BY ADAM M. SCHENCK
On the eighth floor of 528 Hennepin Ave. in downtown Minneapolis sits the Illusion Theater, home of the former Hennepin Center for the Arts. A trip up an elevator will place you in a space entirely dedicated to theater with an eye on personal and social change. The tagline: “Small stage. Giant Impact.”
Illusion’s Fresh Ink Series, which ran in July, allows one to view the process of an entire stage production coming to fruition. I attended the first of its two plays: “Revolving Stage” by Marysue Moses and Phil Kilbourne and “A Gest of Robin Hood.”
Holding script in hand, actors perform not from memory but by reading. For me this was initially jarring, but I found much insight in viewing the real-time decisions made not only by the actors but also by the lighting designer (Michael Wangen). Final products create suspension of disbelief that makes us forget that theater, and any artistic statement for that matter, is actually a series of interpretations made by people.
In “Revolving Stage,” three actors interpret multiple, and mostly comedic, characters. Phil (Gary Geiken) has terminal cancer and knows he is soon to die. With him are his wife and brother, played by Laura Esping and Jim Lichtscheid, who also play a host of ghosts from Phil’s lives past. The story creates a theater lover’s modern “Christmas Carol” but minus the greedy Mr. Scrooge.
Although you may not see this version of “Revolving Stage,” you may see it presented in another form in another place. It’s a powerful script that offers a genre that was new to me: memoir. Our narrator, Phil Kilbourne, looks back on his life from his deathbed and recalls his passions, his loved ones, and the forks in the road that created his life experience. Above all, he finds joy in what he loves and those whom he loves.
Like the rest of the audience I was emotionally affected by Moses’ and Kilbourne’s goodbye letter. Although in marriage two can become one on earth, death clarifies that ultimately they are two. It was odd to see so many tears as the audience left the performance because the actors were reading from the script, but that speaks to the power of live theater—and the beauty of someone devoting himself to craft. Kilbourne lived for theater and was a respected actor on the East Coast and in our Twin Cities scene; his StarTribune obituary is available online.
His farewell makes us consider our devotion to our friends and family and our own crafts.
Reach Adam at [email protected].
