By Mike Fischer, for World Premiere Wisconsin
Most World Premiere Productions in March and April showcased theater companies in Madison and Milwaukee.
That’s about to change.
Yes: There’ll be fresh WPW productions from Wisconsin’s two largest cities. But May will also witness a dramatic expansion of WPW’s footprint, with outstate events unfolding in locations ranging from Sturgeon Bay to Mineral Point. Most of those outstate shows are themselves turned outward, moving beyond the home to wrestle with issues in the larger world.
First up is Jennifer Blackmer’s I Carry Your Heart With Me, with performances beginning May 10. In Blackmer’s one-actor play, Esther recalls her stint as a stenographer, recording testimony from noncoms returning home during the Vietnam War. But Esther is haunted by ghosts of a past that refuses to settle as she struggles to reconcile the story she tells with the stories she’s heard.
One week after the TAP opening, another war will take center stage through Play-by-Play Theatre’s production of Lincoln & Liberty Too, a musical in which siblings Ralph (book and lyrics) and Mary (music) Ehlinger revisit the lives of their great-great grandparents, Peter and Johanna.
Just ten years removed from his native Luxembourg, Peter makes the difficult decision to answer Lincoln’s call and fight for freedom in the Civil War. Will his conviction stand as casualties mount in a war which, Peter aptly notes, is “making everyone blind?”
That same weekend, the WPW entry being presented by Kenosha’s Carthage College will drive home how the freedom for which men fought and died 150 years ago remains illusive in a country still blinded by hate.
In The Kenosha Verbatim Project, a quartet of contributors have drawn on their interviews of Kenosha residents to ask how Kenosha – and, by extension, all of us – can overcome a legacy of violence and discrimination to move forward.
Six days after Carthage’s May 20 reading, playwright Marcia Jablonski will explore a different form of discrimination through The Last Hotel, inspired by the life of Lee Godie – a now-famous artist who made her work while living on Chicago’s streets, during a time when the United States was slashing funding for the mentally ill and razing low-income housing.
Presented through a May 26 reading at Mineral Point’s Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts, Jablonski’s play features the alternately fraught and funny relationship between a professor of art, her student, and a homeless artist, while asking hard questions about who decides what counts as art and about established artists’ relationship with outsiders and the outside world.
Most important, The Last Hotel joins these other outstate plays in challenging us to do a better job of connecting the dots between our private and public lives – thereby overcoming the temptation to turn our back on the world and instead engage it.
Here’s hoping you’ll join me to make your own outbound journey, earning points on your WPW passport by exploring new places, in ways that transporting theater reliably does.
For more information on WPW’s many May openings, including all five Madison shows, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/all-shows/. For an expanded version of this article, or to read more about every WPW production, visit the WPW Backstage blog – with new posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday – at https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/backstage/.
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: https://upaf.org
