​The Constructivists stage a captivatingly complex meeting between two people to the stage with the Midwest Premiere of Jennifer Lane’s contemporary drama To Fall In Love. Two estranged people learn to connect again on an intimate stage as Madeline Wakley and Matthew Scales intricately deliver the complexities of emotional entanglement in an interaction that lives onstage for a little over 90 uninterrupted minutes.

As the play opens, Matthew Scales is alone and restless onstage in the role of Wyatt. He’s fidgeting about on a set that’s been meticulously detailed by designer Sarah Harris to look like a contemporary furnished apartment lacking any real personality. Harris does such a good job of delivering the painstakingly generic flavor of modern interior design that its lack of personality almost becomes a kind of personality. It’s a neutral ground on which two people meet to discuss matters.

Before long Wakely arrives as Merryn--a woman who is running late. She is there to meet with him over a prepared list of questions. The questions around which the drama are centers are a New York Times list of “36 question yo can ask someone if you want to fall in love. (Or make your love even stronger.)” For the curious, there’s kind of a cool website that can walk any couple through the questions.

Lane’s use of the questions allows for a very rigid structure around which to slowly be introduced to Wyatt and Merryn.  Details of Wyatt and Merryn’s relationship gradually develop in a very organic interaction between two people. Even the best actors can have difficulty finding the emotional center between two characters when they’re the only ones onstage for over 90 minutes and no intermission. Director Jaimelyn Gray and Assistant Director Emmaline Friederichs have developed a really natural interaction between the actors in spite of the artificiality of the stage.

Wakely and Scales use just about every corner of Harris’ set. The restlessness keeps the physical energy flowing quite well. The real accomplishment here is that nearly every movement across the stage feels perfectly natural. Tow people moving across the stage in a drama like this can feel like a lot of...blocking...but Wakley and Scales feel very natural moving from one place to the next gradually in the course of the drama.

Wyatt and Merryn have only a limited amount of time and a limited number of questions in which to make any connection they’re going to make. They’ve both been through a lot and it’s made totally clear that this may well be the last chance they have to really make things work. Lane sets it all out very instinctually. Details of the lives of Wyatt and Merryn slowly reveal themselves as the audience bears witness to a deep conversation between two people who know each other quite well. In under two hours, emotions resonate vividly on a cozy underground space in the heart of downtown.


The Constructivists’ production of To Fall In Love runs through April 39 at the Underground Collaborative on 161 W. Wisconsin Avenue. For more information, visit The Constructivists online.

As citizens of a contemporary society dealing with all of the problems of living in a modern age oversaturated with information, we are absolutely crippled by the weight of injustice in the world. It is appallingly easy to do nothing in the face of injustice. Get a group of the most clever people of an era together in one place and one would hope that it would be strikingly easy for them to set aside their differences, recognize injustice and do something about it. It’s not as easy as that, though...a problem which is explored at length in Steven Carl Mccasland’s Little Wars--a drama about a meeting between Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein and Agatha Christie in France in 1940. Bryce Lord directs a production of the drama for the Milwaukee Entertainment Group which is staged this month in the Brumder Mansion.

Maggie Wirth plays a very obstinate and intellectually dominant novelist Gertrude Stein. The play is set in Stein’s home in Paris. As Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas, Donna Daniels is the sweet hostess  balancing out Stein’s bluntness. As the play opens, Stein and Toklas are prepared to receive guests. They are quite unprepared for the number of guests they are about to receive or the drama that is to ensue when they arrive.

Ruth Arnell plays the first to arrive: the American psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner. She’s early. She’s meeting Stein and Toklas on rather important business. Arnell playsthe mysteriousness of Gardiner as something of an enigma in plain sight. Delicate nuances wash over Arnell’s performance as each of the other guests arrive and begin to introduce themselves. Arnell is stirringly heroic as the social conscience of the ensemble. She’s an unknown among literary legends, but her ideals prove her to be a towering figure in her own right.

Cara Johnston cuts a dazzlingly shadowy figure as Dorothy Parker. Johnston plays the acclaimed screenwriter as a ceaselessly aggressive intellect  that seems to be constantly pushing to the center of the stage, even when she’s firmly planted in a chair as far back as the stage will allow.

Carrie Gray is inspiringly poised as playwright Lillian Hellman. There’s a crips precision about Gray as she constructs a very actively organic emotional resonance. In order to have achieved the level of success she had, Hellman had to be quite deft with the scalpel of interpersonal politics. Mccasland gives Hellman some of the most complicated internal dynamics in the ensemble. Gray handles these dizzying dynamics with tenaciously tame alacrity.

Victoria Hudziak is handed a challenge of an entirely different kind in playing Agatha Christie. Mccasland gives Christie a Sherlock Holmesian attention to detail that is paired with a clever tactical mind that keeps her from being completely open about all she knows. The challenge here is to play a character who is only pretending not to know A LOT more than she actually knows about a situation. Hudziak handles the intricate layering of Christie’s tactical mind quite well.

Molly Corkins is achingly strong in silent stillness as Stein and Toklas’ domestic aid Bernadette. Her resillience is revealed slowly from around the edges of the plot. As Bernadette, Corkins plays to another end of the same heroism that Arnell is conjuring as Muriel Gardiner. Corkins stands resolutely around the margins of the stage without over-rendering the heroic fortitude of the character, which is quite an accomplishment given the true nature of what she’s portraying.

It’s a really, really impressive cast from a variety of different backgrounds all coming together to play a group of people from a variety of different backgrounds. Rarely does an ensemble feel this well balanced on this many levels. It’s a deeply engaging dramatic experience that comes across as an inspiration to those of us still struggling to find some way out to do something other than injustice in an increasingly bleak world.

Milwaukee Entertainment Group’s production of Little Wars runs through April 6th at the Brumder Mansion on 3046 West Wisconsin Avenue. For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Entertainment Group online.

The Last Cyclist is a truly heroic bit of satire. The story of its creation, destruction and eventual resurrection would make a really good subject for a drama. Written and developed as political satire in the early 1940s in a concentration camp established by the SS during World War II, the play was performed for a single dress rehearsal before being banned by a Council of Jewish Elders who were afraid of SS reprisals over a play that was so blatantly anti-Nazi. Years later in the 1960s, a survivor of the concentration camp who had been a part of that first dress rehearsal reconstructed the satire from memory. Next month, Cardinal Stritch University Theatre opens a production of the play directed by Mark Boergers. He took some time out of a doubtlessly busy schedule to answer a few questions about the show.

The Last Cyclist is a triumph of art having survived the Terezin Ghetto in 1944 and eventually reconstituted into its current form. It’s been staged a number of times in recent decades. What was the inspiration behind staging it now?

The true inspiration behind the show at Stritch came from Dan Haumschild, Holocaust Education Fellow at Stritch and HERC, who brought the project to us in October of 2017.  It was my first time hearing about the production and at first glance I was skeptical because of the multi-layered complexity of the script and the project.  However, the more I learned about what this script actually represents and how it relates to the kinds of societal constructs that lead to events like the Holocaust, I became ever more intrigued by the project.  Plays that address the Holocaust in general can be seen as cautionary tales, especially when depicting the horrors of the events.   This script does achieve some of that depiction, but it goes further to represent a spirit of art and resilience in the inmates of this particular camp.  Their voice is unique, absurd and intellectual and portrays a particularly scathing commentary on the political and social climate of the time.  One only has to turn on cable news or the nightly talk shows to see how A. our political and social climate is just as tenuous as ever and B. art still has a unique and important role in commenting on it and affecting change.  In the most horrible of situations these artists still had the impulse to create, and that has immense resonance to an audience of any time and place.  Those kind of archetypal experiences have always been at the cornerstone of my work, so this project is a challenge I was excited to undertake. 

Promotional copy for the show says that, “spectators are invited inside the make-shift rehearsal space to bear witness...” The Nancy Kendall Theater is actually a really nice space. How are you using the stage to make it feel like an unpolished rehearsal space? 

That might be a little bit of the magic that I don’t want to reveal in too much specifics.   I will say that it was a big discussion about how to make the Kendall fit with our goals for the show.  Particularly the mixture between elements depicting the conditions of the holocaust, but also doing homage to the freedom of creativity and imagination in the minds of the actors that created this script.  We wanted to find a way to filter our own creativity and artistic process into the physical space of the show to pay tribute to their own limitless artistic dream world.

The Last Cyclist comes from the mid-20th century. However, there are universals in the theme that move well beyond any single era. How specific is the production to any one era? Is there any effort to draw parallels between the script and the modern global political landscape?

In looking at this script, it became clear that we needed to blur the lines between the historical grounding of the show and the satirical chaos of the play-within-a-play.  In very early production meetings, Dan Haumschild spoke to the fact that it is a fruitless pursuit to seek to depict the holocaust with any sort of historical accuracy, but the holocaust is not something that can be suitably explained.  In talks with the playwright, I also expressed the desire for a diverse cast in both age and cultural background, which she embraced.  This stemmed from the fact that my own personal process starts with how stories apply to all humans at all times and then moves more towards the specific.  This philosophy both freed us as a team but also restricted us.  We took ideas of what the original cast had available to them (bed sheets, discarded household items, bits of wood, items they took with them from their homes when they got arrested) and then sought to move from there to a more intense and artistically free world of imagination.   Because of this, I think we find a way to address the archetypal nature of the story without drawing specific parallels to what is going on today.  By grounding the show in the universal experience of artistic impression, it necessarily speaks to the fact that this story has resonance far beyond just that of the holocaust.

It’s a rather large ensemble that you’re working with and yet...there isn’t a single actor in the show who isn’t playing more than one character. That sounds like a lot of traffic to juggle as a director. What has it been like working with the cast on the show so far? 

It certainly is!  I have a large background in Shakespeare so I am used to multiple characters and juggling large ensembles, but this play provides challenges unlike any other.  I often find the “play within a play” construct challenging because one wants to pay attention to both the onstage process of humans creating a play and telling the story of artists who are real humans in process- but there is also the actual play and just how committed those “actors playing actors” can be to each of their pursuits.  Throw in the fact that this is a very complex, absurd and politically motivated satire and there is a lot for our team to manage.  Working with this cast has been glorious.  I am so fortunate to have the support of HERC to hire professional actors to work with some of our students, and in creating this ensemble I had the closest eye on who would be able to play together in the room to make sense of the madness.  We still have some playing to do, but the environment in the room has been charged with creativity, and the cast has been an organic part of figuring out the motivation and through line of the script.   It is in those moments of intense creative collaboration that I feel like we are paying the most specific respect to the original artists who crafted this story under horrific conditions.

The cast mixes established local actors with Cardinal Stritch students. Different productions treat a mixed student/non-student cast for a show in different ways. Some shows place the students along the periphery of an ensemble while others center them right alongside the rest of the cast. How integrated with the rest of the ensemble are they? How collaborative is the process for them? 

 This is an ensemble show, by nature. We aren’t sure how many actors/artists were involved in the original process and if all of them were there from the beginning to the end.  It was the process of rehearsal that they were interested in; spending time to create as resistance to the restriction of the camps.   Because of this, our process is as collaborative as possible.  I don’t see a line between the students and the professionals.  They all auditioned against others to be placed in this show and I expect the same kind of process from everyone in the room.   Of course it is a bit startling to all of a sudden welcome so much new energy into our University rehearsal hall, but from my training and experience it is those “squishy” moments when things feel risky and not-so-safe when the real magic comes out. 

There’s a stark contrast between surrealist absurdity in the script and the very real politics being explored in the story. Surrealist absurdity always runs the risk of undermining meaningful allegory. How are you handling the balance between surreal absurdity and real world political elements in the production?

That’s a great question- and I can only say I hope I am balancing it well!   My inclination is to always find the reality in the scene or the interaction no matter how absurd or surreal it may be.  There is motivation to any action.  I have released the actors from worrying too much about the political implications of the play.  We had amazing resources from HERC and other community organizations to have deep research and also interact with a survivor of the holocaust and hear his story.  We were able to discuss the political motivations of the playwrights and what may have been going on in the play.  But once we got on our feet I wanted to move away from that and delve into the story itself- to the full 360 degree nature of these characters as created and create a physical and emotional vocabulary for the play.  It has been a collaborative process and it feels chaotic at times.  I hope that means we are on the right track…..

Cardinal Stritch's production of The Last Cyclist runs April 5th- 14th at the Nancy Kendall Theater on 6801 N Yates Rd. For ticket reservations and more, visit Cardinal Stritch online.

Given the popularity of murder mystery stories, it’s kind of surprising that more small stage theater doesn’t engage in the crime genre. Writer/Director Katherine Beeson illustrates how easy it is to stage a satisfying original murder mystery script for the small stage on a small budget with Is Murder Tax Deductible? It’s a comedic love letter to the mystery genre in two acts with a short intermission. There’s love. There’s murder. There's suspicious activity. There’s a detective actively working to figure it all out. There’s nothing terribly deep or original going on here, but there doesn’t need to be. After all...who doesn’t like a good mystery?

It’s a retro drama set in the offices of a Milwaukee accounting firm in 1951. It’s tax season. Everyone’s a little stressed out. Somebody gets murdered. Scenic designer Scott Fudali’s small set on the stage of Inspiration Studios in West Allis is made to look like an old movie. Everything is black, white and shades of grey right down to magazines, decorations on tables and a  US flag in the corner of the office. Beeson’s costuming for the show follows suit with everything following the style of a classic detective noir made for the screen.

Mack Heath is cleverly rumpled as a gruff-looking Detective Phillip Bartholomew. The accounting offices of Dett and Merring have become a murder scene as one of the two partners has been found dead. Someone evidently shot him in the back of the head and Detective Bartholomew has to figure out who it was.

Joanna Langworthy is appealingly astute as the accountants’ secretary Bella Matthews. The one person in charge of knowing just about everything about the business, Bella has a firm knowledge of everything that goes on in the office. So why is it that it comes as such a shock to her that one of her bosses has been murdered?

Bella’s surprise at the sudden death of one of her bosses is as nothing to her surprise when he turns up at the office quite alive with an investigation still going on. There’s a good chance that whoever came to kill him ended up getting the wrong guy. In addition to having designed and built the set, Scott Fudali plays the gentleman in question with suitable vulnerability. The people responsible for the death of his partner just MIGHT pop-in for another visit if they knew they had the wrong person.

But...I’ve already given away too much about the plot. There are others. Rebecca Janey is admirably seedy as the ex-wife of the man who isn’t dead. Al Van Lith plays the fumblingly sleazy guy who owns the building where the office is located. Ed Spencer plays a respectable criminal who runs a Bait & Tackle shop located at Main and Hawley.

In a clever little bit of atmosphere the program features ads for a couple of the fictitious businesses mentioned in the mystery. The show takes place during tax season in 1951. It closes a couple of day before taxes need to be filed for 2018. It’s a cozy, little adventure with a few laughs as the winter draws to a close.


Cream City Theater’s  Is Murder Tax Deductible? runs through Mar. 24 at Inspiration Studios on 1500 S. 73rd St in West Allis. For ticket reservations and more, visit Cream City Theater online.

​A fat, old, bloated Broadway Phantom perches its opulent girth on the big stage of the Marcus Center this week. Deep on the bowels of that theatre complex in the shadow of Uihlein Hall, there’s something much more primal haunting Rehearsal Hall A. It’s a brutal tribal staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar animated by a primal percussion. Once again Bard & Bourbon glides through a very stylish and aggressively intimate staging of Shakespeare that shrugs off the formality with which the man’s work is so often presented. Director Zachary Thomas Woods grants the political drama a predatory, animalistic energy about it with a very bestial feel about it thanks to the artistic vision of set/costume designer Keighley Sadler, who also plays Cassius.

Keighley Sadler wields a crazy, vertiginous gravity in the role of the lean and hungry Cassius who schemes to dethrone the powerful Julius Caesar. Sandler’s energy in the role is almost hypnotic, occasionally in danger of tipping over the edge of melodrama, but never quite exploding into an over-the-top intensity. She’s moving around in a set she designed wearing costuming she also designed. She knows exactly how far she can push the drama without going over the edge. Cassius is enticingly seductive as animated by Sadler's shadowy radiance.

Bryant Mason is admirably formidable as the even-tempered Brutus. Mason is a monument as the tragic falling hero pulled into ambition by Cassius. Mason and Sadler develop an intricate dynamic of respect and suspicion about them. Mason’s slow and steady momentum plays clever contrast to Sadler’s restless energy. The nobility of Mason’s treachery illuminates the darker end of heroism as good intentions are corrupted into shadowy ambition.

Chris Braunschweig is a bit of an enigma as Caesar. There’s a steadiness in his towering presence that serves the role well. There’s also arrogance peering around the edges of his portrayal that speak to the darker ambitions that power might amplify. Caesar doesn’t have much time to make a direct impression onstage, but Braunschweig manages to make a firm enough impression in his limited time onstage to serve as the central anchor for the drama.

Susie Duecker is the consummate hero as Mark Antony. Duecker shows courage in the face of insurrection as Antony sees his friend Caesar fall and looks to guide the people to revolt against the assassins. Duecker has a deep well of charisma that feels very poised and polished throughout. It contrasts against Mason’s earthy, organic presence. The resulting dynamic for the dueling orations between Mason and Duecker is as deeply conflicting as it should be. Where Mason’s appeal to the people of Rome is an attempt to justify homicide with an appeal to emotion, Duecker’s deftly poised delivery of details feels almost manipulative. Neither character comes across all that well.

Duecker’s beauty and charisma tip the scales in her favor as a contrast against the bestial brutality of nearly everything else Zachary Thomas Woods has cultivated fro the production. The animalistic hissing and barking filling all the empty spaces of the drama make for a very bestial production in the intimate confines of Rehearsal Room A. It’s a very tough and gritty Shakespeare that is all the more animate and engrossing than anything some Phantom could bring-in by trailer to the neighboring stage. 

Bard & Bourbon’s production of Julius Caesar (drunk) runs through Mar. 17 at Rehearsal Hall A of the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts on 929 N. Water St. For ticket reservations and more, visit Bard And Bourbon online.

No Preparation
There are likely many questions that arise when considering a Boozy Bard production. Why has no one rehearsed the script? Why does all the casting for a given performance take place at random before the show? What’s the deal with all the. beer? Boozy Bard’s Jeremy Eineichner introduces each performance with an explanation having to do with history, Shakespeare and ancient script readings at taverns. It's all terribly interesting, but not terribly necessary. Shortly thereafter, names of characters are drawn at random by an energetic cast and history washes into the corners of everything as a classic plot is brought to the stage in abbreviated format that faithfully renders all of the comedy Shakespeare never intended in his classic tragedy.

Hamlet at the Best Place
Opening night of Boozy Bard Productions’ Shakespeare Raw: Hamlet  filled the space of The Best Place Tavern on what is likely to be the last of the truly cold evenings of the winter season. It was a small but dedicated audience filling much of the empty space in and around a large ensemble. The atmosphere works quite well...the bar is at the back of the performance space, allowing for people to rise and recede to get drinks in the course of the show.

There's a drinking game. (There's always a drinking game.) The drinking game for Hamlet? Well...it IS a script that reads a bit like Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits...so the cry of “DRINK!” rings out through the place every time a familiar phrase is spoken. It’s a highly animate, celebratory atmosphere. Oh sure, we all have to survive the twisted power grabs of an orange stain in DC, but if we’re going to watch ambition play out on a small stage, at least we can drink while we watch everyone die in Shakespeare’s most popular tragedy. It’s pleasantly cathartic to see the wicked die as we all have a couple of glasses of beer.


The Choosiness of Chance and Happenstance
Jim Donaldson might have been the first person to pick a role that night...the title role of Hamlet. Donaldson had such a classily organic presence in the role. There was something impossibly comfortable about the guy holding a script in one hand, a beer in the other and looking off meaningfully into the middle distance between lines.  Stephen M. Wolterstorff played Horatio to Donaldson’s Hamlet. Chance had chosen the perfect pairing there...a couple of guys who work well together in a comic context while also having a deep enough appreciation for the old script to sharply imbue it with loving, satirical delivery. Things were particularly well-balanced comically between, Donaldson, Woltestorff  and a rubber skull as Andrea Roedel-Schroeder played the gravedigger in the single most cliched scene in all of theatre. Oddly, three talented actors and one foam rubber skull made that scene feel fresh last night.

Where chance had chosen to be fairly straightforward with the casting of Hamlet, Horatio and a few others, there were rather interesting twists of fate including Thom Cauley’s oddly perfect imperfection as the fair Ophelia. To Cauley’s credit, he played Ophelia with largely serious drama, allowing the counter-casting to be its own kind of humor. Ophelia’s final scene was haunting counterpoint to the humor. Director Laura Holterman fosters an energy in the ensemble that balances elements of serious drama atop a foundation that feels rooted in a sketch comedy energy. Above all, there’s a respect for one of the stage’s most enduring dramas.

Boozy Bard Productions’ Shakespeare Raw: Hamlet runs through March 6 at the Best Place on 901 W. Juneau Ave. Both of the two remaining shows open at 7:30 pm. For more information, visit the show’s Facebook Events page.

I have been a parent now for about half as long as I’ve been a theatre critic. I suspect that the one job has started to bleed over into the other over the years. As a parent, one finds oneself constantly looking at the world for potential hazards. Constantly looking around for things that might go wrong has a tendency to color one’s critical thought processes. A large ensemble comedy like Sunset Playhouse’s production of The Curious Savage is fraught with potential dangers. It’s kind of a miracle that a contemporary production of the 1950 comedy manages to accomplish all it does in light of all the potential hazards. 

The Setting
This show takes place entirely in a mental institution in 1950. Back then it was a lot easier for people to laugh at mental illness because people were assholes. Okay...0kay...that’s an over-generalization of a very complicated situation in the mid-twentieth century, but the point is that setting the comedy in a world of mental illness wasn’t nearly as much of a touchy subject as it is now. Director Dustin J. Martin’s job of bing compassionate about mental illness while staging a comedy set in a sanitarium is aided by a very respectable script by John Patrick. Every one of the characters feels like an authentic person with very real emotional damage in the past. That being said, the characters could easily have played as flat crazy stereotypes were it not for thoughtful character work by everyone involved in the ensemble. Thanks to Martin, the ensemble and the script, the hazard of insensitivity is avoided because as sensitive contemporary theatre people, cast, crew and audience are all diligently trying NOT to be assholes.

The Comedy/Drama Mix
There’s laughter. There’s tragedy. Madness occasionally veers off in the direction of a punchline. It’s delicate stuff. Comedy thrives on the unexpected. It’s difficult to be caught by surprise if one is constantly conscious of whether a given moment is serious or seriously funny. Paula Garcia plays Ethel--a woman being committed to the institution by her family. We don’t know if she’s crazy or not so we don’t know if it’s okay to laugh at her. Is it tragic that she’s clinging to a teddy bear throughout the entire show or is it funny? And what are we to make of the fact that the teddy bear in question is actually kind of cute in spite of the fact that it’s missing an eye? (So many variables.) Dustin J. Martin, Paula Garcia and company avoid the ambiguity between comedy and drama by simply respecting the characters enough to be true to them. Any human. being is capable of being tragic and funny at the same time. The characters should be no different. Try to be genuine to the characters and let the audience decide when they should laugh...in the process of bringing the reality of the show to the stage, the balance between comedy and serious drama allows to assert itself organically. Martin and company understand this and respect it.

Sunset Playhouse’s production of The Curious Savage runs through March 17th at the Furlan Auditorium on 700 Wall St. in Elm Grove. For ticket reservations, call 262-782-4430 or visit www.sunsetplayhouse.com. My comprehensive review of the show runs in the next print edition of The Shepherd-Express.

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