SEPT 11 – OCT 4 Proscenium Stage By Quiara Alegría Hudes Directed by Robert Rosen Page 4 produced with special support from our Premiere Club Book and Music SEPT 18 – NOV 1 by Joe Kinosian Andy Boss Thrust Stage Book and Lyrics by Kellen Blair Directed by Randy Reyes Page 16 produced with special support from our Mystery Writers Producers’ Club Murder for Two piano courtesy of 2015–2016 SEASON Illusion Theater’s 11th Annual Lights UP! Series presents TRANSATLANTIC LOVE AFFAIR’S Conceived & Directed by Isabel Nelson Created by the Ensemble NOV. 5 – 21, 2015 • TICKETS: $17 – $25 ILLUSIONTHEATER.ORG | 612.339.4944 | GROUP DISCOUNTS AVAILABLE 528 HENNEPIN AVE, 8TH FLOOR, MINNEAPOLIS Dear Park Square Patron, Point and counterpoint. The two shows opening our 2015-2016 Season juxtapose a lyrical, emotional look at the personal sacrifice of war (Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue on the Proscenium Stage) with a witty, fast-paced musical murder mystery (Murder for Two on the Andy Boss Thrust Stage). Two different “tour de force” shows for local talent on two stages. In our goal to be theatre for MORE of you (yes you), these juxtapositions continue throughout the season. Point and viewpoint. We continue to expand our range of stories and storytellers. That seems obvious with Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue which introduces a tightly knit Puerto Rican family created by a Tony-Award winning Latina writer. Not so obvious was our choice to cast Andrea Wollenberg as one of the musical duo in Murder For Two. Written and originally performed by two men, our production is the first to feature a woman. (The original creators are thrilled!) Audiences like you say they rely on us to present unexpected viewpoints. Artists are eager to bring all of who they are to the stage. Together, audiences and artists teach us what a “Park Square play” is and could be. There is a place for you at the Park Square table – room for your story in this expansive season of counterpoints and viewpoints. We hope today is only your first visit of the new season. All our best, Richard Cook, Artistic Director C. Michael-jon Pease, Executive Director, CFRE 651.767.8482 | [email protected] 651.767.8497 | [email protected] OUR MISSION is to enrich our community by producing and presenting exceptional live theatre that touches the heart, engages the mind and delights the spirit. 3 STORY Elliot Ortiz is home from Iraq. Like his father and grandfather before him, the eager soldier is forced to unravel his experience as he nurses his injuries and considers returning to the frontlines. Elliot’s mother, a nurse in Vietnam, holds three generations of this family’s soldiers together; turning their city lot into a lush and healing tropical garden. Hudes’s poetic fugue is a unique non-political exploration of the tolls of war from an often overlooked point of view. Park Square Artistic Associate Ricardo Vázquez will be featured as the youngest of three generations of a Puerto Rican family of soldiers. ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT Quiara Alegría Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. Her work has been produced around the globe, from Broadway’s PERFORMANCE TIME: Richard Rodgers Theatre, to Off-Broadway’s Second Stage Theatre, The performance will run 80 minutes with no intermission. to London’s Southwark Playhouse, to translated productions in Armenia, Germany, Brazil, Korea, Japan, Puerto Rico, and beyond. Original production produced by Page Seventy-Three Productions Inc. ELLIOT, A SOLDIER’S FUGUE is presented by special arrangement with Her plays include the upcoming Daphne’s Dive at Signature Theatre, The Happiest Dramatists Play Service, Inc. New York. Song Plays Last, Water by the Spoonful (Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (Pulitzer Finalist), and the book of the Broadway musical In the Heights (Pulitzer Finalist, Tony Award for Best Musical, Tony Nomination for Best Book of a Musical, Lucille Lortel Award, Outer Critics Circle Award). After graduating from public school in Philadelphia, Hudes received a B.A. in music composition from Yale University and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Brown, where she studied with Paula Vogel. 4 651.291.7005 | parksquaretheatre.org By Quiara Alegría Hudes on the PROSCENIUM STAGE Director Robert Rosen Costume Designer Sonya Berlovitz Sound Designer Evan Middlesworth Lighting Designer Michael P. Kittel Properties Designer Jennifer Johnson Set Designer Kit Mayer Stage Manager Megan Fae Dougherty* CAST Elliot Ricardo Vázquez* Grandpop Pedro R. Bayón* Pop Rich Remedios* Ginny Adlyn Carreras PERFORMANCE TIME: The performance will run 80 minutes with no intermission. Original production produced by Page Seventy-Three Productions Inc. ELLIOT, A SOLDIER’S FUGUE is presented by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc. New York. The video and/or audio recording of this performance by any means whatsoever is strictly prohibited. As a courtesy to our actors and those around you, please DEACTIVATE all PHONES and ELECTRONIC DEVICES. produced with special support from our Premiere Club Park Square Theatre is a member of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for the American theatre. 5 PERSPECTIVE - Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by Matt DiCintio Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue is a timely anymore because there are not easy contribution to a theatrical tradition ways to have those conversations in that dates to the very beginnings of commonplace civilian life, about — Western drama. Plays about war have how do you live with that? What captivated audiences for more than two happened there? Who does that make thousand years, from the battle scenes you now?” of Shakespeare to the moral quandaries of Arthur Miller, from Aeschylus to Zola, Playwrights have had varying from Jean Racine to Bertolt Brecht. The motivations for featuring war. When use of the word “theatre” to describe Aeschylus composed The Persians in a region where war is taking place the fifth century BCE, he may have done suggests its inherent spectacular nature, so to celebrate the recent Greek victory something to see, something needing over King Xerxes. In the play, the ghost a witness. On the other hand, Quiara of Xerxes’ father returns to condemn Alegría Hudes told NPR in 2012, “We his son’s hubris for the invasion. can really forget about wars and these In 2003, Ellen McLaughlin penned sorts of conflicts pretty quickly, and a version as a protest against the it’s not a very exciting topic these days invasion of Iraq. For all the historical 6 651.291.7005 | parksquaretheatre.org PERSPECTIVE - Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue figures that fill Shakespeare’s history on the back of the car that says, ‘I plays, some scholars now argue that support the troops,’’’ he told the Boston his debilitated portrait of Richard III Globe in 2013. “But I don’t think people had little to do with the king’s actual are in touch with what goes on when deformities and deeds. First produced these guys come back. That is a story in 1592, the play may have been heavily I wanted to see told.” The relationship influenced by the Tudor crown, as between Hudes and Ruiz might well be Queen Elizabeth asserted her right to an important new tradition in theatre the throne — her grandfather defeated of war. Richard on Bosworth Field. To portray Richard as a “slander of his mother’s Matt DiCintio was a producing director for womb” and “abortive, rooting hog,” Emigrant Theater and a dramaturg for Park Square to quote Queen Margaret in the play, and the Guthrie, among others. His writing has was an act of political propaganda. The been published in the new Routledge Companion Vietnam trilogy of Sticks and Stones, to Dramaturgy, Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, American Theatre and City Pages. Matt is The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, pursuing a PhD in Drama at Tufts University. and Streamers are searing portraits by the Army draftee David Rabe of the personal tolls of a disputed conflict. Hudes has insisted that Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, along with the other plays that form its trilogy, Water by the Spoonful and The Happiest Song Plays Last, is not a protest against recent American military endeavors. Her Need help deciding? interest was more homegrown, and she Opening Nights Closing Nights began by interviewing family members Post-Show Parties Discussions about their life in Philadelphia, their Pay-What-You-Can Performances Puerto Rican heritage, about addiction Free Shows Audio-Described and trauma. She also interviewed her ASL-Interpreted Comedy Drama cousin, Elliot Ruiz, about his experience Musical Dance Improv in Iraq. Hudes would use the person Storytelling Kids Experimental Ruiz as the model for the character Elliot, as a reason, she told American Your one-click Theatre Magazine last year, to deal “with guide to all of Minnesota’s the things we don’t talk about.” Ruiz must-see was intimately involved in the play’s theater. creation — for his own reasons. “We are fed so much war on television, and it is so easy for people to put a ribbon minnesotaplaylist.com/calendar 7 PRESENTS THEIR 40TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON: WD40WD40 WD402 0 1 5 – 2 0 1 6 AN OCTOROON A full-blooded investigation of race and cultural politics OCT 16 – NOV 15, 2015 — CEDAR CYPHER A special Cedar Riverside festival event NOV 27 – 28, 2015 — DJ LATINIDAD’S LATINO DANCE PARTY A theatrical dance party celebrating Latinidad MAR 4 – 27, 2016 — THE UPSTAIRS CONCIERGE A comedy that pokes fun at America’s obsession with status APR 15 – MAY 8, 2016 MIXEDBLOOD.COM • 612.338.6131 Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue - CAST PEDRO