Rep leaders hope to provoke civil conversation
With shows by Lin-Manuel Miranda, August Wilson, Ayad Akhtar and Lloyd Suh on next season’s calendar, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater is fulfilling its vow to tell stories reflective of the racially and ethnically diverse community it serves.
More than 60% of the people who will appear on Rep stages during 2018’19 will be people of color, thanks in part to a cast of 23 Latinx actors who will perform in the Miranda musical “In the Heights.”
During a recent discussion of the new season, which will celebrate the Rep’s 65th anniversary, managing director Chad Bauman and artistic director Mark Clements linked their programming choices to their mission statement, which could be boiled down to a key phrase: “theater experiences that entertain, provoke, and inspire meaningful dialogue among an audience representative of Milwaukee’s rich diversity.”
Highlights of the new season, announced Monday, include “In the Heights,” which won Miranda a Tony Award before he went on to create “Hamilton”; “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” a “Pride and Prejudice” sequel in a holiday setting focusing on middle sister Mary Bennet; and Brookfield Central graduate Akhtar’s “Junk,” a hard-hitting dramatization of ‘80s financial shenanigans that pits old capitalism against takeover artists.
Next season, the Rep will add a third, non-subscription show to the lineup of its intimate Stiemke Theatre: “Every Brilliant Thing” by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, a tour de force for a single actor who spends much of the show with audience members, enlisting their help in coping with his severely depressed mother.
“This is a beautiful play,” said Clements, “a play about depression (and) suicide that is presented in the most uplifting beautiful package.”
To accommodate its expanded season of 15 plays on four stages, the Rep will employ 885 performer weeks (including actors and musicians), an increase of 20% over the current season, Bauman pointed out. The Rep’s annual budget will be about $13 million.
If selling those extra tickets makes
Bauman and Clements anxious, they’ll be able to relax with a beverage in the renovated Stackner Cabaret, which will reopen Sept. 7 with Joanna MurraySmith’s “Songs for Nobodies,” which draws on the songs and auras of Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf and Maria Callas.
The $1.75 million renovation expands the Stackner’s seating capacity from the 120s to 193, and adds more women’s restrooms. The Rep is also adding a seating area outside the Stackner performing space, making it possible for audience members attending other shows to have a drink and talk while a Stackner performance is going on. Also, the Rep has worked out necessary permissions to live-stream video of soldout Stackner shows into that space.
In 2016, the Rep announced receipt of a $1 million endowment gift to support the John D. (Jack) Lewis New Play Development Program. An obvious fruit of that initiative is the number of new plays the Rep has in development. But Clements said the Rep’s board of directors has also signed on to his broader vision of play development, which includes the willingness to stage second productions and regional premieres.
Second productions can be critical in playwrights improving their plays, Clements said, citing the changes he made between the first and second productions of his new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.” As the Rep’s artistic leader, his criterion for taking on a second production is the writer’s willingness to keep developing the play.
So next season the Rep will offer a fully staged world premiere, “Mark Twain’s River of Song,” as well as American premieres of Australian playwrights Murray-Smith’s “Songs for Nobodies” and Andrew Bevell’s “Things I Know to Be True,” a regional premiere of Akhtar’s “Junk” and a second production of Suh’s “The Chinese Lady,” a new play about a Chinese woman brought to the United States in the 1830s and installed in a sideshow.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Akhtar, who has been an informal ambassador for the Rep for years, has now joined the Rep’s board of directors. Several Rep shows next season will be co-productions, meaning the same cast will perform them in other cities, too.
Bauman and Clements promoted, as they regularly do, their commitment to theater as a catalyst for inspiring discussion. Specifically, noting the scorched-earth nature of many social media encounters, Bauman hopes the Rep’s work will promote “the act of being able to debate, dissent and do it in a civil manner that is being lost in society today.”
That desire led the Rep several seasons ago to create its Act II program. After each performance of a selected production, a community guest responder offers a brief reaction to the show, followed by small group discussions facilitated by the Zeidler Center for Public Discussion. This season’s ACT II show is “Until the Flood,” Dael Orlandersmith’s play derived from her interviews of a wide spectrum of people in Ferguson, Mo., after the death of Michael Brown. Next season it will be “Every Brilliant Thing.”
“We are using the power of theater to bring people together to have really interesting discussions around thorny topics,” Bauman said.