Milwaukee Chamber Theatre artistic director C. Michael Wright is emphatic: “This is my favorite season ever! The plays really speak to me, I think, because our theme is misfits. I grew up a misfit and I think it’s important to honor and pay tribute to people who get bullied, pushed aside, forgotten; to lift them and shine a light on them. We’re all misfits to some degree.”
Wright and MCT’s new associate artistic director, Marcella Kearns, spoke about the season and the art of theater. “We, as a human race, need that legacy of communal experience, sharing our stories and identifying when we have similar ones,” Wright says. “Storytelling is critical to our well-being. Theater is healing. It gave me a course, a path. I want to honor that.”
“When you have a bunch of people in the same room hearing the same thing,” Kearns says, “those who are hearing have as much impact on the story as those who are telling it. No one knows what the story will be or how it will affect them. There’s risk in telling a story in a room where people are present—not distanced by a screen or radio or printed words, although those have danger, too—but people hearing a story in a room with one another is where the power of theater lies. That’s why I love it and that’s why I do it.”
“In choosing a season, I think in terms of a well-balanced meal. I want a little bit of everything,” Wright added. “It’s important to accept that people need just to laugh sometimes, and to really think sometimes. It’s important to have different voices and points of view, American and foreign plays, older plays, newer plays, something for young people and something for older people. I’ve learned to accept that there will be one show every season that individual subscribers won’t like. Nothing’s for everyone. That’s what makes it art.”
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“We want to look outside ourselves to see what we need to discover,” Kearns continues. “The face of Milwaukee includes diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, faith and age. That’s tricky now because there are so many voices that are trying to be heard and that should be heard because they couldn’t be heard in the past. Part of our mission is to employ local artists. We feel very strongly that cultivating the artists who are here helps reflect the face of our community. And it supports our community.”
The season opens with Christopher Durang’s 2012 comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (see John Jahn’s preview on this issue’s theater page). Kearns directs and Wright plays Vanya, a middle-aged gay man who, like Wright, Durang and yours truly, grew up in a time when homosexuality was deemed a sin, a sickness and a crime.
“Durang writes from the heart,” Wright says, “which is what I love. He’s my peer—same history, same nostalgia, same growing up Catholic—so many things that we have similarly. I love the struggle Vanya has of being gay and not knowing how to act on it.” Asked if he worries that some won’t welcome an unrepentant gay protagonist, Wright replies, “Hopefully, they won’t even bother to come.”
“All we see in the media is polarity,” Kearns adds, “but it’s actually a very complex spectrum out there. Unfortunately, celebrating complexity is still something that’s new.”
Actually, each of Durang’s extravagantly, often hilariously unhappy and desiring characters, young and old, expresses complex truths about life today. The ending is hopeful and along the way, as Kearns says, “Durang gives us the entire history of theatre from the ancient Greeks to TV sitcoms.”
Tennessee Williams’ early misfits like Blanche DuBois and the Wingfield family are monuments of American playwriting, but his late works—like MCT’s next show, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur , can feel more honest. The misfits here are single women in 1935 searching for meaning and purpose. It’s a comedy that once again ends hopefully. “I’m attracted to that,” admits Wright.
Of Kenneth Lonergan’s seriocomic Lobby Hero (2001), Wright says, “It’s like a morality play.” A hapless slacker lobby guard is caught between police of both genders and two black brothers (one his boss) in a murder story that raises issues of racial profiling, sexism, problematic role models and the sometimes horribly confusing choice between serving truth and serving ourselves.
Samuel D. Hunter’s The Few (2013) presents an estranged heterosexual couple and a young gay man who publish a newsletter for lonely truckers. “The joke is, the few are the many,” Wright says. The season ends with Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in a new adaptation by Milwaukee playwright Gale Childs Daly. The misfit Pip commits a kindness, planting a seed that helps him grow a future. Likewise, Kearns’ appointment as artistic partner. “Planting a seed,” says Wright.
