Feature
Students perform in the Xperimental Theatre's fall production of Portrait of Dora.
Expect the unexpected
Xperimental Theatre offers innovative programming on a shoestring
By Erin Peterson
Published on January 20, 2005
As the lights dim in the Arena Theatre, the scene is set: Two
Iraqi girls play with Barbie dolls. The girls have their dolls go
to the market to buy food for a picnic, only to find that the shop
owner has nothing to offer them because of sanctions. During the
dolls' adventures, one girl rips the leg off of her Barbie,
explaining that it got blown up. Dozens of toy soldiers circle the
scene, standing at attention. The scene is both funny and
heartbreaking, a testament to the fact that it doesn't take big
budgets or elaborate sets to create powerful theater. In five
scenes, the cast members of this Xperimental Theatre workshop
examine the Middle East from the perspective of children and
adults, Muslims and non-Muslims. Performing just days before the
November U.S. elections, perhaps the only thing not politically
charged about the show is the title: Free Hummus refers
not to the play, but to the snacks served afterward.
See 24-Hour Theatre this
weekend
At 8 p.m., teams of playwrights armed with laptops and caffeinated
beverages huddle together, the nighttime hours clicking by too
quickly. At sunrise, the actors and stage designers begin to arrive
and put in their two cents, everyone spinning together something
that looks like theater, always watching the clock. That night, an
audience will gather to see--I have no idea what they're going to
see, actually.
This process--24-hour theater--condenses creativity to its
essentials and boils the collaborative process down in a manner
unlike any other in the realm of theater-making. Participants have
only one full day to write and stage a play. It puts "experts" and
"newbies" on the same playing field, providing nearly instant
gratification for all. The anticipatory audience, drawn by
curiosity, wonders--will these crazy kids be able to pull it
together and keep it rolling? The result: energized (rather than
exhausted!) students for the beginning of a new semester of
theater.
The Xperimental Theatre will present 24-Hour Theatre at 8
p.m. on January 22, 2005, in Rarig Center's Arena Theatre.
Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. Please call
the Xperimental office at 612-625-1876 to reserve your seat.
--By Jessie Glover, the Xperimental Theatre's artistic
director.
The student-run Xperimental Theatre at the University of Minnesota
has a tradition of creating bold programming on a shoestring. The
financial constraints--the average budget for each production is
$250--force the students to make creative decisions their
University Theatre Mainstage peers often don't face. "There are the
kids who get a toy who end up playing with the box more than the
toy inside," says Jessie Glover, X Theatre artistic director, and a
graduate student in theater. "We're like that kid. We have to use
our imagination to work around those limitations." Because the
University has more than 300 theater majors, not everyone will get
to participate in a major show. The X offers an alternative to the
Mainstage productions. Third-year student Dave Jennings, the space
and time manager for the X, says that the X offers opportunities to
students that aren't available elsewhere. "It's a chance to work
with your peers," he says. "You get to figure things out on your
own rather than having a professor tell you what to do." Though the
X does have a faculty adviser, associate professor of theater arts
and dance Matt LeFebvre (B.A. '87, M.A. '96), both Jennings and
Glover note that students are given great latitude in their
decisions. A student board selects each season's shows and
workshops. No overarching theme connects the productions, except
that they generally veer from the expected. "This is not your
parents' theater," says Glover. Among this fall's offerings was
Portrait of Dora, an examination of Sigmund Freud's first
published case study, of a woman with hysteria. "It's about the
danger of silencing women," explains Glover. "It's largely a
hypothesis on what Dora might have had to say about what Freud said
of her-that is, who is the authority figure? Whose story is right?"
This weekend, the X presents
24-Hour Theatre, a fast-paced
collaborative workshop attempted for the first time (see sidebar).
Five groups of student writers, directors, cast members, and
technical staff will gather at 8 p.m. on January 21 and team up to
write, produce, and perform five original one-act plays over the
course of a single day. Performances begin 24 hours later, at 8
p.m. on January 22. And this spring, Jennings will direct
Religious Pretense, an hourlong improvised show set in the
courtroom of God. "The prosecutors and defendants will make their
cases for someone trying to get into heaven," says Jennings. The
audience will decide that person's ultimate fate. While the
productions aren't typical and the budgets are small, those who
work in the X have a distinct advantage in attracting audiences:
All the shows are free. "We joke that we have the kind of theater
no one wants to pay to see, but we mean that in a good way," says
Glover. "In most theater, it's hard to take risks because you have
to be commercially viable. Here, we can take artistic risks." In a
later scene in
Free Hummus, actors take turns reading
statements gathered from Muslim students at the University. The
passages are by turns angry and hopeful, thoughtful and perplexed.
The words are not always easy to listen to, but they are candid and
honest. Xperimental or not, it's exactly what theater is supposed
to be. For more information on the Xperimental Theatre, visit the
X or call
612-625-1876.
From an original article in Minnesota,
January-February 2005.
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