• Missourian
• VOX
• Classifieds
• MyMissourian
• Archives

E-MAIL BOOKMARK PRINT

You need to be logged in to e-mail an article.
login | Register now | No thanks

Summer lovin’

MU theater brings relationships full of love and laughter to the stage.

By Amelia Bock

July 1, 2009 | 12:00 p.m. CST

MU’s Summer Repertory Theatre opens next week, and this summer it’s all about relationships. This year’s productions deal with real-life situations. I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change features short vignettes about the interactions between men and women, and Steel Magnolias follows the lives of six southern ladies.
“We’re you’re parents, we support you, you little s- - -!” Alex Milner and Zackary Ruesler belt at a cowering Steve Robertson and Bailey Jones. The group is rehearsing for the production, I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change that director and MU professor of theatre Jim Miller describes as witty, silly and funny without being artsy.
Steel Magnolias director Dr. Cheryl Black has a grin on her face as she follows along with the six women reading through their lines at the first meeting for the play. Arranged around a table, the women speak in Southern accents in a small classroom in the Fine Arts Annex.
This summer is the 41st year of the MU Summer Repertory Theatre. Both directors selected productions dealing with relationships old, new and somewhere in between.
“Relationships are universal and eternal,” Miller says. “They will never change.”
Miller and his cast have a close-knit relationship with one another, as he has had many of the students in his classes and other productions he directed over the past two seasons.
Along with working as the play’s director, Miller also functions as costume designer and choreographer in this production. “Five, six, seven, eight,” he counts off to the students, modeling dance moves such as the five-step, half-turns and hip thrusts. Dressed in a colorful floral button-up, Miller smiles and goofs around alongside the actors.
“The best thing about working with Jim is that he lets us explore freely,” Milner says. “It’s about portraying the experiences, not bulls- - - theory.”
Besides a common overall theme, directors share cast members. Milner will also play beauty parlor owner Truvy in Steel Magnolias.
The nearly autobiographical play-turned-movie by Robert Harling is focused on a mother losing her daughter (Harling’s sister) to Type 1 diabetes. The entire script is set in a Louisiana beauty shop in the 1980s. Black, a South Carolina native, remembers the South as a sexually segregated society when she was in high school in the
1970s.
“This play has fabulous roles for women,” Black says. “Call me an optimist, but I think we’ll have a b-a-l-l on this one.”
Black plans to bring a sample of the “old belle cuisine” mentioned in the play to each rehearsal to familiarize the women with Southern traditions. She brought a dish known as “cuppa cuppa cuppa” to the first rehearsal.
“Cuppa cuppa cuppa is a cuppa flour, a cuppa sugar, and a cuppa fruit cocktail, to be served with ice cream,” Black said. “But I added a little coconut, milk and butter to my recipe and served it with whipped cream.”
Cast members do more than try new foods. They cycle through the emotional states of the character they’re playing.
Marsha Miller, a long-time theatre performer (and wife of Jim Miller) plays grieving mother M’Lynn, who ends in tears of laughter in the final scene. The other women help her wipe the mascara off of her face after the read-though.
“I took this role because I’m getting old,” Marsha Miller explains to a fellow cast member. “It’s my third decade of summer theatre … what else do you think [Jim and I] do?”

Get (SM)ART

AMERICAN
GOTHIC, 1930
ARTIST: Grant Wood,
1891-1942
Media: Oil on Beaver Board
Location: The Art Institute of Chicago
The day to celebrate all things American is upon us, and there’s no better time to celebrate a great American painting. American Gothic by Grant Wood is probably one of the best known paintings in modern art and often featured in parodies, but the story behind the simple painting might be surprising.
The couple in the painting is not actually a couple at all. They are a farmer and his spinster daughter posing outside their farmhouse. Wood, an Iowa native, was inspired by a cottage he saw in Eldon, Iowa. He asked his sister Nan to pose with his dentist while he painted them in front of the house whose American gothic style architecture inspired the painting’s title, according to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Web site.
“What most everyone already knows is American Gothic by Grant Wood, a work of many layers of meaning,” says Osmund Overby, MU emeritus professor of architectural history and American art.
It’s these layers of meaning that make the painting so fascinating to all who view it. First exhibited at the Art Institute in Chicago, American Gothic won a prize of $300 and claimed instant fame after being featured in newspapers across the U.S., according to the Institute’s Web site. Wood became very appreciative of Midwestern culture and this painting is a perfect example of that lifestyle.

--DANAE' STOUT

• Contact an editor with corrections or additional information

Comments on this article

Username:
Password:	(Forgotten your password?)
You must be logged in to comment. If you don't have an account, you can register here.