by SOPHIE KERMAN When a play’s design can elicit gasps within the first five minutes, and when it can keep an audience of seasoned theater-goers laughing for over two hours, it puts the reviewer in a truly difficult position. Despite wanting to steer clear of cliche, there is no way around it: how else to describe…
by SOPHIE KERMAN and EMILY MEISLER, guest reviewer Who hasn’t watched “Waiting for Guffman”, the mockumentary about a small town that puts on a community theater production, and felt a twinge of envy for the fictitious audience of “Red, White, and Blaine”? How much fun would it be to see that play, a production so ridiculous…
by SOPHIE KERMAN I look for two things in a children’s show: first, that the kids like it, and second, that it’s got something to entertain adults, too. The Children’s Theatre Company leaves no doubt about either in its revival of the holiday favorite, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It’s a book most Americans have…
by SOPHIE KERMAN As the opening to the MORPHOLOGIES Queer Performance Festival, Scott Turner Schofield‘s Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps is a perfect balance of art and storytelling. The three companies organizing MORPHOLOGIES – Pangea World Theater, 20% Theatre Company, and RARE Productions – have spent the last two years putting together the festival, which aims to celebrate…
by SOPHIE KERMAN The process of getting to the Loring Alley Theatre last night was long and circuitous. The space – a chilly concrete room also used as an indoor skateboard park, when not as a theater – is tucked away in the alley behind Joe’s Garage and Lurcat, and my friend and I walked past…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Kill Me Don’t Go, a brand new play by Trista Baldwin, does not shy away from marriage’s most harrowing moments. Ambitious in its emotional scope, Kill Me explores the profound connection and dangerous interdependency that can develop between two people who have chosen to wind their lives around each other. Although the situation between…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Any attempt at writing a play about genocide is immediately plagued by a host of ethical problems. In representing an individual’s testimony on stage, the playwright risks co-opting the voice of the victim or trivializing a traumatic experience in order to gain an emotional response from the audience. And yet taking too…
by SOPHIE KERMAN You can always rely on the Sandbox Theatre, with its years-long play development process, to present something new, challenging, and seamlessly executed. Beatnik Giselle, performed for just one weekend at the Southern Theater, tackles heavy questions of sexuality and self-expression through a framework of dance, music, and Beat poetry: not a traditional piece of…
by REBECCA HALAT, Guest Reviewer Starting out with a football throwing sequence, History Theatre’s Lombardi got a “pass” for those cheesy moves, as it felt appropriate to have some element of cheese in a play about a football team from Wisconsin. Although there were a few problems with the production, in all this is a truly charming show.…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Memory is a complicated organism, particularly when endless streams of information (both memorable and not) are available at the touch of a button. Rachel Jendrzejewski, more a theater artist than a playwright, may be right in choosing to explore memory through looser forms of movement and linguistic collage, rather than through the stricter structures…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 