The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence - UMD Theatre

Watson Intelligence is an Entertaining Puzzlement
Sheryl Jensen
Duluth News Tribune
November 20, 2015

UMD’s current production, The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, is a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” with its intriguingly interwoven series of vignettes played out over three centuries. Director Jenna Soleo-Shanks and her talented cast of three actors offer up a show so dazzlingly complex in its plot and themes that it demands discussion over multiple cups of coffee afterward.

For your scorecards, there are four Watsons: Dr. John Watson, Sherlock Holmes' faithful sidekick; Thomas Watson, valued assistant to Alexander Graham Bell; Josh Watson, computer repairman and member of the Dweeb Team (read Geek Squad); and Watson, a prototype A.I. computer (an homage to the IBM computer that beat the best contestants on Jeopardy).

All four Watsons are played by Dylan Rugh, who is at turns immensely charming, incredibly nerdy, wildly funny, pompously erudite and, in each iteration, the undeniable heart of the show. His roles all establish that the brilliant people among us need their “exquisite helpers” to support them.

Rugh’s physicality, facial expressions and line readings are spot on in all of his Watsonian personae. His strongest portrayal comes as Josh Watson, an entirely improbable “leading man” who wins the audience’s hearts.

Wes Anderson delivers a mature performance as two characters named Merrick, each the eternally disgruntled husband and foil to two of the Watsons. As a modern-day recently elected city auditor and a dark and dangerous Victorian scientist, Anderson has a commanding vocal and physical presence and a dark vibe that serves as an effective contrast to Rugh’s Watsons.

At the center, of course, is a woman, times three, appropriately named Eliza (yes, there are twisted, nasty “Pygmalion” allusions). As a Ph.D. computer designer, a fainting Victorian wife and a thirties radio interviewer, actress Chelsea Campbell is vibrant, annoying, anguished and gorgeous.

She is most convincing in her modern-day role of the neurotic scientist who spends her evening dipping her Twizzlers in Jim Beam, chatting with her computer creation and longing for someone to understand her.

The plot lines linking these three, as they leap-frog through time, practically require a Venn diagram to keep track of — but in all the character configurations and curlicues of story strands are more importantly common thematic threads of love, loneliness, the female psyche, technology and communication.

Sometimes all of this can get too talky, philosophical, and meditative — and the show at two-and-a-half hours (with intermission) starts to drag by evening’s end — but the powerful cast and the considerable strengths in playwright Madeleine George’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize nominated script keep the audience involved.

Kia Lor’s simple but interesting set is anchored by a center scrim with creative projections to distinguish time and place — a train engine’s evocative smoke and accompanying sound effect are particularly stunning. Kudos to costume designer Brandin Stagg for beautiful and effective choices for each era. A tip of the top hat to the actors and their dressers, who manage incredibly fast and complex costume changes for scene after scene.

The sum of the parts of the show comes in a quote towards the end of the evening when Thomas Watson, Bell’s assistant, says, “Connection isn’t elegant, or precise, or rational. But it’s our fate to be bound up with one another, isn’t it? We are all born insufficient, and must look to others to supplement our strength.”

This thought-provoking production showcases actors solidly connecting with each other and their audience in a show that challenges, enlightens and entertains.

DanceWorks - UMD Theatre

DanceWorks at UMD Offers “Fresh-From-the-Oven Dances”

Lawrance Bernabo

Duluth News Tribune

October  22, 2015 

 DanceWorks, which opened on UMD’s mainstage theater on Thursday night, is as enjoyable an evening of dance as you could hope to find.

As Artist Director Rebecca Katz Harwood told us before the show, these were really new, “fresh-from-the-oven dances,” reflecting the work of choreographers and dancers not only from the University of Minnesota Duluth, but outside the university as well.

Two student choreographers created strikingly dramatic pieces. Sarah Hinz’s “Missing You,” set to Sam Smith’s “Lay Me Down,” had Rebekah Meyer dancing over a white dress shirt laid on the stage, her long hair, undone, accenting her spins and dives. In time she was joined by Reese Britts for a bit of ballroom dancing that set up a nice little narrative twist.

The standout piece of the evening, “Escaping the Pigeon Hole,” choreographed by Cassie Liberkowski to Hoziers’ “To Be Alone,” offered a love triangle noir that begins with two masked figures circling a young man. The contrasts between the shifting pairs of dancers versus the odd dancer out (L.J. Klassen, Michael Hassenmueller and Kevin Dustrude), were fascinating, and there were sections exceptionally well-choreographed to the music.

Katz Harwood choreographed two pieces in collaboration with her dancers. “Tranquility” focused primarily on the horizontal, the dancers rolling around on the floor in progressive waves of languid movement to Zoë Keating’s “Sun Will Set.” It was interesting to see how long it was before any of them broke contact with the stage floor.

In comic contrast, “Freedom” offered joyous anarchy, with everybody doing their own thing, appropriately to the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Whatcha Wanna.” I admit, I was somewhat disappointed when dancers started doing the same thing, but this delightful piece had an awful lot of laughs.

The pure joy of dance was abundantly evident in the performances by the other two UMD dance groups, both of which had dancers who joined the theater students for other pieces.

The African Dancers evinced the joys of synchronicity, where everybody learns the same dance as a defining aspect of their culture. This is something we lack: Once a generation everybody knows how to hand jive or do the Macarena, but choreographed hand movements and pivoting to the right are not really dancing.

The other two student-choreographed pieces, “Spectrum” by Mai Che Lee with its attitude dancing, and “Memo” by Kelly James, which had a nice sequence reminiscent of depictions of the Three Graces, were largely in this spirit of dancing in unison.

Funk Soul Patrol, the other UMD dance group, did a trio of hip-hop songs, and went from lip-synching while they danced to all six of the dancers getting solo turns while the audience clapped along to “Jump Around” by House of Pain.

“Mobile (2),” choreographed by LilaAnn Coates White, explored the possibilities for two male dancers posing Talia Beech-Brown. This was a slow piece, both graceful and powerful.

The other hip-hop piece, “XO” choreographed by Jack Samuel Gill, had a couple of brief sections that concluded just as they were really getting interesting, so I would have liked to have seen more.

The finale was provided by six dancers from the Twin Cities’ Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater company. “Tales from the Book of Longing,” originally commissioned and presented by the Guthrie Theater, was the most sophisticated piece of the evening with several striking sections emphasizing tension in movement.

A pair of dueling dyads offered the contrasts of molten steel versus melted quicksilver, although it was hard to choose who to watch. Then two male dancers maintained a slow, combative embrace, before the piece concluded with the three female dancers being arbitrarily rearranged on stage by their male counterparts.

The program changes a bit over the course of the performances. The African dancers only appear on opening night, while on Saturday and Sunday special guest artist Rosy Simas performs her acclaimed work “We Wait in the Darkness.”

Tribes - UMD Stage 2

Spoon River - UMD Theatre

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

Sheryl Jensen

Duluth News Tribune

October  1, 2015 

 

A play adaptation based on a 100-year-old poetry collection of 244 epitaphs shouldn’t be quite so much fun. Yet, the opening night audience members for Spoon River Anthology at the University of Minnesota Duluth clearly were finding not only moments to ponder life’s eternal mysteries but also opportunities to laugh and to clap along with the music.
Contrary to the old saying, dead men (and women) indeed do tell tales in director Tom Isbell’s adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 poetry collection Spoon River Anthology. The crisp, 90-minute production (performed without an intermission) flies by with its mix of comedy, pathos, music and dance.

In stories of murder, lust, greed, jealousy, pride, and any number of other human vices, Masters’ voices from the grave tells the provocative secrets and revelations and the mostly unfulfilled hopes and dreams of those “sleeping on the hill” in the town cemetery of the mythical town of Spoon River.

Isbell’s research from his pilgrimage this past summer to Masters’ home turf in Lewistown and Petersburg, Ill., is on glorious display, not only in his selection of which poems to choose and how to arrange them in ever fascinating configurations but also in the projections, with the beautiful, the ugly and the comic in images of American life gone by.

Scenic designer Jenna Mady’s elegant set includes a simple rake of wooden planks, nine mismatched chairs, a small bandstand, a few stacked boxes and frames for the projections. Wesley Darton’s lighting design is appropriately atmospheric without being dark or oppressive. Heather Olson’s costumes are evocative of the period, with simple but effective changes made in progress by adding aprons, shawls, hats and coats.

The ensemble of five men and four women tackle nearly 60 of the poems in earnest direct address to the audience. While the monologues don’t all ring with the same levels of conviction and clarity, each of the cast members has a chance to connect in moments that are brutally honest, delightfully comic and frequently sarcastic.

Because each cast member is called upon to play several characters, it is important for them to distinguish each clearly with style, energy, dialect, projection and expression. Some of the ensemble members succeed at this more universally than others.

The evening’s most effective comic highlights are provided by Brian Saice as a fiddler and a diminutive judge and Phil Hoelscher as the ever-beleaguered husband.  On the tragic side of the ledger, Lauren Schulke resonates with her portrayals of a rape victim, a prostitute and the brutalized town poetess.

While it truly is an ensemble show, Ryan James Fargo brings a special maturity and confidence to his various personas. Fargo’s energy is electric and his understanding of how to take command of the stage and how to set each character apart make him the most compelling to watch.

Music Director Andy Kust (who also worked with Isbell on the adaptation) is the onstage “band,” playing piano and percussion. While the show is not a musical, the use of music in hymns, period songs and underscore helps to evoke mood and to provide another slant on the show’s themes.

The full-company vocals on “Blessed Assurance” and, most particularly, “This Little Light of Mine” are stunning. One of the evening’s other standout musical moments is a lively full-company square dance, choreographed by Rebecca Katz Harwood.

The cast shows an obvious reverence for the poems and the songs throughout, most particularly with the closing hymn, “I Feel Like Traveling On.” The song underscores projections of people in the community who sent in photos of themselves and their loved ones, reminding us all how fleeting such moments are.

The English teacher part of my soul hopes that UMD’s production will spark interest in audience members going back to the original source material, to do their own detective work of how intricately these characters connect in a masterwork that reads like a kaleidoscopic mosaic of the human experience.

Speech & Debate - UMD Stage 2

Street Scene - UMD Theatre

Street Scene Opera is Performed Well at UMD

 Lawrance Bernabo 

April 30, 2015 

Bringing together different artistic companies has become a recurrent theme this season, and UMD jumped on the bandwagon with the Departments of Music and Theatre combining to present the American Opera Street Scene on Thursday night. Adapted from Elmer Rice’s play of the same name with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes this is an ambitious work, well executed.

Rice’s setting is an apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen, where the accents run the gamut from Betty Boop to Bowery Boys with an ethnic smorgasbord in between. What starts off like just another day in the life of this East Side tenement ends up encompassing birth and death. Those expecting something similar to The Threepenny Opera will find elements of that, especially with “Lullaby,” which opens the final scene. But early on Weill is more into exploring jazz idioms, reminiscent of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, while at other times the music is more evocative of Puccini. Then we get to “Wrapped in a Ribbon” and suddenly Weill is producing songs that could have been popular songs at the turn of the century from an Edison cylinder.

In a musical, characters sporadically burst into song. In Street Scene what happens is more like shifting into a higher gear. That is what happens when Amanda Bush’s Anna Maurrant launches into “Somehow I Never Could Believe.” Singing of an optimistic belief in a future that seems doomed to be crushed before the final curtain falls, Bush provided a textbook example of what a dramatic soprano can do with a powerful aria.

 Something similar happens when Zach Winkler as Sam Kaplan begins singing “Lonely House.” Winkler has a nice tone in his lower register that grounds his character’s pathos to the grim realities of his situation.

Sam wants to be more than friends with Anna’s daughter, Rose. Anna Torgerson’s “What Good Would the Moon Be?” speaks to the limitation of romantic dreams in the face of reality. The reprise of this number could be more poignant with some darker shadings given what happens in between because it really is not the same song at that point.

 Everything comes full circle in the end of Street Scene and life goes on in one way or another. One thing I admired about this show is how much time it devotes to the aftermath of the tragedy that unfolds. Usually in an opera that is the final scene, but this show is more ambitious.

 There are even more musicians in the pit under the baton of conductor Jean R. Perrault than there are running around on stage. That big of an orchestra combined with the acoustics of the Mainstage Theatre sounds wonderful, and the sound mix with the singers also was excellent for most of the evening.

 There is a recurring comic thread throughout, personified by “The Ice Cream Sextet,” which was done with seven people on stage and one of the chief examples of the ways director Alice Pierce worked humor into the proceedings.  There are lots of little fun bits sprinkled throughout the show, most of which I liked far better than the running gag with the dog, which really cut against the grain of the tragic dramas played out in this opera.

Detestable Madness - UMD Theatre

Detestable Madness Shines Spotlight on Problems in Society

Paul Brissett

Duluth News Tribune 

March 12, 2015 

Detestable Madness is two 1,000-year-old scripts retooled to cast a harsh light on two issues, one ancient, the other modern.  Jenna Soleo-Shanks, UMD assistant professor of theater, has adapted two plays about women by a woman known today only as Hrotsvit, who lived in a 10th century religious cloister and wrote plays to not only entertain but enlighten.  In the production that opened Thursday at UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center, she addresses violence against women in Act I and the objectification of women in Act II. The acts have different characters but played by the same excellent cast of 10.

Curtis Phillips’ spare but dramatic set adapts to either story: a set of black-framed hollow cubes and scarlet drapes hanging at each corner of the in-the-round space.  Act I opens with a party, music from the movie “Saturday Night Fever” playing.  In antique language, punctuated by the occasional vulgarity, Callimachus (played with consummate malevolence by Erik Meixelsperger) tells his friends of his love for Drusiana (Mikaela Kurpierz).  But when — abandoning the old-fashioned speech — he approaches her, she rebuffs him harshly.

As the night wears on, she becomes drunk and he slips from obsession to lustful rage until, after she’s passed out, he rapes her as a friend videotapes the assault and lurid Twitter messages about an actual rape in Ohio in 2012 scroll on the drapes.  Soleo-Shanks uses more sheets of red to dramatize the action throughout both acts, but they’re especially effective in the rape scene, which is shocking without being graphic.

In Act II, Sapientia (played by Colleen Lafeber as a force of nature) storms into a corporate meeting to demand that her three daughters, all of whom have “IT,” be turned into celebrities ala Honey Boo Boo and the Kardashian sisters.  She sings of “capitalistic exploitation, patriarchal standards” to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from the movie “Mary Poppins.”

The act opens funnier than Act I, but slides steadily to a heartbroken mother’s lament for her lost children.  Much of the credit for the effectiveness of the descent goes to sound designer Nick Mrozek, who layers a spooky, echo-y version of “My Favorite Things” with the beeps of a heart monitor during a scene of mock cosmetic surgery.

Soleo-Shanks’ creativity in accomplishing what Hrotsvit says in her introduction is her goal — to shine a spotlight on the problems of her society — is equaled only by the grace with which she deploys modern music and technology to help do so 10 centuries later.  Detestable Madness is a play with a message, one unfortunately that probably will not be heard by those who most need to hear it, people — mostly but not exclusively men — who are likelier to be found in the crowd at a dog fight than in the audience at the theater.

Go, Dog. Go! - UMD Theatre

Go, Dog. Go! at UMD Delights its Target Audience

Paul Brissett, Duluth News Tribune

February 5, 2015 

You COULD cut corners on a theatrical production for kids; they’re easily amused.

But the actors, designers and technicians involved in staging Go, Dog. Go! at UMD didn’t. They were mindful not only of their audience but also their instructors, who  would be evaluating, in addition to technical expertise, their professionalism.

The result is a delightful adaptation by Allison Gregory and Steven Dietz of P.D. Eastman’s classic book for preschoolers, directed by Rebecca Katz Harwood.

With a 6:30 p.m. curtain and 75-minute running time to accommodate their target audience’s bedtimes, it’s a riot of color, movement, sight gags and silliness that had the audience giggling from the get-go when it opened Thursday at UMD’s Marshall Performing Arts Center. The production even offered special children’s playbills that included silly riddles about dogs: “What dog is the best at telling time?” “A watchdog.”

The show opened with Joe Cramer as MC Dog performing a silent routine that was almost Chaplinesque as he struggled with a spring-loaded chair and fumbled with a cap found on-stage until a young audience member called out “It’s a cap!” “Got it before I did,” Cramer ad libbed.

Soon the set, simple but splashed with polka-dots in primary colors, designed by Jenna Mady, was swarming with dogs: Red Dog, Yellow Dog, Green Dog, Blue Dog and Spotted Dog.

They worked. They played. They snuck flashlights under the covers at night. They performed a dance to percussion by bubble wrap.

Virtually the entire play was in broad pantomime, with a lot of sight gags, and actors creating sound effects with their voices.

The show has a light and lively musical score by Michael Koerner, performed onstage by Music Director Andy Kust. Unfortunately, Kust’s keyboard was amplified and the actors’ voices were not, rendering recitations of the book’s text and lyrics of the songs hard to understand.

Costumer Designer Heather Olson’s approach was “less is more.” Each dog’s costume was a primary color, but the only canine features were floppy ears and (impressively wag-able) tails.

The show sacrifices the “instructional” elements of the book, which carefully contrasts concepts such as “in/out,” “over/under” and “work/play,” but offers laughter and music instead. The 40 percent or so of Thursday’s audience at whom the show was really aimed seemed to have no complaint.