Photo credit: Kayleigh Atkinson
The current administration’s immigration policies are echoed in headlines about children separated from parents in squalid camps and threats to build the Great Wall of Trump. But countless smaller stories are reverberating from the president’s border control obsessions, including damage done to Milwaukee’s Theatre Gigante.
Off the Cuff spoke with Gigante’s co-founders, Isabelle Kralj (IK) and Mark Anderson (MA), about cancelling their season finale, Three Other Sisters, when the star performer refused to travel to the U.S. in the face of new policies at the border.
You performed Three Other Sisters in past seasons?
MA: In our 2009-2010 season. We also went on tour with it to Slovenia and performed there in five cities in 2015.
Is Three Other Sisters based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters?
IK: No, it’s based on a Montenegrin legend about three sisters, living in their family home, who fell in love with the same man, a sailor. Each time one of them died, the window of their bedroom was boarded up. The house where it supposedly took place still exists! We felt it was an important legend because it forces us to think about the cost of wasting your life on a dream that will never materialize.
What’s the Slovenian connection?
IK: We largely built our version of Three Other Sisters around the songs of Vlado Kreslin, a Slovenian singer. And the parts of the sailor are sung by him on stage. Vlado is a rock star in Slovenia.
MA: He’s somewhere between a folk singer from a border region of the country intersected with Bruce Springsteen.
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Vlado cancelled because of Trump’s immigration polices?
IK: He heard first-hand from other Slovenians about problems at the airport—of people taken separately into different rooms and interrogated, questioned for an entire hour. Then there was the Slovenian polka band with a 50-year history behind them; they were on tour in Canada but weren’t allowed to cross the border into the U.S. That really shocked him. He said, “I don’t want that kind of trouble and anxiety. I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t be able to come this year."
Is Slovenia being singled out?
IK: I don't know—Melania is from Slovenia.
This must have had an economic impact on your season, having to cancel your final show?
MA: It did. And speaking of economic impact, the last time we toured Slovenia, we received a $10,000 grant from the State Department. That’s changed. We were going to apply for a grant to cover airfare for an upcoming Slovenian tour of Tarzan [a play by Slovenian writer Rok Vilčnik], but because of the government shut down, nothing moved forward. There have been cuts on cultural programs. Huge cuts.
