Growing Theater Group Finds New Home in Third Ward

Modern drama just isn’t blunt enough. It’s too vague in its message or too likely to dodge the nightmare politics and consequences of today.

Anyone who thinks like that hasn’t attended The Constructivists’ production of In the Canyon now at the smaller stage of the Broadway Theatre Center, traditionally the home of the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, This season, the Chamber Theatre relocated two productions to other theaters, giving The Constructivists a 99-seat base.

Most theatergoers don’t know about The Constructivists. Now in its seventh season, it is leaning toward provocative works and long knocking at the door of regular media coverage. Moving into the Broadway Theatre Center helps, though it still has a shoestring budget, some consistency issues and lacks the traditional arts funding that most professional theaters enjoy. But it is rising out of casting vagaries – its idea of talent onstage, not Actors Equity cards — without losing its desire to discomfit the audience.

It has chosen a talented “calamity jane” of Chicago playwriting, who is actually named Calamity West, for this season’s opener. In In the Canyon, written when Donald Trump was president, she produces a blunt, humorous, heady mixture of family conversations, movie references, shock effects and episodic leaps through time, with eight actors playing parts often related to their previous selves (but sometimes not related). The settings are hardly noteworthy, but the lighting and sound effects gain attention. The cast is carrying the same families forward on a grim voyage into society’s future, ranging from 2007 through 2067.

If you look up the dictionary definition of a dystopian, you might find a picture of Calamity West. Her view of society’s growing injustice out of our current attitudes is that deep. She carries you from a supposedly carefree America of easier abortions in 2007, where jokes about sexual attitudes were normal, into an ever-darkening world where the government determines who lives and how – and who dies or doesn’t.

This does not play like some abstract apocryphal Handmaid’s Tale. West doesn’t say directly who is responsible, but she is boldly carrying us from a life before Trump into his years in office and after, and then sort of through him a half century later. It’s blunt, but it’s not a simplistic morality tale, since those who took sexual behavior too casually and those who took religious preaching too seriously are equally skewered.

But the script flips between slightly funny conversations among roommates into a sudden throwup after an abortion, then water bursting on a bloatedly pregnant religious nut, then a doctor assassinated in prison, then a wild shootout on a rural farm where abortions take place and rain rarely falls (climate change, remember). The eruptions of horror can literally blind the audience with a spotlight or echo the language and gunplay of Hollywood movies (several, as the script reminds us, starring Kevin Spacey).

Once the audience picks up on the political intentions – hardly happenstance that this production is taking place weeks before a crucial election – its sci-fi Death Valley is too easy to predict. It’s why the play reads on paper more easily than it stands on three-dimensional feet, unless you find the tight, technically savvy tone, as good experimental theater does.

Jaimelyn Gray, the artistic director as well as The Constructivists founder and guiding spirit, understands all the intentions in her pacing, but hasn’t totally found the key to strong naturalism one moment and shock value the next.

The actors rely on previous training but sometimes don’t know where boldness should alternate with subtlety. Even polemic theater works best when believability is realized, not stabbed at. It sometimes happens, but not often enough.

The men – A.J. Magoon, Joe Lino and Matt Specht – clearly have good training. They bring an assured quick-sketch professionalism to varied characterizations.

Carrying the character of Hope through casual pregnancies, rebellious reaction to her parents, devoted mother and then imprisoned victim, Caroline Norton can’t escape some moments of over-expressiveness but often touches us with her insights and commitment. Her acting moments of self-awareness lead to emotional commentary on her fate. As Wendy, her grown daughter years in the future, stacy madison has an acting ferocity that carries her through, making us enjoy this most Hollywoodish of finales.

An assortment of hinged scenic pieces and furniture require a busy squad of techs and cast with mops and props to cart into place between episodes.

Tickets are $20 but the audience is encouraged to give more in the lobby as the production runs through October 26. For tickets at the Broadway Theatre Center, in the Third Ward at 126 N. Broadway, call 414-291-7800.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here.