by SOPHIE KERMAN Director Amy Rummenie couldn’t have picked a better time of year to stage a drawing room farce: if you’re feeling stuck in the doldrums of a long, cold January, The School for Lies is just the kind of diversion to shake off a winter chill. The play, by David Ives, is a very loose adaptation…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Griffelkin might be a children’s opera, but the performers – a group of over 70 children in graders 4-12 – aren’t playing around. In a limited run at the Lab Theater, the opera is already nearly sold out, and for good reason. This isn’t your average high school musical: these kids have dedicated…
by SOPHIE KERMAN If you’re sick and tired of Christmas spirit, it might be time for a change of pace. Director Josh Cragun‘s adaptation of Maxim Gorky‘s The Lower Depths places you in the middle of a Great Depression basement-level tenement, peeling away all of the candy-coated materialism of the holiday season to reveal what happens to people when they…
by SOPHIE KERMAN What’s in a number? Well, when it comes to sex, numbers can mean a heck of a lot. Ian MacAllister-McDonald‘s The Sexual Life of Savages begins when Hal discovers that he and his girlfriend Jean are numerically mismatched – where he has had 7 sexual encounters, Jean’s number may be up beyond 25 –…
by SOPHIE KERMAN At the beginning of The Veterans Play Project, two would-be filmmakers and a community chorus are all asking the same question: “Where are all the vets?” In the fictional town of Smedley, MN – just like the Twin Cities – veterans are everywhere, but for a variety of personal and political reasons,…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Some topics are so serious, so immediate, and so tragic that it is better to deny audiences the catharsis they often seek at the theater. This is the case with Kiomars Moradi and Porya Azarbayjani‘s devastating Love Letters from the Middle East, a trio of monologues about the plight of women affected by the upheaval…
by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN This Is A World To Live In drops the audience without net into a peculiar hybrid of event, installation and performance. Even the ushering of the attendees into the space is performative. A concierge of sorts in a white t-shirt and suspenders surveys the waiting crowd and selects people by twos…
by SOPHIE KERMAN Sure, saving the universe sounds awesome. Superpowers, space travel, battling aliens… there’s no down side, right? Well, as it turns out for Bruce and Violet Wong, all this superhero stuff is actually kind of stressful. Just as stressful, in fact, as it is to be an awkward, sci-fi loving middle schooler. In…
by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN Orpheus is one of the great boneheads of literature; a man who just cannot follow directions. A musician and poet, he falls in love with Eurydice. At the wedding celebration, she dies (in the original myth, she’s chased by a satyr and falls into a nest of vipers) and ends up…
by MICHAEL J. OPPERMAN Lee Blessing’s Perilous Night is a peculiar play. There is a sensation of being pushed headlong into a combination of Octavia Butler’s time traveling race critique Kindred & Don Coscarelli‘s poignant absurdist Bubba Ho-Tep (which finds two extended care patients, who believe they are, respectively, JFK and Elvis, fighting a mummy). The…
