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words can deceive Racism, journalists who fabricate stories and newsroom politics were all blended together in Tracy Scott Wilson's play The Story, which I saw tonight before I went to work. A brief twenty-minute talk before the performance from one of the actresses in the play was my only foreknowledge of what was going to happen in the story. She was the one who cited those three topics as being key to the play and in some ways I think that that frame of mind worked to my advantage. I had no expectations from the play beyond what she had just told me. There were no previous performances in memory to use as a comparison. I could just sit back and watch. For me, the best part of the play was the ending, where the dark side of humanity came to the surface in the lead character. If the play hadn't ended that way, then I think that I would have been disappointed. So far this season at the Milwaukee Rep has not overly impressed me. Leaving the theater tonight I had to think for a while before I could remember the previous two plays that I had seen. I did not view that as a good sign. Clearly neither of them made that great of an impression of me, but eventually I remembered what I had seen in the previous weeks. The first one was The Crucible, which was brought down by one actress channeling the voice of Holly Hunter. Southern drawl takes me out of the illusion of colonial New England. The second play Cyrano was cute, but I can only take so much away from a comedy. A drama sits in my thoughts much longer and I think that I prefer my theater that way. |