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.

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.

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.