Jack Whaley
Two Crows founders Rob Doyle and Marcus Truschinski.
Founders Rob Doyle, left, and Marcus Truschinski: keeping actors and audiences busy.
Marcus Truschinski remembers standing in front of Arcadia Books in Spring Green one morning in 2014, minding his own business. It was just a couple days after he appeared as Algernon in American Players Theatre’s production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Suddenly a guy in a van wheels up and shouts out the window “‘Hey! Were you Algy? You were fucking awesome!’”
How many towns in the U.S. with a population of barely 1,500 support a world class theater company? And what are the odds in any small town that an actor gets praise on the street for his work? Spring Green is an anomaly. But the theater magic there is largely seasonal.
Truschinski recognized this and decided to join an effort to spread the magic year-round. “I was hoping to help our little town in the winter,” Truschinski says of the impetus behind the nonprofit Two Crows Theatre Company, founded in 2019. “But also to help artists string along an actual career. Mid-sized theaters are vanishing and I feel like Spring Green is very supportive of the arts.”
Before the pandemic, Two Crows had produced six plays, two of them in 2020 — one in January, and Down the Road in early March ending right before the shutdown. A third play, The Aliens, scheduled for April 2020, never took place.
In those two seasons, Two Crows featured on stage or as directors such APT cornerstones as Colleen Madden, Tracy Michelle Arnold and Jim DeVita. The company also presented Colleen Madden’s original adaptation of a Charles Dickens novella, called A Christmas Haunting.
After a three-year hiatus, the company returned in 2024 with one play, The Thin Place. Now it’s back in full flight, with three productions scheduled for this winter and spring.
American Players Theatre actor Nate Burger.
APT actor Nate Burger will star in Two Crows’ 'Harry Clarke' in January.
Harry Clarke runs Jan. 16-26. It’s the story of what happens to a shy midwesterner who adopts the personality of a cocky Londoner, starring APT actor Nate Burger. It will be staged at The Slowpoke Lounge and Cabaret in Spring Green, the site of most of the company’s past productions.
Next, a psychological thriller about human cloning called A Number runs Feb. 20-March 2 at the Touchstone Theatre at American Players Theatre. David Daniel and Truschinski play the leads.
Finally Songs Without Words, April 17-27, will be staged at Hillside Theater at Taliesin, a new venue for Two Crows. It tells the tale of a composer “F. Mendelssohn” who may be Felix or may be sister Fanny in a show that questions gender and sibling relations.
Two Crows aims to provide a theater experience that’s “deliberately intimate,” says Truschinski. “There’s a different kind of energy when people are up close, where actors don’t have to project too much and you can really get to the heart of a story.”
Truschinski spent his childhood in Marshall, Wisconsin. He went to college to play football at UW-Whitewater where he discovered his passion for theater in the wake of a career-ending injury. Truschinski’s co-artistic director and project founder is Rob Doyle, a Long Island native who trained in theater out east. For them, Spring Green blends far-away sensibilities with local ones.
Truschinski says the name of the company comes from Doyle’s grandmother, who took him on a drive when he was a kid, pointed out the car window and explained that the presence of one crow means sorrow. Two crows mean joy. Turns out the observation easily translates into the meaning of the iconic theater masks: drama and comedy. Sorrow and joy. There’s also the undercurrent of Elizabethan dramatist Robert Greene’s putdown of William Shakespeare as “an upstart crow.”
Truschinski, also a core APT company member, moved to Spring Green with his wife, actress Tracy Michelle Arnold, 21 seasons ago. “I feel we lucked into living here because nearly every person you meet in this town is an artist of some kind,” Truschinski says. “I have friends, sculptors and painters and actors and directors, whose kids go to school with my kid. I’ve learned so much about all the artistry that they do.”
