Kenneth Lonergan is primarily known as a screenwriter. His success in Hollywood has been mixed. He wrote the script to Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. He also wrote the live action/CGI Rocky and Bullwinkle movie that came out back in 2000. In the next couple of weeks a couple of his plays make it to a couple of different stages.
On Nov. 23, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre opens Lobby Hero--a comedic drama in which Chris Klopatek plays a security guard in a Manhattan apartment complex who gets involved in a murder investigation. DiMonte Henning plays his boss. Andrew Edwin Voss and Sara Zientek play a couple of cops. You could watch contemporary cop fare on TV, but it’s way too bogged-down in formula and bad writing. Here’s something fresh with a cleverly-written script that takes place entirely in a single apartment lobby in Manhattan at the end of the 20th century. C. Michael Wright directs. Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s staging of Lobby Hero runs through Dec. 18 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. For tickets and more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.
Then one week after Milwaukee Chamber opens its Lonergan, the ENT Theater opens a production of Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth. It’s a baby boomer comedy about a couple of wealthy college dropouts living in an apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It’s kind of a weird set of lenses that the play shifts through: Lonergan himself is a young baby boomer who wrote the play set in 1982 for a critical look back at the generation in 1996. The characters look for something real in the materialism of the Reagan Era. The production is directed by Marquette University’s Jamie Cheatham. Featured in the cast are millennial talents Oliver Wolf, Ben Braun and Alexis Furseth. The show runs Dec 2 - 11 at the Underground Collaborative on 161 W. Wisconsin.
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This is ENT Theater’s fist show ever. The name is interesting branding. ENT looks like a ticker symbol or an airport abbreviation. Actually it stands for, “Entertainment, Nature Transparency.” Cool. For more information about ENT, its mission and the production, visit ENT online.
