What’s Old Is New Again—Again
How fitting that the North Loop, with its blocks and blocks of historic buildings reborn as the Twin Cities’ creative and entertainment mecca, is now home to a brand new all-Equity theater company, The Modern Rep, that is reimagining, repurposing, reinvigorating, and rejoicing in plays from decades, generations, centuries, and even millennia past.
“Our theater scene has long championed new work—and should,” explained Grant Sorenson, Modern’s founder and artistic director. “But the arts have always wrestled with the same core issues—love, sex, death, faith, competition, community, success, failure, injustice, amusement, happiness, tragedy, and hope among them. Current works don’t have the lock on the answers, the questions, and the excitement.”
Modern Rep Founder and Artistic Director Grant Sorenson.
“Modern Rep’s mission is to fearlessly engage with work from the past 25-odd centuries—Tennessee Williams back to Sophocles—and bring those works to pulsating, indelible life for today’s audiences.”
Tonight, Modern Rep debuts with a production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with an all-male cast (pictured above). Which, in itself, isn’t new at all: Females were not permitted on stage when Shakespeare was writing.
What IS new is that this “Midsummer” doesn’t tiptoe around that all-male casting like it’s the elephant in the room. It shines the spotlight on it—throwing glitter all the while—by being queer-centric, queer-curious, and queer-happy. Not least, all but one of the cast members identifies as queer: each plays multiple roles in this compact one-act production.
“Gender and sexuality were entirely more fluid in the late 1500’s. Homosexuality as a concept let alone a word wouldn’t enter the English language for three centuries: the late 1800’s. Same for queer,” added Sorenson. “So affectionate and even sexual male-male intimacy in Shakespearean times may well have been so unremarkable—so normal—that it didn’t warrant specific words or comment.”
Love is love, no matter who’s who. Credit: Molly Jay Photography.
With an explicit and celebratory queer focus, Modern’s take on “Midsummer” is a window that lets we hyper-labeled, often-polarized citizens of the 2020’s see back to a time when whoever you were drawn to was pretty much Just Fine.
Watching can be hella’ fun, too. Credit: Molly Jay Photography.
The Modern’s production and performance hub is in the Bassett Creek Business Center—the present-day repurposing of the Clark & Son warehouse, once the country’s largest wholesaler of pump and well machinery.
Talk about adaptive reuse!
Here’s more about “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” including the link for tickets. The show debuts June 5 and runs through June 20; performances begin at 8pm.
— By Louis Raymond, NLNA Board Member and Culture Correspondent