"Sixpack" at Jungle Theater

I'm not really a sports person (with the exception of my Minnesota Twins), but sports is a great metaphor for life, and a great framework to build a play around. Mixed Blood Theatre has done a couple of great ones - Colossal about football, and Safe at Home about baseball in a site-specific production at CHS Field (home of the Twins' Triple-A affiliate team the St. Paul Saints). Even more relevant to this discussion, Jungle Theater has done two productions of The Wolves, about a high school girls' soccer team, and last year Penumbra Theatre staged FLEX, about a high school girls' basketball team. With the growing attention on girls' and women's sports, it's a great time to debut another play in this genre - Katie Ka Vang's Sixpack. Drawing from her own history and culture, Sixpack features a group of Hmong women who play volleyball together (and sometimes against each other). But as with all of these plays, it's not really about volleyball, it's about friendship, mother-daughter relationships, and community. See this funny, real, and ultimately heart-warming world premiere play at Jungle Theater through June 29.

"Again" by Theater Mu at Mixed Blood Theatre

"At Mu, we believe universality can only be found through specificity." I agree with Theater Mu’s Artistic Director Lily Tung Crystal. Here she’s talking about their new original musical Again, but it's true of all of their work. For 30 years, Mu has been telling specifically Asian American stories from the Asian American perspective, about universal themes of life that anyone can relate to. Again is about Hmong American women living with cancer, an experience that's all too familiar to many people. The story isn't about being Hmong, it's about being human – relationships, career crises, disease, grief – from the specific background of the artists. Despite the heaviness of the theme, I found the musical to be much lighter than I expected, really more about friendship, community, and perseverance than loss and dying. The talented four-person cast (some of whom are purportedly making their professional theater debuts, although that's hard to believe) is charming and fun to watch as they bring this story to life. See it now through April 16 at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.

"Hopscotch: Pop-Up Plays about the Future" by Wonderlust Productions at Frogtown Farm and Park

Wonderlust Productions' newest project is popping up in St. Paul parks this weekend and next. They asked an intrepid group of playwrights to imagine a future world. Which, as co-Artistic Directors Leah Cooper and Alan Berks admitted in their pre- and mid-show talks, is a difficult thing to do right now. But these ten playwrights, some of #TCTheater's best, did just that. The result is Hopscotch, a series of ten ten-ish-minute plays presented in two sets. I caught one set on a perfectly gorgeous late summer afternoon in Frogtown Farm and Park, and it was an entertaining, inspiring, and at times worrisome look at our future, and through the imagined hindsight, our present. Click here for more information and to make a pay-what-you-will reservation for today's two sets at Frogtown, or next weekend at Newell Park.

"The Great Divide" at Pillsbury House Theatre

Tension. Authentic. Provocative. Humorous. Hope. Uncomfortable. Despair. Familiar. These were some one-word audience reactions to the performance of Pillsbury House Theatre's collection of new short plays last night, titled The Great Divide: Plays for a Broken Nation. I think we're all aware that the world is not the same as it was a year ago, or even six months ago. Theater is a great way to explore the issues that we're all grappling with, to understand them, to process them, to look for solutions. Pillsbury House jumped right into this by commissioning five local playwrights to write a ten-minute play with the title as their only prompt. The result is a diverse collection of stories and characters that are all of the above things, as well as incredibly relevant, timely, and necessary.

"WTF" by Mu Performing Arts at Mixed Blood Theatre

I was introduced to Mu Performing Arts a few years ago by a friend of mine who's on their board.  Over the last ten years or so Mu has grown to become one of the top Asian American theater companies in the country.  I've attended several of their shows, ranging from Tony-winner David Henry Hwang's semi-autobiographical play Yellow Face to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song.  So when my friend said she had an extra ticket to their current production WTF at the Mixed Blood Theatre, I was in!

I'm not quite sure how to describe this play, so I'll let playwright Katie Ka Vang do it for me: "WTF is the story of the lives of young Hmong Americans living in today's society.  The characters in this piece all try to build a life for themselves.  Specifically, it follows the story of True and Sunday.  I wanted to magnify these two characters, who seem as through they just slide through life and simply just survive.  They do, but the way they choose to survive is more than just surviving."  That's an interesting way to put it, because at first True and Sunday are passive characters.  Sunday (Saikong Yang) is dealing with an over-achieving sister, opium addict parents, and an apprenticeship with a crazy artist.  True (the talented Sun Mee Chomet, who has appeared at the Guthrie in Macbeth, Intelligent Homosexual, and Two Gents) has recently lost her mother and has a strained and complicated relationship with her father (and his two other wives).  It's only when she gets pregnant that she begins to make choices to get her life back on track, as does her old friend Sunday, who agrees to make a life with her and her baby.

As much as this play is about the Hmong community, it's also a universal story of people dealing with the hardships of life.  Drug addiction, unexpected pregnancy, loss of a parent, a family member in Iraq, trying to find your place in the world, these are things everyone can relate to.  WTF also uses music, dance, and film to tell its story.  A text message is projected onto a screen onstage between scenes, which sets the stage for the upcoming scene (even if its meaning isn't always entirely clear).  True's boyfriend (Fres Thao) is a rapper/singer, and her soldier brother Rush (Billy Xiong) breakdances, as does the adorable 16-year-old Mimo Xiong. 

We left the play not knowing quite what to make of it.  But director Randy Reyes says, "This play is not about finding answers, but rather about asking the right questions."  So I guess that's OK.

Mu's next production is the musical Little Shop of Horrors, which is on my list of shows to see in 2011.  I can't think of anyone better to play Seymour than Randy Reyes, and I can't wait to see what Mu does with this sweet and funny little musical.