WeatherGrrrl and I capped off our day in the Twin Cities yesterday with showing of “Other desert cities” at the Guthrie Theatre. With one exception, the play was quite splendid. The opening section of incredibly funny in a quite dark sort of way, as a family reunited for Christmas dance and spar with each other as a prickly kind of getting reacquainted. It then gets increasingly serious, tense, and emotionally wrenching as both the past and the future of the family are explored in ways that are in turns explosive and tender.

The director and five person cast does a great job with an intelligent and perceptive script, conveying rich complex characters that could easily become stereotypical and 1-dimensional. The set did a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of a well-heeled, old-guard GOP operative home in Palm Springs, and gave the proscenium space a real depth and scale.

My one nit to pick is the very end scene. Without saying much because I don’t want to spoil, I found the last scene to be weak and lacking the emotional punch of the rest of the play. I’m not even sure it was all that necessary, and could perhaps have been left off altogether. While it’s unfortunate to end on a weaker note, the vast majority of the play is quite excellent and totally makes up for that thin spot.

The play ends this weekend (24 March), so get tickets while you can!

Tuesday we saw James T. Wilson, a two person show including Stanton Pavlicek in the title role. We know Stanton and his family from Morris (his dad was a huge help in building an enormous frame to hold up our gargantuan honeysuckle vine), and it was cool to see two 18-year olds just out of high school in this setting. The show itself was still struggling to become, and while there was a of potential, it’ll need some more work to realize that possibility.

Thursday we saw Speech!, an absolutely hilarious comedy about the goofy (and often twisted) world of high school speech competitions. The writing and performances were tres sharp, and the audience was rolling in the aisles from the start to finish. This show has received a number of well deserved nominations, including a best male performance for our friend and UMM alum Tim Hellendrung! Tim’s did lots of cool improv back at UMM (as well as being an excellent manager for the campus radio station), and has continued to develop at Comedy Sports in Minneapolis. It was great to see him do such a fine job in a great ensemble production like this. Big congratulations to Tim and the entire cast and crew!

Last night (Friday) we saw what will sadly be our last show, because we head back to Morris this afternoon so Tom can hang with his friends some before we come back to the Cities Sunday night. We went out with a bang, though, catching the amazing O(h) by casebolt and smith, a two person show unlike any dance performance I’ve ever seen before. They combined some great dance with liberal splashes of spoken word and singing, providing a rich piece of performance than transcended any simple notion of genre. There was wonderful (often comedic) commentary on both culture in general and dance in particular, creating a really fun experience that was also chock full of food for thought. They also received a number of nominations, and our group (two straight guys and a woman) all agree that a sweaty Joel Smith in Superman briefs is hot!

There’s a great section in this performance about intellectual property that inspired a long enough commentary that I’ve moved to it’s own post. It’s not often in my experience that a dance performance explicitly opens these kinds of doors, so check it out.

Thomas is one of the 20 or so kids from the upper mid-west that have been selected to participate in the Guthrie Theater Shakespeare summer workshop next month. Cool, eh? This means that he and I get to spend 9 glorious days in Minneapolis, with Tom going off to study acting with really top notch actors and directors, and I hang around doing course prep and verifying that people still say inane but distractingly amusing things on the Internet. (Sue, in the meantime, gets another 9 days of quality time with the cats.)

We got a pretty good deal at the Faculty House and will be staying there except they couldn’t put us up until the 11th. That means that we’re looking for a place or places to crash for the nights of the 9th and 10th of August. Anyone in the Cities got a couch or two we can plop on? We can arrive pretty much whenever on the 9th, and he has to be at the Guthrie by 10am both the 10th and 11th, so proximity to the Guthrie isn’t a particular necessity.

Also, if any Cities folks want to do lunch or dinner or some such, let me know and we can make arrangements!