“Into the woods, and who can tell what’s waiting on the journey?”
The characters at the beginning of Into the Woods don’t know, as they sing these words from Sondheim and Lapine’s beloved musical.
Similarly, I’m quite sure that incredibly smart, organized, and imaginative as she is, Forward Theater Artistic Director Jen Uphoff Gray didn’t anticipate every step on the road World Premiere Wisconsin would travel in the years since she first dreamed up the idea, at the Statera Conference she was attending in Milwaukee in October 2018.
Back then, “World Premiere Wisconsin” was just a catchy slogan, spoken by Gray to Forward Managing Director Julie Swenson at the conclusion of a conference panel discussion.
Four-plus years later and just over one month ago, on a miserable night that dumped as much as a foot of snow on northern parts of Wisconsin, 130 theater makers from across the state descended on Ten Chimneys to hear WPW festival producer Michael Cotey officially welcome them to the inaugural World Premiere Wisconsin festival.
A Big Tent
“From the beginning,” Gray wrote in a social media post coinciding with the start of the festival, “the vision was to include theater companies of all kinds in WPW: professional companies, semi-professional companies, community theaters, youth theaters, academic theaters.”
And there they all were on that cold February night:
Wisconsin theater royalty trailing long and distinguished careers on the state’s biggest stages – as well as rising theater artists still in high school, playwrights just beginning their careers, and community theater leaders who’ve quietly spent decades tirelessly sharing their love of theater with their neighbors and friends.
In a video presentation that evening, nationally acclaimed WPW playwrights like Lauren Gunderson and Lloyd Suh were given the same air time as budding, relatively unknown playwrights like Art Kopishcke and Kim Ruyle.
And when it came time to share Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ proclamation decreeing March 1 World Premiere Wisconsin day, readers of that proclamation included legendary (and retiring) Children’s Theater of Madison Artistic Director Roseann Sheridan and incoming Next Act Theatre Artistic Director Cody Estle;
Artistic Director Michael Unger of Milwaukee’s storied Skylight Music Theatre and Artistic Director Andrew Abrams from the young Capital City Theatre – a company devoted, like Skylight, to celebrating musicals;
community theater leaders Dawn Molly Dewane from Village Playhouse and Rhonda Schmidt from Waukesha Civic Theatre;
and, from three geographically distinct Wisconsin theater hotbeds: Danielle Szmanda from Door County’s venerable Peninsula Players Theatre, Barbara Wanzo from Black Arts MKE, and Julie Swenson from Forward Theater.
As Cotey noted this week in a Shepherd Express essay on the festival, many of the theater makers at Ten Chimneys that night “remarked that they’d never seen Wisconsin theater so well represented. It didn’t matter if you worked for a regional giant in Milwaukee or an academic theater up north or if you were an old blood or a young blood; it felt like everyone was on the same level.”
“The completeness of Wisconsin’s theater ecosystem was on full display,” Cotey continued. “The event sparked many thoughts and conversations about what would happen if we were to simply gather more often like this.”
“Right out of the gate,” Gray wrote in her post, she’d hoped that a festival like World Premiere Wisconsin might “build relationships between theater organizations across Wisconsin so that we could better support each other.”
Support each other and, dare I say, work more fully together on future projects? Ranging from a festival like this one to co-productions, targeted media campaigns, and collaborative efforts to further stoke the passion for theater among Wisconsin residents?
In short, what might theater artists in Wisconsin accomplish together that they’d never be able to achieve within their separate silos?
Might not a festival like WPW play a role similar to that of the modest cooperative efforts which led first to a six-country customs agreement in 1957 and later to the full-fledged European Union, in which more than two dozen countries large and small retain their individual autonomy while recognizing how much stronger they are when they work together?
And might not such an artistic network in Wisconsin provide a replicable model for theater communities throughout the United States?
“By taking such a big swing with this festival,” Cotey wrote in his essay, “we hope to set an example of what’s possible in the spirit of collaboration and inspire others with the work we’ve done to rally theaters together in their states.”
“People make mistakes, holding to their own, thinking they’re alone,” we’re told toward the end of Into the Woods.
We may not be able to predict what life’s forests hold; to take the most obvious example, nobody working on World Premiere Wisconsin could have predicted a giant pandemic stomping on festival planning that was already well underway.
But won’t we see farther and better if we focus on the entire forest that is our theater ecosystem rather than obsessing over our existence as individual trees?
If we’re going to grow, won’t we do so more fully if we act as trees themselves do and learn to grow together, through interwoven networks of roots allowing us to share nutrients? Information? Imagination? Love?
Collected Stories
Here’s something that has never happened to me in my entire career as a theater critic, and would never have happened but for World Premiere Wisconsin:
Within the space of hours on an otherwise ordinary day last week, I interviewed high school sophomore Arden Gray so that I could write about one WPW production and prepared questions for an interview of Lauren Gunderson – most produced playwright in America – so that I could write about another.
That WPW-induced connection between two upcoming Madison productions started me thinking about how both Gray and Gunderson’s projects involved plays about strong women making their way in a man’s world.
Seeing that similarity opened my eyes to how this theme plays out in stories being told in other WPW productions that will soon be staged in Madison. I wrote about these and other shared themes among upcoming WPW plays in this past Monday’s WPW Backstage blog post and for an article that will appear next week in a newsletter for Madison’s Isthmus.
I’ve long held the view – espoused in essays throughout my writing career and already articulated in previous posts for this blog – that juxtaposed plays learn to talk to each other in new ways, uncovering truths within them that might have otherwise remained hidden.
The result, as is always true in conversation – whether among the artists and companies making WPW possible or among the plays they’re staging – is new ways of seeing that enrich all of those who participate. When it comes to plays themselves, such an expansive vision inevitably sheds light on where we stand and where we’re going on our collective journey.
Is it therefore any surprise that so many of the WPW productions we’ve seen thus far have in fact actually been about journeys and what they might teach us?
The very first WPW play, Milwaukee Rep’s production of Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers, suggested how two lonely immigrants who’d come to America might start a new journey and tell new stories if they learned to make them together.
Later in February, Children’s Theater of Madison’s WPW production of Erica Berman’s Finder and the North Star featured a young protagonist named Finder undertaking a mythical journey of self-discovery involving two vital lessons, both applicable to WPW:
First, you must have the courage to begin even if you’re not sure where your travels will take you. Second, your journey will be more successful – and much more fun – if you don’t try to go it alone.
Variations on these two fundamental themes revealed themselves in WPW comedies as seemingly different as Capital City Theatre’s send-up of Stephen King in Shining in Misery, Madison Theatre Guild’s Bad in Bed, Florentine Opera’s Così fan tutte: REMIX, and Fond du Lac Community Theatre’s A Crooked French Affair.
Each of these four WPW plays involves relationships at significant, crisis-ridden crossroads, with characters working as hard as Finder did to discover how to move forward in a world where – as Stephen King taught us long ago and as Finder discovers before play’s end – every monster is a metaphor for the fears we experience as we struggle to become our best selves.
Two more early WPW plays – Art Kopischke’s You Don’t Deserve to Die (staged by University of Wisconsin-Green Bay) and Kristin Idaszak’s Tidy (being staged in an ongoing production by Renaissance Theaterworks) drive home that any move forward from our isolated, often inward-turning selves must take account of the natural world, without which no human journey is possible.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Hoops – closing this Sunday – features a cornucopia of journeys, often involving young people who come to understand that their path forward into the future requires a reckoning with the past, through which they might simultaneously honor and refashion inherited traditions so that they can tell new stories all their own.
Which, come to think of it, is akin to the way Sondheim and Lapine invoked cherished and time-honored fables while making something new. Or the way World Premiere Wisconsin is drawing on the Badger State’s inspiring theater history while writing a new chapter of the same.
As Ten Chimneys Foundation President Randy Bryant pointed out on that blustery February night last month, longtime Ten Chimneys owners Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne weren’t just Broadway legends. They were also, Bryant noted, “champions of new work.”
Which makes Ten Chimneys itself, as Cotey rightly noted, “a beacon and resource for the American theater” as well as a vital gathering place for contemporary theater makers throughout the country.
“There could not be a more perfect venue for tonight’s celebration,” Cotey said that night. Ten Chimneys “is rooted in our proud past, energized by this present endeavor, and has an eye forward on a promising future ahead,” Cotey added.
Bryant and Cotey weren’t just talking about all that WPW has in store for us in the next three months, during which the land itself will be renewed after another long Midwestern winter.
When it comes to Wisconsin theater, this spring’s beginning augurs so much more. Emerging from a brutal pandemic that has decimated theaters throughout the country, World Premiere Wisconsin offers us an entirely new way of seeing how theater might be made and shared.
Yes: As its name suggests, this fresh approach is making its premiere in Wisconsin; as Cotey noted in his Ten Chimneys remarks, nothing like World Premiere Wisconsin has been done before, anywhere in the United States.
But I’d go still further: Who will gainsay that what’s being premiered in Wisconsin this spring isn’t just new plays, but an entirely different way of making theater? Who will gainsay WPW’s ability to live up to the rest of its name and reshape theater making not just here in Wisconsin, but throughout the entire world?
