items tagged with Pamela Crouch

Director Paul Workman deserves high praise for making the Playcrafters Barn Theatre’s Titanic Aftermath at all watchable, particularly as the boat is sinking in the second act. Throughout Friday’s performance, I kept thinking that playwright Michael Wehrli’s script was a fantastic historical account, but also kept wondering, “Why is it a stage play?” With so much action described, and so little played out visually, especially during the first act, this piece might as well be a radio drama, or the script for a documentary on the Titanic. As a theatrical production, however, Wehrli's work is … well, rather boring.

As Oregon-based playwright Michael Wehrli is the author of Titanic Aftermath – the historical drama being staged at Moline’s Playcrafters Barn Theatre May 11 through 20 – I initially presume that he’s seen James Cameron’s Oscar-winning movie. In our April 25 phone interview, he tells me he has, and that it was even the inspiration for his play.

That’s not exactly the compliment it might seem, though, considering he calls Cameron’s Titanic “visually stunning and incredibly, maddeningly frustrating because of the fictional characters.

“I mean, they took up half the story,” says Wehrli of the young lovers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, “and it was the actual survivors’ stories, to me, that were ... interesting. That, and the corporate-negligence side to the tragedy, which is hardly ever addressed in dramatic form.

“So I thought, ‘All right, well, I’m just going to write a play about all this.’” Wehrli laughs. “‘How the hell do I do that?’”

Thursday's opening night performance of Sunday in the Park with George was far more of an emotional experience than I had anticipated. Prior to opening night, cast members posted Facebook messages saying rehearsals were moving them to tears, and chalking it up to their emotions being heightened by the experience of doing the show - as can often happen with a cast and crew - I didn't expected to be equally moved. I was wrong, with tears streaming down my face multiple times during the performance.

If there's one word I'd use to best describe Playcrafters Barn Theatre's current production, it would be "nice." And while that can be taken as an unflattering adjective, for The O'Conner Girls I mean it as a positive one; I left the opening-night performance with a smile on my face, one awash with the sweet nostalgia and dash of humor that put it there.

As Ouiser Boudreaux, the easily agitated Southern matriarch with the permanently fixed scowl and "more money than God," Dee Canfield enters the Green Room Theatre's production of Steel Magnolias as though shot through a cannon.