The Milwaukee Chamber Theater stages a 90 minute drama with no intermission. Typically such a play would feel light and breezy. This particular 90 minutes without intermission, however, is October Before I Was Born. It's a drama about waiting. It's a drama about silence and uncertainty. So the more chamber theater is going to make you feel every second of those 90 minutes. This is a human drama playing out and all of the silence. And all the emails the next sales in the gentle respiration of human drama. It's set in 1960 based on actual historical events. A plant explosion in America. A few died. Many more were injured. This in an era when communication was tragically slow. It's easy to lament the speed with which news travels, feeding a modern culture that is increasingly focused on meaningless trivia. We lose track of the important stuff in the rush of information. It's all too easy to forget about an era before that. A time when there were radio stations that went off beer at sunset. A time when disaster meant so much more uncertainty.
Here we have three people waiting to hear back about loved ones working at a plant at the time of an explosion. And we're there with them. Waiting for them to hear back. So it's 90 minutes without intermission and it feels like 90 minutes of waiting. So it can feel really, really long. That's intentional. These people are aching in the silence and we are going to feel every heartbeat. And we're going to feel every exhale. And as uncomfortable as this is, it's going to be breathtakingly beautiful in some ways. Because you're sharing this moment in the past with three very sharp actors.
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It's a very gentle immersion. The set design feels very realistic. Feels very solid. Feels very firm. It's 1960. The working-class American home. Small. Modest. And three people wait for information. The only phone available is a party line. Very difficult to get through to the outside world. And we're left here with these three people.
It's a really good cast. The ensemble works together in a way that feels very organic. Ken T. Williams play a man was had plenty of time to himself to think things through. Plenty of time to question at all. Not the type of person who would necessarily spend a whole lot of time reflecting on things. But he's had plenty of time to do that lately. He's trying to be helpful. He's blunt--lacking in tact. Tact is, of course, absolutely essential in getting along with other people in a crisis. So we're not seeing him at his best. Williams does a really good job bringing that character to life. And to his credit it doesn't seem affected. It seems like this could be any other day for this character. It's a very live-in performance.
Raeleen McMillion plays the matron. She's been through a lot. She's even been through this type of crisis before. But she still very human. She's still very flawed. Experience helps her understand a lot of things, but she's not always brilliant at being able to express them. It's a very charming matronly performance. She comes across as being maternal without being angelic the way it so often can. That's really important quality for this script. It's a very earthbound performance that serves the pro ducting very, very well.
April Paul plays the young woman waiting to hear back about her husband. She's pregnant and she's uncertain as to exactly where things would go for it to turn out to be the fact that her husband is no more. Hers is perhaps the most mysterious character rendering in Lori Matthews' script. She's living in an era where he's not quite able to realize her dreams. Women's liberation is still pretty far away. She wants so much. And she carries very much for her husband.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's Midwest Premiere production of October Before I Was Born runs through March 9th at the Broadway Theatre Center's Studio Theatre. For ticket reservations, call 414-291-7800 or visit Milwaukee Chamber online.
A concise review of the show runs in the next print edition of the Shepherd-Express.