The Rep's Theatre Laboratory

An opportunity for the Milwaukee Rep's Resident Acting Intern Ensemble to perform in a series of shorts, the inaugural "Rep Lab"proved to be a strikingly satisfying evening of theatrical appetizers. The appeal of a program of shorts is its ability to push an audience headlong into intensely original and largely unexpected areas of human emotion and remain there for an undetermined period of time. There's always that sense of the unexpected, wild and unpredictable. Rep Lab does a good job of tossing around an audience's expectations.

The two most memorable bits in a program of eight were a pair of shorts by Neil LaBute, author of The Shape of Things, Fat Pig and Reasons to be Pretty. LaBute's The Furies is a modern take on an ancient Greek myth. Giuseppe A. Ribaudo was comically sympathetic as Barry, a man trying to break up with his boyfriend Jimmy (played with comically excessive drama by Charlie Wright). Matters are made considerably more difficult by the presence of Jimmy's silent sister Jamie (Greta Wohlrabe). LaBute's Long Division is a clever monologue by Jonathan Butler-Duplessis as a man trying to convince his friend to take back the outdated home video game system that he'd left at his ex-girlfriend's house. It's a staggeringly funny monologue punctuated by reactions from a largely silent Ribaudo.

Much of the rest of the program was a mix of talent and reasonably good scripts culminating in one of the better shorts of the evening, a series of dialogues at a café that had been written in improvisations between interns.