Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s ‘Hoops’ celebrates the circle of life
In song and sketch, vignette and dance, “Hoops” celebrates circular earrings and the people who wear them.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s friendly show opened Saturday night at the Broadway Theatre Center, with an enthusiastic audience near capacity. This production is part of World Premiere Wisconsin, a statewide festival of new plays and musicals.
“Hoops” began with Nicole Acosta’s photo portrait series of the same name, documenting people who wear the earrings from Milwaukee and elsewhere.
Acosta’s photos are on display at Milwaukee Artist Resource Network’s gallery, 191 N. Broadway, concurrently with MCT’s production. Playwright Eliana Pipes interviewed some of Acosta’s subjects and shaped that material into this production, which has original music by Milwaukee hip-hop composer B~Free (including a “Hoops” theme that sounds completely TV-ready).
Maria Patrice Amon directs this production, with choreography by Tisiphani Mayfield.
Actors Ashley Oviedo, Paulina Lule and Celia Mandela Rivera move fluidly through scenes and characters. There’s a lot of humor in “Hoops,” signaled early on when Lule pops out wearing dinner-plate-size earrings. Later, donning a lab coat, Oviedo poses as the mad scientist who invented hoop earrings as a bleep deflector, preventing the verbal bleep of other people from getting into the ear.
In one of the show’s longer and more touching scenes, Oviedo is the daughter of a poor mother (Rivera), hanging on to one of her mother’s broken earrings, vowing to fix it; her mother’s hoop becomes a talisman that helps Oviedo’s character get through their separation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Hoops” makes time for the stylistic debate of gold vs. plastic earrings, and for thoughts about ethically sourcing precious metals. And of course it notes the agony of desperately searching for a lost earring.
This show unabashedly celebrates