To the point that when we first did it, a lot of people were like, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of weird.’ And now doesn’t seem quite so weird,” said Letts. “At each stage, the play has only become more and more true. Letts’ play, first written in 2016, seemed to anticipate the subsequent national debates over Confederate statues, critical race theory and the backlash over textbooks that include the lingering consequences of slavery. Lady A postpones tour as Charles Kelley focuses on sobriety For Letts, that willful blindness is a national monster. The Frankenstein villagers have been recast as elected leaders of the fictional Pennsylvania town of Big Cherry, who resolutely refuse to acknowledge the town’s horrific past. That initial creative impulse eventually resulted in “The Minutes,” a powerful play that uses a city council meeting to expose delusions at the dark heart of American history. I think this is the wrong idea for us to form a vigilante mob and kill the monster.’” “I thought, ’There must have been a meeting before this among the villagers where one of the villagers voiced dissent and said, ‘No, we should not go after the monster. “The villagers always appear with their pitchforks and torches and they’re completely unified. It was the single-mindedness of the town’s angry villagers. It wasn’t the hideous monster or its wide-eyed creator that drew his attention. His stance finds good company in the current political climate, where book-banning and “don’t say gay” bills are being passed in states around the U.S.Ī final tonal shift, this time from drama to horror, sets up a chilling, yet heavy-handed, denouement to an otherwise riveting parable of political corruption.NEW YORK (AP) - Playwright and actor Tracy Letts was inspired to write his latest Tony Award-nominated play while watching one of those old black-and-white Frankenstein movies. open to interpretation (as long as it’s his). Peel persists, however, and soon he understands why he’d been stymied, and why Carp has been silenced: he’d uncovered a more credible, yet far less flattering, version of the town’s history: “We built this town on a fiction,” Carp insists, in a flashback.Ī now angry Peel must face off with a defiant mayor, for whom the truth is an existential threat. Carp (Ian Barford, Linda Vista) a councilmember who’d been in attendance that week, was dismissed from the committee, and has since gone missing. His skepticism yields to frustration when the council tries to thwart his attempt to see the minutes of the previous week’s session, which he’d missed. For Peel’s benefit, the group performs a hilarious reenactment of that story, The Battle at Mackie Creek, in which European settlers vanquish the Native Americans. The councilmembers are nonetheless enamored with the centerpiece of the design, a statue of Otto Pym, a white man on horseback, and the hero of the town’s origin story. “Oh, here we go, the language police,” Breeding retorts. “I don’t know that normal people should have to suffer an onerous tax burden just so your sister can wheel up to a fountain,” says Mr. Hanratty (Danny McCarthy), whose sister is disabled, introduces a proposal to redesign a fountain in the town square to make it more accessible. The conflict heightens when the earnest Mr. Letts blends the dark comedy of his earlier plays ( Bug, Killer Joe) with the drama of August: Osage County, whose characters also bristle at the revelation of uncomfortable truths. Letts, appearing here for the first time in one of his own works, plays the glad-handing yet firm Mayor Superba. Innes, who sports an elaborate coif reminiscent of Senator Dianne Feinstein and Jessie Mueller as Ms. Oldfield Blair Brown as his contemporary, Ms. Shapiro directs a flawless ensemble that features Austin Pendleton as the befuddled Mr. Locals gather on Friday nights to watch the high school football team, The Savages–a name no one on the council finds problematic.Īnna D. In Big Cherry, the annual Heritage Festival is a defining event. While skewering the pomp of local government, Letts has bigger things on his agenda in this winning Steppenwolf production, primarily what happens when truth is manipulated for political ends. The meeting takes place in the time-worn chamber of an historic municipal building, where a foreboding thunderstorm taxes the building’s ancient wiring, periodically causing the lights to dim. Early in this week’s meeting, performed in real time at Studio 54, Peel’s eccentric colleagues mispronounce ‘piqued’ and ‘jejune’ and squabble over the difference between “semantics” and “nomenclature,” and what constitutes new vs. Peel, a wide-eyed, newly elected city councilman in the fictional small town of Big Cherry. In The Minutes, Tracy Letts’ timely and unnerving dark comedy, Noah Reid (Schitt’s Creek) plays Mr.
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