Poster by Gabriel Termuehlen
The City of Benedict della Crosse at Kneeland-Walker Poster
A poster for the 'The City of Benedict della Crosse' t Kneeland-Walker
With an abundance of unconventional venues, Milwaukee has been a good theater lab for Gaetano Marangelli. His plays have been presented at MARN Art + Culture Hub and at the Wauwatosa Historical Society’s Kneeland-Walker House and Grounds. The Kneeland-Walker Grounds will be the site for the next performance of Marangelli’s The City of Benedict della Crosse.
The play is part two of a trilogy that follows the drift of American society over the past half century through characters and settings in Wisconsin. Part one, Iron County, examines ‘70s countercultural disillusionment as a pair of ex-hippies try to establish a commune in northern Wisconsin on land once held by Indigenous people, and more recently by trappers and loggers, industries whose glory days had already passed.
Part two, The City of Benedict della Crosse, is set during the 1988 election season. The protagonist, Benedict, is “an idealistic candidate for the Wisconsin state senate who is losing by 18% in the polls to an incumbent,” Marangelli says. He adds that Benedict is something scarcely imaginable nowadays, a liberal Republican. Benedict’s sister-campaign manager proposes spreading an insidious rumor about the incumbent senator. Will Benedict remain faithful to his ideals? Or will he, like real-life, once liberal 1988 candidate George H.W. Bush, sell his soul for victory.
“1988 was a pivotal year in our nation’s political discourse,” Marangelli says, recalling the racially loaded disinformation strategy waged by Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater. “Bush ran an aggressive campaign but made a distinction between the way he’d campaign and the way he’d govern.” Bush famously dismissed Atwater’s fearmongering advertisements as “Empty cannons of rhetoric,” a phrase borrowed from Mao Zedong. Nowadays, governing the nation has been transformed into an endless campaign and rhetoric has turned into reality.
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As for the trilogy’s part three, tentatively titled Star … it’s a work in progress that Marangelli hopes to debut next year.
Photo by Diane Reynolds
The City of Benedict della Crosse - Rehearsals 2025
The cast of 'The City of Benedict della Crosse' rehearse. From top left to bottom left are actors Andrea Bullar, Matt Specht, and Selena Milewski. From top right to bottom right are actor Zach Woods, writer and director Gaetano Marangelli, and actor Shayne Patrick as they rehearse
The playwright has gained attention beyond his home base in Milwaukee. He recently returned from a fellowship in Saskatchewan, where he wrote a play he hopes to debut in 2026 about a thorny romance between two immigrants, A Theory of Perpetual Motion. In 2023, Madrid’s El Mundo newspaper hailed his play Four Strangers an “unmissable” highlight of that city’s theater season. Screenwriter Jose Rivera, Oscar-nominated for The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and writer behind the Netflix adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, calls The City of Benedict della Crosse the “disturbing origin story” of our contemporary political situation, “filled with lessons for our own time.” He adds, “It’s one of the few plays I’ve read that attempts to answer the sorrowful question: how on Earth did we get here?”
Last year’s performance of Benedict della Crosse at MARN was a slimmed down rendition of the play with a cast of four. This year’s expanded version has a cast of five: Andrea Bullar, Selena Milewski, Shayne Patrick, Matt Specht and Zach Thomas Woods.
Photo by Diane Reynolds
The cast of The City of Benedict della Crosse (2025)
The cast of 'The City of Benedict della Crosse' from left to right: Andrea Bullar, Matt Specht, Selena Milewski, Shayne Patrick, Zach Woods, and writer and director Gaetano Marangelli.
Marangelli calls the upcoming performance of Benedict della Crosse “a workshop performance” with minimal costumes and sets. He adds that the performances will “afford audiences new, independent theater at modest prices in an accessible setting.”
Coproducing with the Wauwatosa Historical Society, Marangelli will direct The City of Benedict della Crosse at 6 p.m., August 16-17 at the Kneeland-Walker House and Grounds, 7406 Hillcrest Drive, Wauwatosa. Performances will be outdoors, and the audience is encouraged to bring their own refreshments. This fall, Riverwest Radio will present the play as a five-episode series.
Tickets for the August 16 performance can be purchased here: wauwatosahistoricalsociety.org/event/event-theater-in-the-gardens-aug-16/
Tickets for the August 17 performance can be purchased here: wauwatosahistoricalsociety.org/event/theater-in-the-gardens-the-city-of-benedict-della-crosse/
