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 and featuring six world premieres, the Playhouse’s Original One-Act Festival is one of three one-act festivals debuting in June under the WPW umbrella.
On the following afternoon, Madison’s Rotate Theatre opens its Mini Fest of nine short plays, three of which are world premieres. Two weeks later, StageQ unveils 13 more world premieres in Madison through its CapitalQ Theatre Festival.
Giving Playwrights a Voice
“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, having been involved in the festival from its start as an actor, director, and writer. “And we’re the only such festival that does exclusively Wisconsin work.”
In a separate conversation, Playhouse President Dawn Molly Dewane – whose involvement in the Playhouse festival as an actor or director began in 1991 – made much the same point. “There’s a lot of writing talent here, and it’s good to highlight it,” she told me.
This year’s six Playhouse offerings feature a writer wrestling with his Muse; friends dissecting the dating game; two women wondering what’s in a name on their wedding day; the insights of a blind high school girl seeing everything her classmates miss; a pre-curtain squabble between a jaded critic and the playwright’s relatives; and an exploration of the way context affects what and how we perceive.
Many of these pieces sound variations on the disconnect between what we feel, what we see, and how we express it; more on that in a future, post-festival blog post.
In the interim, I’ll close my overview of the Playhouse festival with sage counsel from Zuehlke and Dewane.
“What I want to leave your readers with is that these are fun,” Zuehlke said. “They’re called plays. So let us entertain you.”
“The pandemic was hard,” Dewane said. “If we can do something that makes people laugh, that’s a good thing. And if it furthers the development of theater and theater artists in Wisconsin, all the better.”
Finding Light in a Heavy World
Humor is also important at Rotate Theatre Company, as ensemble member Cyra Polizzi made clear when we talked last week. “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,” Polizzi added.
Cue the dance music for Kristin P.’s Dancing at Intermission, one of three world premieres featured in the Rotate Mini Fest, running June 10-11. “This is a comedy that starts with two friends debating and making assumptions, before it turns into a big dance number taking us into intermission,” Polizzi said.
Our collective search for joy is again front and center in Out, another world premiere written 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 Rotate’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.
Polizzi made clear that Rotate itself is nourished by new work, which might explain why it, much like the Playhouse, has been among the most vigorous and frequent social media champions of World Premiere Wisconsin; both companies offer a model to emulate in being among those that have most consistently promoted productions by other WPW theaters.
“We do a lot of contemporary and new work,” Polizzi said. “We love to watch new work, create new work, and perform new work. So World Premiere Wisconsin has been a big deal to us.”
Expanding Horizons With Pride
As Rotate’s Mini Fest lineup demonstrates, a short-play festival offers a microcosm of what World Premiere Wisconsin has been doing since February: by promoting new voices, one leaves room for alternative pluralisms, involving frequently overlooked ways of seeing.
“We don’t want to just focus on one issue,” Polizzi said to me, while noting the breadth of underrepresented perspectives Rotate brings to the stage. “We want to place different types of characters and issues in conversation, offering audience members multiple ways to connect.”
All of that goes double for StageQ’s CapitalQ Theatre Festival, playing June 23-25 with a 13-play lineup deconstructing any illusion of a monolithic queer perspective. This year’s festival spotlights four themed showcases – each including 3 or 4 plays – with the titles “Lesbian Power Hour,” “We Are Who We Are,” “Family in All Forms,” and “Teen Spirit.”
I asked former StageQ President and Interim Production Manager Zak Stowe if StageQ picked plays to fit a particular theme – or, in a year of mounting intolerance toward and attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, a particular viewpoint.
“Attention was paid to the quality of the scripts and stories,” Stowe said. “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.”
Neither, apparently, are the many playwrights from across the country who submitted their plays; Stowe noted that Stage Q received a whopping 205 submissions for this year’s festival, marking an 11 percent increase over last year.
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.
Polizzi sang a version of the same song when I spoke to her. “We hope the plays we put on stage loosen up how people think about the way the world works,” she said.
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 https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/all-shows/.
