Review: Milwaukee Rep Interns Show Why They Were Tapped for Prestigious Internship
They play extras each year in shows like "A Christmas Carol," while logging long hours as understudies to high-profile leads. But the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's interns rarely get to demonstrate why they were tapped for one of the country's most prestigious internship programs for emerging theater artists.
That's reason enough to welcome the second annual installment of "Rep Lab," a program of short plays featuring the Rep intern company.
A few of these shorts, including the opener, are stilted and fraught because they cram too much emotion into overstuffed frames. Another, about a hapless Little League team, goes on much too long.
But collectively, these pieces tell a compelling story of loss, absence and our ensuing quest - what the evening's final play, clearly influenced by Sarah Ruhl, identifies as a search "for wholeness and clarity."
Characters in these plays lose mothers, brothers and partners. They lose illusions and innocence. And they're often at a loss for the words that bind us together and help us hold on.
In "The Can-Can" (directed by Laura Webb), a man (Joseph Kemper) and a woman (N'Tasha Charmel Anders) find themselves trapped within the shopworn clichés that have impoverished our discourse and reduced our humanity.
In "Bright.Apple.Crush" (directed by JC Clementz), such reductions result in all three characters (Nathaniel French, Melissa Graves and Eric C. Lynch) turning to physical violence because they've lost faith in words.
Often, unacknowledged dreams of forging a new language loom large in the evening's best two plays.
In Neil LaBute's "Land of the Dead" (directed by Joshua Baggett [Bradley]), Graves and Alexander Pawlowski IV - both impressive, throughout the evening - play characters remembering a climactic day illustrating all that's wrong in their frayed relationship, while giving glimpses of the love that remains. Pawlowski plays a working-class boy made good in a brokerage firm, where he is just as crude as the other guys. But his casual invocation of two beautiful passages from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" reveals a poetic side that continually surprises both him and us - while explaining why his put-upon partner still loves him.
Carson Kreitzer's "Parachute Silk" (directed by Leda Hoffmann) takes us back to World War II, as two young women (Eva Balistrieri and Anders) await the return of their beaus. Like their men, they've been changed forever by the war, and the question they face is one that confronts us all: whether there's ever enough fabric to stitch together a life - and justify the leap of faith we call love.