Coming of Age (With Superpowers!) at UWM’s ‘The Sparrow’

×

Expand

The Sparrow poster

Director Marcella Kearns moves an engaging live theater ensemble into rarely explored science fantasy territory with a production of the contemporary coming-of-age drama The Sparrow. The drama of one girl and her superhuman powers comes to unflinchingly courageous life on the sparse stage of a tiny studio theater.

Sophia Keppler is engagingly vulnerable as Emily Book—a girl who is quickly accepted into a high school that has been touched by the same tragedy that has touched her. Ariana Manghera summons a tremendously articulate portrayal of an overachiever who befriends Emily early-on. Kearns has fostered a remarkably intricate dynamic between nearly everyone in the entire ensemble to develop an impressively immersive small town high school environment that breathes through classes, a basketball game and a homecoming dance. The action takes place without sets or costuming. Kearns fosters a remarkably cool immersive stage dynamic between everyone onstage that conjures a kind of social reality that would only be muted in a bigger production. The full intensity of the stresses of high school feels strikingly close on a very emotional level. It is fantasy that could so easily turn into horror.

The earthbound intimacy of the high school reality that Kearns and company bring to the stage gives the fantasy of Emily’s powers a firm anchor. Coming-of-age superhero stories have gone from the comics page to the movie and video screen, but they’re rarely given the kind of dramatic focus that can only be fully realized on the smallest or live theatre stages. Kearns and company bring the human side of superhuman drama to a very close notional space onstage.

UWM Peck School of the Arts’ production of The Sparrow runs through Nov. 6 at the Kenilworth 508 Studio Theatre, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For more information, visit UWM PSOA online.