​Milwaukee Chamber Theatre has been doing a really good job of tackling the challenges posed by COVID. The pre-recorded productions that the group has been bringing to the internet are among the most satisfying that Milwaukee has had to offer. This month MCT opens its production of Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel.  The production stars Elyse Edelman as a librarian giving a presentation regarding the mystery of a library book that had been retuned 113 years overdue. A dry cleaning ticket and a number scribbled into the margin of the book serve as the opening of a long and winding story told with great enthusiasm in a one-woman show that’s online this month.


Traditionally the one-character play draws a great deal of appeal from the strength of a single performer onstage drawing-in an audience for a sustained, intermission-less 90 minutes or so. It would take a very unique kind of energy to translate that energy to the screen for an online production. Edelman plays a librarian from Holland who travels far to discover the mystery of the book’s history. Edelman’s Dutch accent is warm and deeply engaging. She brings a very sophisticated reality to the stage aided only by a slide projector, blackboard and irrepressible intellectual exuberance. A video format would theoretically tempt a director to add-in superfluous elements intended to amplify the production. MCT Artistic Director Brent Hazelton shrewdly allows Edelman a stylishly minimalist production.


The playwright hands Edelman numerous difficulties that the actress finesses with a strikingly deft poise. Berger’s script requires the librarian to be an expert storyteller gradually unveiling the elegant convolutions of the story. Edelman does the brilliantly. Berger’s script requires the actor playing the librarian to be vulnerable while wielding a great inner strength. Edelman plays the librarian’s arcane constellation of trivia with a beautifully idiosyncratic appeal that swims in and around Berger’s script. The complex intricacies of the mystery can make the librarian feel like a bit of an obsessive schizophrenic obsessing away at minor trivialities even as her life seems to be falling apart in the process, but Edelman draws strength from the character’s love of the mystery that’s truly inspiring.


Milwaukee Chamber Theatre staged a production of Underneath the Lintel back in 2013. James Ridge played the librarian. Like that live staged production, Edelman’s pre-recorded performance engages audiences in a journey through the fringes of history that reaches into the heart of human curiosity. There are moments in every mystery thriller in which intrepid investigators discuss clues that they have run across in the course of their struggles. (It’s one of the better elements of any good mystery story.) Berger’s script lives exclusively in those moments. Like Ridge before her the better part of a decade ago, Edelman finds the energy of those moments with graceful tenacity. Edelman is an immensely appealing video Sherlock Holmes for any number of living room Watsons.


Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Underneath the Lintel is available through May 2nd. For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.

Milwaukee theatre percolates in and around the edges of the internet in April as COVID’s impact on the stage continues to be felt more than one full year after the initial outbreak. April offers a little bit of everything from drama to comedy...from shorts to feature-length shows. There’s even a live reading onstage for those interested in venturing out to Hartland this month.

Someone has returned a book to a library that is 113 years overdue. A sole librarian goes in search of the book’s history with one initial clue: an unclaimed dry cleaning ticket. This is the premise behind Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel. This coming month, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre stages the show online in a production featuring the always-engaging Elyse Edelman as the librarian in question. Brent Hazelton directs the show, which runs April 9 - May 2 online. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre has done a really good job of bringing compelling local theatre to the internet. With Edelman paired with a good script, MCT appears to have another compelling show for the 2020-2021 season.

The Village Playhouse has maintained activity over the course of this past year. This coming month, they’re bringing program of three shorts by George Bernard Shaw online.

“Overruled,” is a one-act about a pair of couples looking to negotiate complexities of open relations. 
“Passion, Poison and Petrification,” involves a poisoning and cure-by-plaster in a rather strange comedy.
“How He Lied To Her Husband,” is a three-person comedy involving a woman named Aurora, her husband and her lover.

An Evening With Shaw is available April 15-25 online. For more information, visit Village Playhouse online.

Deanna Strasse directs a staged reading of a play she’s written that will be staged in Hartland at Lake Country Playhouse this month. Islands is set in a bed and breakfast in Ireland. A group of strangers come together in a potentially fun, little excursion outside of Milwaukee for anyone interested in seeing something live. Lake Country Playhouse will, of course, be staging the reading in a reduced-capacity socially distanced format. The show will be performed Saturday, April 24 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, April 25 at 2:00 pm. For more information, visit Lake Country Playhouse online.

Director Michael Cotey brings a contemporary drama to light in Next Act Theatre’s latest. An American soldier is accused of war crimes in Iraq. Casey Hoekstra plays the soldier in question who finds himself lost in encounters with superior officers, lawyers, preachers and more. The cast also includes Next Act Artistic Director David Cecsarini, Chike Johnson and Malkia Stampley.

“9 CIRCLES is not about war or Iraq,” says Next Act Producing Artistic Director David Cecsarini, “but the journey of a man discovering himself within the environment of war.”

The show runs April 26 - May 16. For more information, visit Next Act online.

​It’s an hour in a basement with an insurance agent. It’s okay, though: she’s cool. She’s enjoyably philosophical and engagingly articulate. And she’s played by Jennifer Vosters so…y’know…she’s really cool. It’s a one hour video production of Lauren Gunderson’s Natural Shocks. The one-act monologue is set in “A half-finished basement in a normal house in America right now.” Only it’s not right right now. She doesn’t mention anything about COVID. And she would because she gets into A LOT of different topics over the course of the monologue. And because she’s really really into risk assessment. She would have preferred to be an actuary, actually.


Directed by Micheal Cotey, the incredibly tight, little video package was produced for the Third Avenue Playhouse as a part of its PlayWorks 2021 online series. It was available for one night only on the 19th, but wow…it’s REALLY too bad this video isn’t available anymore as it was one of TAP’s “special events.” Vosters’ one-hour performance was an incredibly nuanced portrayal of one of the sweetest, most endearing characters ever committed to drama. She’s trying to be honest to the audience, but she lies about some things. She says that there’s a disaster coming. A tornado. And so she’s addressing an audience. And since this is made-for-internet, Vosters plays the character delivering the monologue into her phone. It’s a powerfully intimate performance.


Vosters has had a lot of experience delivering monologues into the internet recently. Her “Impassioned Video Monologue” series on Facebook  has been raising money for American Players Theatre over the course of the pandemic. She’s a captivating presence pointed directly at an audience from within a glowing rectangle. In the course of that series, she’d played…actually she’d played a few characters in one of those videos. (But only briefly. And they were all played for comedy.) With Natural Shocks Vosters  a deeply engrossing ability to render the inner complexities of a single person and her memories. Vosters deftly dives into one hour in the life of a person who is very, very familiar with the nature of risk and hazard as she hides out in her own basement.


Lauren Gunderson’s script is jaw-droopingly intricate. There’s a HELL of a lot going on in the script narratively, poetically and thematically. The themes being covered in the script are staggeringly important in today’s socio-political environment. It’s a play that needs to be seen. Again: it’s really too bad that this was a one-night thing. With any luck this script gains traction and makes it onto tiny, little stages all over the place once COVID restrictions lift. This video, though…wow. Things can be incredibly intimate on the small stage, but this script played to a phone on low-res video…it gains quite a bit. It’s just you and her and the screen. It is darkly stunning in so many ways.


The Third Avenue Playhouse’s PlayWorks 2021 online series continues into the Spring and beyond with James Valcq’s The Kissing Girl and Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy coming-up in April and May. For a full schedule of upcoming events, check out TAP online.

You may not be able to see Vosters cowering in a basement in character, but you CAN see her delivering monologues online. Jennifer Vosters’ Impassioned video monologue series remains available on Facebook. There are 16 of them. They’re all 5-6 minutes long and they’re all a lot of fun.

​And the show may be over, but audiences can still view the trailer. Here it is:

As the COVID pandemic continues into the current Milwaukee theatre season, the more established local companies have been putting some really compelling stuff onto the internet. It may not be live performance, but the intimate, small-cast productions have been host to some remarkably compelling drama. The latest show to premiere with Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online is Isaac Gómez’s The Way She Spoke. Michelle Lopez-Rios plays an actress reading a script for a writer friend of hers. Director Lisa Portes has brought together subtly minimalist elements to amplify Rios’ performance in a one-actor one-act that progresses through an uninterrupted 83 minutes.


As the actress sits-down, she’s reading the script for the first time. Lopez-Rios plays an actress engaging with a script that recalls certain memories for her. The memories aren’t hers, though. The narrative tells the story of a town in Mexico where numerous women have been disappearing. Thousands of women have vanished from Mexico. Horrific murders have been targeting women in the area. The memories are those of the narrator who is the playwright who wrote the script that the character is reading. As this begins to become apparent, she’s learning things about a man she’s known for years.


The drama unfolds at a table against a black brick that feels very much like the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre that has played host to so many memorable MCT productions over the years. As Lopez-Rios reads the script, photo and video are projected against the brick wall. The projections are faded imagery in the background as the narrator breathes through an actress being portrayed by Lopez-Rios. Her voice echoes off of the walls. She’s trying to understand the tragedy of so much death and human trafficking. The darker side of humanity is explored with powerful resonance through a single script and a single performer, but the narrative valiantly reaches for an alchemy that reaches for the shadows of so many missing women.


The drama of the narrative casts light from the darkness of human horror to those courageous enough to explore it to the playwright to the actress to actress who is playing her and out into the video that’s captured it all. As remarkably vivid as the drama is, it’s very, very difficult to connect with the reality of it. It all feels like such dark fiction, but it’s weaving a story that is an appalling reality for so many people living in the shadow of the good fortune that so much of the rest of the population of the world has been gifted with. It’s absolutely essential that stories like Gómez’s continue to be told. It’s all too easy to forget about those occupying the edges of popular perception.  There’s darkness in the periphery, but it needs to be seen if we are to come together as a compassionate species. This drama needs to be seen if we want to be something better than we are as a society.


Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of The Way She Spoke is on-demand until April 11th, 2021. More information about MCT, its virtually reimagined 20/21 season, how to purchase tickets, and how to donate can be found at www.milwaukeechambertheatre.org. ​

​The societal changes that are go along with the latest global pandemic are transforming human interaction in ways that society is only beginning to comprehend. Cooperative Performance explores the nature of truth and human connection in the age of COVID with director/creator
Andrew Coopman’s RE: Social/Divide. The pre-produced 90-minute dramatic comedy features a rather large ensemble playing a group of writers and editors for a publication as they navigate the complexities of life and work via videoconference.


The 90-minute show consists of many, many little scenes outlining a week in the life of the magazine. It’s a highly episodic plot that plays very much like highlights from an entire season of a well-written sitcom. Not every single moment is brilliant, but the RE: Social/Divide holds more than enough moments to hold together for a fun 90 minute week with an enjoyable group of characters. New York-based actor Benjamin Neumayer plays editor of a publication the employs an appealingly diverse group of writers. Julia Gorordo (who also wrote some particularly poignant music for the show) appealingly plays tenacious serious journalist Kate. Maria Rojkova brings some remarkably heartfelt emotionality as Elvira: the privaely conflicted sexy social influencer working for the publication.


There’s a whole lot of subtlety in a script that seems modeled after video serial sitcoms that have a tendency to lean in a far lighter, less complicated direction. Of particular note here is Niv Joshi as a sweetly enigmatic gossip columnist who seems almost impossible to read socially even though she seems almost completely open an earnest in casual conversation. In some of the better scenes in the show, Joshi reaches an impressive amount of characterization with relatively little screen time.


One of the more intricate dramatic moments in the show happens between well-meaning aspiring black community ally Shannon Annabelle (Ashley Retzlaff-Rogaczewski) appears on the “Spill the Tea” podcast hosted by Reenah and Teenah (Aria Caldwell and Kayla V. White.) Race relations are dizzyingly complicated. Retzlaff-Rogaczewski manages a thoughtful rendering of a woman who really IS trying to connect-up through an earnest appreciation of black culture. Caldwell and White sharply render a couple of characters caught in a particularly difficult moment for themselves socially and professionally.


The Reenah/Teenah/“Shannabelle” plot has more than enough weight to carry a feature-length drama. It might feel a little light mixed-in with everything else, but then...so does the plight of Elvira and...well...A LOT of the rest of what’s going on in a very large ensemble piece which comfortably presents a hell of a lot more story than one might expect from a single 90 minute program. Audiences are getting a great deal of content for only $15...it’s a remarkably tight,  little package of drama and comedy.


Cooperative Performance’s RE: Social/Divide is streaming on demand through April 11th on Vimeo.  For ticket reservations and more, visit Cooperative Performance online.

There’s a deep, intense power in staged prison dramas. There’s an inescapable emotional gravity in sitting down in the front row of a small theater to watch people play prisoners. For a few brief moments, actors and audience alike are tourists in a place  that is all too well-known to a huge, hidden worldwide population of incarceration. For a few moments everyone in a theatre feels some shadow of imprisonment. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre brings a bit of that feeling to the small screen this month with its production of The Island: Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s  two-prisoner apartheid-era drama.

DiMonte Henning and Sherrick Robinson play Winston and John: a couple of South African prisoners who have been sharing a life without freedom for many,  many years. John is working with Winston to develop a theatrical staging of Antigone. Winston is reluctant to study for a role as the title character. He’s afraid of looking ridiculous playing a woman. He’s also serving a life sentence. John believes in the power of theater and the importance of the story. Prior to the performance, John has been granted a release. The two are forced to come to terms with the fundamental nature of art and prison prior to the performance.

The absence of the live stage is felt with particularly intense depth in a prison drama. As much as an audience might want to feel the pull of the emotional gravity, Winston and John are imprison on a glowing rectangle for 01:15:37 seconds that can be paused, rewound and scrubbed through. There’s a maddeningly comfortable distance between audience, actors and characters. Director Mikael Burke keeps the production stark and simple. It’s a largely bare set. The editing is simple. The drama is right there in the center of the screen for the entire run of the show.

Robinson is engagingly passionate as a prisoner restlessly trying to keep himself active. Henning plays a man far more existentially adrift who knows exactly where he is going to be the rest of his life. Henning and Robinson do a remarkably vivid job of portraying a couple of people who know each other extremely well. The deep and intimate familiarity between characters who have known each other for years can be extremely difficult to bring across. Henning and Robinson manage a very intricate portrayal of a couple of guys who know each other well enough that each one seems to know exactly what the other isn’t thinking. That level of intimacy can be a challenge for any pair of actors. More than merely working well together, each actor has an opportunity for solitude onstage that further defines the external desolation of each character in a thoroughly satisfying drama.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of The Island is available through March 28th. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber online.

Just a couple of days ago, the Milwaukee Rep announced that it would be opening-up for indoor performances starting April 27th with its production of Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song. Smaller stages still wait for the COVID to clear enough to allow live audiences back in. There are quite a few shows popping-up online this coming month as COVID continues to run its course. Here’s a look at some of them:

Cosmic Fairy Tales
Theatre Gigante’s next big project turns out to be 31 Cosmic Fairy Tales written by Slovene writer Rok Vilčnik. The 31 stories are available in video format for 31 days...each one told by a different storyteller. There’s quite a range of impressive talent involved including Megan Kaminsky, Nathan Danzer, Mohammad ElBsat, Posy Knight, Evan Koepnick, Jason Powell, Nate Press and more. Gigante’s own Mark Anderson and Isabelle Kralj are also featured. Gigante refers to the project as “Thirty-one winking, blinking, curious Fairy Tales in the cosmos, offering uniquely bizarre adventures in search of the earthling heart in all of us.”

All videos are available beginning March 1st. For more information, visit Gigante online.

​The Island
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents a show online this month which also becomes available March 1st: Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island. DiMonte Henning and Sherrick Robinson play a couple of cellmates in a maximum security prison. By day the two inmates work back-breaking manual labor. By night they rehearse for a prison production of Sophocles’ Antigone. The Apartheid-era drama continues to hold the kind of resonance one would expect from one of the most resepcted playwrights of the late 20th century.

The show is available for viewing with Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online starting March 1st. Tickets are $35. They go on sale March 1st. 

RE: Social/Divide
Cooperative Performance returns to the web this month with a new show. The group’s recent Embodied Truth was a compelling fusion of small-stage aesthetics that were firmly-rooted in Milwaukee. The group’s latest explores the nature of human connection in a world of digital connections made through the forced isolation that continues to impose itself on contemporary society. Andrew Coopman devised the piece. There’s a really interesting mix of talent involved in the show including Ashley Retzlaff-Rogaczewski, Allison Chicorel and a whole lot of people I don’t recall ever seeing before. If the last Cooperative Performance show was any indicator, this should be a really, really good show.

RE: Social/Divide streams on-demand March 12th-April 11th for more information, visit Cooperative Performance online.

BTC Spotlight Artist Virtual Cabaret
Brand-new local performance group Bombshell Theatre Company introduces itself with a one-night-only Virtual Cabaret featuring Broadway showtunes from Les Miserables, My Fair Lady, Chicago, Guys and Dolls and more. Eric Welch and Tim Albrechtson are joined by local talent including Eric Begendahl, Morgan Clarey, Laura Monagle and more.

Virtual Artist Cabaret hits the internet March 19th at 7pm. For more information, visit Bombshell Theatre online.

Neat
It was a little over ten years ago when Marti Gobel starred in playwight Charlayne Woodard’s  one-woman show Neat with Renaissance Theaterworks.  This March, Gobel reprises her role as Aunt Beneatha “Neat” Harris, who teaches black pride and a love of live through the ’60s and ’70s. Gobel is a great talent. The intimacy of a one-woman show online should be a great deal of fun with Gobel’s charm.

Neat runs March 19 - April 11 for more information, Visit Renaissance online. 

​
Milwaukee Opera Theatre hosts another fun, informal distance performance event late this winter as it welcomes the work of two-piece string/vocal group SistaStrings. Monique and Chauntee Ross’ distinctive violin/cello sound is presented in a fully-produced music video developed by Traveling Lemur Productions. Once again, MOT fosters a fun evening of conversation and performance for a limited audience in the latest of its Zoom-based soiree “zoirees.” There’s a vibrantly playful mood about the program as artists of various types discuss their craft in an open online setting.


Milwaukee Opera Theatre Artistic Director Jill Anna Ponasik hosts a three-part evening. After introductions, the small Zoom audience is introduced to the artists by way of pre-recorded interview that precedes the performance. This is an interesting choice. It allows the audience and opportunity to get to know the artist a little bit before seeing their art. It really brings across the feel of casually meeting a couple of people at a party, finding out they are musicians and then seeing them perform. Then after the performance, there is an opportunity for an audience back which was followed by a live performance this past Saturday night.


A pre-recorded performance plays like a music video. The video was put together by Traveling Lemur productions added features reef and soul for appearances by a couple of cute, fuzzy puppets courtesy of designer Bill Olsen and Angry Young Men, ltd. SistaStrings’ unique blend of wistfully impassioned vocals and classical sounding strings is at the forefront of a video package which combines their performance with footage of demonstration and puppets playing along in a dreamy superimposed shadow on violin and cello. Deeper statements that might have been made in combining street protest footage with violin, cello and puppets seem to be a bit lost in the dream he miasma of the video presentation. It’s a remarkably pleasant experience, but it is difficult to draw the deeper meaning which is clearly there in the substance of the work devised by SistaStrings. A truly unique pair of performers are given a truly unique platform in which to present their material.


Video conferencing still feels a bit stiff as a vehicle for performance. As pleasantly informal as it is, it’s still very much like a work meeting over Zoom. And though it is kind of cool to see the artists in their natural environment accompanied by appearances of accompanying vocalists and Angry Young Men puppeteers, the overall experience isn’t quite as relaxing as it could be in a format that is so often used for more formal meetings. SistaStrings manage to soften the experience. They are a great deal of fun to hang out with before and after a performance. (And Ponasik is always fun.) Saturday night, Monique and Chauntee played together on zoom in a live performance of “Amazing Grace that round it out the evening quite nicely.
​

Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s The Sound with SistaStrings continues through Feb. 28. For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Opera Theatre online.

COVID has continued to have its impact on local theatre. There have been quite a few different responses to the unique challenges posed by online video presentation. Video can be like any other factor in performance. It can add, detract, enhance or distract from any given production. It’s interesting to see what video does to Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in the new production being streamed by The Village Playhouse this month. The fully-produced studio theatre staging of Wilde’s one-act is presented in a full-color, low-res Zoom format that does interesting things to the themes being presented in Wilde’s take on the biblical tale.

It’s a very comfy staging. The set is small and humble. The lighting has a cool, relaxing blue about it in the foreground and a brightly overpowering red about it in the background. Hannah Kubiak is enjoyably haughty in the title role. She feels an aloof fascination with John the Baptist and demands things of him that he’s not willing to give. Later-on Eric and Stacy Madson appear onstage as Salomé’s parents Herod and Herodias. They’re just as arrogant and entitled as she is. He wants his daughter to dance for him. His wife doesn’t want her to dance. Things get weird and ugly.

Wilde’s unique talent for showing the overwhelming pettiness of the ruling class is put to good work here. These are epic characters from one of the most widely-read books in human history, but they might as well be the people living next door. There isn’t anything larger-than-life abotu them in the way they are presented onstage for screen. Kubiak could have played the haughtiness of Salomé in full-blown knock-down drag-out Kardashain-esque exaggeration, but she plays it casual. Similarly the dialogue between her parents could have been blown-up to heroically arrogant proportions, but the Madsons play it casual. This is a kind and a queen in a throne room, but it could really be any married couple anywhere at almost any point in history.

With very little glamor and very little editing, there’s something vaguely hypnotic about bringing this story into one’s living room. The low-res video isn’t so faded as to be a distraction from the comedy and drama of Wilde’s script, but it. In its own way it’s quite beautiful. It casts everyone in the same sort of pleasantly lurid blurriness. This could be surveillance camera footage of a particularly ugly night between a mother, a father, a daughter and a dismembered human head. There’s no sense of elevation here. The viewer is bearing witness to the ugliness of human desire without limitations on human power. Hubris. Anger. Frustration. Decapitation. It’s all there. And it’s all so very, very cheap. No need to exaggerate it. No need to blow it out of proportion to make it look epic. Humanity can be very, very ugly.

The Village Playhouse’s production of Salomé runs through Feb. 21st via Zoom. For more information, visit The Village Playhouse online.