In 2016, Wisconsin theater faced grim realities, yet also offered hope

In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wonderful book about the making of “Hamilton,” co-author Jeremy McCarter recounts how Washington tried to inspire his freezing and bedraggled army: As they gathered around their campfires during a brutal winter in Valley Forge, he arranged for a production of Joseph Addison’s “Cato,” a play about a man who gave his life for freedom.

Closer to home last April, Madison’s Forward Theater gathered us around the campfire that opens Anne Washburn’s “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play,” set in a post-apocalyptic future where the survivors make sense of the present by telling stories of their collective past.

Still closer to home, in Milwaukee last June, Off the Wall Theatre staged Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” in which another freezing family sought warmth by preserving the best books and stories from a civilization rapidly passing away.

As “Hamilton” itself brilliantly demonstrates, the stories we keep and tell can give us the courage to carry on, during even the darkest and coldest of days.

Politics of exclusion

Many of the Wisconsin shows I saw during 2016 suggested that times are indeed bleak.

I can’t recall a year involving so many productions addressing the disconnect between the utopias we dream and the frequently grim realities we live.  Even when such shows were set in another time or place — including the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s “Of Mice and Men” and Theatre Gigante’s “Woyzeck” — they spoke to our present, in which Americans are more aware of the class divide depicted in these two shows than they’ve been since the Great Depression.

Befitting the violent year and accompanying hateful rhetoric we’ve endured, many of the darkest 2016 productions concerned race in America.

Next Act Theatre took a hard look at Rodney King’s beating and its aftermath in “Twilight.”  I saw “Twilight” the night after watching the Bronzeville Arts Ensemble and Theatre LILA explore a black family coping with the legacy of a police shooting in “The Mojo and the Sayso.”  I saw “Mojo” two weeks after reflecting on the long shadow cast by racism while viewing the First Stage production of “Holes.”

In April and May, director Lou Bellamy and the Rep examined what happens to dreams deferred in a landmark production of “Fences,” involving an embittered Troy Maxson, destroying himself after racism had scuttled his chance to play Major League Baseball.

Racism also short-circuited the careers of other performers we glimpsed on stage this year.  The Rep mounted shows featuring, respectively, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and boxer Jack Johnson; American Players Theatre’s “The African Company Presents” told the story of a beleaguered black theater troupe in 1820s New York.

Women on this year’s Wisconsin stages frequently didn’t fare much better.

In a one-month span last winter, Milwaukee Irish Arts’ “Little Gem,” Renaissance Theaterworks’ “Agnes of God” and Cooperative Performance Milwaukee’s “a woman’s Place” portrayed how women and their bodies are constricted by others’ view of who women are; in the latter two shows, women were driven to or past the brink of sanity.

Renaissance closed its season last April with “Censored on Final Approach,” chronicling the discrimination against female pilots in World War II.  Up north, spring arrived in Door County with Third Avenue Playhouse’s production of “Patio/Porch,” involving four women’s lifetime of disappointment.

Last July, Door County’s Peninsula Players Theatre profiled a quartet of pigeonholed women in Agatha Christie’s “The Hollow,” in which the real mystery — as so often with Christie — involved how readily women are perceived as being less or different than they really are.

Liberating Stories

Wisconsin theaters also staged plays this year that continually rejected such limitations, choosing instead to tell and perform lives and stories daring to imagine how much more we could be.  For every “Passage to India” — Off the Wall Theatre’s sensitive depiction of British colonialism — there was a “Secret Garden”: Soulstice Theatre’s moving testament to the power of the imagination, which liberates an English child raised in colonial India to see the world fresh.

Many of these stories involved men flying free of constricting definitions of gender.

In plays as different as Theatrical Tendencies’ “Some Men” and Northern Sky Theater’s popular “Lumberjacks in Love,” men learned to express a love that once dared not speak its name.  In the Marcus Center’s “Kinky Boots” and Skylight Music Theatre’s “La Cage Aux Folles,” men performed expansively dressed views of themselves on stage.

Similarly inventive storytelling was at work in Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s “Victory for Victoria,” about the many personae assumed by feminist Victoria Woodhull; the Marcus Center’s hilarious “The Book of Mormon,” involving a missionary who fudges details to see greater truths; and First Stage’s inventive “The Snow,” which self-consciously wrestles with the question of who tells the story of our lives and why this matters.

Finally, the Milwaukee Rep’s final two 2016 main stage shows – “Man of La Mancha” and “The Foreigner” – both staked the claim that one could and should play an active role in creating the stories shaping one’s world.  The protagonists in both of these shows can initially seem silly and limited.  But they dream different selves that compel our attention.  Our respect.  And our love.

It’s a love any critic should feel for the theater artists who regularly inspire us to live better lives.  Memories of their performances often live within us forever, becoming integral to who we are.  It’s in homage to these artists and all they generously give that I offer you the following snapshots of the 2016 shows and artists living most fully within me.

Each of my year's best lists could have been different and twice as long, reflecting the theatrical riches in our state.  To quote from “Hamilton,” “how lucky we are to be alive right now.” It’s most certainly how I feel every time I walk into a Wisconsin theater.  Here’s to plenty more of the same, come 2017.

More: 
Wisconsin theater faced grim realities, yet also offered hope
Best productions of 2016
Best leading performances in 2016
Best designers of 2016
Best supporting performances