Miss Evers' Boys
Last week I went with the Guthrie to Hennepin County Medical Center for a dramatic reading of Miss Evers' Boys, a play about the Tuskegee Experiments written by former Guthrie actor David Feldshuh, who earned a PhD in Theater and an MD from the University of Minnesota. For anyone not familiar with the Tuskegee Experiments, black men from a rural area in Alabama who were infected with syphilis were enrolled in a study and told they were getting treatment for their disease, while the unchecked disease ate away at their brains for an astonishing forty year period.
The Guthrie has run a program for about nine years in which they read this play at the UofM medical school, and the day before they go to a different medical facility to perform for working doctors at places ranging from HCMC to the Mayo Clinic, and its just, well, really cool. The effect that play had on the doctors was remarkable, and it sparked a broad discussion between the actors and the doctors and nurses about issues of race in medical care, the legacy of Tuskegee, and generally how doctors interact with patients, and the generational differences so visible in patients and doctors. This play is apparently the highlight of training on medical ethics given to doctors and nurses at the UofM, and it was interesting to hear the discussion it sparked amongst nursing students talk about how different their relationship with doctors is today. All I did was a bit of unskilled labor and scraping the Guthrie van through the HCMC parking lot, but man was that a cool thing.
Third
Wendy Wasserstein's final play is fantastic, and I now know why everybody says Sally Wingert can do no wrong. I caught the dress rehearsal on Friday and the whole production was so intriguingly different from what I pictured when I read the script, it was an absolute delight to see what Casey Stangl did with it. The set and music were unique in their own right, a series of covers of songs from the 60's and 70's, including Cake's immortal cover of "I Will Survive" and a box onto which a series of projections of still images and video created the numerous scenes of Third, with furniture sliding out from the wings, Sally Wingert seductively draped across it, as necessary. Just a superb production, sharp and bright, and Third packs into two hours a story that can be explored from so many different angles it's one of the most stimulating plays I've seen in ages... much like The Home Place, the last play I saw on the McGuire stage. And it's nice to see Sally in a speaking role, since the last time I saw her was as the chain-smoking, scene stealing Parisian maid in Private Lives stomping across the stage and snarling in French at anyone who tried speak to her.
Peer Gynt
This is one of the hardest plays in the world to stage, and Henrik Ibsen himself suggested ditching act four altogether. The Guthrie's Minnesota-styled production stages the play as the fevered vision of a man having a heart-attack, full of dazzling dances and quirky humor (Help me, Omar Sharif!) and I figured when I walked in to the Pirandellian framing device of a birthday party with a band playing the Beer Barrel Polka, it was going to be a strange trip and it certainly was, complete with subterranean trolls singing the Vikings fight song. Mark Rylance is one of the world's most prestigious stage actors (when they rebuilt the Globe, as in Shakespeare's theater, Rylance was the first creative director) so I figure there aren't going to be too many opportunities in life to see him don a thick Minnesota accent in the all-singing, all-dancing, sometimes-rhyming, troll and belly-dancing infested bizarre voyage of Peer Gynt, and I'm glad I was there to see it. (And not just for the belly-dancing). It's hard to know what to think of Peer Gynt, it's so overwhelming, but Mark Rylance is a god.
Gerald Green's dunk
Gerald Green's signature dunk in the all-star weekend dunk competition was really cool, as he had teammate Rashad McCants place a birthday cupcake behind the rim, and then Green got enough air on his dunk to blow out the candle before dunking. He should have won and defended his title, because that was way cooler than Dwight Howard's Superman dunk. Gerald Green, #15 in your programs, #1 in your hearts... and about #12 off the bench for the Wolves right now.
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