Photo Credit: Len Villano
There is a mystique about the Green Bay Packers. Something that is difficult to explain to folks outside Wisconsin. Where else would you find such a scheduling note: Featuring a Green Bay Packers friendly schedule with no Sunday shows and 3 p.m. matinées on weeknight games.
Around these parts, Packers tickets are worth their weight in (green and) gold; Dad’s Season Tickets, which opened Saturday, Aug. 31, at Northern Sky Theater’s new Gould Theater, tells the story of a family’s bond and the role of the tickets.
In this play written by West Allis playwright Matt Zembrowski and directed by Jeffrey Herbst and Molly Rhode, we learn that, decades ago, Mom broke her ankle (or foot, depending on whose version of familial history you choose). Rhonda (Kelly Doherty, last seen as the scene-stealing gangster in Skylight’s Kiss Me Kate), the eldest daughter, stayed home to help Mom in the kitchen. She is not the football type. Gabby (Anna Cline) went to the Packers game with Frank, their Dad (Ray Jivoff), thus cementing the daughters’ roles in the family dynamic.
Frank has attended every home game since his Dad got season tickets in the pre-Lambeau days, when the Packers played at East High School. In fact, his first date with his now-deceased wife was a Packers game, and they went to all the home games together. He still talks to her portrait hung in the living room of the house he shares with his youngest daughter, Cordy (Jamie Mercado).
But there is a problem: The family does not talk. The oldest sisters are at odds, and Cordy just wants to graduate high school and go to college as far away as she can. When Mom was alive, game day was the only time when everyone got along.
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This underlying touch of Eugene O'Neill is balanced with a handful of tunes that range from downright hokey to deftly cultural and Packers references to the historic 1996 season. (It really is hard to beat actors in referee uniforms singing backup parts and a song like “What Do You Do with a Bye Week?”)
The fulcrum, suddenly, is Frank announcing to his kids that he is scheduling a visit with an attorney to set up his will, which, of course, means who will get the tickets. The running gag of reasons why the attorney needs to keep rescheduling is paced by the updates of all the colleges Cordy gets accepted to attend.
In a pair of Packers-centric subplots, Gabby’s English professor husband gets outed for his allegiance to a rival NFL team, while Rhonda is convinced her husband only loves her for the chance to get access to the tickets. (“I know a guy whose spot on the Packers tickets waiting list was willed to son.”)
Substituting a scoreboard for a Greek chorus, the season ramps up to the playoffs with Cordy emerging as the voice of reason. Her plan to find out the cause of her sisters’ rift digs into coveted halftime snack recipes and family artifacts stashed in the attic, including a menu from Marc’s Big Boy.
After a playoff game day argument, Frank is fed up and goes to the game alone. “Why Did I Ever Have Children,” his tune sung from the bleachers, includes a play-by-play commentator that is an homage to Meat Loaf’s “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.”
When a very pregnant Gabby goes into labor (the baby’s name will make sense many years later) and can’t go to the game, Cordy volunteers. She has a heart-to-heart with her Dad at Lambeau that sets a plan in motion to tie up the family’s loose ends.
And we all know how Super Bowl XXXI ended.
Through Oct. 26 at Gould Theater, 9058 County Road A, Fish Creek. For tickets, visit northernskytheater.com.
