Post Script

In a 2018 interview about her much-produced work The Thanksgiving Play, Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse summarized the plot, saying “I make fun of white people for eighty-two minutes!” And in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s well executed production, available on video through May 23, that is exactly what you will get. Helmed by Laura Gordon, the four performers lean into intentional stereotypes of a shallow, ambitious actress expertly wielding her sex appeal; a frustrated academic and wannabe playwright; and two painfully lefty snowflakes crippled by their own hyper-awareness. At the crossroads of performative goodness, good intentions, liberal guilt, and pervasive self-interest, things go terribly wrong when the group is tasked with improvising an educational play about Thanksgiving.

The LNU (Loud ’N Unchained) Black Theater Festival, which debuts on April 30, has been several years in the making. Producer Dana Pellebon says it feels long overdue.

“I was actually the last member added to the team,” Pellebon says in a recent interview. “But this idea aligned really well with my goals as a director, producer and artist. I’ve been working for a while to create a space to showcase Black theater artists.”

After a quick search online in 2019, Pellebon found a mere four theater festivals in the country that specifically celebrated Black artists, only one of which was an annual event. “I knew there were so many talented artists of color out there — in our own community and many other places around the country — who didn’t have opportunities in ‘traditional’ theater spaces. I was very excited to build a festival focusing on them, celebrating their unique art, and introducing them to wider audiences.”

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s current production, Underneath the Lintel, is a smart, funny, maybe even profound look at how professional interest can turn into a personal obsession, and how a small collection of facts can lead to large leaps of credulity, and perhaps eventually leaps of faith. The provocative and captivating show by playwright Glen Berger is available virtually through May 2.

It begins with a chalkboard, a slideshow titled “An Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences,” and a trunk of artifacts, carefully labeled and numbered. What follows is a scholarly but passionate lecture by an initially prim Dutch librarian (an enchanting Elyse Edelman), who is somewhat disappointed that more people did not show up for her presentation.

In 1804, Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to travel west, to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and search for a northwest passage from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. They didn’t ulitimately find one, but they did travel 8,000 miles in two-and-a-half years, documenting their journey and piecing together the mountains, rivers, and valleys of that make up a huge part of the U.S.

Their enthusiastic president was thrilled. Jefferson declared, “We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this great country: those who come after us will fill up the canvas we begin.” And with Lewis and Clark’s richly detailed maps in hand, American settlers did just that. They pushed Native people to the edges of the country and bought, sold, and colonized every inch of “canvas” in a matter of decades, rather than the generations that Jefferson had predicted. Initially omitted from history, the legend of Lewis and Clark was revived on the hundredth anniversary of their trip, and from that moment on they have been celebrated (by school children at least) for taming the West and opening the frontier.

Fans of American Players Theatre have been waiting more than a year to return to the woods of Spring Green to see the classical company perform extraordinary dramas and comedies in the open air in the Hill Theatre or in an intimate setting in the Touchstone. After an entire season of empty stages and vacant seats, today APT’s artistic director Brenda DeVita announced the theater’s return to live, in-person performances — the first since the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to public gatherings in early 2020.

To adhere to the latest safety mandates and to keep both audiences and theater practitioners safe, the 2021 theater schedule will include both fewer productions and fewer actors than in previous years. Beginning in May, the company will mount three pairs of plays, one in each venue rather than its traditional rotating repertory. The first plays will be the world premiere of James DeVita’s An Improbable Fiction in the Hill Theatre, and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop in the Touchstone Theatre. Next up will be Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing (Hill) and a remount of the tour-de-force monologue with music, An Iliad (Touchstone). The third pair will be an adaption of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline by Henry Woronicz (Hill) and Christopher Fry’s A Phoenix Too Frequent (Touchstone), which was originally slated for the 2020 season. APT also expects to announce three more productions to play in the fall and winter.

Rennaissance Theaterworks already had their work cut out for them this year — long before the pandemic closed their doors. After decades of performing in the small and artisitcally challenging black box Studio Theatre at Broadway Theatre Center, the 28-year-old company had decided to move a few blocks out of the Third Ward to the Next Act space, so they could expand their audience size and the scale of their productions.

With the abrupt halt of their final play of the 2019-2020 season, while still in rehearsals last March, the company waited. They partnered with other theaters to host interactive “theater in a box” evenings and a virtual collection of three plays by BIPOC writers called Belonging. Now they are back with a refreshed production from their archives, Marti Gobel reprising her role in the much lauded one-person show, Neat, by Charlayne Woodard. Presented in the Next Act theater and expertly filmed, it is available on demand, streaming through April 11th.

Some people blame gangs. Some think it’s the police. Or sex traffickers. Or the bus drivers that ferry the young women of Juarez, Mexico, back and forth to their low-paying jobs in local factories. Many blame the government for its unwillingness to address the problem of rampant femicide. But one thing is sure: In what’s been dubbed “one of the most dangerous cities for women,” little girls, teenagers, grandmothers, 30-somethings, wives, girlfriends, and daughters are disappearing, their bodies often discovered dumped in fields after being raped, tortured, and mutilated. Hundreds of them every year are kidnapped and killed, their families devastated. And there is no sign of the unspeakable violence against women stopping in this Mexican border town. Instead there are pink crosses and missing posters that commemorate each life that was ended in the most brutal and sadistic ways.

Every once in a while a new article about the crisis in Juarez bubbles to the surface of American media. Sometimes there are documentaries. But now, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents a vivid and visceral look at “las desaparecidas” – the missing ones – in the one-woman, docu-mythologia The Way She Spoke, written by Isaac Gomez. A true tour-de-force for the exceedingly gifted actress Michelle Lopez-Rios, the semi-autobiographical play is both an essential and an extremely difficult story to watch about a culture of violence, entitlement, and sexual abuse towards women that has taken hundreds of lives.

For the year that theaters have been shuttered due to the pandemic, I have often thought that Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s new artistic director, Brent Hazelton, has gotten a really raw deal. After shadowing the previous director, Michael Wright, for an entire year, Hazelton finally took the reins of the storied organization with one of the most diverse and exciting slate of plays that any arts organization had scheduled for the 2020/2021 season. And just when he was getting to put his incredible plans into place, everything was shut down.

Next Act Theatre released its second virtual performance of the season this week, a look at the struggles faced by high school teachers in the fictional Chinua Achebe Academy on Chicago’s South Side during the Before Times. “The Principal Principle,” directed by Marti Gobel and written by former Chicago Public School teacher Joe Zarrow, takes audiences inside the English department’s office to meet a group of educators who fit into familiar types. There is the get-along, go-along department chair Ola (Ericka Wade); the old school, can’t-wait-for-retirement Denise (a wonderfully feisty Flora Coker); the innovative idealist (a fascinating Malaina Moore) and the utter fish out of water Kay (a passionate April Paul), who is an impressionable newbie with little training and no experience. As the play unfolds it’s also apparent that this freshman teacher has no idea how to reach her students, many of whom are a million miles away from Kay’s own middle class, white bread life, growing up in an affluent Chicago suburb. Antagonizing these weary, but good hearted teachers at every turn is the principal, Ms. Wei (a stiff Megan Kim), who believes that education can only be measured by scientific data. An administrator with very little time in the classroom, Wei engages a test prep company to design their new curriculum, ensuring that students will do well on standardized tests that will determine the future employment of the teachers and funding for the school.

“Pivot” is not a strong enough word to describe the changes professional theaters have had to make over the last ten months to keep producing work for socially distanced audiences. By now, “reinvent” is probably a better descriptor. That is what Artistic Director Jeff Frank and First Stage have done with their latest virtual production, “Escape from Peligro Island – A Create Your Own Adventure Play,” available for live streaming through February 8 and for on demand viewing from February 6 – 28.