A WRINKLE IN TIME begins with recorded testimonials from young people and adults about the effect of this Newberry Award-winning book on their lives. Not being young and not having read this book, I can't share their opinion of it as life-changing. But, I enjoyed the theatricality adapter/director Tracy Young brought to OSF's world premiere.
The story, a daughter's search for her absent father, is complicated by time travel and genuine scientific concepts such as a tesseract (you can look it up). The staging is in the style of chamber theatre, where the original book was a presence on stage and various performers read from it as narration was required. To describe it sounds deadly, but please believe me when I tell you that in these hands it ends up being quite entertaining (and, helps enormously when the plot becomes complicated and the pace begins to drag in the middle).
Alejandra Escalante, who plays Miranda in THE TEMPEST, morphs into an 11-year-old nerdy kid, and 20-something Joe Wegner makes a believable "a couple years older" boyfriend. I was a little reticent to see what I figured to be a show aimed at children, but in the end I was charmed.
I was not quite so charmed with OSF's all-woman production of TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. It wasn't so much that the performers were playing cross-gender roles, though that reality took a little getting-used-to. It was more that this entirely competent production was really no more than that.
The liveliest thing that happened all evening was K.T. Vogt. As Launce, the show's clown, she worked hard (and successfully) not to be upstaged by Crab, the dog. And, she teamed with Kjerstine Rose Anderson, who played Speed, to entertain the audience with semi-improvised Shakespearean quotes during intermission. She was also saddled with the role of the Duke of Milan, however, and that one didn't come off nearly as well. I should add that Ms. Vogt caught beautifully the put-upon hauteur of the Margeret Dumont role in THE COCOANUTS. She's truly a gem.
I'd call this production of TWO GENTS an interesting experiment. Bill Rauch seems to be committed to working on the heavy male domination of roles in Shakespeare's plays, and I will look forward to seeing how this project progresses.
Bill, heading to the airport soon
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