SPT conjures a spirit of fun

by Vicki Krajewski

SPT Theatre - An Elizabethan couple chatters away as several long-haired hippies squint behind pink-tinted John Lennon glasses. Meanwhile, a half-hearted vampire scans the crowd for fresh blood while a lonely Goth with a face full of piercings ponders volunteering to be the next meal. Heads turn when a masked Michael Jackson enters accompanied by a girlish devil — and this all happens offstage before the show begins.

Last weekend—yes, Halloween weekend — SPT Theatre offered the latest installment of their Tales from the Writer’s Room series entitled, Dead Moose on the Table, and the entertainment provided was as eclectic as the characters in the audience.

The program explained that the evening’s host was “Edgar Adam Woe” (Adam Witte), though this most fascinating emcee was not much developed as a character (which is a shame because he seemed like an amiable chap). Instead, he simply appeared on stage periodically with a leather-bound volume and, without comment, read pieces of Poe’s spellbinding works, beginning with The Conqueror Worm.

Upon first hearing this poem, I thought that the writers modified it, but then I realized that this selection was just that keen of a match for the occasion. Mr. Woe began:

Lo! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

The poem ended by explaining that, “the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’/and its hero, the Conqueror Worm.” In the way that this piece directly addressed the audience and acknowledged that we were watching a play, this opening was almost Shakespearean, reminiscent of Puck’s moment at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only this was more of a mid-fall evening’s musings. I’d say nightmare, but even though SPT chose a slightly ominous theme and performed on Halloween weekend, their approach to their subject matter remained consistently Puck-like: playful and never too serious, as evidenced by what happened after Woe finished reading the introductory poem. He slammed shut the book and dramatically, yet very properly proclaimed, “Oh mama, I’m in fear for my life from the long arm of the law,” at which point, the band leapt in with their pulsing version of the song, Renegade, which begins with those lyrics.

You can find good, live music in the Corridor area. And you can find good, live theatre, too. But it is rare to find these two things together in the Corridor, or anywhere, and that is one of the special things about SPT. Their music and theatre goes together like so much chocolate and peanut butter, only without the guilt or potential for triggering nut allergies. How everything works so well is something of a mystery, however, because the musicians and vocalists are as eclectic and individual as is the range of scenes, stories and characters typical of an SPT show. Their styles run from lounge-like to bluesy to folk-rock, but, somehow, their voices blend wonderfully. They all demonstrate an ability to balance their contributions to the music, shining in solo moments, and never stealing focus by overplaying or over-singing harmonies. Two reasons I was looking forward to seeing another SPT show were Janelle Lauer’s rich, textured vocals and Bill Heller’s sensitive and interesting song choices. I was not disappointed on either count. This time, though, Greg Kanz also busted out his mad skills in a furious drum solo. The band was creatively lit with multi-colored spots that danced to the music, creating the feel of a miniature (but still bonafide) rock concert. As evidence of this, I offer the following observed behavior: the audience not only clapped, but whooped and hollered after most of the numbers. By the end of the show, I found myself among the whoopers, having uncontrollably abandoned any pretense of my cold, impartial reviewer persona. I felt like a food critic in a fine restaurant with crumbs all over my face, loudly exclaiming, “Mmmmmmmmmmm! Can I kiss the chef?” But I digress.

For the next two or so hours, these sonic treats were woven in-between comical sketches about the grim reaper as convenience store employee, storytelling-type monologues about childhood fears, more readings of Poe, and scenes covering topics ranging from the hazards of drunk dialing to the “real” story behind Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic.” With few exceptions, the actors commanded the stage and created engaging situations and characters.

A particularly gut-busting sketch was recurring character Professor Peter Pizzle’s plenary address at the American Paper and Pulp Conference entitled, Up from the Cob, which was a lengthy and well-researched academic treatise focused mainly on the virtues of folding versus wadding one’s toilet paper. As Pizzle, Jason Alberty pulled off a perfect intellectual, pompous deadpan while explaining how toilet papering habits connect to personality. FDR, for instance, was a “folder,” while Stalin, he sneered, was a “wadder.” Waxing philosophical, he liberally quoted Robespierre and Nietzsche on the topic as the sketch reached for the heights of absurdity.

“What does toilet paper have to do with Halloween or Edgar Allen Poe or an expired moose?” you may ask. Not much, as far as I could tell, but it was so funny that it didn’t matter. One of the charms of SPT’s approach is that they aren’t heavy-handed or overly literal. For their Writer’s Room scenes and stories, they’ve been choosing loose themes, but then following their ideas down divergent paths, if that’s where they’ve led. The same is true of the song selections. Some pieces, like Frankenstein and Witchy Woman, very clearly connected to the theme or the sketch they followed, while other pieces just sounded great or gave the band a chance to showcase a particular, talented individual. Because you’re not beaten over the head by a one-dimensional idea, it’s easier to let your mind wander and engage yourself in finding connections between the disparate flurry of scenes, characters, and songs. So while everyone was having great fun, the evening as a whole was busy adding up to a sort of meditation around fear. How is it part of the human experience? How do individuals experience it differently—and in the same way? What is at the root of it?

Nowhere was this more evident than when Woe’s reading of The Raven was followed by Janelle Lauer’s rendition of Hurt, the pained song’s refrain repeating itself:

What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

The Raven is one of the first pieces of literature that I was exposed to—before I could even read by myself. I remember sitting on our basement couch in pink cotton pajamas while my father cracked a book and read it to me. I remember being struck by the spell that words could cast. I remember, even at that age, knowing that this poem was “scary.” But at that time my fear arose from the dark and foreboding imagery, and from the ominous tones of my father’s voice. Fear, at a young age, is made concrete, given form: there is a monster in the closet, there is a phantom in the dark. But even then, what we are actually afraid of is not the monster or the phantom, but the possibility that they might hurt us.

We are all, from a very early age, simply afraid of getting hurt. And that is so often the "Dead Moose on the Table;" the reason we do the crazy, irrational or even hurtful, defensive things we do; the one thing we try to protect ourselves from; the primal fear we flirt with and try to turn upside down on Halloween. The drive to avoid pain, whether physical or psychic, is something that unites all of us.

Listening again to The Raven as an adult, I understood the narrator’s darkness anew. This is a poem about our deepest, most central fear: the irreversible and inevitable pain of death and loss. “Everyone I know/Goes away in the end,” Woe repeated after Lauer’s song ended, and I could smell the dead moose on the table.

Then I thought, “Hey, how did I get from laughing about bum wiping to pondering the nature of human existence inside half and hour? Should I be upset by this dramatic change in tone?” But I wasn’t upset, because, before I knew it, a new scene unfolded and we were watching something that felt like a fairy tale, or a Jungian dream. When SPT tackles a theme, they include the kitchen sink, the yin and the yang, the long and the short. And it’s fun to not know what’s coming next and to be constantly surprised.

Of course, it wasn’t a perfect show. There was a wigged out doorbell and some awkwardly fumbled lines. Some scenes were stronger than others. One or two felt a little too short or undeveloped. However, none of these minor flaws stopped the performers from quickly recovering and jumping right back into the moment.

Unfortunately, I can’t recommend you go see this show, as there were only two performances. It is a testament to these artists’ creativity that instead of using the same material for a long run of performances, they present their work, and then move on to a new project—which is exactly what they’re doing now. So, while the Dead Moose has been laid to rest, you can plan to attend the next installment of Tales from the Writer’s Room, which is called Bless Your Heart and will be performed February 12th and 13th. This is no trick; it’s sure to be a treat.

Check out the rest of SPT’s season, or even buy their first CD here.

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

Reviewing Medusa

Riverside - When I review a show, I’m always interested in what I overhear between the acts and around the margins. I’m not eavesdropping on who had what for dinner beforehand. I want to know: What does the audience think of the show? Perhaps this curiosity arises from a lack of self-confidence in my own opinions, but I prefer to attribute it to a sense of the larger duty of the reviewer. I like to ask: What was this experience like—not just for me, but for the community of people who formed the audience the night I saw the show? And what will you, dear reader, be likely to see, feel and think if you come see what I saw?

Watching Raising Medusa by Barbara Lau at Riverside Theatre was striking in terms of audience reaction. The play centers on a mother-daughter relationship fraught with all the tension that adolescence introduces into the parent-child bond: a young woman tearing towards independence, an adult clinging to the image of a child who no longer exists, emotional fights about everything from shampoo brands to taste in friends. It is impossible to watch the show and avoid comparisons with one’s own life. “Every scene! Every scene something has happened between me and you,” a young woman exclaimed to her mother at intermission, just as the older woman sitting next to me leaned over and smiled. “At least my four daughters were easy,” she said with certain satisfaction. At the same time, I found myself recalling the fights and deceptions and general unrest I went through with my own mother when I was a teenager testing the (then very unsatisfying) boundaries of my independence. In short, the show strikes a chord and does a complicated balancing act in constructing the emotional needs of both the mother and daughter. One of the beauties of this story is that both points of view (the clinging to what was on the part of the mother and the stabbing for what could be on the part of the daughter) are developed with care and compassion. We sympathize with the mother; we understand the daughter. We see ourselves in each of them.

Behind the brilliance of the story shines the unique form in which it is relayed; it is a blend of poetry, scene, and even features a three-person Greek chorus whose members alternately comment on the action, crack jokes, serve as muses for the mother’s character (who is a writer), burst into little songs, and inhabit other characters as driven by the narrative. The seeming pastiche also garnered comments from my fellow audience members, who wondered out loud “how they were gonna weave this play together.” It is woven seamlessly, passing between beautiful poem and scene with lyrical ease and grace. Since the mother’s character is a writer, her journal (a ubiquitous presence on the stage and a character in itself) serves as a narrative device to prompt many of the poems’ insertions into the narrative. The chorus members alternately prompt the mother to read old poems which reveal something about the history of her relationship with her daughter, and to write “into the void”—to craft new meaning out of the uncomfortable struggle that characterizes her current relationship—so that we see, also, poems being created before us. The mother tells a story about burying the neighbor girl’s hamster, and how she realized she also had experienced a loss, a death; her little girl was never returning. “Come back, come back, my songbird, my jester, my cartwheel cross the floor for whom no ceremony of grief exists,” the mother laments in her striking poet’s voice that is at once witty, richly imagistic, earthy and wise.

Embodying the spirit of the mother’s character with grace equal to the language of the script is Nancy Youngblut, whose performance anchors the show. Youngblut does a superb job of portraying the sometimes crippling intensity of a mother’s love with sincerity and conviction. There is a delicate balance between hysteria and emotionality to be found in many of the scenes. In other hands, I could envision this character grating a bit — because there are a lot of fights and a lot of storming off the stage by the mother and the daughter — but Youngblut finds the emotional textures and contours that Lau has created in her script and creates peaks and valleys that we want to traverse with her. When she’s yelling, we’d be yelling too, dammit. When she cries, it’s with good reason. Likewise, she is convincing as an author. The poems she recites seem at home tripping off her tongue, and her handling of the sometimes complicated but always beautiful language is natural.

The mother-daughter scenes in the show are absorbing in their honesty and intensity, and they wouldn’t be thus without the also-convincing performance of Laura Tatar as the daughter (Maddie), who undergoes a physical transformation as dramatic as the psychological dimensions of her coming-of-age, going from a sweet kid in a dishwater blonde pigtail and blue jeans to a punk with severe black-and-red hair and extraneous zippers and safety pins everywhere. Thanks in part to the complexly woven script, Tatar plays the “angry daughter” two-dimensionally and sympathetically. We see both the rebellion (when Maddie hurls the “f” word directly into her mother’s face) and the uncertainty and insecurity behind it (when Maddie hugs a teddy bear or faces rejection from an old friend she’s neglected). Tartar plays both of these turns with equal conviction.

The actors in the chorus (Jody Hovland, Kristy Hartsgrove and Jaclyn June Johnson) nimbly insert and extricate themselves from the action, letting the focus stay where it should remain: on the main characters and their conflict. The chorus steps into and out of that story to move it along, trying on characters as diverse as “Ven” the teenaged “new kid in town” who is Maddie’s latest best friend and the mother’s worst nightmare, to jaded parents in the waiting room of a family counselor, to Medusa herself, snake-hair and all. The chorus is in sync and spot on with their uniform recitations and sometimes silly stray song bursts. I swore at one point they were going to bust out with a little Supremes number - but I digress. They are also effective in their independent characters, sometimes making startling transformations themselves. I had to double-check the program and rub my eyes, for instance, when I realized that Chorus 3 and Ven were both played by Johnson.

If the measure of a play is the effect it has on its audience, count Raising Medusa a success. It is a well-written, skillfully-voiced carnival of language both poetic and dramatic that will leave you thinking about your own family drama — or lack thereof in the case of the woman who sat next to me. “I think I’m glad I had four girls,” she told me when the show was over. “They worked it all out together, between them.”

-Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

A Review of A Number

Stage Left - On your way to A Number you may drive through a downtown awaking from a coma, discovering missing and paralyzed limbs. You may hear on the radio the words bankruptcy, financial crisis, market meltdown, record unemployment, toxic assets. As you turn right on 12th and left on 3rd and right on 16th, you may drive past a group of young men, wandering aimlessly past dark houses, yelling obscenities and throwing stray punches.

Then, on the corner, you will find the Paul Engle Center Neighborhood Center for the Arts’ white façade glowing, drenched in swooping murals of rainbow people and bicycle spokes, looking like a remnant of the Old West met the Wizard of Oz.

And then, as you sit down to Stage Left’s exacting production of Caryl Churchill’s short play, you may remember that even amidst the low hanging clouds of natural disaster, recession and poverty, the human spirit is as free to imagine and create as it ever was.

You sit down. The house lights go dark. Two men take their places in the ad hoc living room before you: one older, slightly hunched and defeated, in a dingy sweater; one younger, shoulders back, in a button-down shirt. Four lamps come up to warmly illuminate their faces, and they hold you spellbound and intrigued on the tip of their tongues for the next brief hour with Churchill’s fast-moving fragmented sentences and mythic-scaled themes.

“A number…” the play begins. There are a number of—not twins, but scientifically engineered copies of the younger man, Bernard (Steve Wunderlich). His father, Salter (Steven Marc Weiss), is deeply troubled by this news. There weren’t supposed to be copies. How could they? Without his consent? “They’ve damaged your uniqueness, weakened your identity. How dare they?” the father says. Bernard wonders if he himself is the original, or if he is a copy too. For how would he really know?

And we are introduced to one of the play’s themes. Who are we? And how do we come to know ourselves?

Bit by bit, Bernard discovers through his father’s reticent revelations challenging truths about who he really is and how he came into the world, while his father tries to hang onto his relationship with his son, and Bernard tries to hold on to some sense of self.

Bernard tells his father about these copies. They are the same, but not the same. They are exactly the same genetic person, but culturally, personally, they differ. Does Bernard want to meet them, the father wonders. Yes, Bernard thinks. He does.

But the story unfolds around the father, who is visited (almost Christmas Carol style) first by the secret original son and then by a cheerful copy whom he didn’t raise. The familial secrets revealed make the plot something of an unraveling mystery that I don’t want to unwind here, but the deep questions of identity persist throughout. In the final scene, the father talks to a copy of his son whom he’s never before met. “Tell me something about yourself,” he commands. The copy begins telling a story. No, that’s something you did. The copy lists things he likes: blue socks, banana ice cream. No, those are only things you like. “Tell me something intimate.” The copy obliges by telling about how he’s fond of his wife’s ears. That’s something about somebody else. In the end, the father is unsatisfied. The copy cannot satisfactorily articulate who he is; he can only tell what he likes and what he does. These are not the things, the father feels, that constitute a human being. There must be something more to being oneself, to being a unique person.

The copy wonders if the father can tell him apart from the son he raised. The father tells him that he wouldn’t mistake him for his son, “because of the eyes. You don’t look at me in the same way.” But by this time, after so many twists and revelations, we wonder if the father is telling the truth. Could he actually tell this copy from the son he raised? In the end, what makes his son unique is his relationship with him—how they know each other and the experiences they share. Identity is almost beside the point.

The story unfolds briskly and is deftly handled by Wunderlich and Weiss whose cadences amount to something of a linguistic duet. They interrupt and finish each other’s sentences with natural timing and use silence as effectively as sound. They build tension-filled relationships without resorting to melodrama and inhabit their characters physically as well as emotionally. Wunderlich, who plays three different versions of “himself,” does so with pleasing understatement; and Weiss handles highly dramatic moments with delicate authenticity, as when recounting his wife’s suicide.

After the show, the “house” lights return you to the interior of the Paul Engle Center, which is just as colorful as the outside, seeping with bright blue and pink walls lined with sculpted masks and portraits of diverse faces painted thriftily onto narrow paper lunch sacks. You realize this setting has conspired with its inhabitants to create an absorbing aesthetic experience.

Director Joshua Beadle mingles with the small crowd and the actors. He explains that he’ll graduate from the University in May, and that he began Stage Left Productions so he could have the opportunity to direct, and also because he wanted to see more contemporary productions in the area. He found the venue because he happened to be waiting on the table of its proprietor: a happy coincidence.

That a fertile oasis like the Paul Engle Center exists and that a handful of people can grab a couch and some lamps and create a theatrical experience that opens up a plane on which you can ask big questions about life and identity in the midst of a gloomy economy and a challenging flood recovery is edifying and heartening. I hope more people take advantage of this opportunity to be entertained while pondering their own humanity.

What makes you who you are? Culture? Nature? Experience?

And who are you anyway?

Stage Left Productions might just help you come closer to an answer. Go see the show, playing next week in a town near you (Iowa City) at another great arts incubator-type venue (Public Space One).

--Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

Review of Sarah, Plain and Tall

ICCT - This weekend, Sarah Plain and Tall opened at the Iowa City Community Theatre. This show may be familiar to some because of the tv movie version, and may be familiar to others because of the book of the same name. Vaguely, I knew it was about rural life when women wore long dresses and men slopped pigs. Normally, I hear about a show involving pigtails and prairie grass and run the other way through the romantic, undulating fields, but I decided I’d attend this one.

I rolled up to the theatre, skeptical, but heard welcoming tones as soon as I entered. The director has chosen to have live pre-show music, a guitarist and a vocalist, and this touch established a warm rapport between the audience and the performers even before the show began. Since one of the recurring themes of the show is the comforting and uplifting power of singing, this was an even more appropriate introduction and nice choice.

The plot revolves around a Kansas widower who takes out an advertisement for a bride, which is answered by the title character, the non-conformist Sarah, Plain and Tall. Sarah’s digressions include inviting the neighbors for dinner and yearning to wear overalls while she works on the farm. The conflict in the show revolves around whether or not Sarah will marry the widow Jacob Witting and help him care for his two children. Will the children accept her? Will Jacob? Or is Sarah just too modern to fit in on this Kansas farm with her crazy driving-into-town-on-her-own ways?

Brian Tanner as Jacob Witting is warm and establishes a genuine and convincing relationship with his children, Caleb (Daniel Burian) and Anna (Annie Hartley). The only shortfall in his performance is that he comes across as too nice all the way through the show, even when we are supposed to believe that Sarah is feeling oppressed by his traditional no-overall-wearing rules. He doesn’t give Sarah enough reason not to stay, so the romantic outcome of the show is even more inevitable than it might have been. And Sarah (Kathy McDonald) could be a bit more confrontational in her manner and tone at these times of conflict as well if we are to believe she’s wavering in her choice to stay or go. Not that you attend a show like this for the surprise ending, but still.

Howard Meadows and Mary Ann Cozine as the neighboring farm family also put in strong performances. They are fun to watch, especially Meadows, as his big voice fills up the performance space and he trods around in old jeans and boots.

But perhaps the most impressive performances come from the children, who the script relies on to hold this show together, particularly Daniel Burian and Annie Hartley as Caleb and Anna Witting. They have good timing, they look natural onstage, they nail their lines and they put in earnest performances. There are some emotional moments that could have been rendered with a bit more intensity and paid a bit more attention, but these are minor flaws compared to the energy and honesty with which the rest of the show is played.

Also grabbing a bit of attention is a hand-made quilt hung on the back wall of the set. The quilt is a nice touch. It lends authenticity to the time-period. It’s also up for raffle. You can pay two dollars for a chance to win it.

Aside from the quilt, the set is handled nicely, with a stage area set up for Sarah’s family back in Maine and a different area used for the Kansas farm families. A rowboat off stage right does a lot to remind us that Sarah’s character is used to the sea and misses it when she travels to Kansas and leaves her old life behind.

This is not a thrilling play. There are no acrobatics, no stage combat. No one really even raises his or her voice—save one well-played outburst by Annie Hartley.

It’s a quiet show, one about building relationships and trust, one about accepting people for who they are, one about how generally good people are. The actors take on their roles with skill, affection and warmth, and if you don’t feel good when you leave the theatre after this show, you must have had a very bad day.

Sarah, Plain and Tall, like the book and the movie, is a solid piece of entertainment for the whole family.

--Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

A Review of Apartment 3A

Riverside - To begin, I must say TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONES, PEOPLE.

Not once, not twice, but three times was the Friday night performance of Apartment 3A at Riverside Theatre interrupted by the grating chimes of the wireless albatrosses.

I noticed the absence of any kind of curtain speech, and I think this may have contributed to the problem. I understand the desire to treat the audience like grown ups, but it seems that a personal reminder is still necessary. A small note on page four of the program did not suffice. But I digress.

If we ignore the fact that I was harangued by ring tones and somewhere in the evening I lost my wallet, the show itself provided for an entertaining night out. And that’s what you’re really wanting to know, after all.

I was skeptical about seeing a show written by Jeff Daniels. The same Jeff Daniels, I wondered, whose filmography includes such gems as Dumb and Dumber, Supersucker, and the soon-to-be released summer movie entitled Space Chimps? The guy on TV begging corporations to open branches in Michigan? It didn’t bode well.

Neither did the first 30 minutes or so of the show. I am not a fan of facial expressions and gestures that look overly planned and bigger than life unless I’m watching a full-blown farce that would call for such broad strokes. This was not such a script, and I found the overly choreographed body language distracting and off-putting. Combine this with a strangely written tirade about the many ways in which Big Bird might die, and I’m checking out for the evening.

I had pretty much given up; then something happened. The female lead, Annie (played by Elena Passarello), had lunch with an ardent and endearingly nerdy admirer, Elliott (played by Jim Kropa). Their conversation unexpectedly turned to a debate about God’s existence, and, suddenly, I could completely forget I was watching “Acting” and just relate to these people and their struggle for meaning in life. The script itself became less gimmicky and more character-driven, and Jim Kropa delivered a speech about Elliott losing his parents at an early age with such honesty and simplicity that it brought me to tears. Annie and Elliott shared a delightful kiss, then intermission.

I came back to the second act with my hopes raised, and I was not disappointed, which is good, because finding hope in a seemingly hopeless world was a major theme of the show. How ironic. Or maybe not. Jeff Daniels, perhaps you are cleverer than I thought.

In the second half of the show, we get to see the humanity behind Elliott’s nerdy glasses as he embarks with his true love on an emotional roller coaster. We also get to learn more about Annie’s motivations, hopes and fears. The characters are, overall, more real, more human and more interesting to watch.

Tim Budd (who plays Annie’s confidante, Donald) flawlessly delivers a moving speech about finding the talent to paint his beloved wife, an event he interprets as a miracle. This is one of many really nice moments in what is ultimately a romantic comedy with a bit of a twist.

The play soon reveals a somewhat transparent “surprise” ending, but it doesn’t matter if you see it coming or not. It hits you. By this time, the performances are engaging and the characters are compelling.

I set my hopes and my standards high for a Riverside show. And, at least in the end, these hopes were rewarded. This is an engaging production of what felt like a bit of an uneven script. And even if I left the theatre without my wallet that night, I did have a bit of a cry, some chuckles and a little food for thought.

A night at the theatre that can make you laugh, cry and ponder where it is in your life that you find hope is well worth the time. Cheers to Jeff Daniels and the folks at Riverside! Get your tickets soon because a few of the performances are already sold out.

And now, my own surprise ending: Riverside rescued my wallet. Thanks, Nan Martin!

--Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

A second review of Hero Stories

(The first review is here.)

Rage - Over the river and through the sub-zero to Hero Stories we go. This collaboration between Rage Theatrics and the Old Creamery Theatre opened on January 19th in the Amana Colonies.

It’s a bit of a drive down meandering two-lane highways to get there, but the journey is worth it. First off, watching Hero Stories in the pleasant atmosphere of the Old Creamery’s proscenium theatre makes it all the better. And secondly, opportunities are few to enjoy over two hours of live theatre, complete with swordfights, for only twelve dollars.

Rage has become well-known in the area for producing shows in which stage combat plays an integral role, but Hero Stories is a bit of a departure for the group as it includes original works centered on the theme of “heroes.” Some of these works were more polished and tightly written than others, but it’s always invigorating to see new plays on their feet, and every piece presented had enough appeal to contribute to an overall enjoyable evening.

True to “Rage” form, the swords start clanking even before the curtain opens on a scene adapted from The Three Musketeers, and the high energy combat continues through a vampire hunting adventure and a slick, Matrix-inspired, post-apocalyptic duel.

The sets are simple but effective with lighting design going a long way to set the proper mood in many of the pieces.

The large ensemble cast serves the stories well. A few performers would do well to slow down and fill the space a bit more with their voices and presence, but many more performers take this opportunity to shine—too many, in fact, to mention each one by name. Some of the particular stand-out performances include Adam Turner as a comically self-aggrandizing Robin Hood and Brad Cary as a lovable yet oafish Little John. The cast of Pop Tart Hero was also particularly strong. Emily Dokken is lovely as the slightly awkward love interest, and Thomas Henrich’s performance as Stan is both impressively athletic and emotionally honest. Nika Neihaus and Nate Kula are visually perfect videogame characters in their hilarious “virtual fighting” scene.

Throughout all six pieces, the actors made the fight sequences appear natural and seamless (but not painless) while simultaneously working up a sweat.

As a whole, the evening achieved a nice rhythm and balance with three fast-paced shows in each act. Particularly wise was the choice to end Hero Stories with Pop Tart Hero, a play about an apathetic kid who longs for something tragic to happen so he can prove himself heroic. After watching five pieces full of serious swordplay and traditional stage fighting, Pop Tart Hero’s original take on stage combat is the perfect way to end the evening. It splits the side to see two fast food employees come to arms with spatulas, and to view a video game come to life. A man in front of me had to take his glasses off because he was laughing so hard his eyes were watering. Pop Tart Hero left me wishing there was a rewind button so I could see it again.

Not only does this piece amuse, it successfully leaves the audience with questions. What is a hero? What does it mean to act heroically? What will we sacrifice to be regarded as a hero? Is it worth it?

As the director’s note in the program reads, “We live in a society enamored with heroes.” Indeed, the hero’s narrative is one of the earliest forms of storytelling that exists. Hero Stories can’t possibly address all the dimensions of heroism that have been explored through the ages, but it does a nice job of mixing contemporary and classic notions while keeping the audience wholly engaged.

Even if it is twenty degrees below zero, take the trip out to see this collection of shows before it closes on January 27th. It’s not often that you can actually see blood, sweat and tears in a performance, but this one promises all three—plus a good belly laugh or two.

--Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

(The top picture shows Erik Wissenberg, Tyler Hanft, Brad Cary, Lane Hanon and Emily Dokken in Captain Blood. The bottom picture shows Nate Mims, Nate Kula, Derek Schmelling, Brad Cary, and Aaron Haworth in The Siege of La Rochelle. Both photos taken by Shuva Rahim.)

A review of Frozen

City Circle - Have you ever looked into the eyes of a serial killer? Not in some hokey Hannibal Lecter film. In person?

Go see City Circle's production of Frozen for an idea of what you’d see staring back at you.

Though its subject matter may be half-CSI and half-Lifetime movie, Frozen is mostly unfettered by salacious gore or maudlin histrionics. Credit for avoiding these pitfalls goes to the playwright, the director, and the actors, who conspire beautifully in this production to create honest, convincing characters in extraordinary circumstances.

If you drew a picture of Frozen's plot, it would be a Venn diagram. The sparse, blue-white set even reflects this structure with its overlapping platforms.

In the center, the principal character, Ralph, resides. He is a serial murderer and pedophile. He kills ten-year-old Rhona, whose mother, Nancy, occupies the stage left circle. At stage right, a third circle is populated by Agnetha, a slightly neurotic American academic at work on her thesis, “Serial Killing—A Forgivable Act?” who finds Ralph to be an intriguing subject.

You can't blame Agnetha for being drawn-in.

Matthew James’s performance as Ralph is the most striking element of the production. The lights cast a charming gleam in his blue eyes early in Act I as he coaxes a little girl into his van with a distinctly pre-meditated intention of assaulting and killing her. Through James's performance, we see simultaneously that Ralph is human, putting on hand lotion and complaining about his landlady, and that he is horrible, planning and carrying out tortuous acts on young children with no remorse. Or perhaps it is just that he does horrible things. But how to separate these concepts? And why?

This question was first put to me in an undergraduate seminar on Holocaust literature. “To say that Hitler was an animal lets us all off the hook and preserves our sense of humanity,” went the professor’s argument. If we can put Hitler in the “monster” category, we are free to go about living our own lives untroubled by the depths of his depravity—for we have nothing in common with him.

To admit that Hitler was human, on the other hand, indicts us all for the acts he committed; it indicts our very concept of humanity. This admission must make us all look into our own eyes and see not just the capacity for the sublime or the banal, but the capacity for hate, violence, and perversion.

How to deal with “the monsters” in our society? What do we make of them intellectually? How do we respond to them emotionally? Even physically? Where do we put our “monsters”? Do we lock them up? Torture them for information? Kill them? Forgive them?

These are essential questions at any time in history, but seem to have particular resonance in the epoch of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the anti-American villain du jour.

It would be gratifying (and even miraculous) to leave the theatre with answers to these questions. My experience, instead, was to depart with a string of unconnected thoughts groping for connections across the synapses of my brain.

In some sense, watching this play was like seeing a woman with a butterfly net poised to catch the secret of the universe capture only an empty chrysalis. I'm game for disappointment in life - and even in art.

But I couldn't resist feeling that some truth escaped the threads of Lavery's net because she wasn't able to balance the gravity of Ralph's and Nancy's stories with Agnetha's comparatively trivial dilemma.

This issue in the script threw the production off balance for me. There was one moment in particular when Agnetha's neurotic fit eclipsed my ability to make sense of the theories she was offering regarding Ralph's capacity for remorse and insight. Maybe this was the intention, but it was a moment that pulled me out of the spell of the play.

There were very few other moments like this—the most unfortunate of which had to do with poor Mister James's perpetually peeling, shiny mustache. To see such a remarkable performance dogged with such an absurd issue was like watching a bald eagle soar head-on into a pole.

Still, if the biggest hitch in a complex and challenging play like Frozen is an uncooperative piece of synthetic facial hair, I would call the production a success.

A unity of vision and directorial insight was apparent throughout, from the ethereal pre-show music, to the tow-headed young stage hands, clad in gossamer white, simultaneously running props and serving as visual voids, sad placeholders for the children taken from their existence by the “monster” of the show.

Go see Frozen. At the least you will witness riveting and skillful performances and arresting theatrical moments such as when Nancy confronts Ralph as her daughter's murderer. At best, you will leave with new questions about forgiveness, guilt, and responsibility. And if you find any answers, please let me know.

--Vicki Krajewski

Vicki Krajewski has acted and directed with theatre companies in Chicago and Iowa including the Prairie Center for the Arts, Sandcastle Productions, Dreamwell, Catalyst, Iowa City Community Theatre and City Circle. Several of her short plays and monologues have been produced in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Along with her performance pieces, she does occasional newspaper reporting, freelance feature writing, technical writing, personal essays and even some poetry.

(The above photo was taken by Wayne Carlson. Pictured are Matthew James and Deborah Gideon.)