sparkle in summer
Several troupes offer quality shows during vacation season
In addition to sun, sand, fish boils and cherry pie, Door County is home to four top-flight theater companies, each offering vacationers the chance to step out of their tents or cabins for a night and lose themselves in alternative worlds created by seasoned storytellers.
Here’s my first of two reports chronicling what’s currently playing just a few hours north of Milwaukee.
“Lungs” (Third Avenue Playhouse)
Last fall, this standout Wisconsin theater company introduced us to playwright Duncan Macmillan through “Every Brilliant Thing,” a play I described as unlike any I’d ever seen and as making “a brilliant case for choosing life.”
Now director Robert Boles and TAP are staging the Wisconsin premiere of Macmillan’s “Lungs,” a two-actor play making the same case through a different lens, as a young couple – the never-named “M” and “W” – decide whether to make a new life in a dying world. It’s the best of the six plays I saw in Door County in the first week of July.
Consistent with Macmillan’s directions, M and W occupy a stage without props, scenery or gimmicks, in a world that we’re continually reminded is imploding, thanks to demagogic leaders and environmental devastation. How can one consider making a baby in such a blasted world? How can one consider making a play in such an empty space?
In deciding whether to take the plunge during this 95-minute, intermission-free piece, Nick Narcisi’s M and Elodie Senetra’s W speak with excruciating honesty about numerous thorny topics relating to love, sex and procreation.
The relationship between lust and love. The selfishness inherent in adding a new being to an overcrowded planet rather than adopting. How child-rearing can both fulfill and paradoxically compromise one’s ability to live one’s best self. How a man's and woman’s different experience of pregnancy alters the balance of power in a relationship.
Restless, fearful and openly needy, Senetra’s W tends to circle these topics. Narcisi’s M says much less but tends to tackle these topics head on. Boles coaxes riveting and nuanced performances from both actors, as they gradually sketch a portrait of a relationship that’s both flawed and deeply right. For all their failings, we believe in this pair as a couple; we want them to make it, and share what they know with a child.
If you thought about the ramifications of having a kid, you never would, W says, before suggesting there are times we ought to think less and love more – plan less and instead just let ourselves breathe. Doing so requires a leap of faith, on behalf of those one loves and the world we inhabit, with all its toxins. Neither is perfect. But both are worthy of every breath we take.
“Lungs” continues through July 21 at Third Avenue Playhouse in Sturgeon Bay.
“Dairy Heirs” (Northern Sky Theater)
Northern Sky Theater, which has a distinguished track record of staging 90-minute world premiere musicals under the stars in the Peninsula State Park amphitheater, is offering two new shows this year, playing in repertory through late August alongside a singalong version of the perennially (and justly) popular “Lumberjacks in Love.”
The title of “Dairy Heirs” – brain child of Joel Kopischke (music by Alissa Rhode; book by Eva Nimmer as well as Kopischke) – says it all. Directed and choreographed by Molly Rhode and Kelly Doherty, this selfstyled “Moo-sical” is loaded with puns, groaners so deliberately awful that they provoke wry amusement.
Set on a family dairy farm in Wisconsin, the story involves a stay-at-home sister (Nimmer) and her highflying Hollywood brother (Doug Clemons), in town to settle the estate after their father’s unexpected death.
With his white tie and loud red pants, Hollywood Gabe looks and feels out of place amidst sister Elsie, onetime sweetheart Linda (Molly Rhode) and twins who imagine themselves identical even though they look nothing alike (Alex Campea and Chase Stoeger, with some nifty vaudevillian routines).
Many Northern Sky shows play variations on this theme of an outsider (re)discovering the good life in rural Wisconsin; many of those shows have more textured characters, compelling storylines and accompanying music than this one.
Rhode’s music is serviceable but takes few risks. The score needs more ballads, much as the show needs a more compelling love story rather than three perfunctorily outlined couplings. The book so frequently reaches for the same not particularly funny jokes – involving addictive cheese, a ringing phone, or hurled and crumpled beer cans, for example – that they become annoying and predictable tics.
Best in show comes more than one hour in: two late, knockout numbers featuring Lachrisa Grandberry as a Hollywood agent and Gabe’s girlfriend. Grandberry is a rising star who bears watching; here her soulful voice, zest for life and infectious humor steal the show.
“Dairy Heirs” continues through Aug. 25 at Peninsula State Park.
“Boxcar” (Northern Sky Theater)
“Boxcar” (music by James Valcq; book and lyrics by Laurie Flanigan Hegge; directed by Jon Hegge) travels a different track in recalling the Great Depression, during which hungry hobos rode the rails looking for work. Two of them camp out by the tracks in western Wisconsin, at the edge of a rich banker’s property.
Valcq (“Victory Farm”) and Hegge (“Loose Lips Sink Ships”) represent a second, more resonant and far more serious strain of Northern Sky’s DNA. Drawing on inspiring stories from our collective past, their work dares to imagine that we might build a similar future, overcoming difference and recapturing the meaning of community.
In “Boxcar,” those differences revolve around class. Fred (Jeffrey Herbst) is a homeless and shellshocked World War I veteran who loves Shakespeare but distrusts the world. He’s gruff and short-tempered
as well as lost; in Herbst’s wrenching rendition of the harrowing “Black Bottle,” all Fred’s fear spills out and pools around him, threatening to engulf him.
But as we’ll see by journey’s end, Fred is also filled with tenderness and love, most fully expressed in the gorgeous “Hobo’s Lullaby,” during which he remembers his own mother while himself mothering a small boy named Charlie (10-year-old Ben Martin). It’s vintage Valcq: poignant, melodic and filled with hopeful yearning for a better world.
Sensitive son to the play’s taciturn and tightly wound banker (Doug Mancheski), Charlie seeks in Fred and traveling companion Mack (Doug Clemons) the loving father he craves. This unlikely trio strike up a friendship driven forward by Valcq’s score, in which the rumbling percussion and bass reflect all we can’t or won’t say about how we truly feel.
Other elements of this promising world premiere still need fine-tuning; both Mancheski’s banker and especially Charlie’s older sister (Nadja Simmonds) are plot devices rather than characters, making them and their transitions hard to fathom or credit.
One would also like to see a greater connection between this show’s infectious love affair with trains (best expressed by Alex Campea as a stationmaster) and the underlying story involving the desperate men who rode them in the 1930s. All that said, “Boxcar” is a keeper that will hopefully chug along – at Northern Sky and other American theaters – for years to come.“Boxcar” continues through Aug. 24 at Peninsula State Park.
“Miss Holmes” (Peninsula Players Theatre)
What if Sherlock Holmes had been a woman, with all the additional challenges that would pose for a Victorian? Christopher M. Walsh’s “Miss Holmes” goes there, in a smart and fun play that’s now on stage at Peninsula Players Theatre in Fish Creek, under Elizabeth Margolius’ direction.
Played with verve by Cassandra Bissell – excellent as the lead in the recent Renaissance Theaterworks production of “Top Girls” – this Sherlock is as fiercely bright as her renowned male counterpart.
But this Sherlock has also been periodically confined to an asylum by her own brother (Sean Fortunato) – reflecting how readily intelligent women then and now are marginalized as mad hysterics.
And also routinely underestimated. Sherlock sidekick Dorothy Watson (Maggie Kettering) must continually remind the men surrounding her – including a well-intentioned if haplessly conventional suitor (Dan Klarer) – that she’s a doctor with a career. As a wife, Lizzie Chapman (Erica Elam) is much more than the sweet angel that she initially seems.
In Walsh’s play, women like Lizzie aren’t just underestimated. They’re also apt to be murdered. Lizzie herself is third wife to a creepy Scotland Yard detective (Karl Hamilton) whose first two wives died under mysterious circumstances.
The game’s afoot as Sherlock tries to discover why, in a fast-moving plot involving rapid-fire dialogue between Bissell and Kettering as well as quick, adeptly handled transitions on Jack Magaw’s set.
That set is dominated by an upstage wall of painted glass with revolving panels, lighted by Jason Fassl in lurid and shifting colors suggesting a phantasmagorical Turner seascape. Shadows loom large and danger lurks behind those walls, true to a London in which characters feel alone and lost – and in which no one is quite who they seem to be on the surface.
Those psychological mysteries are always larger than material clues in the best Holmes stories, among which I’ll count this one. Its gender-bending focus on Victorians’ fear of, fascination with and violence toward women introduces a mystery that this Sherlock both embodies and intrepidly works to solve, proving anew that you can’t keep a good woman down.
“Miss Holmes” continues through July 22 at Peninsula Players Theatre in Fish Creek.