Here's a tough way to make a living. Take a hundred or more people who have just eaten dinner and maybe had a drink or two. They may also have put in a full day of work.
Place them in a room, turn off most of the lights, and command their attention for a couple of hours. We're talking live performance here, so you can't use car chases, big explosions or humanoids in 3-D.
Writing for the theater is a daunting challenge, and we don't have an abundance of successful playwrights pounding away on their word processors in Wisconsin. The development of a good new dramatist is cause for celebration.
That makes the emergence of Neil Haven particularly noteworthy. A Whitewater native with a degree from the University of Wisconsin campus there, he first turned heads three years ago with a buoyant comedy about a nice single guy who rents an apartment haunted by a dead porno actress.
While the premise sounds cheesy, "Get a Life" was cute, sweet and laugh-out-loud funny. Produced in the old Brumder Mansion Theatre, the original run of the show was such a box office hit, a revival was mounted.
Haven moved west in the fall of 2007 to attend graduate school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, but his presence continued to be felt in Milwaukee. His "Who Killed Santa?" popped up at Carte Blanche Studios in Walker's Point during the Christmas holidays of 2008, and an updated version was staged this past Christmas at the Bay View Brew Haus.
As the playwright describes it, "Who Killed Santa?" is a "choose your own ending, musical murder mystery holiday whodunit." It mixes live actors with large rod puppets created by Milwaukee theater artist Dan Katula, and it most definitely is not a family show. Santa is a drunken philanderer who invites a collection of off-duty holiday characters -- a gang that includes Rudolph, Frosty, Tiny Tim and the Little Drummer Boy -- over to his house for a bacchanalia of bad behavior while Mrs. Claus is away.
The party gets rough, the fat guy in the red suit is fatally stabbed with a candy cane, and a jury picked from the audience must choose which of the other characters is guilty of Santacide. Haven wrote multiple endings to accommodate the jury's decision.
"Who Killed Santa?" has also been produced twice in Denver, where it was a big hit for a small theater company. The show tilts toward the sophomoric, but it is an effective antidote to the syrupy sentimentality of the holidays, and it further confirms that Haven is a clever fellow with substantial writing potential.
This brings us around to "Stuck," the latest Neil Haven creation to receive its professional world premiere. An old fashioned screwball comedy centered around an elevator in a restored art deco Milwaukee hotel, "Stuck" was first mounted in a UW-Whitewater student production last year. The Whitewater folks packed everything up and brought the show here for a few performances at In Tandem Theatre's Downtown performance space.
Chris and Jane Flieller, who founded and run In Tandem, liked the comedy enough to give it a fully professional staging, which opened last weekend. The production continues through March 14.
While "Stuck" is entertaining, it doesn't quite have the comic juice that fuels "Get a Life" and "Who Killed Santa?" The show strains, especially in the early going, to earn its "screwball" label.
The play's conceit is that the hotel is so authentically retro, it employs an elevator operator to push the lift's buttons for the guests. That would be a bright young woman named Ella, who is fun but has some lifestyle quirks. She chooses to make the elevator her home, leaving it only for showers and restroom breaks.
Living in the lift, Ella tends to make connections with her passengers, and that entangles her in a scheme involving a jealous wife, a restless husband, and the seductress hired to entrap the hubby in a compromising situation.
This genre of comedy isn't required to follow logic or have well developed characters. It does need to produce repetitive swells of comic energy, and those swells sometimes fall flat here.
I'm frankly not sure if casting, staging or the play itself is responsible. All of those ingredients may be lacking in varying degrees.
The good news is that the production is buoyed by Leia Espericueta, a young actress who has earned favorable attention at the American Players Theatre and Madison's new Forward Theater Company during the past year. Making her Milwaukee debut as Ella, she charms and sparkles, tugs at our heart and makes us laugh.
When Haven went off to UNLV to get his master's degree in theater, many suspected Hollywood was his final destination. His writing style would work well for television, and the Las Vegas school has veteran TV writers and producers on its faculty. But the Whitewater native is moving back to Wisconsin after he collects his diploma in a few months.
Talking about writing for television, he said, "I found I don't care for the medium. I think for the stage."
The strength and quality of the Milwaukee theater community is a magnet for the 27-year-old Haven. "You have to go away, and then you discover why you love Milwaukee," he said.
"The theater community here is very warm, inclusive and loving. There is no elitism. And the quality of theater in Milwaukee is so high."
Haven is also an actor, and he would like to pursue a multi-faceted career of acting, directing and writing. He has been cast to play Sebastian in the Shakespeare in the Park production of "The Tempest" at Alverno College next summer.
But writing plays is Haven's main gig. Uprooted Theatre and the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center will collaborate on producing another of his works, "Pink Champagne," next season. Expect the scripts to keep on coming.
Damien has been around so long, he was at Summerfest the night George Carlin was arrested for speaking the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. He was also at the Uptown Theatre the night Bruce Springsteen's first Milwaukee concert was interrupted for three hours by a bomb scare. Damien was reviewing the concert for the Milwaukee Journal. He wrote for the Journal and Journal Sentinel for 37 years, the last 29 as theater critic.
During those years, Damien served two terms on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, a term on the board of the association's foundation, and he studied the Latinization of American culture in a University of Southern California fellowship program. Damien also hosted his own arts radio program, "Milwaukee Presents with Damien Jaques," on WHAD for eight years.
Travel, books and, not surprisingly, theater top the list of Damien's interests. A news junkie, he is particularly plugged into politics and international affairs, but he also closely follows the Brewers, Packers and Marquette baskeball. Damien lives downtown, within easy walking distance of most of the theaters he attends.
