by SOPHIE KERMAN The Minnesota Opera‘s world premiere production of Silent Night – opening this Saturday for a limited run at the Ordway – fights both an artistic and an ideological battle. First, it takes a stand for the continued relevance and importance of new opera. Second, it makes the case that some of the most effective anti-war arguments…
by SOPHIE KERMAN & ANNA ROSENSWEIG Something about the transition from fall to winter – the impending gloom that is just around the corner – has made the local theater scene shift from playful and speculative to downright brutal. Two adaptations of Greek tragedies opened this past weekend – and not just any Greek tragedies,…
by ANNA ROSENSWEIG When asked by her mother if she’d ever marry, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf answered that she didn’t need to. She was and would always be her own wife. Von Mahlsdorf’s response to her mother can in part be explained by her decision to live as a woman. Born male as Lothar Berfelde in…
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…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 