried to figure out what was going on and potentially whether it was part of the story.

In the play, all I could think about when I saw the rocks [who were actors] and the rocks' shadows [also actors] was that they could have cast them as Lemonheads instead.

The play focused on forgetting and remembering and love and which parts of love last and which simply fade away.  Eurydice - Eva Gemlo - did a particularly good job. 

The Book Club [Play]

Friday night we went to The Book Club [Play] by Karen Zacarias [directed by Shanan Custer] at Theatre in the Round.  It's their 71st season over there.  I'm glad they made it through the deepest depths of covid.

Here's the official summary, which should be free of spoilers: "Laughter and literature collide in this smart comedy. Ana lives in a letter-perfect world with an adoring husband, the perfect job and her greatest passion: Book Club. But when her cherished group becomes the focus of a documentary film, their intimate discussions about life and literature take a turn for the hilarious in front of the inescapable camera lens."

The play was very good.  All about a group of friends at a book club and the interactions that are certainly not confined to the reading.  I don't think I'm giving anything away there - it's what you'd expect out of such a play.  Definitely funnier and lighter than some of what we see over there.  A lot of laughter from the audience. And I'd say pretty older kid accessible unless you're deeply conservative.  But if you are, I'm fairly certain you're not frequenting Theatre in the Round anyway.

Props to Baily J Hess who played the "pundit" and interjected some additional humor as a variety of characters during scene changes.

Because we use the flex passes and can't make it to all the plays - life gets in the way - I throw my extras at Ming.  Here he is photo bombing Aeryn.  He was supposed to sit next to us, but Julie wanted to see this one as well so he picked up an extra ticket.  But not in time to make sure all our seats were together.

These Shining Lives

Last night we went to see These Shining Lives at Theatre in the Round.  It was about four women who worked in a watch factory licking radium brushes until they fell ill and died.

It was a good play, but there was more exposition than showing, although I'm not sure how that's avoidable.  You can't exactly show the women with bones extracted from their jaws and pitted with radiation poisoning.  You have to imagine that part. And I'm pretty sure whatever you imagine, it's not as bad as the reality.  Go here (http://boredomtherapy.com/radium-girls/) and you can see a knee and chin affected by radium-based cancer.  Specifically, the chin/jaw of the main character.  They should have shown the photos at the play.  Pretty damn horrific.  I've always said I appreciate my job because although it might screw with the temporary livelihood of individuals, it never puts me in a position where I have to worry about their long term health and/or life.

Here's a link to a Radium Girls reading, which is parallel and took place in Connecticut instead of Ottawa (Illinois). 

 

The Metromaniacs

A week ago we went to The Metromaniacs by David Ives at Theatre in the Round. I wasn't sure what to expect...my concern was an early modern French period costume piece all in rhyme.

That's not what it was.  It was incredibly enjoyable.  He (or TiTR) modernized it a little bit with some purposeful anachronisms in talk (phones) and character (ditzy teen girl type) and pushed the rhyme in places to have fun with their farce.

Distilled, it was vaguely Austen-esque and Shakespeare-esque with numerous characters trying to find love with considerable confusion and misdirection.  It was just fun.

Emma

Today we went over to Theatre in the Round to see their production of Emma, the novel by Jane Austen as adapted by Sandra Fenichel Asher.  My take: I do not like the third wall Jane interacting with her play.  But perhaps that's because it was hard to hear her over the music and fan in the theater.  No...on contemplation I just didn't like it.  I acknowledge it was necessary to keep the play tight, although the movie did it in an hour and twenty minutes and I don't remember a faux narrator there.  Although who knows, per the image I've attached, there's certainly been more than one Emma (and more than one Mr. Knightley), so perhaps one or more of them had a Jane Austen narrator.

Otherwise, the play is an excellent adaptation.  Really well done to fit in the timeframe of a play.  There was a full house and the audience laughed frequently, and groaned when Emma was mean to Mrs. Bates before Knightley calls her out on it.  And although there are fanfic Emma/Knightley spankings, you won't get me to link to them here.  You'll just have to find them yourself.  Good acting.  The mannerisms helped drive the play beyond the words.

Eryn hates Jane Austen (really, she's related to me?  I backed a Jane Austen game on Kickstarter - Marrying Mr. Darcy which Klund played with the designer at Gameholecon).  But we talked about it in a historical perspective and how much influence there is between Austen and Shakespeare in the Comedy of Manners style, such as Much Ado About Nothing.

A View From the Bridge

We did the matinee at Theatre in the Round after lunch at Republic this afternoon.  I did not approve of my lunch, by the way.  They snuck a mayo-based chipotle sauce into my jalapeno hash.  Unlike the profile for most Minnesotans, my issue was not the spice, but the mayo.  I hate the stuff.  If there's a whiff of it in what I'm eating, that taste overrides all the other good tastes in my food.  Nasty.  It's not as bad if it melts into the food and is dispersed, but drizzles of it all over my food...ugh.  Might as well order a bowl of mayo in my opinion.

The play was good, although I'd summarize it by saying it's the most stressful episode of All in the Family I've ever seen.  We had a good discussion in the car on the way home about what the lawyer/narrator meant by settling for half as much.  My opinion, and maybe I'm way off, is that he respects something in Eddie because Eddie is the stereotypical tragic character.  You look at Eddie and his actions, and he screams Shakespearean conflicted protagonist.  There's a purity to his actions and his singular focus, even if that singular focus is way, way fucking wrong.  It's a short hop to thinking it's chivalrous love from where he stands.  But even in that respect, it's perverted and messed up and drives him down paths he shouldn't go.  It's flawed.  And he ends up dead in the end for his flaws, just like a tragic hero.  So the narrator is saying you feel like you're looking at someone who should be that hero, full of emotion and singular purpose, and who is so large.  And you should just get that out of your mind, because in a real world, with real people, and real repercussions, half is sufficient and maybe better off for everyone around you.

Aidan Jhane Gallivan was very good as Catherine.  We saw her in Fahrenheit 451 last season.  Michael Eagan made me so uncomfortable as Eddie that I can't help but congratulate him. I squirmed a bit in my seat.  I was not as taken with the Rodolpho character - it was the interpretation of him as having a wavering, quiet voice that bothered me.  I think it was to make you think extra hard about whether he was or was not gay and whether he was really using Catherine for her citizenship, but I think it could have been done another way.  Overall, an excellent production, although I still prefer The Crucible (which I last re-read as part of an ethics in science course in 1987).

Richard III - Theatre in the Round

We went to Richard III at Theatre in the Round not so long ago (next up, The Magic Garden).  It's one of my favorites because I studied the Tudors for almost five years as an undergrad and the liminal between Richard III and Henry VII and the changes to the government were fascinating.  So this sits right on the start of what I studied.  It usually feels like one of the most accessible plays to me as well.  How difficult is to understand a piece of propaganda where the main character is pretty much a total dick.  That translates in action, if not in language.  Eryn picked up most of it, and she's not a big fan of Shakespeare at TiTR.  Guy kills all his relatives, marries their wives, wants to marry his niece (this skeeved Eryn the most).

It helps to have all the history and know that it's a piece of Tudor propaganda.  Sure there were humps and nefarious deeds, but history is written by the victor.  Even more so if you're trying to back up a claim to a crown you're not really queued up for.

Lucas Gerstner (you work at Imation in your free time, Lucas?  That's cool) as Richard III was extremely good and really captured the conniving nature of the character in his tone and action.  He really made the play.

And Tyrrel and Ratcliffe as sort of hipster/Portlandesque assassins played by Daniel Vopava and Matthew Englund?  That was a good touch. They had solid, semi-sniveling, do-what-we're-told, lackey vibe.

Fahrenheit 451

I'm not blogging because of  New Year's resolution - I never do anything because of  New Year's resolution.

We went to Fahrenheit 451 at Theatre in the Round on Friday night.  The acting wasn't superlative, and the story is a little long winded in places because Bradbury turned book lectures into dramatic monologues (he wrote the screenplay himself), but it was still very enjoyable and a nice addition to the Shakespeare and Christie we sometimes see there.  Montag and Mildred (his wife) were believable, and Captain Beatty definitely had a psycho/evangelist/true believer vibe.

The set was well done for a minimalist attack.  They papered over the props/furniture, and it was modular so they could reuse it for walls and blocks and a sofa to switch between the fire station, Mildred's living room, and outside the town.

Their choice of books to burn amused me - I wonder if they bought my company's books by the pound or if someone is a lawyer in their spare time.

The play is VERY different from the book, but I'd read the book so long ago I couldn't quite remember all the details.  Apparently Bradbury modeled the play after the movie.  I had to go check the plot notes at Wikipedia, and they confirmed Beatty was a much worse character in the book, met a much more violent end (burned alive vs. a dog, although the dog noises in the play were scary, sort of Cloverfield-ish; they're releasing Cloverfield 2 btw, trailer here), and the book memorizers made more sense because there was a threat that civilization might end, at least temporarily, so the threat of no books meant not carrying forward culture after a catastrophe.

By the way - the Wikipedia page has a section on F451 being banned if you're into irony [link to a post on some local book burning].  The idea of burning the Bible, not the actual fact of it, was what triggered the ban.

Eryn was excited because the program talked about a video game from 1984.  I told her I'd owned it (and you can get a copy for emulation on DosBox) and that what I remembered more than anything else was the dogs.  It made me appreciate that some people really miss the days of text games when the focus was on the story and not open world.  Eryn's been playing Life Is Strange lately which seems to attempt to get back to some of that story telling while not losing the modern gaming approach.

We went to Town Hall prior to the play.  We were trying to go to Ramen Kazama, but the place was absolutely packed as we drove by, with people standing around waiting for tables. It worked out, because TiTR had given us a 20% off one meal coupon we used on Eryn's steak (she's a steak fiend), and Pooteewheet tried the Three Hour Tour Chestnut (in a tulip glass despite not a high level of alcohol) and agreed with this reviewer who said: "Shit gets Cadburry real quick..."

Full Frontal Male Nudity

We have been to an amazing number of plays lately.  I'm not even sure how we found time to fit them in between all the movies (including some esoteric but absolutely wonderful ones like The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared as well as Avengers and Pitch Perfect 2), MS Bike rides (85 miles), MHTA Spring Conference, Code Camp, and birthday parties and band concerts.  We've been to:

• Peter Pan at the Children's Theatre Company - beautiful staging
• Hairspray at Simley Theatre (high school) - best Simley musical so far
• Narnia, the Ballet at the Ames Center - beautiful, although Aslan scared me
• Bedroom Farce at Theatre in the Round - funny
• War With the Newts at Sandbox Theatre - yes, based on the science fiction novel

And last weekend, the regional premiere of Black Tie at Theatre in the Round.  It wasn't until we got there and were sitting down that Eryn pointed inside the program at the line that indicated we would be treated to male nudity.  She was horrified and I think for a moment she thought we'd just pack it in.  But you know, art nudity.  It's not the same as gratuitous nudity.  So she spent most of the play waiting to put her hands over her eyes.  When the nudity scene finally came and the son flashed his mother (arguing about whether he wanted to get married) Eryn tensed and....they flashed the other way.  That's the joy of a 360 degree theater experience.  Sometimes the nudity is facing away from you.  I have a sneaky suspicion they realized the only 12 year old in the audience was on our side of the theater and chose to flash the other direction on purpose.  Almost disappointing given how worried Eryn was.

It was a very enjoyable play.  The father spends the play talking to his dead father and trying to reconcile the fact that all the thought he's put into being a proper wedding host means nothing in the end.  A happy ending in that respect, as he embraces the change despite considerable angst on his part, his son's part, his dead-father's part, and less so on his wife and daughter's part. 

Catch Up - Part V - Cedar Riverside

One last catch up.  Goes all the way back to August of last year.  Kyle and I visited our old apartment complex at Cedar Riverside on a historical tour.  I've mentioned I lived there a number of times, and I'm often in the neighborhood, in part because Theatre in the Round is right up the street, but I haven't been back inside the building since I lived there in the late 80s slash early 90s over a quarter century ago. When we were there it seemed to be primarily low-income white and Hmong with Ethiopian immigrants just starting to move in.  My understanding is it's mostly Ethiopian immigrants now and the building manager (who was the building manager when we were there) noted that they tend to stay longer because of religious no-interest-bearing loans restrictions which can keep them out of houses.  But the flip side is they're very nice to their apartments because they're there for a long time.

The sign sort of freaked me out because it didn't really occur to me when I moved in that it had only been there about 13 or 14 years.  Kyle and I lived there in the first 1/3 of its existence.



I craned my neck to look at this view more times than I can remember.


When they repainted, they kept the colored panels because there's a lot of nostalgia about them.  Brighter than what I remember some of the older pastel-ish pinks being, however.


At one point they took us to the roof of McKnight where they used to allow residents to go.  Kyle and I must have missed that opportunity by a few years, so it was exciting to get up there.  McKnight is 39 floors high.  Kyle and I lived on the top floor of D, facing Cedar Avenue, which was 21 floors.  That was so high fire truck ladders couldn't reach you, so this was WAY up there.  If you click through to Flickr, some of these are nice in a larger resolution.  I particularly like this one.



Looking at the nearby highways.


The University of Minnesota.


I think we're looking at the new I-35 bridge here.  That tall apartment building to the right of the bridge is where my Arthurian studies professor lived with her older (also a professor) husband.  The windows on the decks were removable, but her husband was too old to handle them, so one class assignment was to swap out the windows while we talked about our Arthurian projects.  That bluish building is Theatre in the Round.  The white building in the foreground is where my wife once got the red bean paste Good Wife cookie she had to spit up in her hand.  To the right of it, with the green awning is the Acadia where Kyle and I went for lunch  Beneath my feet are the Wienery from the post referenced above and the Cedar Riverside Cultural Center.


The new stadium going in.  Much further along now.  As of this week they were working on siding and glass/windows and moving the Star Tribune folks to new digs so they could use their building as a park.  Kyle sent me an article about Jon Bream's 25000 record collection being sold off as part of the move.



You'll have to go zoom in on this one.  Not much point to a tiny panorama.
Larger panorama



They also took us on a tour of a room. These look EXACTLY like the single bedroom Kyle and I shared for two years in college.  More than a bit of deja-vu.  This is the room we slept in.  Kyle had the left side of the room


I slept right next to this window, except 21 stories up.  I loved waking up to the full wall drop off every morning.  Definitely gets your brain going.


This is why we didn't have parties at our place.  Obviously we could have let some of them hang out in the bedroom, but still a bit crowded.  This picture does highlight that we had a pretty nice one bedroom apartment in college.  It's plain, but the fact that these tourists all fit with room to spare shows just how much room we had if you include a separate kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom.  Not to mention it came with cable tv, close circuit cameras for the front doors, sprinklers (after year one), a/c and heat and water shared communist style across everyone, and more (like one of the few apartments at that price with a dishwasher).


Speaking of shared a/c and heat, they took us for a tour of the bowels of Riverside Plaza.


Hard to see it in this picture...


...but the equipment is enormous.  This was just one of the rooms.  At the time, I was just happy for heat and a/c.  I never gave much thought to exactly how big the apparatuses were that kept me happy.

Catch Up - Part I, Missing Theatre in the Round

This is purely a bit of catch up to get some documentation around a few photos I don't really have descriptions around.  I'll get back to my week of vacation momentarily, but you can consider this a hard core effort to avoid taxes, bills, and presentation work for work while hanging at the coffee shop.

Where to start...where to start...we're going to start with Theatre in the Round because there's only one photo, and then we'll do a separate post for Part II and/or III so this post isn't 20 pages long.

I've missed talking about two plays at Theatre in the Round.  Back at the end of 2014 (December 5) we went to Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution.  I can remember it well because I can sum it up as paying to go see a mock trial with a twist at the end.  Almost the entire, long, play was about the trial and at the very end you learn there's a twist.  Almost a deus ex machina, without the machine and without the god/s, to tidy the whole thing up. There's probably a term for that, but it escapes me at the moment.  Don't get me wrong.  I like mock trials.  I volunteer at mock trials. Dixon v. Providential Life Insurance is one of the most popular posts on Nodtonothing.com. But I like them when I'm involved.  Not as a spectator.



We also went to the Drawer Boy this year.  What really stood out in the Drawer Boy was that one of the three main characters, the farmer, was Hermann Goering in 2.  A play my wife and I both remember well because he did such a great job.  Amusingly, it's not on my blog not because I was slacking, but because it predates Eryn and ran January 5-28, 2001. I thought it might have been the play where Pooteewheet was 9 months pregnant and ready to explode, but the timing isn't right.  That had to have been a different one.  She was very confused about The Drawer Boy before we went.  She was certain it had to be about a boy who lived in a drawer, as in part of a cabinet.  I said it was about a boy who drew.  She was pretty sure that was nonsense.  I didn't tell her I knew better and that despite not having seen the play before, I knew a little about it.  I have to say it was one of my favorite plays at TiTR so far.  A lot of progressive revelation between the characters about their involvement in the war and how they survived after the war and the nature of survivor's guilt both on and off the battlefield.  All helped along by a young somewhat-naive hippie playwright who serves as the foil for the best humor and driving the revelations.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...Really

Friday we went to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Theatre in the Round.  I didn't know anything about it and, at first, it was strange.  Miss Brodie is a peculiar character talking about how her female students are the crème de la crème and she's putting old heads on their young bodies.  Over the course of the play it becomes evident that what she's really saying is that she has these ideas about how exciting the world should be, how much grander it should be than her own life.  And those ideas spill over into how she interacts with everyone, positioning them to be Lady of Shallot-like, resistance fighters, and other characters in an internal view of the world that, while it isn't obviously crazy, is warping and dangerous to her students, particularly given her status as their teacher.  One student, the one she positions as the practical and dependable character, rebels and fills positions that don't fit Miss Brodie's plans for individuals, on purpose to push at Miss Brodie and to show her that the way she's casting her students in roles that fill her grandiose, literary, visions of the world are limiting and, eventually deadly.

It was a very uncomfortable play - and one of the few at TiTR over the last several years to make me really think - in how the teacher's belief in her the greatness of her students was, in the end, limiting and problematic, despite being a draw for those students and the men who loved her and who couldn't fulfill her internal narrative (made external).

An amusing TITR-specific story is that Sue, who I used to work with, was there and noted that the nudity in the show was undertaken by someone her son had been in high school with, which made her feel particularly old.

Saturday, my wife and I went to the Trylon (yeah, new projector, paid for in part with corporate matching dollars from our donations.  TITR listed donations from us which were matched as well.  It's good to know my art-related donations are going to places I frequent).  They were showing Picnic at Hanging Rock.  It wasn't nearly as fast at the Zatiochi series Kyle, Ming, Eryn, and I have been attending, but it was surprisingly similar to Miss Jean Brodie in a few respects (Zatiochi is not).  At one point one of the teachers says of Miranda, who disappears, that she's like a Botticelli angel and it comes with all the baggage that being that angel would entail.  Something to look at rather than a character of action.  Shortly afterwards, all the gazing at Miranda (and her friends) that has happened, turns to active searching as they disappear at Hanging Rock, nearly naked by the terms set forth in the movie (stockings, corset, gloves).  Sexuality in part has caused them to disappear as visions of courtly/painted love.  It is a SLOW movie.  But that gave you plenty of time to think through what they were doing, and why the search was so important, and what their disappearance was doing to all the other characters in the movie.  Pooteewheet (my wife) and I thought at first it might be based on a real event.  But it's not.  And that makes the unresolved ending all the more intriguing in a movie.  When I popped over to Wikipedia to look up what else Peter Weir has directed, it wasn't a surprise to see The Truman Show, The Mosquito Coast, and Gallipoli (which was the one I knew).

Don't Dress for Dinner

I forgot to mention we went to Don't Dress for Dinner (alt wikipedia) by Marc Camoletti at the Theatre in the Round not so long ago.  It's wedged between two plays with adult content: Six Degrees of Separation and Dead Man's Cell Phone.  Given Eryn actually blushed when there was a scene where someone "inadvertently" bent someone else over a couch for comic effect, grown up content must be really grown up at TiTR.

But Eryn really seems to enjoy the ham-it-up sort of plays with the attendant miscommunication and mistaken identities.  And intermission allows us to parse it apart in chunks and catch her up if she gets a little lost.

I agree with TC Daily Planet, it was a particularly good showing by Heather Burmeister as Suzette the Cook.  She seemed stiff for the first few lines and then really loosened up and stepped up as the primary presence in the play, tying all the characters together by being at the center of their machinations.

Spider's Web

Last night we went to Agatha Christie's Spider Web at Theatre in the Round.  In my opinion, I think it blew away everything we've seen there in the last year or so.  An excellent story with plenty of humor revolving around a body found in a house being rented by Clarissa Hailsham-Brown and her husband; a bit of name confusion, drugs, antiques, and lots of supposing.  Some great new actors, including Laura Anderson as Clarissa and Pierce Huxtable as Jeremy Warrender.  Laura was particularly good and her acting fit the Clarissa's character to a tee.  I don't think I was ever taken out of the character and I believed she was charming enough to lie about a murder and still have the sympathy of all the men in her life.  Even the bit parts such as Constable Jones (Grant Hooyer) were played for some humor that elicited open laughs as he stole snacks, was overly attentive to Clarissa, and engaged in a bit of the traditional British policeman walk ala Monty Python.

Eryn enjoyed all 2 hours and 20 minutes of it, finishing up close to midnight.  I've never seen her quite as awake after a late show.

Morning's at Seven

Last night we went to Morning's At Seven at Theatre in the Round.  It was very well acted and well done and I think it helped that I had never watched a single one of the three television performances.  That meant everything remained a surprise, including the funny bits.  The basic plot is about four sisters who find after many years that it's still not too late for things to change, and for the better.  Life doesn't have to remain the same and what seems like disruption and heartbreak at first can lead to growth and opportunity.

Aaronetta (front) was particularly good, although that's probably the Minnesotan in me bonding with a character that seems like she comes right out of the rural parts of the state.  Homer, the son who can't commit to marrying Myrtle, reminded me somewhat of what my nephew would be like if he'd had a bad chromosome or been dropped on his head more often.

Eryn agreed that it was enjoyable and she had a great time for an 8:00 p.m. show.

The Imaginary Invalid

Last night we went to Theatre in the Round's The Imaginary Invalid (alt) by Moliere.  I was looking forward to it as I had played in Moliere's The Doctor In Spite of Himself in high school.  It was Eryn's least favorite play so far, although my wife and I suspect that has way more to do with being tired than anything about the play.  It was one of our favorites so far.  Very funny, despite what always feels like a bit of disjointedness in Moliere as far as I'm concerned.  Toinette, the maidservant, played by Katie Kaufmann was particularly enjoyable and was on character even when the focus was elsewhere.  Her vocals, facial expressions, and mannerism all made for a believable servant who exhibited a bit of wit and sarcastic humor. 

We both particularly liked the scenes where Dr. Diafoirus is trying to convince Argan, and more accurately himself, that his son is a good marital catch by providing back-handed compliment after back-handed compliment including how he appropriately waited until he was nine (9) to learn the alphabet, and where Argan is explaining to his younger daughter Louison, played by Molly Pach Johnson, that his pinky finger can tell the truth.  Their exchange became more and more humorous until Louison is arguing directly with the finger and accusing it of lying.

Thom Pinault as Beralde, Argan's brother, gave me Donald Sutherland flashbacks whenever I closed my eyes.  An excellent voice, a great actor, and a level-headed foil to Argan's flightiness.

My least favorite aspect of the play was the very strange hip hop/rap interlude.  It felt like they were trying to modern it up a bit and make it interesting, but it ripped you right out of the play and felt extremely strange.  I redlined it in my head when it was over and have been trying to pretend it didn't happen, marring what was otherwise an extremely enjoyable play.

Appointment With Death (there will be spoilers!)

"There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,  now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra." [The Appointment in Samarra, retold as The Appointment in Petra in Appointment With Death]

Friday night the family went to Theatre in the Round to see Agatha Christie's Appointment With Death. Despite a bit of a weak cast - I really hate saying that, having once done quite a bit of acting myself, so you know when I say it I'm likely serious about something lacking in a performance - Molly Pach Johnson as Sarah King and Scott Keely as Dr. Theodore Gerard, the two most vocal parts, were both very good.  Molly was very good as Helena in All's Well That End's Well that we saw earlier in the season. And Muriel J. Bonertz as the domineering Mrs. Boynton scared me, so an incredibly good job on her part.  I believed she was capable of such malice that she'd off herself to leave her children domineered and cowed even after her death.  Amusingly, at least to me, I found the relationship between Dr. King and Raymond Boynton more believable because his more wooden delivery could be interpreted as deferring to a stronger female character.  First his mother, and then Dr. King.  Similarly, Ginerva seems destined to move from being under the thumb of one domineering character to another. Only Nadine and Lennox seem to find a new balance of power that's more egalitarian in their lives.

The play has quite a few changes over the book.  A major one is that there's no end-game explanation of what happens to the characters, which apparently is spelled out in the book, each of the children going on to lead happy lives.  And there was an interesting discussion post play as we left.  Eryn (age 10) and I were convinced that Dr. Gerard had gone a bit Hannibal on everyone.  I think in the book and the traditional version of the play, Mrs. Boynton is truly conniving and offs herself of her own volition when she discovers she only has six months or so left.  In the end of the TItR production, Dr. Gerard does a little bit of exposition that left me feeling as through perhaps Mrs. Boynton was just fine, and Dr. Gerard had planted the six month idea with Dr. King, who had planted it with Mrs. Boynton, who had offered herself as Dr. Gerard hoped based on a psychological profile, in order that Ginerva would be freed to go with him.  That makes it a much creepier story.

I put a copy of the play on hold at the Dakota County Library so I can do a bit of mental contrast and compare.

In the Rest Room at Rosenblooms

Friday night we went to Theatre in the Round to see "In the Rest Room at Rosenblooms" by Ludmilla Bollow.  I'd liken it to something like The Golden Girls, but without all the obvious one-liners and a disturbing theme about getting old and not being able to let go of the past.

Myrah, Violet, and Winifred are three elderly women who meet in the department store restroom consistently, and each is facing a personal issue.  Myrah is losing her health.  Violet is losing her house (more accurately, all her money).  And Winifred is losing her mind, a slow process that started when her husband died in the war 40 years earlier.  They band together to combat Winnifred's sister Clare who wants to take Winnifred back to her dog kennel where she's good at training both dogs and humans, and she can make sure Winnfred is safe (and potentially sell Winnifred's house and leverage her war widow pension).  Clare is tenacious and accounts for much of the humor in the show. She reminded me of the paperboy in Better Off Dead with John Cusak, except her $2.00 is Winnifred.  At the end of the play (spoiler!) Clare is tied up in the bathroom with an old fur coat, still trying to get her hands on Winnifred (who has agreed to go with her, but doesn't end the play with Clare).

The actresses did a wonderful job, and Maggie Bearmon Pistner was particularly good as Myrah.

Life and Beth

Last night we went to Life and Beth at Theatre in the Round.  Very enjoyable and much more digestible for Eryn than All's Well That Ends Well, which was a struggle with the language, but which she still enjoyed.  She laughed out a loud a few times during Life and Beth, despite some grown up themes here and there.  It was a good play to find humor in, and it's fun to take her to some plays that are both funny and sad and make her think about what the playright is trying to convey and the complexity of people, opposed to the Children's Theater plays which are more one dimensional, even when they have a more complex theme.

I've been to an Alan Ayckbourn production before.  I saw Absurd Person Singular in London back in the very early 90's when I was there by myself.  I didn't know anything about the play before I went, and at the time the suicide theme for Eva was just too depressing to allow me to enjoy it, despite the humor in the other parts of the play.  But it was exciting to go to a play in London, which was my point at the time.  I notice in the Wikipedia article about Absurd Person Singular, it says it was playing at Whitehall Theatre in May 1990.  That would have been when I was there seeing a play at the West End.

But back to Life and Beth.  Funny, although in a dry way given most of the characters are dysfunctional in some way.  Alcoholic sister in law.  Overbearing, passive-aggressive (but dead) husband who says things like "hand on heart" and argues about how they've never argued.  Son who's driving his girlfriend nuts.  Girlfriend who's nuts (and talks once, which Eryn caught and we didn't).  And widow who is, in many respects, happy she's on her own.  I liked the idea that the dead husband's (Gordon Timms) parents used to tell his sister (Aunt Connie) that he had lapped her three times, until she could feel him breathing down her neck.  My sister should tell her eldest that same thing just so she knows to try harder.  And the vicar tells the widow at one point that she should accentuate the positive (the old Johnny Mercer song) and that she's still young, "for a woman."

As the Star Tribune review states, Jean Wolff was excellent as Beth.  She was the most believable of the characters and her reaction to her life with Gordon gone was illuminating.  An excellent production.