May Days 2013

I apologize for being late with my May preview. If it means you missed one of your last four chances to see Middletown at Heartland Theatre or you're getting notice really late about Illinois State University's Spring Dance Concert or Actors Showcase, well, then I am really going to have to apologize more profusely.

But, yes, whether I am prepared or not, May is upon us, borrowing April's showers, but still calling itself May.

ISU's 2013 Actors' Showcase and Design Exhibition happened officially last Monday night in Chicago, but there is a redux for local folks today at noon. I hope I get this post up in time! Break legs, ISU seniors, whether I'm in time or not.

ISU is also sneaking its Spring Dance Concert in under the semester's wire. The concert opened last night, with performances again tonight and tomorrow. You have a choice of 7:30 shows Friday and Saturday, as well as a matinee on Saturday. This performance is being held during National Dance Week, and includes a special piece choreographed by guest artist Melinda Myers. For more information, click here. You may also contact the College of Fine Arts Box Office in the Center for the Performing Arts from 11 am to 5 pm today at 309-438-2535 or purchase tickets directly through Ticketmaster.

And as I said, Heartland Theatre's very well-received production of Will Eno's Middletown is in its last weekend of performances. In the play, John (Rhys Lovell) and Mary (Karen Hazen) meet on an in-between day in their in-between town, moving in and amongst fellow townspeople (and a couple of tourists) as Eno ponders the meaning of life. What does it mean to be in the middle? Lovely play, lovely performances. Get there early and grab a seat at one, two or three of these last performances.

Also this weekend, Eureka College hosts the Olio Cemetery Walk in conjunction with the Woodford County Historical Society, with student actors performing as the former citizens of Eureka. That's Sunday May 5 at the Olio Township Cemetery.

One of my favorite musicals, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, takes the stage at Community Players with a special Pay What You Can preview on May 9 and performances continuing through the 26th. Brett Cottone directs this good-natured look at a children's spelling contest, complete with an ex-champ who now moderates the Bee (played by Aimee Kerber), a vice principal and returning Bee judge who'd been a judge before but was banished for bad behavior (Joe McDonald), a "comfort counselor" doing community service (Chris Stanford) and six elementary school contestants, each excited to be in the Bee, but each with his or her own brand of vulnerability. For Community Players, your spellers will be played by Brian Artman, Kallie Bundy, Megan Masterman, Joel Shoemaker, Kelly Slater and Austin Travis. I make no secret of the fact that sweet Leaf Coneybear, the one who inexplicably keeps getting asked to spell rodent names, is my favorite. Go, Leaf! Win that bee!

Urbana's Station Theatre has two weekend left for Next to Normal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about mental illness that was also nominated for eleven Tony Awards. Station Artistic Director Rick Orr takes the reins on Next to Normal, with a cast that includes Jodi Prosser, Allison Morse, Andy Hudson, Chris Johnson, Dylan Connelley and Steve Conaton. You have until May 11 to catch this groundbreaking show. All shows are at 8 pm. You may call 217-384-4000 for reservations.

The Shakespearean Globetrotters

Athough last night was originally scheduled to be "Time to Make the Shakespeare," one of this season's new projects from the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, it was pushed back to next Thursday because of weather issues. So you can still catch "a Shakespearean play created entirely before your eyes by The Shakespearean Globetrotters" on the patio at Destihl on May 9 at 8 pm. Call 309-862-2337 to reserve a table for this outdoor event.

Prairie Fire Theatre is currently touring schools with its children's opera The Sky Is Falling -- And I'm Not Even Kidding! Prairie Fire promises dates and times for the general public coming soon, so watch their website for more info. In the meantime, you can enjoy this picture of the colorful cast. Is that Chicken Little I spy? Look out for Foxy Loxy!

The cast of The Sky Is Falling

Illinois Wesleyan University offers the play The Breach, a devastating and personal piece about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, as its May term project. For IWU, The Breach, which was written by Joe Sutton, Catherine Filloux and Tarrell McCraney, is directed by Raven Stubbs, with performances scheduled for May 23 to 25 at 8 pm.

MIDDLETOWN Burns Bright at Heartland

In a piece on Will Eno's Middletown earlier this year, Boston Globe critic Christopher Wallenberg called the play "a meditation on birth and death and the lives burning bright in between."

Note "the lives burning bright in between." The characters living in Middletown tell us about birth and death all through this quirky, engaging play, as they muse on why they're here, what their places are in this world, and what their legacies might be. It's easy to fall under the spell of Eno's heady writing in all its poetic beauty. But don't miss the fact that he is also etching vivid portraits of a town's worth of people -- the librarian, the mechanic, the cop, the handyman, the newcomer, even the astronaut who once called Middletown home -- in heartbreaking, wonderful detail. These people are as quizzical, as amusing, as real as your neighbors, and yet not like your neighbors at all.

It's to the credit of director John Kirk's current production for Heartland Theatre that each of those portraits comes across loud and clear. His actors, most of whom play multiple roles, have worked hard to come up with individuals who are different from each other, a little odd, a little awkward, and quite fascinating.

Rhys Lovell and Karen Hazen are out front among the cast, both turning in terrific, layered performances. Lovell is always good, but his John Dodge, a man in between jobs, in between hobbies, living very much in the in between, is something very special. Dodge may be a bit of a mess -- well-meaning, but a mess -- but Lovell's performance is anything but. He's fantastic.

And Hazen is just as subtle, just as amazing, opposite him as Mary Swanson, the newbie in town, the one who serves as our eyes on Middletown. Hazen's portrayal of Mary makes the character funny, sweet, and relatable, as Mary's yearning for something more, something more than a husband who is so often on the road, becomes clear.

Kathleen Kirk's librarian and Dean Brown's "public speaker," who introduces the idiosyncratic tone of the piece, add quirky warmth to the tableau, while George Freeman's scary cop and Richard Jensen's scary (in a different way) ne'er-do-well mechanic bring harder edges into Middletown. Others in the cast who shine are Aric Diamani and Devon Lovell as doctors, John Poling as an astronaut high above the town, Lynna Briggs as a strange spectator, and Ann White and Megan Huff, who pair up as guide/tourist and hospital attendants.

Your guidebook to Middletown is written right into the script. Pay attention to how many times the "great and unexamined middle," as Eno puts it, comes up. The middle, the intermission, the time between birth and death, waiting periods and in-between times... Or, you know, life.

Eno has a unique voice in contemporary theater, just as Heartland Theatre has a unique place in our local theater scene. And what a good match they are.

MIDDLETOWN
By Will Eno

Heartland Theatre Company

Director: John W. Kirk
Assistant Director/Stage Manager: Jess Friedli
Scenic Designer: Kenneth P. Johnson
Lighting Designer: Anita McDaniel
Costume Designer: Jeanine Fry
Properties: Cyndee Brown
Sound Engineer: Aaron Paolucci

Cast: Lynna Briggs, Dean Brown, Aric Diamani, George Freeman, Karen Hazen, Megan Huff, Richard Jensen, Kathleen Kirk, Devon Lovell, Rhys Lovell, John D. Poling, Ann Bastian White

Running time: 2:30, including one 15-minute intermission

Remaining Performances: April 25-27 and May 2-4 at 7:30 pm and April 28 and May 5 at 2 pm.

For show times, click here. For reservation information, click here.

Will Eno's MIDDLETOWN Opens Tomorrow Night at Heartland

There are always a few "it boys" in current American playwriting, and right now, the eccentric and poetic Will Eno definitely hits the list. Eno emerged onto the national theatre scene with Thom Pain (based on nothing), a one-man show that enjoyed a sold-out run at the 2004 International Edinburgh Festival, where it won the First Fringe Award, among others, and then took New York by storm with a year of off-Broadway performances. Thom Paine was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Flu Season received the 2004 Oppenheimer Award for the best debut production in New York by an American playwright, and his newest work, Gnit, an updated and irreverent adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, was a mainstage selection for the recent Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, in a production directed by Actors Theatre Artistic Director Les Waters.

Yep. It Boy.

It helps that Eno's writing is singular and different, with its own rhythms and warped sense of humor. Middletown, the deceptively sweet play about life in Anytown USA that preceded Gnit, received the Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play in 2010. It has that Eno touch, making it sound and feel distinctly different from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, for example, a play Middletown has been widely compared to. Both plays deal with ordinary people living ordinary lives in an ordinary town, and both touch on life and death. But while Our Town shows us life and death, Middletown is more about the time and space in between, about the middle, about regular old people finding a way to mind that gap.

John Kirk, who is directing Middletown for Heartland Theatre, writes that Eno's characters "are trapped in 'the space between' their birth and their death. The title Middletown...suggests the dilemma of characters who are stuck in the middle of themselves and have not found a way out."

Karen Hazen (left) and Rhys Lovell appear in Heartland's Middletown

The characters in the play range from John Dodge, a handyman type who is between jobs but has lived in Middletown for a while, and Mary Swanson, who just moved there with her husband to start a family, to a cop, a librarian, a mechanic, doctors, and even a couple of tourists who come to see what this town is all about. For Heartland, Rhys Lovell will play John, and Karen Hazen will play Mary, with Lynna Briggs, Dean Brown, Aric Diamani, George Freeman, Megan Huff, Richard Jensen, Kathleen Kirk, Devon Lovell, John Poling and Ann White filling out all the other roles in the everyday tableau that is Middletown.

Performances begin tomorrow night with a special Pay What You Can preview at 7:30 pm, with shows continuing Thursdays through Sundays till May 5. For details on times and dates of performances, click here. To see reservation information, click here.

Heartland Has its MIDDLETOWN Cast in Place

Will Eno's Middletown is a bittersweet slice-of-life, showcasing the citizens of a small town on ordinary days in their lives. There's birth, death, curiosity, pride of place, casual cruelty, longing for connection and... A good deal of humanity.

Because of the ensemble nature of the show, the size of the cast has varied from production to production. After auditions last week, director John Kirk has announced his cast for the Heartland Theatre production coming in April. For Heartland, the Middletown ensemble will contain twelve players, ranging from IWU student Geena Barry to Heartland past-president Ann B. White, who is also the program director and founder of Young at Heartland, the theater's senior acting troupe.

Barry will play three roles -- Woman, Female Tourist and Music Host -- while White will be take on the roles of Tour Guide, Aunt and Attendant.

The other denizens of Middletown will be played by Lynna Briggs (playing Sweetheart and Ground Control), Dean Brown (Public Speaker, Landscaper and Janitor), Aric Diamani (Male Tourist, Freelancer and Male Doctor), George Freeman (Cop), Karen Hazen (Mrs. Swanson), Richard Jensen (Mechanic), Kathleen Kirk (Librarian), Devon Lovell (Female Doctor and Cop Radio), Rhys Lovell (John Dodge and Science Host) and John Poling (Greg and Man).

It looks like a powerhouse cast for a complex, thoughtful and poetic play by a major new voice in American theater. Will Eno received the Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play in 2010 for Middletown, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award, and numerous other awards and citations. His play Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Performances of Middletown begin April 18 at Heartland Theatre. Follow these links to see showtimes and reservation information.

Auditions for MIDDLETOWN Now Set at Heartland

Director John Kirk has announced he will hold auditions for Heartland Theatre's upcoming production of Will Eno's Middletown on March 6, 7 and 8, 2013, from 7 to 9:30 pm each night.

This is how Kirk describes what he will be looking for:

"Middletown is a play by an exciting new talent in the theatre. Will Eno is writing for the most advanced and contemporary performer. His characters are trapped in 'the space between' their birth and their death. The title, Middletown, while it seems to be about a small town, echoing Our Town, it is much more than that. It suggests the dilemma of characters who are stuck in the middle of themselves and have not found a way out. They are truly lost in themselves and the performances should reveal that.

"What that means for the actor is perhaps best exemplified in this quote from Will Eno’s preface to another of his plays, Thom Pain.

The actor should, of course, be so comfortable and familiar with the script that words come out of him as if they are his own, as if he is making them up as he goes along… There are a lot of 'switchbacks' and changes-of-direction in the script. He thinks and feels quickly and changes his mind a lot; we all do. Both directions he might go in are true, each direction comes out of a real feeling and a real need to move in that particular direction at that particular time… Honor this, honor the largeness, the complicatedness, of human beings, and find a way to play it all as simply and truly as possible… Though there are many parts of the play that are meant to be funny, for the most part, [the characters are] unaware or unconcerned that what [is said] might be found humorous…

"There are 26 characters in this play. They will be played by 9 or 10 actors, so there will be lots of double and triple casting. You could play small parts and have a big role.

"The nature of the play makes character 'descriptions' inappropriate and actually probably counter-productive. The characters don’t really know who they; they are trying to find that out. They are human beings. So here’s a list with genders and approximate ages in order of appearance."

PUBLIC SPEAKER – Male 40s-60s
COP – Male 30s-50s
MRS. SWANSON – Female, late 30s
JOHN DODGE – Male, late 30s-40s
MECHANIC – Male, late 20s-30s
LIBRARIAN – Female, 50s-60s
TOUR GUIDE – Female, 20s-30s
MALE TOURIST – 30s-40s
FEMALE TOURIST – 30s-40s
GREG - Male, 40s-60s

Intermission Audience:
AUNT – Female, 40s-50s
SWEETHEART – Female, 12-16
FREELANCER – Male, 30s-40s
MAN – 20s-30s
WOMAN – 20s-30s
LANDSCAPER – Male, 20s-30s
MALE DOCTOR – 40s-50s
FEMALE DOCTOR – 40s-50s
ATTENDANT #2 - Female, 20s-30s
ATTENDANT – Female, 20s-30s
JANITOR – Male, 30s-50s

Offstage Voices:
COP’S RADIO – Female
GROUND CONTROL – Male (Possibly seen onstage)
INTERCOM – Female
RADIO HOST (Science Show)– Male
RADIO HOST (Classical Music Show) - Female

---------------------------------

When Middletown was performed at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, director Les Waters used a cast of ten -- five women and five men -- including Brenda Barrie, Francis Guinan, Ora Jones and Tracy Letts. In New York, Middletown's cast of twelve included Linus Roache, Georgia Engel and David Garrison in the Vineyard Theatre production directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. Kirk clearly has a plan for nine or ten, so look for something more like the Steppenwolf arrangement, where, for example, actor Tim Hopper played Public Speaker, Male Tourist, Greg, Freelancer, Male Doctor and Radio Host (Science Show), and Alana Arenas played Tour Guide, Sweetheart, Attendant #2 and Intercom.

For more information on these auditions, click here.

Heartland Theatre Announces What's Up for 2012-13

Heartland Theatre Company has announced its 2012-13 season, beginning with the very popular 10-Minute Play Festival, running from June 7 to July 1.

This year, the 10-Minute Play Festival's theme is "Playing Games," with each of the eight winning plays involving a game of some sort. The plays range from John D. Poling's "Destiny's Tug-of-War," about a divorced couple and the wife's new partner, all three worried about the dog caught between them, to Austin Steinmetz's "Word Play," about a world Scrabble champ scrambling to stay on top, and Erin Moughon's "In Memory of Calvinball," about a game whose only rule is that rules constantly change. For more information about all the plays and the "Playing Games" festival, click here. You are advised to make your reservations early, as it is always an audience favorite.

Coming in July is New Plays from the Heartland, which features three one-acts written by Midwestern playwrights just for Heartland. The New Plays' theme is "Summer in the Heartland," with the three winning plays performed July 13 and 14 in conjunction with a master class and forum conducted by Douglas Post ("Bloodshot," "Drowning Sorrows"), this year's guest playwright in residence.

The fall kicks off with "These Shining Lives," Melanie Marnich's sad and beautiful look at the women who made radium-dial watches in Ottawa, Illinois, in the 1920s. "These Shining Lives," directed by Illinois State University Professor Don LaCasse, opens on September 6 and runs till September 23, 2012. (The poster image at right is from a Chicago workshop production of the play in 2011. A previous production at Chicago's Rivendell Theatre received Jeff Award nominations for the play, director and leading actress. ISU alum Kathy Logelin played the lead role when Rivendell revived the play later.)

Next up is the blazing art drama "Red," by John Logan, which began its life at London's Donmar Warehouse in 2009, before moving to Broadway and winning the 2010 Tony Award for Best Play. The play involves artist Mark Rothko and his assistant as they prepare canvases for New York's Four Seasons restaurant, with issues of artistic integrity played against monetary success and accolades. Illinois Wesleyan's Christopher Connelly will direct "Red," with performances from November 1 to 18, 2012.

Opening on Valentine's Day, Donald Margulies' "Time Stands Still" is the first show in 2013 for Heartland. "Time Stands Still" involves a photojournalist who must decide whether she will return to a dangerous, exciting life spent on the front lines or stay where she is, in a more peaceful, comfortable place on the home front. ISU Professor Sandra Zielinski returns to Heartland to direct "Time Stands Still," which runs from February 14 to March 3, 2013.

And the last show on the schedule is Will Eno's "Middletown," which looks at extraordinary lives in Small Town, USA, over the course of a few very ordinary days. It's been compared to "Our Town," but I'd say "Middletown" is quirkier, more poetic, and a whole lot more surprising. "Middletown" received the Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play in 2010. ISU Professor Emeritus John Kirk will direct "Middletown" in performance from April 18 to May 5, 2013.

For more information on Heartland Theatre, you can visit the website here, with new information being added all the time.