by Jeff Grygny

So, a washed-up celebrity gets reanimated by a shady operator. Underlings rush madly to cover for their drooling, flesh-eating boss as chaos spirals towards doom. Does this sound at all familiar? No, it’s actually the plot of Zombies on Broadway, a new musical comedy now playing at Off the Wall Theatre. Impresario Dale Gutzman, who wrote the book and lyrics, returns to one of his favorite playgrounds: corny B films, just in time to ride the backwash of The Walking Dead and the coattails of Jim Jarmuschs’ new spoof The Dead Don’t Die. This show is an intentionally bad movie with it’s own sarcastic running commentary; a dark existential comedy perfect for summer fun in these days of national strum und drang. There isn’t a serious bone in this musical’s decaying body, and nothing escapes its campy ridicule. Show biz egos, gay panic, backstage rivalry, sexual harassment, dementia, cannibalism and God him(or her)self—it’s all gristle for Gutzman’s satirical meat grinder. Of all Off the Wall shows, this might be the off-the-walliest.

We know immediately what to expect when aging diva Dottie Lotrine (pause for canned laughter) sings the opening number, a jaunty ditty delivered in the timbre of a parrot choking on a cracker: “The Show Goes On Until Your Dead” —and then drops dead. The desperate and none-too-bright producers call on the expertise of none other than Carl Denham, the genius who shipped King Kong in to devastate downtown Manhattan. Denham, it seems has learned the secret of turning corpses into zombies from the witch doctors of Skull Island, and before you can say “Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga and McCormack,” she’s back, if not quite ready for Broadway. Workmanlike music and lyrics by Gutzman and Chris Holoyda (creator of the legendary Lobotomy: The Musical!) keep the show moving from sight gag to double entendre to comic misunderstanding while giving various characters their soul-baring moments in the spotlight. It’s irresistible to read the show as a metaphor for The Current Administration (after all Denham is a seedy, Bannon-like fixer who let a giant gorilla loose in America). But there are too many loose ends to make the analogy fit; the playwright admits that the show has “absolutely no redeeming qualities.”  

But if you come for the zombies, you stay for the performances, which the players carry off with surprising dedication and panache. Larry Lukasavage plays a sleazy investor with silken menace; Teddi Gardner is suitably feckless as a dance captain named Dick (the name that launched a thousand snickers). Mark Neufang brings pitch-perfect poise to the role of a gay supporting actor, and as the star-crossed star Dottie, Michelle Wade gamely grimaces and groans with the best of them. Jenny Kosek commits to her innocent ingenue character with a hint of a wink, and Gutzman chews scenery, chants mumbo-jumbo, and brings a pathos worthy of an Arthur Miller character to the part of Denham.

Only Off the Wall Theatre has the guts to stage such a perfectly tasteless spectacle—and those guts are on prominent display before the carnage is over. As an audience member was overheard saying after Friday’s show: “We went somewhere.”

Off The Wall Theatre presents

Zombies On Broadway

Music by Chris Holoyda

Book and Lyrics by Dale Gutzman

playing through June 30

https://www.offthewallmke.com/zombies-on-broadway.html#/

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by Jeff Grygny

Few people will be shocked to hear that the relations between women and men excite powerful passions of all kinds. Indeed, such passions are key forces in the social storms that swirl throughout the early twenty-first-century world. So it seems quite bold for Skylight Music Theater to put on  Kiss Me Kate, a show that was not considered controversial when, say, Joe Biden was a kid, but might stir strong feelings today, with its inspiration in Shakespeare’s arguably misogynistic (and equally rarely produced) The Taming of the Shrew. You could say that the current cultural climate is just too darn hot for these shows. As Biden could assure Cole Porter, these days anything does emphatically not go. 

It would be worthwhile just to see a fine production of a classic show from “the golden age of Broadway musicals,” especially in the lighthearted spirit with which director Ray Jivoff imbues it. But it’s fascinating to see how the show holds up seventy years after it first opened, in a world almost inconceivably different from Porter’s, who grew up when the Model T was still new on the road. The answer is: pretty darn well.

Though Petruchio’s abuse of Katherine still raises hackles (as it always has, evidently). Kiss Me Kate uniquely creates a sort of cultural time tunnel: Elizabethan mores at one end and this production on the other, with post-war screwball comedy in the middle. It’s to our contemporary musical theater industry what the cotton gin is to high-tech fabrics: rather primitive in comparison, and you can see all the gears moving, but it has the authentic charm of an art form that was still trying to figure itself out.  It cobbles together elements from comic opera, like the schmaltzy “Wunderbar” (does anyone else remember that the melody was once used in a radio jingle for a Wisconsin cheese?), with vaudevillian entr’actes like the patter-y “We Open in Venice” and “Brush up your Shakespeare.” The dated weirdness of ”Tom Dick and Harry” with its peculiar (maybe suggestive?) chorus of  “Dick, dick, dick/ A dicka dick” shares the stage with the smoky sophistication of classics like “Why Can’t You Behave.” It’s easy to see why the show ran for over a thousand performances in New York.

Jivoff brings the world of the stage to vivid life with countless little interactions between the players, and it’s all delivered with affection and panache by a crack company of singer/actor/dancers to restore the freshness and innocence of escapist entertainment. As the leading lady, Rana Roman renders a show-stopping “I Hate Men,” flinging prop salamis into the wings with venomous relish. As a gold-digger who finds every opportunity to flaunt her assets, Kaylee Annable delivers an equally rousing “Always True to You in My Fashion.” Doug Jarecki and Kelly Doherty flash sparking comic chops as a pair of unusually dignified mobsters; Jonathan Gillard Daly offers a cartoonish caricature of a MacArthur-like military bigwig, and Joe Capstick takes the Gene Kelly prize for his staircase gymnastics in “Too Darn Hot.” Jivoff’s direction makes every song it’s own little play; this is more entertainment for your money than most three other shows in town put together.

The battle of the sexes plays out mostly between Roman’s character and her ex-husband, a philandering egomaniac leading man played impeccably by Andrew Varela, whose spot-on characterization is matched only by his crystal-shattering tenor. Together, they hit every beat of the couple’s Punch-and-Judy verbal sparring. But when they sing together, recalling happier days, their voices soar: how could they not reunite when they sound so good together? In the end, Roman does sing Kate’s embarrassingly servile speech about women submitting to their husbands, but she does so with soft strength and dignity—and it’s Petruchio who kneels.

So—does this theatrical fossil offer any insights for our current state of strife between the sexes? Maybe only this romantic one: that men and women are better together than apart, and that love is more important than winning the war.

Skylight Music Theatre presents

Kiss Me Kate

Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter
Book by Sam and Bella Spewack

playing through June 16

http://www.skylightmusictheatre.org/shows-events/on-stage/kiss-me-kate

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by Jeff Grygny

Moby Dick is an immense book, a metaphysical doorstop of a novel. It’s not just an adventure story about whaling, though it certainly is that, too. Herman Melville was there, recording the emotional, economic, and spiritual implications of this world-shattering changes as America was feverishly inventing the modern era of itself. Dale Gutzman, in his program notes for Call Me Ishmael, his adaptation of Melville’s epic of madness on the vasty deep, admits up front that the novel is impossible to stage. So what is this play? What we see is a stylish, sometimes funny, sometimes monotonous, often brilliant cinematic dream that touches on ideas about religion, power, nature, race, culture, and man’s futile efforts to control the world, to name the most obvious. It may be the closest thing to pure philosophy ever performed on a Milwaukee stage.

The literary theorist Jacques Derrida coined the phrase “white mythology” for the tendency of powerful elites to claim that their rule is natural and really the only way things could possibly be, commanded by the inarguable word of a deity whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Moby Dick had refuted white mythology more than a century earlier: all it takes is a little crack in the sacred order to let chaos come pouring in. Melville painted a picture of what music critic Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America,” based on first-hand experience: the harsh Puritanism, the capitalist exploitation, the patriarchal hierarchy, and the strange society of men, slamming against the immensity of nature with hubristic fury.

How in heaven do you stage such a monster? Gutzman gives us fragments of the story, like an art film or collage (hence the show’s subtitle “a hallucination”) with its own theatrical vocabulary. Black walls and clothing, pale faces lit by bright flashlights, spotlights and lanterns create the mood of an antique engraving; wood, rope, and yards of raw fabric create the whaler’s world, a light-and-shadow realm of Protestant theology and can-do capitalism. As in the novel, we see the story through the eyes of an innocent youth. Jake Russell plays Ishmael with all the trepidation, eagerness, and wonder of an introspective soul. His first encounter with the wild world comes in the form of his bed-mate in the port side inn, an islander named Queegqueg, played with fine bemused stoicism by Nathan Danzer, whose broad, tattoo-covered chest and back are the show’s most impressive special effects. Their relationship becomes the emotional center of the play: an openly romantic same-sex couple in an all-male society that operates far from civilization’s norms. In this version, the Pequod becomes a kind of gay utopia, its cramped sweaty spaces recall the aesthetics of a twentieth-century leather bar. Ishmael spends his spare time jotting his meditations in a notebook, pondering life, the sea, and Queegqueg’s tattoos, which represent for him a primordial writing containing mysteries that the printed lines of the Bible can’t possibly convey.

The play hews closely to the book’s narrative, unfolding in painterly tableaux, meditative moments, and exciting action scenes. Sometimes the stage seethes with movement as the players pantomime the actions of sea-craft and the hunt. The whalers go to their work with the gusto of professional athletes, especially Teddi Gardener as an exuberant harpooner and Jim Feeley as an old salt who relishes no land-bound life. Only the first mate, played by the low-key Mohammed ElBsat, shows misgivings about their voyage. James Strange plays the role of Ahab with more wounded pathos than Old Testament rage, but there is still the atmosphere of doom, the sickening sense that no one is in charge—or worse, that the authority, be it captain or God, is mad, and the ship/universe careens forth by no rules that reason can comprehend. It’s a feeling quite familiar to many Americans these days, don’t you think?  Yet there is a strange stasis at the center of this play: from Ishmael’s musings, to the well-worn plot, to Russell’s moody cello soundscape. Not even some hearty shanties composed and performed by Shayne Steliga and Tom Koehn, can dispel the emptiness at the heart of this maritime melodrama.

As the Pequod careens further into Ahab’s monomania, the style of the play shifts into something like performance art, or a Tarkovsky film, where mundane objects take on uncanny meanings. A string of Christmas lights becomes Saint Elmo’s fire; a storm is signaled by a mere utterance. The simplicity of the stagecraft is as if to shrug at the impossibility of the task; even with the budget  of Broadway, would any plastic whale or high-definition projection bring us closer to the novel’s sublime inconceivable? The inevitable failure is cooked into the attempt; as Queegqueg and Ahab make futile stabs at a painted eye simply rendered a large piece of cloth, they seem like puppets, no more capable of killing the great white whale than Melville’s book can be adequately staged. Maybe unconvincing theater is all we can ever muster in our attempts to conquer savage being.

We could see Call Me Ishmael as a rite of passage. People like Queegqueg became adults by being ritually isolated in a dark, closed space where they were symbolically devoured by a terrifying monster, then reborn as mature members of the tribe. Perhaps the most important mystery of the modern tribe is this: all our certainties are written on water. Nowadays we don’t believe in rites or cosmic monsters. All we have to explain the world is science; and art, to lead us out of our cultural trance and bring us face-to-face with the unknowable universe.

Off the Wall Theatre presents

Call Me Ishmael

adapted by Dale Gutzman from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

playing through April 28

www.offthewallmke.com

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by Jeff Grygny

In an old joke, the prison camp commander addresses the prisoners: “I have good news,” he says. “Today you will all change underwear. Now you change with you, you change with you. . . “ Dark humor is one way we have of dealing with intolerable situations. It is a sign that our spirit, however abused, hasn’t yet been broken. The Last Cyclist, now playing at Cardinal Stritch University in a collaboration between the theater department and a couple of cultural organizations, gives us a rare opportunity to see, as through an old-time stereoscope, blurry but powerful images of how life was for Jews during the Holocaust.

This account comes to us handed down in the form of a comic play that was written by cabaret artist Karel Švenk in the Terezin ghetto, basically a place where Czech Jews were held in miserable conditions on their way to Auschwitz. It was also a Nazi propaganda site, used to show how humanely the Jews were treated, so they were allowed to have lectures, concerts and plays, all performed by captives. Švenk’s play is a Kafka-like satire, depicting the Nazis as escapees from a lunatic asylum who are deluded into thinking that bicyclists are the cause of all their problems. Therefore, they go around harassing cyclists, finding out who is descended from a cyclist, detaining them, and eventually shipping all the cyclists or anyone who has been accused of being a cyclist to a place called “Horror Island.”

In an brief expository prologue, we learn of the grim conditions in Terezin. Then, we the audience become prisoners who have crowded into an attic to watch a rehearsal of the play. Though the script was reconstructed from memory by a surviving actress twenty years after the fact, then still later reworked into its present form by playwright Naomi Patz, the play retains the flavor of popular comedy of the last century—think Laurel and Hardy or W. C. Fields. There are stock characters, like the naive grocer and the con artist, and hoary routines, like the man hiding in the wardrobe, the humorous courtship, and the wacky courtroom scene. But the comedy cliches serve a deeper purpose and play with much darker undertones.  We even see Terezin itself in Horror Island, where the commander brusquely forces the prisoners to act happy for Red Cross inspectors. “Sing loud so they can hear you from a distance,“ he commands them after handing them a propaganda song. But when his back is turned, they change the lyrics to express their true feelings for the camp. The Last Cyclist is that song.

The play was never actually performed (the ghetto authorities decided it was too inflammatory), but the rehearsal audiences were said to have roared with laughter. But even though many of the bits are quite funny, there was not much laughter during Saturday night’s performance. How could there be?  We can only imagine what those people went through; our duty is to witness. The actors, under the direction of Mark Boergers, have a complicated job: to play ordinary men and women in a dreadful situation, mostly non-actors, performing in a comedy that burlesques their captors and expresses the terrible and surreal irony of their condition. It’s a difficult needle to thread, and  Boergers preserves the script’s vaudevillian tone and pace while subtly hinting at the layers of feeling beneath the clowning. The decision to forgo the ethnic mannerisms and speech patterns of European Jews inevitably loses some of the inimitable quality of Jewish humor; the multi-racial and gender-blind casting aims at universality, as if to say: “this could be any of us.”

Many of the student and professional actors of the cast rise to the challenge of playing so many levels at once.  Joel Kopischke, who carries the story as an everyman grocer, brings a strained desperation to his comic grimaces and gestures, as if he could singlehandedly fight off despair. Marcee Doherty-Elst shows her character losing herself in the role of the grandiose leader of the anti-cyclist movement. Monty Kane plays a cynical opportunist with fine physicality, showing us how hard he works to ingratiate himself with the lunatics in charge, while seeming to hardly believe his own shtick. Others take a more low-key approach: Laura Monagle’s romantic lead actress never really forgets the deaths she’s witnessed; Leslie Fitzwater brings moving authenticity to the role of a decent woman realizing that she is at the mercy of unprincipled madmen.

Boergers lets us applaud the comedy, but then the players step forward to acknowledge the people they’ve played. Each actor places a costume piece on the stage and speaks the first name of a long-dead prisoner. The house lights go up. The audience sits for a moment, some dabbing their eyes. Then we leave the auditorium in silence, as we should.

Some of the political targets of this satire are long dead and forgotten, but we can still recognize their types. It’s hard to say who is worse: the madmen who persecute the innocent or the cynical sane people who let them take power. We have been warned — again.

Cardinal Stritch University Performing Arts
In collaboration with The Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center
and The Harry and Rose Samson Jewish Community Center

presents

The Last Cyclist

by Naomi Patz

playing through April 14

https://www.stritch.edu/Events/Theater-Performance-The-Last-Cyclist

by Jeff Grygny

Aristotle wrote that people of different ages enjoy different genres of performance. Elderly people, he wrote, like epic poetry best. Mature people prefer tragedy. And children would much rather watch a puppet show. Machina Persona, the currently-playing original performance by the Cooperative Performance collective, sits comfortably in the last category (or we might say “cartoon,” since Aristotle knew nothing of animation.) This play is an excursion into a dimension of extreme whimsy: emphatically animated, there is so much action, so many shrieking entrances and exits, so much interplay between its archetypal characters, all gesticulating and chattering in a made-up language, that the experience is much like watching one of George Melies’ silent movies: you may not know what exactly is happening, but there’s sure a lot of it! And as all the characters are dressed in lovingly-detailed Steampunk outfits, you may feel at first that you have stumbled into a group home for asphasic cosplayers.

Amidst the Commedia del Arte  pratfalls and lazzi-like antics, characters begin to emerge. They are titled by their function, like “The Pilot,” “The Engineer,” and “The Stowaway,” but they also have their invented names, which we begin to recognize. Eventually, we begin to follow the action more clearly, often leading to some chortle-raising non-verbal humor. The players are so charismatic and gosh-darn cute, it’s hard not to get caught up in their dramas, obscure though they might be. There is a large, multi-faceted vehicle which they occasionally mount and try to fly on– maybe they’re shipwrecked travelers from an alien world? But though many things happen, their interactions communicate the most. These clownish characters, all feelings, tend towards obsessive manias and are easily offended. But they can also be patient and empathetic with each other, and ultimately they play together pretty nicely. When they whip out a guitar, a mandolin, a ukulele and a Capoeira bow to play a bouncy tune (which we are encouraged to accompany on provided percussion instruments), it suddenly strikes us that these are actual people with some pretty impressive talents on display.

According to director JJ Gatesman, the action is set in “The Brain.” Gatesman began his composition by interviewing people who have experienced difficulties with communication, including a trauma victim, a person with Downs syndrome, and a “bird handler.” From these personal experiences, he and his all-in performers improvised characters and incidents that, while not representing any one person, suggest windows onto their experience. Presenting this material filtered through several layers of interpretation gives the show a sense of truthfulness; even if we can’t always follow the story, we know there is a story. Thanks to the actors’ seriousness and intensity, the emotional verities come across loud and clear. As if by accident, Machina Persona becomes a demonstration of what it means to be in a community: often complicated, usually messy, with many different agendas and needs, but optimistic that through fair-mindedness and goodwill, we can somehow muddle through. It is a refreshingly sunny perspective for our cynical times.

By all means bring your toddlers to this 70-minute fable. Don’t be put off by the rough appearance of the yet-to be-finished Arthaus—they’ll be delighted, as will anybody who can still see the world with the eyes of innocence. (Just bring a blanket, the unheated space can be chilly, even on a spring night.)

Cooperative Performance presents

Machina Persona

conceived and directed by JJ Gatesman

https://www.cooperativeperformance.org/

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by Jeff Grygny

In a typically witty moment in Skylight Music Theater’s Carmina Burana, a few sheets of paper flutter down from the great height of the Cabot Theater’s ceiling. Reading their messages, some of the characters react with joy; others with dismay. More and more papers fall; soon the stage is full of people scrambling and reacting in very individual ways. This mysterious moment is but one of the show’s many fragmentary stories; it showcases the lucidity of the singers’ and dancers’ acting skills and their seamless ensemble work. It also demonstrates Director Jill Anna Ponasik’s genius for pulling evocative action from both texts and performers.

Carmina Burana is organized around the theme of Fortune’s wheel: the unavoidable uncertainty that is life’s only certainty; we are always winning or losing, rising up or on our way down, at the whim of Lady Luck. Every element of this fabulous production contributes to the sense of cyclical change, from Lisa Schlenker’s set with its curved ramps, dominated by a lunar disc which lighting designer Jason Fassl washes with subtly-changing moods and projections of “magical images” and lapidary text; to Shima Orans’ elegant costumes, conjuring a timeless modernity and encompassing a wide range of social classes; to music director Janna Ernst’s choice of arrangement, with an amazing six percussionists beating out the abruptly altering rhythms of Carl Orff’s score. Dani Kuepper’s choreography, while occasionally hyperactive, enlivens the space and successfully comments on the music’s many moods, while gracefully folding the non-dancers into the movement.

Ponasik gives the transitions a pleasing, organic flow, bringing a painterly sense of composition, space, and contrast, along with a musician’s feel for rhythms and a dramatist’s sense of action. Together, the Skylight’s singers, plus four vocalists from the Chant Claire Chamber Choir, along with seven dancers from the Danceworks Performance Company and a number of impossibly adorable child performers—artists of a wide variety of ages and physical types—create a microcosm of the world with its many joys, griefs, conflicts, and relationships. From the first group vignette of a spring picnic interrupted by rain, the production paints a panorama of great humanity and the profound beauty of everyday life. Overall, the show is rich, deeply felt, and as much a joy to behold as it looks like it was to create.

Just as Medieval scribes would wipe out old parchments and write over them, so Carmina Burana shows dizzying layers of meanings, each overwriting the last, but with traces of each still visible. The original lyrics were probably written by “Golliards” —wandering bards conventionally portrayed as unemployed college graduates who, forced to perform entertaining songs for a living, wrote laddish odes to drinking, gambling and love. The compilation of many authors’ work was given its title, “Songs of Beuern,” by a nineteenth-century scholar, based on name of the Bavarian monastery where he found the manuscript. A century later, modern composer Carl Orff fell in love with the songs’ poignant, often ironic tone, and condensed them into his musical setting, intending it to be a sort of gesamkunstwerk—a total theatrical spectacle combining music, text, dance, art, and metaphysical profundity a la Wagner. Now we have the production presently playing in the Cabot Theater, radically erased and overwritten again to suit twenty-first-century sensibilities.

There is certainly nothing laddish about this production. One thing we conspicuously don’t see is any representation of the boy/girl romance that was a mainstay of the earlier texts. As if on a mission to cleanse classical music of its patriarchal taint, Ponasik has steeped her show in feminist values, creating scenes which, while charming, dramatic, and personal, are unlikely to have occurred to any Golliard. She expands the meaning of “love” to include a wide spectrum of gynocentric concerns: the lament of a lover waiting for his mistress becomes a mother’s patient longing for her unborn child; we see an entire baby shower materialize, as guests literally shower the expectant mom with presents. Cute little girls smile before a mirror asking “am I pretty?” followed by a matronly woman asking the same question. A seduction song becomes a brutal pas-de-deux in which a woman strenuously resists submitting to a would-be lover’s insistent demands. Another enigmatic duet shows two women in a tense and unrequited encounter, which seems to end with one’s death. And it’s hard to know exactly what to make of a tavern scene in which a glitter-clad person of indeterminate gender tries to hand out potatoes, which are spurned by the crowd in favor of fast food fries. As the supertitle reads: “Left is right, up is down. Therefore I drink.” It might be hard to find a phrase that more succinctly captures the mood of our times.

As new meanings overwrite old ones, things are gained and things are lost; the wheel of fortune keeps turning.

Skylight Music Theater

in collaboration with Milwaukee Opera Theatre
Chant Claire Chamber Choir
and Danceworks Performance Company

presents

Carmina Burana

playing through March 31

http://www.skylightmusictheatre.org/shows-events/on-stage/carmina-burana

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by Jeff Grygny

Tennessee Williams is surely one of our most lyrical chroniclers of emotional messes; he arranges them so skillfully that, like one of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine sculptures, what would normally repel us becomes strangely beautiful: art out of trash. So it is in Small Craft Warnings currently manifesting in a modest but infinitely compassionate production at Off the Wall Theatre, where Williams unfolds the inner lives of a handful of losers into illuminated renderings of humanity. Anyone who cares about theater—or about life, even—will find the play deeply rewarding.

At the fag-end of America, butted up against the vast Pacific and the Mexican wilderness, Monk’s Place is the kind of tavern where everyone knows your name—but not necessarily in a good way. Its patrons live on the fringe of the economy: modern nomads, except for Monk, the titular proprietor, whose upstairs apartment beckons like a mythical dream of home. The others live like animals: in a tiny room over the game arcade; or in a wheeled trailer; or scraping by paycheck to paycheck; or crashing on (or sharing) a variety of extra beds. One of them is literally on a cross-country solo bicycle trip: the rootless isolation of America made plain. They exhibit a peculiarly Williamsian absence of personal boundaries: not so much friends as enmeshed with one another in great co-dependent clusterfucks, frequently devolving into screaming scuffles but rarely into actual violence. Neither cultured nor very educated— I hate to say it, but in this day and age they might well be avid admirers of you-know-who.

In this late play, Williams offers little in the way of plot or structure, but much bar-room philosophizing. Embracing the dramatic principle of  “drink, drugs, and delirium,” to rise above everyday speech, he does little more than give his dead-end characters a snootful and then stand them up to deliver monologues that express in greater or lesser detail the essence of their beings. As presented by a director and cast that bring their whole hearts to the task, it’s compelling to see. Director Dale Gutzman has coached his players into remarkably sensitive realizations of their characters. As they stand before us telling their stories, we can see their raw humanity in their eyes. There really isn’t an actor who doesn’t inhabit their role fully and truthfully: Robert Hirschi’s barkeep oversees his clients’ dramas with tender compassion, never judging them even when they fail mightily. Mike Pocaro is thoroughly credible as a cynical doctor, a smart man fallen on hard times. Both Nathan Danzer as a sad sack loser and Max Williamson as a brutish gigolo named Bill show us the lost boys within their men’s bodies. Conversely, Jenny Kosek somehow lets us see that her pathetic character’s helplessness is actually a canny survival skill; while as Leona, the big-mouthed, big-hearted, judgemental mother hen of this odd little chicken shack, Marilyn White creates an outsized persona that we miss when she’s gone, even as we sigh with relief when she leaves the stage.

Williams treats his sexuality with particular frankness, particularly in the characters of a temporary couple who happen to be passing through. James Strange’s speech as Quentin, a jaded Hollywood writer, burns us with the depth of his self-loathing and regret; Jake Russell as his momentary fling brings an unspoiled innocence that we fear for. Many of the other characters also place themselves in relation to the gay world; Leona explains how she loves being gay men’s female ally; Bill the gigolo plans to lure Quentin into the men’s room and roll him later; Monk explains the difficulties of running a gay bar: it leads to police raids, needing bribes and mafia protection. But ultimately, every character is an outcast of sorts; Williams’ outsider status lets him see the living hearts beating within people we might ordinarily swerve to avoid.

In his program notes, Gutzman writes “This play is about what it means to be ‘HUMAN!’” For this playwright, it especially means facing up to our own abject state: in the end we are each of us alone, vulnerable, full of yearning, a “poor forked naked animal,” set loose in the great ocean of the universe to navigate as best we can; to find happiness—if not forever, at least for tonight.

Off the Wall Theatre presents

Small Craft Warnings
by Tennessee Williams

playing through March 3

https://www.offthewallmke.com/

by Jeff Grygny

At the mythic dawn of civilization, problems like plagues or family tensions were easy to resolve: you just found a goat, blamed everything on it, threw it off a cliff, and everyone felt better. The same principle (minus the goat) played out in Oedipus Rex, one of the foundations of Western drama, wherein the protagonist, searching for the guilty party, discovers that it is himself (he doesn’t  take this information well).  

Now Henrik Ibsen is regarded as one of the fathers of theatrical realism, but he often laced his everyday dramas with mythic themes. An Enemy of the People— which is currently playing in a gigantified adaptation by Theatre Gigante as Enemy of the People—is Ibsen’s satirical study of small town scapegoating. First published in 1882, it is perhaps to nobody’s surprise, completely relevant today. You can sum up the entire play in Upton Sinclair’s pithy epigram: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

In a way, director/adapter Isabelle Kralj takes the theme back to its origins in Greek tragedy, adding stylized movement, songs, and the direct-address delivery often favored in Theatre Gigante’s work. Jettisoning Ibsen’s five acts with their complexities of character and relationships, this is essentially a zippy 80-minute-long political cartoon.

The actors, dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts, with abstract blocking and nameless characters, have really little more to do than hit their marks and speak their lines clearly and with conviction, and this they do very effectively: Emmitt Morgans, playing a whistle-blowing doctor, travels the journey from a civic-minded authority to a shunned outcast, at first modestly gratified to be doing his community some good, and gradually becoming more and more frustrated, putting up a good fight, and finally, in defeat, becoming a bitter self-righteous loner. His final words: “The strongest man is the one who stands alone.” could terrifyingly apply to any number of modern rebels, and it’s sobering to see him end up there.  As his nemesis, the town’s crooked, venal mayor, David Flores is too classy to go full-on Trump, though nobody can hear this character’s truth-twisting rhetoric without thinking of our con man-in-chief. Ben Yela, as a troubadour/chorus, adds welcome emotional variety with his musicianship and acting skills, commenting on the action while rendering passable impressions of several well-known singer-songwriters. Local tunesmith Jason Powell contributes a handful of tossed-off ditties, each one riffing on its chosen theme. His opening motet to water, for example, goes in part:

Two parts hydrogen
One part oxygen
Bonded covalently
Water is all.

The play’s very relevance to so many current issues, from poisoned water to global climate change—and the floods of denials from those responsible—has the side effect of draining the show of almost any dramatic tension. We have seen this story so many times before, we know exactly what’s going to happen the minute the mayor rejects the doctor’s proposal to site the town’s new health spa upstream of the factory on the grounds that it would be too expensive. We are left contemplating an all-too familiar tale played out in a novel and entertainingly straightforward  way. Some may find it cathartic, others merely depressing. But, like Ibsen’s original, Enemy of the People lets nobody off the hook, pointing out, in the nicest way possible, the hypocrisy of caring for others only to the extent that it doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice anything ourselves. And in the final defiant speech by the doctor, it shows the dangerous energies that we play with when we rush to find someone else to blame.

Theatre Gigante Presents

Enemy of the People

inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People

adapted, created and directed by Isabelle Kralj

text written by Isabelle Kralj and Mark Anderson

playing through February 16

http://www.theatregigante.org/

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by Jeff Grygny

In the migration seasons we see all kinds of non-native birds that are just stopping for a quick nosh on their way to something better. For quite a few years now, a random selection of Milwaukeeans have had the magical luck of spotting writer/performer/puppeteer and underground wandervogel Donna Oblongata on one of her periodic low-flying tours of the nation. She plays in rough offbeat venues, and publicity is largely by word of mouth or the digital equivalent, but her rambling, whimsical, one-night-only shows are priceless happenings.

This year it was All 100 Fires in a bare room upstairs from Company Brewing. As this year she performs solo, the show is less elaborate than her past DIY spectaculars, which might have scenes taking place in puppet stages, dioramas, or hand-painted scrolls. And, in tune with this peculiarly fraught moment in American culture, it features a darker, less whimiscal mood than in previous years. But these things don’t keep it from being inventive, brimming with compassion, and monstrously funny. Oblongata shows herself to be more than capable of holding the stage. With a stuffed crotch and a crepe hair beard, she plays the nameless leader of a down-and-out revolutionary army, greeting us as the latest bunch of recruits to be trained in a regime of survivalism and shambolic machismo. Speaking in an indefinable accent, she could be from anyplace in the world where political ends are pursued at the ends of semi-automatic rifles. Modeling toughness as best she can, she lays down the rules, issues death threats, leads team-building exercises, dis- and re-assembles an actual AK-47, and—with the flourish of a grotesque sight gag that’s likely to be forever burned on our unfortunate retinas—demonstrates how to make gunpowder out of human urine (“I get the sulfur from the Home Depot”). These lessons in the manly art of revolution take on even more charge when you learn that they contain direct quotes from Ted Kaczynski, Che Guevara, and Jim Jones.

Oblongata’s stories generally collage several seemingly random elements whose common thread is evocatively revealed in the telling; often her protagonists are loners: artists and scientists pursuing eccentric visions. Here, she paints a blurry picture of the insurgent’s life in cryptic but telling details: the loss of her comrades, the senseless time spent roaming over an illegible landscape, how she comes to keep her brother’s eyeballs in a cardboard box, and how, when the war is won, we will all have streets and schools named after us—though we probably won’t be around to see it.

This bathetic saga is juxtaposed with the life and work of John James Audubon, a feckless character in his own right, often broke and unemployed, who shot and killed hundreds of wild birds in the course of creating his masterpiece. From time to time the action breaks for Oblongata to manipulate a series of bird puppets: a great auk, a flock of starlings. We learn the strange story of how the starling was brought to North America (blame Shakespeare), and varied other ways in which human beings have manhandled the natural world. What does guerilla warfare have to do with displaced wildlife? That’s a question we are left to ponder, as themes swirl and flutter around us, right up to the shattering conclusion, which mashes tragedy against long-odds hope.

Few people will see Oblongata’s work in the grand scheme of things. But like the exquisite gestures of Quixote or Cyrano De Bergerac, the world is a more beautiful and noble place because of it.

by Jeff Grygny

Do you find the jargon of finance boring and impenetrable? That’s exactly what investment people want—at least, according to Robert Merkin, the dark sorcerer of Wall Street in Ayad Akhtar’s Junk, now playing in a handsome production by Milwaukee Repertory Theater. But even if your eyes glaze over whenever someone tries to explain what “bonds” are, this show is . . . exciting. That’s right: “finance” and “exciting” —two words you’d only expect to find together in a sales pitch. And you can easily imagine Shakespeare’s audiences sitting just as intensely rapt for his history plays, which for them were current events. Junk is no ordinary drama: it’s a creation myth, a saga of how the world we live in was made.

And made it was: the loss of American industry to cheap labor abroad; the financialization of the world economy; the excesses of Wall Street, and the mind-boggling concentration of wealth into a few privileged hands, all began (as left-wing economists tell us) in the 1980’s, when New Deal protections were allowed to lapse and deregulation opened the door to (as right-wing economists tell us), the most dynamic, innovative economy in history. Whether you like it or not, the ideas flogged by the likes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School— that the only purpose of business is to generate profits for shareholders—came of age in this era. The character Merkin is based on the true story of Michael Milken, the “Junk Bond King,” who personified the rapaciousness and greed of the new investor class, who made it their mission to use borrowed money to buy out established family companies and systematically gut them, leaving thousands jobless or without pensions. Politicians on both sides of the aisle embraced them, explicitly or not; they all took their money. It’s hard to imagine a story with more impact on our lives.

Akhtar skillfully crafts a tale where the characters’ emotional stakes are clear and pressing He focuses the drama on one incident: Merkin’s hostile takeover of a multi-generational steel company, the kind where everything in the town is named after them. Like Shakespeare, Akhtar divides his crowd of players into factions: the lean and hungry pirates and their henchmen; the aristocratic steel magnate and his team; the investors and factotums, and the legal authorities investigating them. (It’s especially cheering to see, among the first-rate cast, many familiar local talents.)

James Ridge suggests a Lear-like pathos in the beleaguered chief executive faced with losing his family legacy; Jonathan Wainwright brings his patented sneer to the role of a sinister stock fixer; Brian Mani captures the confidence and bluster of an investor who sees that Merkin and company will destroy his world, while Justin Rivera shows the overweening ambition of a minor player whom Merkin, Mephistopheles-like, manipulates by appealing to his avarice. In one scene they sit together in a Los Angeles penthouse, city lights glittering below, speculating on how much money it would take to buy the entire city. Gregory Linington plays the enigmatic Merkin to perfection: is he just an effective snake charmer, or does he believe his own hype about changing the world for the better? Does he really want to help excluded Jews and Latinos take over from the casually racist WASP elite, or is that just part of his chain-yanking patter? The most intriguing relationship is between him and Rachel Sledd as his wife Amy, a financial genius in her own right, who seems to genuinely believe in his transforming mission and supports him in his moments of doubt. The Macbeths come readily to mind, though there’s also a gnome-like trace trace of Shylock in Merkin’s sanctification of the bond, and there’s a touch of Richard III in his single-minded machinations. “Don’t bother with facts,” he tells an adoring crowd. “You’ve got to make people feel.” The powers that be have learned this lesson well.

Director Mark Clements keeps the narrative juggernaut grinding forward with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. His decision to run the show without intermission keeps the tension building; the dense, idea-heavy script is a mental workout, but you never find your mind wandering the entire two hours. The Rep’s characteristically high production values add welcome elements of spectacle: Todd Edward Ivins’ monumental gray-faceted set could represent office towers, or enormous stacks of virtual wealth, or the Escher-like labyrinths of Merkin’s schemes. Video projections by Jared Mezzochi spectacularly deliver the glamour of business being done at high risk and high stakes, to the effectively chilly drones and pulses of Lindsay Jones’ electronic score.

As in life, there is no happy ending. Everyone—from the shareholders, to the company’s employees, to the politician, to the hapless journalist, to Merkin himself—everyone goes for the money in lieu of any ideal, obligation, or purpose. “It was like they were founding a new religion,” the journalist/narrator tells us. But in the end, they all went for the money. It’s a powerful, gut-wrenching conclusion. And it’s the world we live in now.

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents

Junk

by Ayad Akhtar

playing through February 17

https://www.milwaukeerep.com/

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