by SOPHIE KERMAN How do you tell the true story of a man when you don’t know what he looks like, where he came from, or what his real name is, and when a whole team of Royal Canadian Mounted Police had to spend two cold months tracking him down? You make it up, of…
by Anna Rosensweig Halloween is a tricky holiday because it’s a hard one to halfheartedly celebrate. Sure you can show up at a costume party dressed in your usual clothes and some random hat. But it’s guaranteed you won’t have as much fun as your friends who go as Xena the Warrior Princess, a Keebler…
By ANNA ROSENSWEIG To sit in a Ten Thousand Things audience is to become part of the show. The company performs in small, often unconventional spaces that make boundaries between actors and audience thin and porous. What’s more, Ten Thousand Things performs in the round and keeps the house lights on, so that the actors…
by SOPHIE KERMAN As a former sixteen-year-old prep school student from the New York metropolitan area, I might have a skewed perspective on The Edge of Our Bodies, Adam Rapp‘s (almost) one-woman play about a sixteen-year-old prep school student from the New York metropolitan area. Unlike most of the Guthrie Theater‘s Minnesotan audience, I can…
by SOPHIE KERMAN For a play inspired by an ethnographic study, Four Destinies has a whole lot of heart and a surprising amount of humor. Playwright Katie Hae Leo was drawn to write the play – which opens Mu Performing Arts‘s 2011-12 season in its world premiere – after reading a study by Kim Park Nelson on adopted children,…
by SOPHIE KERMAN There are some plays that are so heartfelt that you root for their success before the actors even open their mouths. This is even more true when there are important political and ideological reasons for the play to be written and produced – in this case, creating theater that represents gender identities…
by SOPHIE KERMAN “I got one! I got one!” For all of the many reasons we might say we go to the theater, at the heart of it, we all just want a good story. At least that is the argument behind The K of D, a play which takes us back to our very earliest…
By ANNA ROSENSWEIG Adaptations of old plays for modern audiences too often miss the mark because they seek merely to update, and end up doing so cosmetically. A contemporary setting, fashion-forward costumes, or the newest gadgets all shoulder the work of making a play current, with little concern for what makes the play currently meaningful.…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Cshhh. Cshhh. Cshhh. From the very first moments of Two Trains Running, the pace of the action is metered out by the slow scuff of diner waitress Risa’s shoes as she crosses from the kitchen to the tables and back again. Risa (Crystal Fox) walks as though she is burdened by much…
by SOPHIE KERMAN With Così Fan Tutte, opening on Saturday for a five-day run, the Minnesota Opera throws down a gauntlet to anyone who thinks opera is stodgy, irrelevant or boring. Can you sit through Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s 1790 opera without cracking a smile – or bursting out in an explosion of giggles as two grown men roll…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 