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?'"
The Playcrafters Barn Theatre's production of Rehearsal for Murder suffers from poor pacing, but excels in its sincere sentiment and charm. The actors, for the most part, tend to take too many beats between lines, which leads to sometimes-clunky dialogue progression. Still, Friday night's performance was appealing for its overall emotional effect, and likable for the cast's ability to move the audience to sympathetic sorrow for the main character's heartache.
The Harrison Hilltop Theatre's latest presentation is playwright Kathleen Anderson-Curado's La Llorona, and you won't be reading the review I originally set out to write, because after more than 1,000 words of trying, I couldn't find a way to finish it.
