Recently by Tad Simons

Tuesday night is arguably the deadest entertainment evening of the week, but you have to hand it to Bryant-Lake Bowl for bucking the tide and putting on a show (sometimes two) pretty much every night, no matter what.

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As most of you must know by now, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer marks quite a few firsts. It’s the first time Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling has cast himself in a title role, the first time he has both directed and acted in a Guthrie play, and the first time he has dusted off his acting chops in more than twenty years. 

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You know things are going badly when working at a whorehouse represents a step up in your living situation.  But it beats being gang-raped by soldiers for five months, or having your uterus split open with a bayonet, which is the fate suffered by Salima and Sophie (respectively), two young Congalese women caught in the crossfire of a civil war that is tearing their country apart. 

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The death of the book has long been foretold. Sages of the digital future speak rapturously of a time when all the world’s knowledge will be contained on a silicon wafer no larger than a baby’s tooth, and all forms of written content—books, magazines, newspapers, press releases, recipes, doctor’s prescriptions, shopping lists, notes from your mother—will be viewed on a screen lit by diodes capable of producing 186 million different colors and several thousand shades of gray, none of which will in any way disturb your mental equilibrium or challenge any of the moral, philosophical, religious, political, or intellectual conclusions arrived at by your information-saturated brain beyond the age of, say, fifteen. This bookless existence will be a blessed era, they say, unless of course you want to read outside, in which case you’re f-----d.

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You have to hand it to the Coen brothers: they never make the same movie twice. Their latest, A Serious Man, is an odd addition to the Coen catalogue. It’s a quirky, low-budget film steeped in Jewish culture and set in the bleakest imaginable outpost of 1960s suburbia, and it is essentially a philosophical meditation on the meaning of life, or lack thereof. Market that, suckers.

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August Wilson died six months after writing Radio Golf, the final installment of his 10-play Century Cycle, a lifelong project that features a play set in each decade of the 20th Century. It would be fitting and just to say that Wilson left the best for last, but he didn’t—Radio Golf doesn’t even rank in the top five plays of Wilson’s cycle. But what it lacks in emotional, spiritual, and dramatic depth, it makes up for in a kind of eerie relevance. And Penumbra Theatre, under the direction of Lou Bellamy, is breathing life into the play in a way no other company in the country can.  

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I know all eyes are on the new Coen Brothers movie, A Serious Man, which opens Friday—but there’s another high-quality, locally shot movie opening this week: Rob Perez’s Nobody, an indie comedy about an art student seeking the inspiration he needs to finish his final project. The movie opens Thursday, Oct. 1, at the State Theatre, then starts a run on Friday at Block E. It features several local actors, including Sam Rosen and Emily Gunyou Halaas, and contains scenes shot at MCAD, Porky’s on University Ave., The Black Forest Inn, and several other recognizable locations around town. Last week, I attended the cast/crew party at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis and spoke with Rob, Sam, and Emily about the new film—and discovered, much to my chagrin, that there are no zombies, vampires, time travelers, amnesia victims, or apocalyptic disasters in it. Or, for that matter, very many serious men.

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A truism arts journalists and critics often encounter is that artists are not always the most incisive or articulate commentators on their own work. Some artists won’t talk about their work at all—preferring to let it “speak for itself”—and the ones who will don’t necessarily offer much in the way of insightful analysis. 

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The 5th annual Ivey Awards for excellence in local theater took place Monday night at the State Theatre and, as usual, the winners represented a diverse cross-section of actors, directors, technicians, and theater companies. Hosted by Claudia Wilkens and Richard Ooms, the 2009 Ivey awards went to:

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Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is one of best-known, most-often-produced, -quoted, -imitated, -butchered plays in existence. It is an easy play to stage, but a difficult play to do well, which is why most productions fall in the mediocre middle, where far too many great plays go to die. 

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