Photo by Lisa Fadden
In addition to being a provocative program of shorts, José Rivera’s Giants Have Us In Their Books provides an interesting range of different moods and emotions for actors. This makes it an excellent choice for a university production. The six-short program was staged by the UW-Milwaukee Department of Theatre last week in a one-week-only production in the intimate space of Kenilworth Studio 508.
The six stories had a beautiful, heartfelt, absurdist fugue about them. The program opened with a tale featuring Rachel Meldman as a girl who is rapidly turning into a plant. Meldman was charming there, but she made a much bigger comic impression as the best friend of a woman who was about to give birth to an angel in the last story of the program.
The second program, Tape, featured Erika Kirkstein-Zastrow entering a strange arrangement involving a room and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thorin Ketelson showed a talent for disturbingly sinister cheerfulness both as her guide and as a Nazi in The Crooked Cross later in the program. In that short, Melanie Liebetrau played a high school girl wearing swastika earrings given to her by a morally vacant boyfriend played by Andy Montano. Liebetrau showed considerable depth, both in that role and the strangely comic A Tiger In Central Park. There she played comic determination against a manipulative tiger played with charming comedic poise by Montano. Mott Abrams showed an ability to mix comedy with outrage in a monologue called Gas about a young man trying to make sense of Operation Desert Storm.
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Upcoming UWM productions include Love’s Labors Lost, The Crucible and Little Women. For more information, visit psoacal.uwm.edu.
