Drama – an intuitive perspective

May 2, 2026

The Contructivists: BUG. Plumbing The Breadth Of Contagion

The Constructivists pride themselves on presenting dark cutting edge theater. And they have certainly accomplished that with their season ending presentation, Tracy Letts’, BUG. In her program notes, director Maya Danks describes loneliness as the driving force in this play. But that is only part of the story…how far is one willing to suspend disbelief in real life in order to assuage that loneliness. In BUG, Letts suggest that there is no limit.

Jaimelyn Gray. Photo courtesy of The Contructivists.

Constructivists founder and artistic director Jaimelyn Gray plays our lead protagonist, Agnes. At first Gray’s Agnes seems to be on the verge of getting her shit together, strictly on her own terms. But that bit of bravado seems to be buoyed by a fair amount of drug and alcohol use. She’s a waitress sequestered in a sketchy long stay motel somewhere in Oklahoma. And Gray moves to a subtle loss of composure as her ex-husband, out of prison on an unexpected early parole, still haunts her emotionally and then physically when he arrives on the scene. It is unsettling for us to watch as Agnes acquiesces to the violence and control of her husband once again and as she seeks shelter in the machinations of her new found friend, Peter.

So who is Peter? Well, Agnes’ friend, R.C., shows up at Agnes’ room in the middle of an evening of partying with Peter in tow. R.C. wants to have Agnes join her in her endeavors to continue partying through the evening but it’s not happening. Tess Cinpinski is a direct and forceful presence as R.C.. Also something of a wild and crazy woman who just moves on after being turned down by Agnes. Later on, acting as an advocate for Agnes, she has a showdown with Peter that is a pivotal point sending us in a new direction and the climax of the play. Cinpinski’s strong dramatic presence tends to draw much of the attention to herself in her moments on stage.

Jaimelyn Gray and Tess Cinpinksi. Photo courtesy of The Contructivists.

Peter is played by Joe Lino. He is brought to Agnes’ room by R.C. but doesn’t leave with her. They are essentially strangers who met at a party. Lino’s Peter seems to live at the periphery of the action initially. Lino very effectively tiptoes around the edges of the other cast members on stage and convincingly exhibits a number of tics and twitches describing his nervous nature. As we learn Peter’s backstory of hospitalization and military service, Lino increases the intensity of the character and brings Agnes under the sway of his issues and under his control.

Matt Specht. Photo courtesy of The Contructivists.

Goss is Agnes’ ex-husband. Matt Specht brings a forceful destructive male presence to the stage as Goss. Completely self-absorbed he ignores a restraining order and a possible parole violation by visiting Agnes and trying to take up where he left off. And he gets physical with Agnes and helps himself to her purse. Specht depicts a troubled misogynist who doesn’t realize he is troubled. This is just the normal course of events for him.

Late in the play, Goss brings Dr. Sweet to the motel. Dr. Sweet has been asking around town for Peter and claims he would like to help him by returning him to the hospital. Robert W.C. Kennedy brings a calmly somewhat detached doctor to the stage. He might be a little naive about Peter’s condition but he makes a great effort in trying to coax Peter to agree with him. Instead, this is the final breaking point. I will leave it there.

Joe Lino and Jaimelyn Gray. Photo courtesy of The Contructivists.

Maya Danks has assembled a great cast and tells a great story, despite it’s deeply troubling aspects. I can’t imagine how she moved these actors to plumb the breadth and depth of contagion and mental illness without affecting their sleep at night. But the content is on Letts’ head, Danks has made it into a great season closing presentation.

And I don’t envy the stage crew. There are literally hundreds of small props to handle, add, remove, or replace as the play progresses. And in the talk back afterword, we were told that it takes an hour to reset the stage before the next presentation can begin. And Martilia Marechal did a marvelous job with sound effects and music throughout.

And this disclosure from The Contructivists about BUG: This production contains adult subject matter. Viewer discretion strongly advised. We believe in the power of dark art catharsis. As such, every Constructivists production contains provoking words, ideas, and actions. We respect everyone’s boundaries, but also respect those who wish to know as little as possible about this production. General warnings are violence, language, and heavy drug and alcohol use. [I am going to add: spousal abuse and suicide as possible triggering activities. Ed]

BUG is being presented at the Studio Theater, Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway, Milwaukee WI from now until May 9, 2026.

Ticket info is available here. More info about the play is here.

Joe Lino, Jaimelyn Gray, and Tess Cinpinski. Photo courtesy of The Contructivists.

April 28, 2026

Dinner With The Duchess: Who Defines Your Legacy?

Next Act Theatre couldn’t have selected a better play to end their season and highlight Laura Gordon’s return to their stage than Dinner With The Duchess. And Laura Gordon is absolutely at the top of her game here. So, if like me, you have been waiting to see Gordon in front of the footlights again, this is the show you want to see.

Left to right: Mai Abe, Laura Gordon, Andrew May. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of Next Act Theatre

We meet Margaret as she enters the stage from what we will later learn is the primary bedroom. The set is a small modern kitchen with a sleek island facing a contemporary dining room table surrounded by mid-century modern chairs and settee. She goes out to the balcony to have a cigarette and returns to answer the door. And she welcomes Helen into her home. Laura Gordon is Margaret and Mai Abe is Helen. They seem wary and unsure and both actors clearly represent that discomfort and maybe project just a bit of icy demeanor. We don’t know either character yet but the initial conversations seem to indicate it might be a generational thing since Helen is much younger than Margaret.

Left to right: Laura Gordon, Mai Abe, Andrew May. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of Next Act Theatre.

And now we meet our characters. Margaret is an accomplished violinist who has performed world wide and is retiring from her position as concert master from an unnamed and un-sited symphony orchestra. She is granting her last interview to Helen, a journalist who is hoping to make a name for herself via this interview. It isn’t an assignment but an idea she pitched to her editors. So the chill in the room is now apparent. Margaret wants to talk about the music and Helen the events in Margaret’s life and both want to define Margaret’s legacy. Abe is a consummate professional journalist. She exhibits the proper directness you’d expect in a journalist and is sure of her footing since she has done all of the necessary research into her subject. Gordon’s Margaret, for all of her accomplishments, is guarded and uneasy and insists they talk about the music. But she gives us the impression that she has something to hide. And maybe she hasn’t totally convinced herself that she is ready to retire?

And then the other shoe drops and the dynamics in the room change a bit a Margaret’s husband, David, arrives with take out Italian food from a restaurant from their fabled past but whose food they have come think of as bland. Andrew May plays David as a suave, flirty, mature presence but leans toward the sarcastic side. He insists on enhancing the meal before serving with his major contribution being lemon zest. And that is sort of a backdrop for his role too as David often interjects himself into the conversation…often providing background that Helen would relish but sometimes embarrassing himself or Margaret in the process.

Left to right: Mai Abe, Laura Gordon. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of Next Act Theatre.

May knows how to mutter under his breath effectively and just how to twist the knife effectively. And although both Margaret and David regale Helen with some very romantic stories from their life, there is a palpable undertone of hostility. Abe’s Helen can sense it and wonders how to react. I sensed that maybe Margaret and David were still together out of habit rather than the continuing love story that they defend. But the lemon zest in their life might just be a bit of seasoning ala Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? When their dueling finally comes to a head, David storms out of the room to the bedroom and slams the door. This is the pivot in the action. (small quibble: I found the door slam unsatisfying)

But that slam triggers Margaret and allows Gordon to launch into an elegant tell all soliloquy. Playwright Nick Green has put together an amazing stream of consciousness script here, an absolutely engaging precise bit of language, that finally answers all of the questions that Helen has raised during the course of the evening. Gordon just takes hold of this speech and unravels it as if it were her own life and experience that she is describing. I just sat there enthralled, trying to take it in. When she finishes Helen doesn’t know what to do and the distance between the two women doesn’t seem to have narrowed. Margaret starts to play a recording of her signature performance and Helen leaves.

When the music’s over, turn out the lights.

Mai Abe is making her Milwaukee debut and Andrew May is making his Next Act debut. I want to thank director Samantha Martinson for bringing them together with Laura Gordon for Dinner With The Duchess. Such a delightful and perfectly balanced cast. I hope we see Abe and May again soon.

Dinner With The Duchess runs at Next Act Theatre from now through May 17, 2026 at their theater at 255 South Water Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Additional information and tickets here.

P.S. A question for Nick Green: Given there was a movie with a dinner theme some time ago, was it intentional or a coincidence that the unseen but oft mentioned symphony conductor is named Andre?

April 16, 2026

Milwaukee Rep’s Frida…A Self Portrait…In One Actor

In the first half of the 20th Century, male artists dominated the art scene just as they have done for centuries. Fortunately two woman artists of the Americas were able to break out of the patriarchy, Wisconsin’s own Georgia O’Keefe and Mexico’s Frida Kahlo. Certainly a major reason for their visibility is the remarkable artwork that they created which clearly still speaks to us today. But Kahlo is also intriguing not only because she was a landmark artist but because of the difficulties that she endured in her personal life.

And it is that endurance plus a personal spiritual connection to Kahlo that brought Vanessa Severo to write and perform Frida…A Self Portrait. Frida is directed by Joanie Schultz.

Vanessa Severo. Photo by Michael Brosilow and courtesy of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

Fittingly for a play subtitled, an autobiography, there is only one actor, Vanessa Severo. So in essence, Frida gets to tell her own story. But don’t be fooled into thinking that with only one actor, that there is only one character on stage. The first one is prominent. It is Severo the playwright who in at least three different moments speaks to the audience directly and has Severo the actor explain the various whys and hows that brought this play about. There is enough drama in these interludes for an actual play on its own…but we really want to see and hear Frida.

And hear Frida, we do. She narrates her life story with all of its drama in a very engaging manner often telling us how she feels, how she perceived the events around her, and why she decided to do some of the things she did. All of the major events in her life are examined. Many of them in Frida’s own words but often with Frida ( or is it Severo, the lines are at times blurred), impersonating another character in costume or just in narration. It depends. Many many different people make an appearance but most importantly, there are major moments with her father Guillermo Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. These re-tellings and impersonations are fraught with drama and edged with humor, both in word and the visuals. Severo moves from one focus point to another in an uninhibited fluid dance that just dares you to look away for even a moment. Intriguing story telling at its finest.

Severo is intensely Frida Kahlo and you will suspend disbelief readily and accept that you are witnessing a private story from Frida.

The framing story is Frida entertaining a guest who is visiting to view the architecture of her home, La Casa Azul. But instead of concentrating on the history of the house, Frida wanders off in her mind and recounts the key memory points in her life. The simple set aids the flow and ebb in the story telling. Overhead and to the rear, the general set is a four poster bed that is key to the backstory as Frida spent many days in bed recuperating from one injury to another. And after Severo finishes her prologue to the audience, the stage is festooned by three clotheslines of clothing and bedding that have been questioningly lying on the stage until Severo begins as Frida. These clothes provide the costuming and decor needed for different characters and environments as the story proceeds and Severo discards them stage left or right as their utility vanishes. And there are some stories that remain unspoken…but are told via Severo’s interactions with individual items, lighting, and sound. Some of these moments are particularly sad and should remain unspoken.

Besides the settings, the story is subtly enhanced but the background sounds including insects chirping, city street noises, and such. Very nice, thank you Thomas Dixon. And with just one actor on stage, lighting is very important to help tell the story and to lead the audiences focus and to set the mood and timbre of a scene. Hats off to Rachel Cady.

Frida…A Self Portrait runs about 80 minutes without an intermission.

Frida is being presented in the Herro-Franke Studio Theater at the Milwaukee Rep from now through May 17, 2026. More details and ticket information here.

Extra Credit Reading: Program