Post Script

One of the most powerful experiences theater can impart to audiences is one of empathy. Florian Zeller’s play The Father accomplishes this in a way that a slew of other plays about older people in the grip Alzheimer’s or dementia cannot. The current Strollers Theatre production, onstage at the Bartell Theatre through March 30, illustrates the main character’s final years, primarily through his own altered perspective. Instead of exclusively looking in from the outside at an elderly man who’s lost his faculties, through Andre (a remarkable Carl Cawthorne) the audience also sees a world that doesn’t make any sense. There are puzzling time lapses, new people showing up in each scene claiming to be relatives or caregivers, and contradictory information presented as facts. It’s as if the main character is the only sane person in an increasingly absurd world that refuses to snap back to normal.

Over the course of a decade when the Lebanese Civil War was at its height -- 1982-1992 -- more than 100 foreign nationals were kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut. Used as leverage against Western intervention in the conflict, most of them were Americans and Europeans. Among the prisoners were Irish writer Brian Kennan and British journalist John McCarthy, who shared a cell for nearly five years before their release. The story of their captivity is the basis for Frank McGuiness’s play Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, which is currently receiving an extraordinary production at Spring Green’s new Two Crows Theatre Company.

There’s no doubt that the slightly scruffy Huck Finn (an astonishing Luke Brotherhood in the Clemens cast) could use some “civilizing,” as his elderly guardian Widow Douglas (a chameleon-like Kat Wodtke) pointedly suggests with demanding thumps of her cane and an accusing finger pointed at Huck’s chest. In First Stage’s soulful and enchanting production of “Big River,” she sings admonishments in “Looka Here Huck,” while many of her castmates join in the chorus and provide accompaniment on the fiddle, guitar, ukelele and washboard. Among other pronouncements, she asserts that Huck should go to school, eat all his vegetables, and start behaving like a responsible adult. Of course this is Huck’s cue to playfully disobey, running off to the banks of the Mississippi River to commence loafing on the shore and fishing under the warm sun.

According to historians, German composer Carl Orff was so pleased with his new composition “Carmina Burana,” a spectacle which combined Medieval poetry, a full orchestra, choirs, dance, and many theatrical elements, that he sent the following note to his publisher: “Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With ‘Carmina Burana,’ my collected works begin.”

After experiencing Skylight Music Theatre’s multi-media, multi-disciplinary performance of the symphony/concert/opera/dance piece with the unforgettable hook, it’s easy to see how an artist would regard this as a bold new chapter in his work. Often performed as an orchestral piece with a standard chorus, this version, running in the Cabot Theatre at the Broadway Theatre Center through March 31, is probably much closer to what Orff had in mind.

It’s such an attractive offer when, on a cold night in March, the energetic Emcee (Erin McConnell), with her pixie haircut and a bawdy twinkle in her eye, implores you to come in to the Kit Kat Klub and leave your troubles outside. But after a few playfully naughty chorus numbers in Cabaret, it becomes clear that having another drink of gin or doing another line of cocaine to forget about the increasingly dire world around you is a recipe for heartbreak, or worse.

For four decades Spring Green, Wisconsin, has been synonymous with American Players Theatre, the much-lauded classical company that draws more than 100,000 patrons a year to the sleepy rural town, all summer long. Now theater-goers have a reason to visit in the colder months as well. Two Crows Theatre Company is finishing up its inaugural season, right off the town’s main street in a building that, until recently, was home to the Village Tavern. Under the guidance of artistic director Robert Doyle and associate artist Brian Byrnes, the space is being reimagined and slowly transformed into The Jefferson, featuring a speakeasy style cocktail bar called Rosa Lee's Lounge in the front and a versatile black-box theater in the back, with a capacity for seating between 80 and 100 patrons.

Tibet Through the Red Box is a cultural exploration focusing on the spiritual connection between a bedridden boy in 1950s Prague and his filmmaker father, who is lost in Tibet after an avalanche killed most of his crew. On March 9, Children’s Theater of Madison kicked off a short run of this visually stunning production for young adults and teens, which runs through March 17 in Overture’s Playhouse.

Murder ballads -- story songs that tell of a gruesome killing and its aftermath, frequently involving former lovers -- have been popular for hundreds of years. A standard in American folk music, they combine the sensationalism of a crime of passion with a warning to the audience that getting mixed up with the wrong man or woman could lead to one’s downfall, or death.

It is refreshing to see a play open with really high stakes. “The Velocity of Autumn,” playing at In Tandem Theatre through March 17, does this in spades. Chris (Stephen Marzolf) a 40-something-ish, restless artist breaks in to his mother’s home by climbing her favorite tree up to a second floor window and flinging himself inside. But instead of welcoming her prodigal son home after a 20-year absence, she immediately orders him to leave or suffer the consequences: she’s prepared to blow up her entire Brooklyn brownstone using homemade Molotov cocktails, fueled with her late husband’s photograph developing fluid. And we can see that Alexandra, the determined, 79 year-old mom (a steel-spined Angela Iannone) means business; she holds a mason jar of accelerant in one hand and her father’s Zippo lighter in the other. She may be old, she may be a good candidate for an assisted living community, but she’s not leaving the building without a fight. Or so she threatens.

For decades audiences have been revisiting the pain of America’s participation in the Vietnam War, and the fraught return home by many of its veterans. From David Rabe’s three play trilogy, including “Streamers,” and “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” to the docudramas “A Piece of My Heart,” and “Tracers,” to the current touring favorite “Miss Saigon,” writers have been examining how the soldiers who fought in one of the country’s most horrific and unpopular wars have transitioned back to civilian life.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s current offering “Strange Snow,” by Stephan Metcalfe, is another entry in that category.