Recently by Jaime Kleiman

Sometimes good plays happen to good artists who simply don’t understand what they’re doing or why, which makes everyone—the playwright, the actors, the designers—look bad. It’s a shame, because the production of Well at Park Square Theatre has an all-star lineup that, by anyone’s estimation, should have resulted in great theater. What has formed instead is a sorely misdirected interpretation of a play that requires far more than anyone involved was able to give it.

Playwright Lisa Kron is a performance artist whose oeuvre is challenging the area between theater, performance art and—in the case of Well, memoir—as valid theatrical performance. Kron has created a kind of metatheatricality that pokes fun at itself. It’s a lovely convention, but Park Square’s production doesn’t do it much justice.

Well is essentially a play about the relationship Kron has with her chronically ill mother, Ann. That through-line is important, as Well does not have a conventional narrative. Thanks to Michael Dixon’s confused direction, it barely has a narrative at all. (It should be noted that Dixon is an imminently talented director. His repeated missteps here are, to be metatheatrical about it, out of character.)

Lisa, played by Christina Baldwin, talks directly to the audience with personable, funny monologues. Baldwin begins strongly, but falters when the play requires honesty and emotional depth. Baldwin is a talented actor with a wide range, but she doesn’t show it here, and the demonstrative catharsis feels like a cop-out. In the Broadway production, Kron played herself, which undoubtedly worked much better.

Kron’s mother is played with benign, little-old-lady syndrome by Barbara June Patterson, who gets plenty of laughs but fails to capture the guts of the woman slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Ann was, according to Lisa’s recollections, a vanguard in their Lansing, Michigan neighborhood. A progressive, Ann moved the family into a neighborhood where they were the only whites and the only Jews, back when racial integration was crazy talk. That sly chutzpah, in addition to her chronic fatigue, is not apparent in Patterson’s interpretation. The most glaring problem is Baldwin and Patterson’s age difference. The character of Lisa (just like the real-life Lisa) should be in her mid-forties. Baldwin is too young. Instead of a charged mother-daughter relationship, we get something like a sputtering grandmother-granddaughter conversation, one that Lisa can back out of at any time.

There are other characters in Well, played with varying degrees of success by Faye M. Price, Heidi Bakke, Edwin Strout, and Emil Herrera. Their talents, like Baldwin and Patterson’s, are wasted. Every time the foursome enters to play people in Lisa’s past, the bottom drops out. When the actors rebel and walk offstage because the play makes no sense, one is tempted to go with them.

Well runs through February 10 at Park Square Theatre.

Mixed Blood Theatre’s The Poetry of Pizza is easy on the drama and heavy on light comedy. That said, it’s not the most original of stories. Playwright Deborah Brevoort’s persistent quirkiness results in an overlong play about what is essentially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, minus the poetry and fluidity of Shakespeare. Like actual pizza, Poetry is not substantial, but it is palatable.

Poetry, directed by John Miller–Stephany, focuses on Sarah Middleton (Stacia Rice), a professor of poetry living in Copenhagen while researching the topic for her next book. One night, as Sarah is walking home, she bumps into a Kurdish–owned pizzeria to get out of the rain. Her red umbrella looks like a beautiful rose to the Kurdish pizza boy, Soran, and he falls head over heels in love with her. Unfortunately for Sarah, two Danish men, Ule and Heino, lust for her too.

Patrick O’Brien’s Ule is small and good-natured, but his Sarah–stalking tendencies are more creepy than cute. Barbara Kingsley provides a nice contrast as his agoraphobic wife, Inga. Sean Michael Dooley’s Heino is slimy but inconsequential, and Michelle Hutchison’s Pam, Sarah’s best friend, seems out of place and overacted. The same can be said for the role of Olga (Jayne Taini), who commiserates with Inga over the phone until she unwittingly falls in love with her husband. Omar Koury, as the Kurdish owner of the pizzeria, Rebar, is great. He brings an inner life to his character’s outsized personality.

The play’s emotional center revolves around Soran’s earnestness and believability, and Ron Menzel does an excellent job. He’s created a compelling, charismatic portrait of a young man who has been through hell and whose heart is still filled with love. Soran makes Sarah beautiful pizzas, with names exotic enough to melt any woman’s bookish heart—Arabian Nights, Purple Passion, and The Persian Kiss. It’s weird, but also sweet.

The speed bumps that the lovers hit on their way to the altar get chuckles, but many of the laughs come at the expense of greater depth. There is a lovely moment during Soran and Sarah’s first date. She looks at a picture of a thin boy on the wall and asks who it is. It’s him, a few months after he’d arrived at a refugee camp. The quiet moment of realization that sets in relays in five seconds what two hours doesn’t. Soran, having seen the worst humanity has to offer, craves beauty. Sarah, despite her fancy degrees, can’t fully comprehend it.

Poetry is the stuff of fairy tales, though, and everything works out in the end. It’s a little ridiculous, but a lot better than the alternative. Everyone, even thinly written characters, deserves a happy ending.

The Poetry of Pizza runs through February 10 at the Mixed Blood Theatre.

Hormel Girls, which just extended its run at the History Theatre through December 30, is about as good as a can of SPAM. If you like that kind of thing, you’ll thoroughly enjoy this musical. If you prefer, say, Kobe beef, you might want to sit this one out.

Hormel Girls is about the sixty-plus World War II veterans (with some beauty queens thrown in) who comprised the first female drum-and-bugle band, and later hosted their own radio show. The act was an ingenious marketing tool created by J. C. Hormel to promote his plethora of canned meat products. The ladies toured the nation, singing and dancing their way into housewives’ kitchens and capturing the hearts of red-blooded Americans everywhere.

The music, written by Hiram Titus with lyrics and book by Laurie Flanigan, is written (so says the press release) in the spirit of the Andrews Sisters, which basically means there are a lot of all-female ensemble numbers; unfortunately, there are no hummable, memorable tunes. The main problem lies in the music’s predictability, as well as its appropriation. The show is titled Hormel Girls, but the men get all the solos. It makes one wonder whose story this really is—the tale of young women journeying into adulthood after World War II, or Hormel’s, whose fatherly affections help turn them into highly groomed pets.

The actresses have perma-smiles, even when they sing about going crazy within the confines of life on the road. Individual personalities go mostly unexplored until act two. Jen Burleigh-Benz has some lovely moments as mother figure Meredith, and Sondra Norland wisely avoids turning her character into a stereotype. As for the men (Richard C. Grube and Mark Rosenwinkel), they get the best writing, the best songs, and have the most developed roles. It’s a shame, really. After sitting through two-and-a-half hours of nostalgia for the way things were—women in the kitchen, men allowing them to work—it would have been nice to get to know the women behind the SPAM.

Hormel Girls continues at the History Theatre through December 30.

Minneapolis Musical Theatre’s area premiere production of Jerry Springer: The Opera is trashy, brash, and loud. In short, it’s exactly like watching The Jerry Springer Show, and for the most part, it’s great. The Jerry Springer Show has all but disappeared from quotidian consciousness, and it’s a pleasure to have the show's namesake back.

The show, as its title suggests, is through-sung, beginning with a song that sounds more appropriate for a church choir and digressing into gutter-language arias and faux-lieder that only classically trained singers could pull off. Of course, not all the characters get pretty ballads, and there are plenty of pop-inspired chords. Songs like “Talk to the Hand”—sung by a transvestite caught in a love triangle with Peaches, Peaches’ best friend, and her insensitive fiancé—and “Mamma Gimme Smack” (imagine two adults, one dressed in a diaper, the other, Baby Jane, in a Shirley Temple-esque wig, begging to be spanked) bring out the best Middle America has to offer.

Kim Kivens, who plays both Peaches and Baby Jane, lends her lyric soprano and wide-eyed comic timing to her roles. Christine Karki plays Shawntel, a wannabe stripper with a booty deadly enough to demolish U-boats. Her performance is a leopard-print wearing tour de force. Director/choreographer Steven J. Meerdink revels in the raucousness of it all, encouraging his performers to sing well but otherwise behave like amateurs, the kind one might find, say, on a lowbrow talk show. The sets, designed by Andrea Heilman, are both plain—four nondescript chairs on a small platform—and over-the-top. Satan’s lair (where act two takes place) features those same chairs burnt to a crisp and skull graffiti galore.

The plot is flimsy, but that’s neither here nor there. The first act serves as an excuse to have a bunch of white trash sing their woes. The second act, which finds a recently shot Jerry caught between Satan’s personal drama and Jesus’s petulant stubbornness, is pointless and a little boring, even with a climactic scene featuring a Satan-Jesus-Mother Mary-Adam-Eve-God smackdown.

The only other thing to know ahead of time is that the f-word is used merrily and copiously, with the “c” word thrown in about six times for good measure. How long does it take to tire of the shocking language and repeated references to cocaine? Exactly twenty-three minutes. The authors of the show could have used urbandictionary.com to come up with some raunchier rhymes. Other than these minor complaints, there’s not a night at the opera that gets grander than this.

Jerry Springer: The Opera runs through October 28 at Hennepin Stages.

Trying, a two-person play based on playwright Joanna McClelland Glass’s time as personal secretary to judge Francis Biddle, is an innocuous play. Biddle was the former secretary of state for president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the chief justice of the Nuremburg Trials from 1941–1945. In Trying, he’s eighty-two and approaching death in the surliest of ways.

The play takes place in 1967, in the Georgetown, Washington, D.C. office of Biddle. The room says as much about Biddle’s mental state as it does about his physical ailments (astute yet forgetful, occasionally bitter, debilitating arthritis). There’s not a modern object in sight save for a typewriter, the provenance of which is not discussed. Biddle is trying to finish his memoirs but needs an aide to help him.

When his new hire, Sarah Schorr (Emily Gunyou Halaas), enters Biddle’s office for the first time on a snowy winter morning, he warns her that he’s impossible to work for and that he’s made all his other secretaries quit. Sarah, a self-possessed twenty-five-year-old, is undeterred, and the play, predictable and often trite, begins.

Biddle is played by Richard Ooms, a tall man with a glowing presence and the face of a pussycat. If you see him around town, you automatically start to grin and want to hug the man. He keeps his innate incandescence mostly under wraps throughout the first act, where the script gives him nothing more to do than be cranky, limp about, and quip one-liners into the cold Georgetown air.

Sarah is a “bugger for work” who takes on her formidable task with stony determination. Trying to get Biddle to finish transcribing his memoirs before he passes away is a task, made even harder by his deliberate attempts to make her miserable. Ooms does a nice job of playing Biddle not as a monster, but rather the opposite—the closer Biddle gets to death, the more he wants to distance himself from other people.

The rest of the play is as one would expect, with Sarah taking the reigns at the end of act one, the pair becoming close friends by the start of act two, and the inevitable death of Biddle by the end of it.

True to conventional-play form, there are endless wordplays on the title (the multiple meanings of the verb/adverb “trying” shall haunt me all weekend) and the overt symbols are not particularly graceful. Sarah is pregnant by the end of the play—and Glass’s metaphor is plain as day. As one life ends, another begins. It’s not a new sentiment, and the actors save it from being theatrically dead on arrival. In the hands of another pair, Trying would be trying indeed.

Trying closes tomorrow at Park Square Theatre.

Paula Vogel is not the subtlest of playwrights. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, How I Learned to Drive, she dealt explicitly with incest; a lesser known play, The Oldest Profession, is about three old women on a bench reminiscing about their lives as prostitutes. Her seriocomic-feminist approach can yield phenomenal work (Drive and The Baltimore Waltz are at the top of this list), or it can birth heavy-handed diatribes such as Hot N' Throbbing, which opened this weekend at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage, produced by 20% Theatre Company. Thankfully, this production is very good, so it's easy to overlook most of the sticky wickets.

Hot N' Throbbing depicts a world where women are beat up, vilified for being out of control, and generally get the sh*t end of the stick. Hoary stuff, right? Thankfully, director Claire Avitabile keeps it light—as light as a play about domestic abuse can be, anyway. This emotionally taut production highlights some of our society's darkest secrets and isn't easy to watch.

The play opens with two erotically charged characters slinking around in their own film noir fantasy. He's a detective and she's a playful dame. It turns out that they're both characters in the screenplay our heroine, Charlene, is trying desperately to complete before deadline. Charlene is the mother of two wound-up adolescents on the brink of sexual revelation. To pay the bills, she's started a women-centered production house called Gyno Productions. As a mother and provider, she's stretched thin. As a woman, she's lonely, and lives out some of her sexual desires through her work.

For various reasons, including writer's block and a teenage daughter who has yet to comprehend the effect of her cleavage on men, Charlene can't finish her screenplay. Oddly, she seems somewhat relieved by the final and most disturbing disruption of the night—her drunken husband, Clyde, who breaks her door down, upset about the restraining order she's put on him (gee, I wonder why). She shoots him in the butt and suddenly her evening has gotten a lot more interesting. Instead of writing a script, she gets to live one, to a lugubrious conclusion.

Clyde is at the heart of this play, and Jeff Broitman goes the distance and then some, portraying Clyde as all sinew and sex, alcohol and rage. As the night wears on, Broitman reveals Clyde's complexities and vulnerability. We start to like the creep. Broitman is also the most charismatic actor onstage, which doesn't hurt.

Without a doubt, Hot N' Throbbing is a horrifying play as well as an important one, and Avitabile makes sure her audience goes home with a greater awareness of what can happen behind closed doors. I did not sleep easily last night, but when I awoke, I was grateful for the reminder.

Hot N' Throbbing plays Thursday through Monday until August 25.

For me, August is all about the Fringe Festival: what I’m seeing, what’s good, what’s not, which shows my friends are in, which shows I can tell my grandmother about, which restaurants are giving good discounts on dinner and cocktails, etc.

I’ve only seen a handful of shows thus far (the festival runs through August 12) , but word of mouth is starting to spread. In addition to the Minnesota Fringe, I’ve also seen a couple shows at Augsburg’s Manna Fest, which are the two I would most recommend this early in the game. They are The Neon Man and Me by Slash Coleman (left)  and Potato Chip Head by Heidi Arneson. (Coleman’s show will be taped by PBS this fall.)

Other shows I’ll stand behind include True Theatre Critic (Omar Sangare is an incredible actor from Poland) and Macbeth’s Awesome Scottish Castle Party, by Joseph Scrimshaw, co-starring some of the Cities’ funniest sketch-comedy actors. (In the interest of full disclosure, my husband is playing guitar for the show. But rest assured that all of the sophomoric jokes are pure Scrimshaw.) Brother Joshua is remounting From Here to Maternity with Shannon Wexler, which a lot of people loved it was at Bryant-Lake Bowl in May. I wasn’t crazy about it. If you consistently disagree with my reviews, you will probably like this show.

I also plan to see Amy Salloway’s show, Circumference (left), which I expect will be as good as her previous Fringe shows, Does This Monologue Make Me Look Fat? and Kiss Me Already, Hershel Gertz! Tonight I’m seeing KIPO!, a category-defying performance featuring twenty Tibetan dancers and musicians. Later this week, I’m seeing Blue Collar Diaries, a one-woman show by Michelle Myers, as well as Bedlam Theatre’s William Shakespeare’s Hystery Queene Margaret. Rumor has it that the Bedlam show may be shut down—their makeshift stage is outside and their permit for it expires this week—so I’d go sooner rather than later. (Of course, if this is just a publicity stunt, it's nothing short of brilliant!)

Things to skip: The World’s Largest Aluminum Foil Ball stands out from the crowd. This original musical by a well-intentioned Iowan made my head hurt. The anti-Bush jokes are funny, though.

In the out-of-town department, here’s what’s piqued my interest: FLUID, a one-woman show out of New York, Bouffon Glass Menajoree (also from New York), and The Most Mysterious Day of the Year (left). I have no idea what that last one’s about, but the promotional photo makes it look like it will be a cross between a Marilyn Manson–esque cabaret and kilt-wearing chaos. I’m sure I have it completely wrong but I like the picture, so there you go. I’m a big fan of white face paint and kilts.

Everything Fringe can be found on the extensive Fringe Festival website. Have fun!

The Guthrie’s production of Noël Coward’s smart romp Private Lives should have been wonderful. In fact, I don’t know why it wasn’t. It had everything going for it. The actors were outstanding. Peter Rothstein’s stylized direction was inventive and playful, and the sets and costumes were divine. Peter Moore choreographed a deliciously ridiculous fight scene that included people breaking phonograph records over each other’s heads. What’s not to love? Maybe I inadvertently left my sense of humor in the parking garage.

Veanne Cox plays Amanda Prynne, an imperious, manipulative, and sexually irresistible divorcée. The play begins on the day she arrives at the Deauville, France, resort she’s staying at for her honeymoon with her new husband, Victor Prynne (Kris L. Nelson). This is the same day that Elyot Chase—Amanda’s droll, self-assured ex—arrives at the exact same Deauville, France, resort, where he’s staying for his honeymoon with his new spouse. Better yet, their rooms share the same veranda (Above, photo by Michal Daniel). When Amanda and Elyot discover the situation, trouble ensues.

Both Amanda and Elyot  (a divine Stephen Pelinski) have devoted a considerable amount of time to bad-mouthing their exes and thus refuse to tell their new partners about what’s happened. Instead, Elyot and Amanda balk, preen, panic, and flirt. Realizing their all-consuming passion is as red-hot as ever, they ultimately decide to run off with each other. It’s so wrong, but it feels so good!

Meanwhile, Elyot’s new wife, Sybil—pretty-in-pink Tracey Maloney—is half his age and not very smart. (That’s why he married her.) Victor, Amanda’s nebbish husband, is naïve and forgiving. That’s probably why Amanda married him. When Sybil and Victor figure out they’ve been ditched, they go searching for their egocentric other halves.

In the meantime, Elyot and Amanda have holed up in an opulent Parisian suite. Their relationship is as volatile, feisty, and sexually charged as ever. Just as in real life, passion doesn’t always inspire domestic bliss, and much of the rest of the play consists of physical and verbal barbs (some subtle, some not), played with relish by Cox and Pelinski. Their chemistry and comedic precision propel the play toward its climax, which includes a brilliant cameo by Sally Wingert, who arrives via elevator in a cloud of smoke muttering unintelligibly in French.

To get back to my initial question: what’s not to love? For me, personally, the script itself might be the problem. I appreciate Noël Coward’s wit, but the plot and characters just didn’t grab me the way I wished they would. If Rothstein could use the same cast for Blithe Spirit (another classic Coward farce, with a similar plot but involving a dead ex-wife and all sorts of hokie malarkey), I’d be a very happy theatergoer indeed. Maybe next season?

Girl Friday Productions' Our Town is as unadorned and lovely as its characters. Director Craig Johnson follows the blueprint for Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece to a T, using a minimal set, sound effects instead of musical instruments and animals, and direct audience address—and for the most part does well by it.

Our Town is the story of the people who live in Grover’s Corners, a small town in New Hampshire, at the turn of the century. Over the course of three acts and the passing of twelve years, the characters present for the audience ostensibly quotidian moments in their lives. The play focuses on two neighboring families, the Gibbs and the Webbs. These families' respective children, George and Emily, go from friends to class leaders and, finally, to husband and wife.

Jenny Hollingsworth Kathman does a more-than-serviceable job as Emily Webb, nailing her sweet intelligence and optimism in the first two acts. Ian Miller as George Gibbs is a delight to watch. His sense of playfulness and yearning are endearing. Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs, portrayed by Bob Malos and Kirby Bennett, make a fine pair. Bennett brings an understated dignity to her role as George’s mother. Her counterpart, Mrs. Webb, is played by Heather Stone, who hasn’t quite figured out how to balance humor with drama and chews the pantomimed scenery from time to time. Johnson’s choice to divide the lines of the Stage Manager (as written, the narrator of the play) among the ensemble defuses and detracts from the storylines, and is just plain confusing. (Photo, above, back: John Middleton as Editor Webb, Jenny Hollingworth Kathman as Emily Webb. Front: Heather Stone as Mrs. Webb, Collan Simmons as Wally Webb. Photo, Richard Fleischman.)

The disquieting third act deals with Emily’s death and the universe at large—a daunting topic if ever there was one—and this is where Kathman, who has one of the most famous speeches in the play, struggles the most. Emily’s life-after-death experience is supposed to be a time of revelation—“Do human beings ever live life while they live it?” she asks—but Kathman doesn’t grasp the full meaning of the text. This doesn’t take too much power away from Our Town as a great work of art, but it does prevent this production from reaching its full potential.

In the play, there’s a character who addresses an envelope: “Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, North America, the Western Hemisphere, Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the mind of God.” The postman delivers it, anyway. Girl Friday’s moving production, despite its missteps, delivers too. Go.

Our Town runs through July 28 at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage.

The opening moments of the musical 1776 are punctuated with the explosion of gunfire. It’s the sound of General George Washington’s undersized army of teenagers and old men fending off the British, and an exciting way to start a play about the birthing of the Declaration of Independence.

1776 is about the twenty-one men in the Continental Congress, whose bickering and lollygagging could have been, by all rights, nothing more than a dramatized history lesson of the kind one is forced to watch in grade school while throwing spitballs—but playwright Peter Stone and composer and lyricist Sherman Edwards don’t let that happen. More than anything, the play is about the idiosyncrasies of the men behind the famous document, and the fervent belief that the American spirit used to stand for something noble.

Director John Miller-Stephany keeps the set simple and wisely focuses on the actors, all of whom deserve high praise. Bostonian John Adams, “obnoxious and disliked” by pretty much everybody, is played with likeable irascibility by Michael Thomas Holmes. The Gout-ridden Benjamin Franklin is fond of quoting himself and napping during debates. Peter Michael Goetz’s good-natured interpretation is a hoot. Richard White has a show-stopping number as Richard Henry Lee called “The Lees Of Old Virginia.” Thomas Jefferson is played with brooding, taciturn grit by newcomer Tyson Forbes. There are other standouts as well: Bradley Greenwald, as South Carolina’s representative Edward Rutledge, sings an aria called “Molasses To Rum,” about Rutledge’s opposition to abolishing slavery. Greenwald performs it magnificently, even if the song does feel like an apologetic insertion by the authors. Lee Mark Nelson gives a skillfully nuanced performance as John Dickinson, the one delegate who refused to sign.

The play is bookended by two images: the seditious political cartoon of a snake cut into eight segments with the phrase “Join, or Die” printed beneath it, and the reenactment of the delegates as they sign the Declaration, their signatures highlighted above them (image courtesy T. Charles Erickson). Never has the phrase “John Hancock” been demonstrated so poignantly on the American stage.

1776 runs through August 26 at the Guthrie Theater.