Through the first half of the four-month World Premiere Wisconsin festival, all but two productions in Fond du Lac as well as one-night readings in Spring Green and Green Bay have showcased theater companies in Madison and metro Milwaukee.
That’s about to change.
Yes: There’ll be fresh World Premiere Wisconsin productions from Wisconsin’s two largest cities. But May will also witness a dramatic expansion of WPW’s footprint, with five outstate events unfolding in locations ranging from Sturgeon Bay in the north and Mineral Point in the west to Kenosha in the southeast.
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, which kicks off the 2023 season for Sturgeon Bay’s Third Avenue PlayWorks with performances beginning May 10.
Playing a middle-aged woman named Esther, Karen Estrada may be the only actor on stage in Blackmer’s play, in which 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.
Uniquely positioned as a stenographer to see how the frequently harrowing stories she records morph into the myths that pass for history, Esther asks herself and her audience some hard questions about how the choices we make shape the narratives we build, thereby remaking ourselves and the world.
Third Avenue PlayWorks’ production of I Carry Your Heart With Me runs from May 10-28 at Third Avenue PlayWorks, 235 N. 3rd Ave., Sturgeon Bay. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/i-carry-your-heart-with-me-3/.
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 and still paying off the mortgage on his Wisconsin farm, Peter makes the difficult decision to answer Lincoln’s call and fight for freedom in the Civil War.
“What we are building here is worth fighting for,” Peter says to a fellow immigrant soldier. “I don’t want another man’s freedom to be the price of [my] dream,” his friend agrees.
Will such convictions stand as casualties mount in a war which, Peter aptly notes, is “making everyone blind?” You’ll need to come see the Play-by-Play production, playing from May 19-21, to find out.
Play-by-Play Theatre’s production of Lincoln & Liberty Too runs from May 19-21 at St. Norbert College’s Webb Theatre, 315 3rd St, DePere. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/lincoln-liberty-too-2/.
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 this latest installment in its nearly decade-old Verbatim Project – through which Carthage creates scripts from interviews collecting otherwise unheard stories within the community – a quartet of contributors explore what’s happened to Kenosha and its residents since police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times and Kyle Rittenhouse killed two protesters.
In preparing this latest script, Nora Carroll, Rayven Craft, Katherine Layendecker, and Martin McClendon have drawn on trial transcripts, news accounts, and other documents as well as their own interviews to ask how Kenosha – and, by extension, all of us – can overcome a legacy of violence and discrimination to move forward.
Carthage College’s reading of The Kenosha Verbatim Project will be presented on May 20 at Carthage College’s Wartburg Theatre, 2001 Alford Park Dr., Kenosha. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/kenosha-verbatim-project/.
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 – an artist who made work that now hangs in museums while she was 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 I Carry Your Heart With Me, Lincoln & Liberty Too, and The Kenosha Verbatim Project 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.
When we avoid each other, losing ourselves in endlessly looping conversations involving isolating obsessions, we simultaneously risk losing our ability to communicate at all; talk too much to ourselves and we may wind up unable to mediate our differences through conversation with others.
The Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts reading of The Last Hotel will be presented on May 26 at the Alley Stage, 18 Shake Rag St., Mineral Point. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/the-last-hotel/.
We’ll be given two distinct views of the potentially dangerous consequences through the two WPW one-acts included in May’s fifth outstate WPW offering: the Tisch Mills Fringe Festival being presented in Kewaunee from May 19-28 by the Forst Inn Arts Collective.
In Martin Prevost’s Deeper Meaning, a professor is as obsessed with Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” as the madman in that poem is with the woman he murders. Prevost’s haunting play tallies the price we all pay for anti-social pathologies, while ensuring that you’ll never again read a poem – or attend a professor’s office hours – in quite the same way.
Elizabeth Syzman’s On Your Shoulder is a deeply personal exploration of the grief she experienced in the year following the unexpected death of her mother.
Both a chronicle of what she went through as well as a map helping others navigate the universal experience of loss, Syzman’s play is a microcosm of what each of these outstate plays as well as WPW itself consistently does: take us beyond ourselves and into the wider world.
I’ll be there, sending back dispatches for WPW Backstage involving each of these plays as well as the exciting May entries from Madison and Milwaukee. Here’s hoping you make time to see them for yourself, earning points on your WPW passport through transporting journeys taking you to new places, in ways that theater reliably does.
The Forst Inn Arts Collective’s production of The Tisch Mills Fringe Festival runs from May 19-28 at the Forst Inn, E2910 County Road BB, Kewaunee. Learn more by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/forst-inn/.
