Rotate Theatre Company.
Rotate Theatre mini-festival image featuring two actors
Megan Tennessen and Marie Charles.
By Mike Fischer, for World Premiere Wisconsin
Long before World Premiere Wisconsin, there was the Village Playhouse, which has been staging annual one-act festivals of new work by Wisconsin playwrights for nearly 40 years.
Opening on June 9 in Milwaukee, the Playhouse’s Original One-Act Festival is one of three such festivals debuting in June under the WPW umbrella. On the following afternoon, Madison’s Rotate Theatre opens its Mini Fest of nine plays, three of which are world premieres. Two weeks later, StageQ unveils 13 more world premieres in Madison through its CapitalQ Theatre Festival.
“Our festival offers an opportunity for playwrights to find and express their own voice,” noted Tom Zuehlke, who has produced the Playhouse festival for more than 20 years.
Many of this year’s six Playhouse offerings sound variations on the disconnect between what we feel, what we see, and how we express it; that expression often involves humor. “If we can do something that makes people laugh, that’s a good thing, said Playhouse President Dawn Molly Dewane.
Finding Light in a Heavy World
Humor is also important at Rotate Theatre Company, as ensemble member Cyra Polizzi made clear when we talked. “Humor helps us engage some of the heavy issues we address,” she said, noting Rotate’s commitment to staging stories of the marginalized and underrepresented. “And it allows us to feel joy,” she added.
Cue the dance music for Kristin P.’s Dancing at Intermission, one of three world premieres featured in the Rotate Mini Fest. “This is a comedy that starts with two friends debating and making assumptions, before it turns into a big dance number,” Polizzi said.
Our collective search for joy is again front and center in Out, also by Kristin P. “It’s about three friends navigating some of the difficult issues we’re all confronting post-pandemic, while trying to find joy,” Polizzi said.
Joy is in short supply in the Mini Fest’s third world premiere, Rini Tarafder’s Rishi’s Grocery List. “The main character is trying to do some grocery shopping, and is continually interrupted by outside things interfering with the simple task of nourishing oneself,” Polizzi said.
Expanding Horizons With Pride
As Rotate’s Mini Fest lineup demonstrates, a short-play festival’s promotion of new voices leaves room for alternative pluralisms, involving frequently overlooked ways of seeing.
All of that goes double for StageQ’s CapitalQ Theatre Festival, playing June 23-25 with a lineup deconstructing any illusion of a monolithic queer perspective.
“Attention was paid to the quality of the scripts and stories,” said former StageQ President and Interim Production Manager Zak Stowe. “But it’s increasingly important that we make sure our festival is a visible event, regardless of whether any story has a specific political bent. We recognize that there’s power in visibility, and we’re not backing down.”
Consistent with how festivals like this one give voice to the frequently unheard and unseen, one can hope there’ll be a similar growth of empathy and understanding among audience members attending the CapitalQ festival.
At a minimum, such festivals inevitably foster communication, between and among multiple plays and viewpoints. “We want people to know how we do things and who we are,” Stowe said.
A longer version of this article, together with nearly 50 additional essays devoted to World Premiere Wisconsin, can be found at WPW Backstage: worldpremierewisconsin.com/backstage
More information on Village Playhouse’s Original One-Act Festival (running in Milwaukee from June 9-18), Rotate Theatre’s Mini Fest (running in Madison on June 10-11), and StageQ’s Capital Q Theatre Festival (running in Madison from June 25-27) can be found at worldpremierewisconsin.com/all-shows.
Mike Fischer wrote theater and book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for fifteen years, serving as chief theater critic from 2009-18. A member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison, he also co-hosts Theater Forward, a bimonthly podcast. You can reach him directly at mjfischer1985@gmail.com.
Mike’s work as WPW’s Festival Reporter is part of an ongoing series called WPW Backstage, collected on WPW's website. His writing here and elsewhere throughout the festival is made possible through the sponsorship of the United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF). Learn more: upaf.org.
