by SOPHIE KERMAN When going to see a play about a group of teenagers out to expose a sex scandal involving a teacher, what do you expect to see? A heartwarming tale about finding social acceptance in surprising places? Or a sad story about the fallout of a traumatic and coercive relationship? No matter what your…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Over the past few days, Anna and I have explored the three very different plays on offer at the Mixed Blood Theatre‘s Center of the Margins festival, which celebrates the often-neglected perspectives of individuals with disabilities. We have to commend the Mixed Blood for undertaking such a project to begin with: there…
by ANNA ROSENSWEIG For the the third play in its Center of the Margins festival, the Mixed Blood Theatre Company offers the world premiere of On the Spectrum, an encounter between two young adults who live with different degrees of autism. Written by Ken LaZebnick and directed by Jack Reuler (Mixed Blood’s founder and artistic…
by ANNA ROSENSWEIG Mixed Blood opened its Center of the Margins festival over the weekend, which features three plays that explore “the complex world of disability.” Staging these plays together thankfully avoids making any one stand for a supposedly universal experience of disability, and wards off the impression that there’s an ideal way to represent…
by SOPHIE KERMAN The Center of the Margins festival at the Mixed Blood Theatre has the admirable mission of producing plays involving populations that we don’t often see on stage. My Secret Language of Wishes, the second play to premiere as part of the festival, centers around a seventeen-year-old girl with cerebral palsy and the women who,…
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…
Aisle Say - Twin Cities 