items tagged with Playcrafters Barn Theatre

The last time I watched Nancy Teerlinck perform, earlier this year, she offered a moving portrayal of a matriarch making tough, emotional decisions in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre’s Moving. Yet as much as I liked her in that role, I think she’s even better when she’s playing … well, a bitch … such as the one she portrays in Playcrafters’ current offering, The Christmas Express. Teerlinck’s Hilda, who runs the play's Holly Railway Station, is an acerbic, crotchety, sarcastic, bitchy delight, and I think I now love the performer, and want to see this side of her comicality a lot more often.

Judging by Friday’s performance of The 39 Steps at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre, it’s apparent that director Tom Morrow likes sight gags and British humor. He handles playwright Patrick Barlow's comically melodramatic take on the 1915 spy thriller – and Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film – with care, avoiding over-the-top staging but highlighting the humor in ways that elicit a lot of laughs. (Whereas overselling the gags would likely elicit groans.)

There’s a lovely sincerity to the Playcrafters Barn Theatre’s production of Bernard Slade’s Moving, and Saturday’s performance possessed such realism – with notable acting from every member of director Bryan Woods' cast – that I had to wonder how such an impressively produced piece could feel so mismatched with its script.

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?’”