IWU School of Theatre Arts Announces Mainstage Choices for 2017-18

Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts has announced via Facebook what will be on stage for the mainstage part of their 2017-18 season. No dates yet and the official IWU Theatre page is still showing last year's schedule, but at least we know what we'll seeing if not exactly when. I'm guessing checking back on that page periodically should yield a schedule at some point.

If the order of the photos indicated the order of the shows, first up will be Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel's wistful, haunting memory play set in County Donegal in Ireland in 1936.  The Lughnasa in Dancing at Lughnasa refers to the August harvest festival. The five Mundy sisters are struggling to get by, from the eldest, Kate, a tightly wound schoolteacher, to Christina, the youngest, who has a child but no husband or other means of support. Their lives only get more difficult when their older brother, who'd been a Catholic missionary and chaplain in Africa, returns for unspecified reasons, but has trouble mentally balancing the world he left behind and the one he's reentered. Christina's son Michael is the narrator of the play, standing in for Friel. He appears as an adult to step back into the action of his childhood. Dancing at Lughnasa was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, thereafter transferring to London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Play in 1991. On Broadway, it also took the Tony for Best Play, along with awards for director Patrick Mason and Best Featured Actress in a Play for Brid Brennan, who played Agnes, the shy, tentative sister somewhat overshadowed in the middle of the family, in its Dublin, West End and Broadway productions.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical South Pacific comes next in the picture scroll. Everybody knows "Some Enchanted Evening," "Bali Hai" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," right? Based on James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, this South Pacific features music by Rodgers, lyrics by Hammerstein and book by Joshua Logan, telling the stories of Americans stationed on islands in the Pacific. There's Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, who faces her own prejudices when she falls in love with a French plantation owner named Emile de Becque who has mixed-race children; a squadron of rowdy Seabees led by Luther Bills; and Lieutenant Cable, a forthright young officer in the midst of dangerous missions and a love affair with a native woman. As a child, I remember thinking Nellie was an idiot for her bigotry against two kids who were half-Polynesian, but that's the point of South Pacific, that our prejudices are not innate or logically justifiable but "carefully taught." The original Broadway production won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and piled up ten Tony Awards, including winning Best Musical along with awards for its book, score, director, producer and scenic design, and sweeping the acting categories, with wins for leads Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, who played Nellie and Emile de Becque, and featured actors Myron McCormick, who played Billis, and Juanita Hall, who played Bloody Mary, the enterprising mother of Cable's beautiful love interest.

Next on the list in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist drama Rhinoceros, wherein the citizens of a French town inexplicably start turning into stampeding rhinoceroses. One by one, they sprout horns and hoofs, as a lone man, Berenger, tries to hold out against the onslaught. Rhinoceros was written in 1959 and is widely regarded as a cautionary tale about how mass movements like Fascism and Nazism can take over and turn people who were once reasonable human beings into fanatical monsters. In other words, it's perfect for our current international political landscape. Although actor/producer/director/mime Jean-Louis Barrault played Berenger in the original French production and Laurence Olivier took the role in London, it was Eli Wallach who made Berrenger (now with an extra R) his own on Broadway, with Zero Mostel as his intellectual friend John (originally Jean) who turned rhino in front of his eyes. In the showier role, Mostel was the one who won the Tony as Best Actor. In the 1973 film, Gene Wilder played a new version of Berenger called Stanley, with Mostel reprising his role.

In a real change of pace from the politically and personally provocative to just plain fun, the last show in IWU's mainstage season is the roller disco musical Xanadu, based on the 1980 film that starred Olivia Newton-John as a Greek muse. On Broadway, Kerry Butler took the Newton-John role, while Cheyenne Jackson played the man she's trying to inspire. Douglas Carter Beane spruced up the book from the film script, adding more mythology and a whole lot of parody to send up the campy movie. Along with the roller skates, songs from the movie like the title song and "All Over the World" came with it from screen to stage, with added hits like "Have You Never Been Mellow?" and ELO's "Strange Magic." Click here to see Jackson, Butler and the rest of the cast perform "Don't Walk Away" on the Tonys.

In case you're wondering, it was Kelli O'Hara who was nominated but did not win the Tony for the 2010 revival of South Pacific, whose poster image you see up top, while Kerry Butler -- the blonde in the poster just above -- was nominated but did not win for Xanadu in 2008.

Watch this space for more details on all these shows as dates are added. Check here for IWU's Laboratory Theatre schedule once that's added.

ISU Brings Out the Pretty Side of DANCING AT LUGHNASA

I've been reviewing theater for a very long time. I started writing for the Champaign News-Gazette in 1989, and at the beginning, my process was a bit like Jed Leland's in Citizen Kane, returning to the newsroom immediately after the performance to type up my thoughts. Without the manual typerwiter or the bottle of Scotch, of course.

I quickly discovered that my opinions were more fully formed if I let the performance sit overnight, just resting there till morning. I would wake up clearer and more focused on what I thought. And that's mostly been the way I've operated ever since. I let it sit. And then I can set out my opinion in a more reasoned, reflective manner.

I saw Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 1. That's more than a week that I've let this one sit, and I have to admit, I'm still not exactly sure how to approach this production. Hmmm...

First, let's be clear that this was not your standard proscenium staging in the Center for the Performing Arts. Director Lori Adams chose to set the action of the play on a side portion of the CPA stage, bringing the audience onto the stage with the actors, seated on folding chairs arranged on risers, with some of the "grass" from the set extending into corners and pathways through the seating area. We entered from the side hallway and never went near the actual seats in the auditorium. I am generally all for environmental staging, bringing us closer to the drama, and Jen Kazmierczak's scenic design is certainly pretty and charming, carving out a niche within the larger space of the Center for the Performing Arts with a warm little cottage that represents the home of the Mundy sisters and an overreaching tree with a beautiful blue sky in the background.

Likewise, Lauren Lowell's costume design is pretty, with a flouncy embroidered skirt here, an exquisite lace apron there, and an adorable pair of Mary Janes with red, gathered straps that my mother would've killed for when she was a teen in the late 30s.

The set and the costumes make for a lovely, idyllic tableau. It might also be an appropriate tableau for a memory play, one in which our adult narrator, Michael, steps back in time to conjure up the world of his mother and her sisters as he remembers them in 1936. But Michael is not a sentimental narrator. He knows full well -- and he tells us -- that the Mundy household was teetering on the edge of poverty at this precise moment. His memories include shoes with thin, much-mended soles and missing laces, and a dinner with three eggs stretched to make a meal for eight people.

In performance, this Dancing at Lughnasa is sweet and languid and almost like a fairytale. That makes for an interesting choice, if not necessarily the most dramatic choice, or the one most connected to the stark financial reality the sisters face. Yes, Dancing at Lughnasa is a play about family. But it's also about poverty, about the lack of options for women in Depression-era Ireland, about the difficulty of finding a way to keep a family together in a place where customs, rules and a hugely repressive church conspire against them. That's why their dance is such a revelation, because it breaks through the grim reality of their lives for one joyous, life-affirming moment. It should shatter the pervasive oppression. But we're missing the oppression here.

Among the cast, Fiona Stephens and Jaimie Taylor stand out as sisters Kate and Maggie. Kate is the most serious and responsible sister, and Stephens does an excellent job of giving her enough pride and enough backbone as well as a sense of underlying despair. She's the one who feels the burden.

In contrast, Taylor's Maggie is the family jokester, the one brimming over with life, the one who livens things up for her sisters and for the audience. Taylor is a breath of fresh air in the role.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a beautiful play, and this is certainly a beautiful production. It's so pretty to look at that you want to love it. But I think the play is deeper than this.

DANCING AT LUGHNASA
By Brian Friel

The School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University
Center for the Performing Arts

Director: Lori Adams
Scenic Designer: Jen Kaczmierczak
Costume Designer: Lauren Lowell
Hair and Makeup Designer: Narissa Tovey
Lighting Designer: Caisa Sanburg
Sound Designer: Glenn Wilson
Choreographer: Duane Boutté
Dialect Director: Connie de Veer

Stage Manager: Matthew T. Black

Cast: Robert Michael Johnson, Fiona Stephens, Jaimie Taylor, Faith Servant, Natalie Blackman, Elsa Torner, Ronald Roman, Arif Yampolsky.

Running time: 2:20, including one 15-minute intermission

Opening Friday: ISU's DANCING AT LUGHNASA

Sisters are always popping up on the page and on the stage, from Shakespeare's Weird Sisters in Macbeth to Goneril, Regan and Cordelia in King Lear, Chekhov's Three Sisters, the March girls in Little Women, the Southern Gothic Magrath sisters in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, Wendy Wasserstein's New York Jewish Sisters Rosensweig, and last summer's Fail sisters at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, who found their place in Chicago in the 1920s.

Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa has five sisters, not three, and they're in Ireland, not Russia. Still, it's hard not to see the similarities between Friel's women and Chekhov's. The eldest works too hard and is a schoolteacher and one of the others is smitten with an impossible love. Both sets of women are stuck somewhere provincial and suffocating, somewhere they don't want to be, and money and gender pay big parts in who can do what and go where. Each family also has a brother, and he brings complications that only make their lives more difficult. And yet... Chekhov's women are so very Russian. And Friel's are so very tied to Ireland.

Plus Lughnasa is a memory play, as our narrator, a man named Michael, steps back into the childhood he remembers, with his image of his mother and her sisters what we see on stage. There's another factor that sets the Mundy sisters apart, too, in the poverty that pervades their humble abode. Money may be a problem for the Prozorovs, but it's a grinding reality for Kate, Maggie, Rose, Agnes and Christina Mundy. But what makes Lughnasa stand apart is neither the memory play issue or the financial distress they're in. Instead, it's the sense of joy in the midst of that poverty, of dancing even when the soles of your shoes are wearing very thin.

Dancing at Lughnasa began its life in Ireland, as you might expect, in a very well-regarded production at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1990. Much of the Irish cast traveled with the play to London and then New York, including Brid Brennan, who won a Tony Awards for her portrayal of Agnes. That production also took home Tonys for the play itself and for director Patrick Mason.

The Cusack sisters (Sorcha, Niamh and Sinéad -- who've also done Three Sisters, by the way) appeared in a 2009 London revival, while Meryl Streep joined Brid Brennan for the 1998 film version.

Lori Adams directs Dancing at Lughnasa for Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts in performances from November 1 to 9. Robert Johnson will play Michael, the narrator who steps back into his youth, with Faith Servant and Natalie Blackman as Agnes and Rose, and Ronald Roman as Gerry, the dashing Welshman who comes back into Christina's life at all the wrong times. Johnson, Servant, Blackman and Roman are all part of ISU's new class of MFA actors. Fiona Stephens will play Kate, the oldest and most responsible sister, while Jaimie Taylor takes on Maggie, the one who likes to laugh. Rounding out the Mundy family, Elsa Torner will play Christina, Michael's mother, and Arif Yampolsky will play Father Jack, the brother who went to Africa as a priest but came back very much changed..You can see all the details here including how to get tickets.

Who'll Be DANCING AT LUGHNASA for ISU

Lori Adams

Fresh off her off-Broadway triumph with Deanna Jent's Falling, director Lori Adams returns to the Illinois State University Center for the Performing Arts at the helm of the lovely and lyrical Dancing at Lughnasa. This memory play, written by Brian Friel,  is set in his native Ireland, and its original production took place at the famed Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990.

Friel is sometimes called the Irish Chekhov, and Dancing at Lughnasa bears that out in some respects. Instead of Chekhov's Three Sisters, Friel focuses on five sisters, the Mundys, who live together in a small cottage outside the fictional town of Ballybeg in County Donegal. We see Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rose and Christina Mundy from the point of view of Michael, Christina's son, as he shares his memories of his mother and her sisters in August, 1936. Their lives are complicated not just by the murky romantic possibilities of that moment in their lives, but also by their difficult financial situation, and the return of their brother -- much changed and very unwell -- after 25 years of mission work as a priest in Uganda.

Dancing at Lughnasa is poignant, sweet and sad, as we learn about the sisters' dreams and disappointments, and how Friel's stand-in, Michael, was affected by it all. The play has been honored with numerous awards, including the 1991 Olivier Award in London and the 1992 Tony Award for Best Play for its Broadway production. You can see the Broadway poster at right.

The 1998 film version, featuring Meryl Streep as oldest sister Kate, also made an impression, winning an Irish Film and Television Award for Brid Brennan, who played Agnes. Brennan had previously won the Tony for the same role in the Broadway production.

Lori Adams has cast MFA actor Robert Johnson as Michael, our narrator who steps back into his youth, with fellow graduate actors Faith Servant and Natalie Blackman as Agnes and Rose, and Ronald Roman as Gerry, Michael's father and the man who rides back into Christina's life with a flourish. Fiona Stephens and Jaimie Taylor will play Kate and Maggie, the taskmaster and the joker in the family, respectively, while Elsa Torner will take on Christina, Michael's mother.

Performances of Dancing at Lughnasa are scheduled for November 1 to 9 at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts. You can click that link under the title to see the Department of Theatre and Dance's entire 2013-14 slate of productions as well as ticket information.