"When We Are Found" at Penumbra Theatre Company

After producing his beautifully tragic play Sugar in Our Wounds two years ago, Penumbra Theatre commissioned playwright Donja R. Love for a different sort of play; a fable, a fantasy, "a meditation on enduring love through thee forced parting precipitated by the transatlantic slave trade" (Penumbra's President Sarah Bellamy in a note in the program). Sugar in Our Wounds tells the doomed love story of two enslaved men in the South shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation, and When We Are Found is almost like a prequel to the story, as well as a modern-day coda. Running just over an hour, it's a lyrical, fantastical, fluid celebration of unbreakable love. See it at Penumbra in St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood through May 18.

"Black Nativity" at Penumbra Theatre

Another holiday* tradition is back this year - Penumbra Theatre's joyful production of Langston Hughes' Black Nativity. They've been doing this show for over 30 years now, and this version is very similar to what I saw three years ago. It's a wonderful tradition that fills the soul; recommended if you've never seen it before, or if you've seen it a dozen times. Continuing through Christmas Eve at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul.

"Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing" at Pillsbury House Theatre

I couldn't describe Pillsbury House Theatre's Jimmy and Lorraine: A Musing better than playwright/adapter Talvin Wilks does, calling it "a meditation on the American political climate of the late '50s and '60s through the lens of two significant artists of the time, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Following their impactful careers as artists, their call to social activism and the challenges of wrestling with the balance of an artistic career and politics, their lives give us an opportunity to look at this rich period of political and social upheaval." This is a brilliantly constructed 90 minutes of theater that gives us a clear picture of these two artists/activists in all their complexity, with much (or all?) of the text coming from their own writings. It's really quite impressive how Talvin cobbled together all of these different sources to form a cohesive and dramatic story, like the most complicated jigsaw puzzle coming together to form a picture that was always there. A picture of a very specific time in America that still resonates today.