"drama ink" - Spring, 2023

INKdrama

The donor newsletter of Milwaukee Rep

SPEAKINGdirectl y

It’s an exciting time here at Milwaukee Rep! We recently announced our upcoming 70th Anniversary Season, which will include the groundbreaking world premiere rock musical Run Bambi Run written by Gordon Gano of Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes and Academy Award-winning writer Eric Simonson. Additionally, we are thrilled to bring the third production in our Classics Initiative, Little Women, to the Quadracci Powerhouse stage. To view the full season and purchase your subscription, visit www.MilwaukeeRep.com.

While we are looking forward to next season, there are still plenty of opportunities to engage with our current productions, thanks to our Education & Engagement Department. For our world premiere production of The Heart Sellers by Lloyd Suh, we assembled an oral history display in the Stiemke Studio lobby that provides a glimpse into aspects of emigrating from Asia to the United States in the 1960s and 70s from four different AAPI elder storytellers, adapted for and recorded by a youth voice. All of the oral history recordings are available on our website. Our production of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars includes several engagement opportunities, including TalkBacks following the performances on March 23 and 30, along with a Dinner Dialogue on March 27 at Sam’s Place Jazz Café. The final opportunity of our Dinner Dialogue series will be May 3 at Café del Sol featuring a discussion about God of Carnage.

We are now 60% of the way toward our $75 million goal for the Powering Milwaukee Capital Campaign to transform our current home into a state-of-the-art theater complex. We recently announced the $5 million transformational gift from the Herzfeld Foundation — the largest in the foundation’s history — to build The Herzfeld Foundation Education & Engagement Center, creating a dedicated space for Milwaukee Rep’s growing education and engagement programming. Read more about the new space and how it will expand our programming on page 4.

Finally, a huge congratulations to our two Milwaukee regional winners of the Next Narrative Monologue Competition: Ryon Davis from Pius XI High School and Sanaiah Hibbler from Oak Creek High School. These two will join other winners from across the country at the national competition in New York City May 6-8, 2023.

Mark Clements Artistic Director

Chad Bauman Executive Director

Ryon Davis and Sanaiah Hibbler.

Narea Kang and Nicole Javier in The Heart Sellers. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

MILWAUKEE

Powering

Rep Education & Engagement

There is Power in Theater! In visceral, live storytelling that unfolds before our eyes. In voices, visions and perspectives that shake our souls and spark broader thinking. In thoughtprovoking discussion with stories that reflect and engage our audiences. And in engaging, inspiring, and teaching the next generation in our community.

Year in and year out, Milwaukee Rep has harnessed the power of theater to engage and advance our local community.

Rep Education & Engagement programs use theater as an outlet to learn, inspire action, and celebrate the rich diversity and cultural vibrance of Milwaukee. Through programming conducted in schools, onsite at Milwaukee Rep and at community organizations, Rep Education & Engagement uses the work on and off our stages as an agent of positive change.

Whether using theater to teach literacy and social emotional skills to 20,000 students in 150 different schools annually, or building mutually beneficial relationships around community healing, empowerment, and shared resources, our Rep Education & Engagement programs are an engine that drives Milwaukee forward.

Learn more...

And there is so much more we can do for our schools and our community with enhanced facilities.

Recently The Richard and Ethel Herzfeld Foundation announced a $5 million gift to support the Powering Milwaukee campaign.

The grant will help build The Herzfeld Foundation Education & Engagement Center which will enable us to broaden and deepen these essential programs, serving even more students and community members.

Rep Immersion Day for 700 Students!

THE HERZFELD

We currently provide programs for thousands of students, but we have no classroom or community spaces in which to serve them. When students come to Milwaukee Rep, they are often relegated to commandeered spaces that are not intended—nor are conducive—to being learning environments. The Herzfeld Foundation Education & Engagement Center will create a dedicated space for Milwaukee Rep’s Education & Engagement programming featuring:

• A fully-equipped performance venue with seating for approximately 100 patrons

• Multiple classrooms for rehearsals and workshops

• Accessible restrooms

• A prep kitchen for use during events

• A state-of-the-art event space made available to our community partners

Additional support is needed to fund all aspects of the Powering Milwaukee Campaign. To learn more please visit: www.MilwaukeeRep.com/PoweringMilwaukee Or contact Chuck Rozewicz, Chief Development Officer at 414-290-0717 | crozewicz@milwaukeerep.com.

FOUNDATION Education & Engagement Center

In our brand-new center for Rep Education & Engagement, we will be able to broaden and deepen our programs and achieve greater impact in the communities we serve, welcome our partner organizations and Milwaukee residents into our downtown home. Below is a snapshot of the programs that we currently offer that will benefit from the new Education & Engagement Center.

Reading Residencies

An in-school program that uses theater as a tool to teach reading comprehension and develop social-emotional skills to Milwaukee middle school students.

School Subscriptions

A subscription program that brings Milwaukee high school students to Milwaukee Rep to see four productions across our three performance spaces.

Next NarrativeTM Monologue Competition

Created by True Colors Theater in Atlanta, GA, this competition gives students the opportunity to deliver powerful, contemporary monologues from modern playwrights and compete for cash prizes and a trip to NYC to perform in the national competition.

Dinner Dialogues

Surrounding specific shows in our season, patrons have the opportunity to have impactful and relevant conversation on the themes of the production while breaking bread and enjoying delicious food and drinks.

Rep-in-Depth

Free pre-show discussions with actors and artists providing the audience with further history and context for our productions.

Rep Immersion Days

Middle and high school students come to Milwaukee Rep for behind-the-scenes technical demonstrations, private performances, and actor talkback sessions surrounding productions in our Powerhouse theater.

All Education & Engagement programs are guided by our Community Impact Partners, 13 organizations who work with Milwaukee Rep to create greater collective impact. Each season, we collaborate with more than 100 non-profits, social services agencies, educational institutions, and arts organizations to ensure we’re meeting the needs of our community. Rep Education & Engagement programs are an integral part in achieving our mission to ignite positive change in the cultural, social, and economic vitality of our community.

SCENES behind the

Milwaukee Rep’s Prop Shop is All Wings on Deck

In preparation for our production of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, Milwaukee Rep’s prop shop needed to build realisticlooking chickens and roosters that could not only move but also bleed on stage. We spoke with Props Crafts Artisans Tayler Varney and Nick Bartleson to gain a better understanding of how they approached the creation of these props.

Describe the prop chickens that are needed for the show.

Nick - There are multiple chickens in the show and each has to function differently. For example, we needed to create a rooster that could flap around as the actor held it by the feet. It also needed to bleed all around the stage when its head gets chopped off in a scene. Within this one rooster prop, we created a wing flapping mechanism that is actor-controlled, a blood rig created from a modified catheter bag, and, on top of that, beautifully sculpted feet and heads. We also added layers of feathers that were each sewn individually on to a spandex onesie in order to create the body. In addition to the rooster, we also have hens that get their heads twisted off on stage, so we added blood rigs to their necks as well.

What was your process like when approaching these pieces?

Tayler – The director, Ron OJ Parson, wanted to make these moments with the chickens really big, as they are important moments of character development within the script. While Nick worked on coming up with interesting solutions for the movement and blood mechanics, I focused on casting and sculpting the exterior to make them look like real birds.

What was the most challenging part about these props?

Nick – My biggest challenge was figuring out how we could make the wings flap. I went through about five or six versions of the mechanism before we landed on our current one, such as having them be remote controlled so that a stagehand could control it off stage, or having them be controlled through simple puppetry. I experimented with a very simple mechanism that is used in many flying toys, but eventually we learned that this was not strong enough for the needs of our production. Through our research, we found a homemade gear mechanism that we refined. Now, we can make the chickens flap with a simple battery-powered button control, so all the actor has to do is hit a button and the chicken will start moving.

Tayler – This prop is far more complex than a lot of other things we have created since it has so many moving parts –literally. Creating the feet presented a lot of challenges for me since they required a mold with a really complicated shape. Through this process I learned more about mold making and multi-part molds while also working with urethane, a material I hadn’t worked with before.

August Wilson’s Seven Guitars runs March 7 – April 2, 2023 in the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater.

The props team works on building a moving chicken for our production of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars.

Kevin Brown as Hedley in /Seven Guitars. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

How do you produce Shakespeare for a modern audience?

The decision to cast a woman in the role of Don John also came as a result of this desire to include more women, as well as revelations made by Laura and her team while conducting research into PTSD in Gulf War veterans. The Gulf War saw one of the largest single deployments of female troops to combat zones in US history. However, despite fighting in the same war, women didn’t have the same support systems or opportunities for advancement after returning home. Don John’s resentment of Don Pedro’s acclaim and support then became this representation of the differences in the way men and women soldiers were treated both during and after the Gulf War.

By adding music and a contemporary context to Shakespeare’s 400 year old words we created a richer world, expanding on the themes of truth and misogyny which modern audiences could relate to and engage with.

Producing Shakespeare for a modern audience is an interesting task. Even seasoned theatregoers might come with a lot of trepidation to Shakespeare because of the difficult language, but he deals with universal themes like love, betrayal, jealousy, and happiness that are inherently human that everyone can relate to. Our goal is to make Shakespeare’s plays accessible without diluting the quality of the original language. When his works were written 400 years ago they were populist plays, written for the masses. In order to appeal to the masses today, we use added modern context to guide the audience through the difficult language. The music we added to our production of Much Ado About Nothing, and even As You Like It from last season, has also played a significant part in making the plays more understandable for modern audiences.

When we began planning for Much Ado About Nothing, director Laura Braza had the idea to set the show in the 1990s during the Gulf War, placing it in a period in the not-too distant past so that modern audiences could relate to the content. She also believed that the lyrics that were part of the original text leant themselves well to the style of grunge music which became popular in the 1990s, and was keen on having Dan Kazemi compose original music. It was important to us that we add more female voices to our production as the script only has a handful of named female characters, and only one who speaks in more than two or three scenes. As a result, Laura and her team found poems written by 15th and 16th century female poets which were then set to grunge music, such as “Joyful/ Sad” by Louise Labé, which sounds eerily like a song by Alanis Morissette.

Ask Artistic Director Mark Clements...

The cast of Much Ado About Nothing. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Michelle Shupe as Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Eric Durant has been a Rep Subscriber for more than 20 years. He and his partner, Scott Swickard, have been regular attendees since Milwaukee Rep returned from its pandemic hiatus. They became members of the Limelight Legacy Society because “Milwaukee Rep brings immense joy to so many in the Milwaukee community and we realize that the cost of production far exceeds ticket revenue. So, it is important to us to help future theatergoers have the same kind of wonderful experiences that we have.”

Their support will help ensure Milwaukee Rep’s legacy of providing arts education. “We’re excited by the new education center that Milwaukee Rep is building. Showing Milwaukee’s next generation how they can be part of theater and everything it has to offer has an enormous impact on our community, especially in a time when funding for arts education has been eviscerated.”

Tanya Hanyes Donor Relations Officer thaynes@milwaukeerep.com

Morgen Lucas Associate Director of Development, Events & Stewardship mlucas@milwaukeerep.com

Yolanda Doney Development Associate ydoney@milwaukeerep.com

Megan Newbanks Associate Director of Development, Institutional Giving mnewbanks@milwaukeerep.com

Amy McGuire Development Database Manager amcguire@milwaukeerep.com

Cassidy Skorija Major Gifts Officer cskorija@milwaukeerep.com

Amy Dorman Director of Development adorman@milwaukeerep.com

Alli Engelsma-Mosser Director of Major and Planned Giving aengelsma-mosser@milwaukeerep.com

Chuck Rozewicz Chief Development Officer crozewicz@milwaukeerep.com

Scott Swickard (left) and Eric Durant.