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World Premiere Wisconsin premiere of I CARRY YOUR HEART WITH ME at Third Avenue PlayWorks.
26 April 2023

Magical Realism: Reflections on a WPW Weekend

Mike Fischer, for World Premiere Wisconsin
Magical Realism: Reflections on a WPW Weekend Image

 

 

“I cast spells. Good spells. Healing spells.”
– Sam D. White, Hush the Waves

“Do you know what magic does, Charlie? It gives people hope, and hope is dangerous.”
– Stephen King, Fairy Tale

 

 

Barbie (Bernie Hein, left) shows Ash (Kyla Vaughan) her gaudy engagement ring.

I. Settling Sail With It’s All Overboard

 

Appropriately enough, I embarked on a five-play Wisconsin theater tour this past weekend by punching my ticket for a cruise leaving from Madison’s Broom Street Theater with a Thursday night performance of It’s All Overboard, which playwright Lisa Sipos bills as “a romantic (political) comedy.”

I wrote on this blog a few weeks ago about how Sipos’ title suggests the tension between her play’s romance and politics; watching her play Thursday night, I was struck by a similar tension between its comedic text and darker subtext.

The cruise on which Sipos’ comedy unfolds takes place during a pandemic that eventually places its entire troupe of entertainers into quarantine; nothing funny about that for the countless theater companies confronting similar challenges during the past three-plus years.

One of the passengers has lost his wife to Covid. Another, trying to move on after a recent divorce, tells a fellow passenger that she feels lost at sea. A third has dropped out of college and was kicked out of her childhood home. A fourth, formerly homeless, is one of many people on this cruise pretending to be someone they’re not because they’re afraid to be who they are.

Did I mention that there’s a hurricane that changes the ship’s course?

Sipos adeptly steers her own ship toward comedy, but not before undercutting any fantasy that one can escape the surrounding world, even on a luxury cruise taking one out to sea. As Sipos’ title suggests and as all of her characters eventually learn, the personal is always political. Even in a romantic comedy.

If we can’t sail away within an escapist fantasy, what sort of ship of state do we want to book instead? And what role will we play in charting its course toward a destination we can believe in?

As one might expect from a playwright, the answer comes to these characters through a production they stage; it wouldn’t be fair to tell you much more except to say that Elvis is involved.

Suffice it to say that as Sipos’ characters become increasingly aware that all the world’s a stage, they start thinking harder about the parts they’ll play on its boards.

The roles they choose will change who they are, empowering them to see themselves in new ways and reminding the audience that art doesn’t just reflect the world. It also gives us the magic we need to transform its stark realities and make something better.

Call it magical realism: A picture of the way we live now, imbued with the imagination and hope required to create a most rare vision showcasing all we may still yet become.

HUSH THE WAVES at Strollers Theatre. Photo: Jon Miner.

II. Crossing Over in Hush the Waves

 

As I again headed west from Milwaukee on Friday for the Strollers Theatre opening of Sam D. White’s Hush the Waves, the U.S. Supreme Court was ruling that women in the United States would still have access – at least for now – to mifepristone.

Talk about life imitating art: White’s play revolves around two pregnant 17-year-olds – Mary in 1948 and Liz in 1978 – and the crises they consequently face.

“Ultimately, this play is not specifically about abortion,” White had told me, noting that he’d begun writing it before the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

But of course it now is; I couldn’t watch the world premiere performance Friday night without thinking about women’s imperiled freedom and autonomy – issues that White rightly notes are “at the heart of the play.” As had happened with the characters on Sipos’ cruising ocean vessel, politics had caught up with White’s moving story.

As had also been true of Sipos’ characters, White’s young women ultimately turn to the healing power of art – and specifically music – as they try to stay afloat in life’s choppy waters.

In moving dream sequences, Mary and Liz bridge the three-decade gap separating them by invoking the Irish Travelers’ belief in dream walking, which allows them to enter each other’s dreams and talk to each other.

As they do so, they dance to underscored accompaniment, channeling the Irish music which, Mary later tells her nurse, captures History’s joy and beauty as well as its sadness and sorrow.

Their dancing and music buoy them both – even when the men in their lives try to invade their dreams, circling around them and telling them what to do.

They can’t entirely escape that encircling patriarchy, any more than Sipos’ cruisers could escape Covid. But they nevertheless manage to stage their own story, seizing control of the more traditional play in which they’d been cast by dreaming how powerful sisterhood might be.

III. Finding Shelter From BITh (Bizarre Intrusive Thoughts)

 

Music also proves crucial to Dee (they/them), whose OCD threatens to crush them in John Van Slyke’s wrenching but ultimately uplifting BITh (Bizarre Intrusive Thoughts), presented through a reading Saturday afternoon by Milwaukee’s Pink Umbrella Theater Company.

As I wrote in my Monday blog post, Van Slyke’s play doesn’t just chronicle his own pitched battle with OCD. As with Sipos’ play-acting cruisers and White’s dreaming dancers, it also thinks hard about how one might devise a new story.

Self-consciously rejecting various types of plays as ill-suited to conveying the story they want to tell, Dee nevertheless carries on, determined to find a structure that can communicate their story. The result is Van Slyke’s play, which bakes in and then overcomes the interruptions and distractions blocking the way forward.

Much as Mary and Liz end their journey by singing and dancing to a Celtic lullaby, Dee approaches the finish line by invoking music.

“When I’m trying to get a point across, trying to get motivated, I start thinking about music,” Dee tells us, while dancing to The Field’s “Looping State of Mind.” “It’s a connection I make,” they continue. “The music helps me connect everything” – much as Van Slyke’s composition of this play forges connections between him and his audience.

IV. Singing For Freedom in Joe Hill: A Song of Protest

 

Sunday afternoon I headed north by northwest to spend time on UW-Oshkosh’s Fond du Lac campus with playwright Anthony Wood’s version of Joe Hill, whom I described in a blog post a few weeks back as radical labor’s most famous troubadour and one of its most famous martyrs (Hill was framed and executed in 1915 for a crime he didn’t commit).

But while we’re periodically serenaded by Jimmy Miller’s Hill and the cast surrounding him, Wood’s primary focus is on the related question of how and why we build the stories we sing.

Director Chris Flieller and his design team lean into how little we actually know about Hill’s life; that life plays out in this production as a series of lightning flashes on a deliberately dark stage. Andy Brault’s lighting design highlights a series of brief vignettes – many of them unfolding in the upstage gloaming and thereby emphasizing how hard it is to see the truth when we (re)construct the past.

We see how that history gets built, through a version of the telephone game: The audience watches an older version of Hill’s defense lawyer (David Neese), watching a younger version of himself (Joe Gallo) scribbling notes as he listens to various witnesses sharing their own memories of who Joe Hill was – bearing in mind that Hill himself wasn’t above shaping his story for his own ends.

Form follows content: We watch how the myth of Joe Hill gets made and deployed, much as Hill himself believed that the stories he told through the songs he sang might inspire his fellow workers and change the world.

All four of the WPW plays I saw this past weekend played variations on this theme: art isn’t an escapist cruise leaving the world’s troubles behind, but an imaginative exercise that allows us to engage our world and dream better worlds to come.

When Flieller’s cast concludes Wood’s play by singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” it’s clear that their nighttime visions involve far more than ghostly images featuring yet another American radical murdered by their government. Dreaming Joe Hill back to life means dreaming into being a country where his vision of justice and fairness for all still matters.

V. Coda: Revisiting Detroit

 

During my twenties, I sang “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” on a regular basis as an activist in my native, forever beloved Detroit.

That’s among the reasons I spent Saturday night in Marquette University’s Helfaer Theatre, watching a production of fellow Detroit native Dominque Morisseau’s Detroit ’67. While it wasn’t a WPW production, Marquette’s show reinforced what WPW has consistently made clear: world premieres change how we see and experience plays we thought we already knew.

Drawing parallels between the rebellion that shook Detroit in 1967 and the protests following the murder of George Floyd, director Nadja Simmonds underscores what Morisseau’s play implies: what happened then is still happening now, and will continue doing so until we create a better story from our shameful history.

As with the cruisers I’d met in It’s All Overboard, some of the Black Detroiters one meets in Detroit ’67 hope to escape that history by turning inward and focusing on themselves; as with Sipos’ cruisers, they eventually come to accept instead that the only way forward requires facing outward and engaging the world.

How does Morisseau drive that vision home?

As was repeatedly the case in plays I saw this past weekend, she does so though music, in a play that doubles as a playlist for and homage to Motown.

As the brother and sister at the heart of Morisseau’s play dream of overcoming all they’ve lost and rebuilding Detroit, one of them goes to their new-fangled 8-track player, commemorating their fresh resolve through the Four Tops:

“Now if you feel that you can’t go on/because all of your hope is gone,” Levi Stubbs urgently sings, don’t give up – notwithstanding life’s confusion and the sense that “happiness is just an illusion” in a world that’s “crumbling down.”

“Reach out,” the remaining Tops join in and sing, before all four connect to sing together that when you do, “I’ll be there, with a love that will shelter you.”

“Only connect,” writes playwright Jennifer Blackmer, quoting E.M. Forster in I Carry My Heart With Me, an upcoming WPW play offering a sustained meditation on the way we tell stories and why it matters. “Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. We will live in fragments no longer.”

I’ll have much more to say about Blackmer’s gorgeous play, which begins performances at Third Avenue PlayWorks in just two weeks, in future posts.

But as I drove home from Fond du Lac late Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t help but think how fully Blackmer’s invocation of Forster’s best novel speaks to the connections I’d seen forged time and again all weekend and throughout this inspiring, game-changing festival.

There were connections forged between characters telling new stories within each play.

Connections between and among those stories themselves, each of which prompts reflection on one of the many ways that discrimination and misunderstanding afflict and disfigure this country, whether it’s directed against women (It’s All Overboard; Hush the Waves); those living with disabilities (BITh); the working class (Joe Hill); or Black America (Detroit ’67).

And, finally, connections between WPW plays and audiences bearing witness to what World Premiere Wisconsin itself is all about: How telling new stories creates fresh possibilities. In our Wisconsin communities. In our country. And in the wider world.

It’s All Overboard continues through May 6 in Madison. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/its-all-overboard-2/.

Hush the Waves continues through Saturday, May 6 in Madison. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/hush-the-waves-2/.

You can learn more about Pink Umbrella Theater Company’s now-concluded reading of BITh (Bizarre Intrusive Thoughts) by visiting https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/bith-bizarre-intrusive-thoughts/.

Joe Hill: A Song of Protest continues through Sunday, April 30 in Fond du Lac. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/joe-hill-a-song-of-protest-2/.

I Carry Your Heart With Me runs from May 10-28 in Sturgeon Bay. For more information, look for future Backstage blog posts and visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/i-carry-your-heart-with-me-3/.

You can learn more about Marquette University’s now-concluded production of Detroit ’67 by visiting https://issuu.com/marquettetribune/docs/d67_playbill.

Meet Mike

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 was made possible through the sponsorship of the United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF). Learn more: https://upaf.org/