Table 12: A funny existential crisis

Photo by Scott Pakudatis

In No Exit, Jean-Pau Sartre posited that Hell is being forced to spend time with other people. Freshwater Theatre's Table 12 ramps that idea up a notch, by pushing the mismatched souls together at that most fiendish of modern-day gatherings: the wedding.

Freshwater mades its debut at the Minnesota Fringe Festival and is revisiting the show as part of its 5th anniversary. It's a glorious, funny, and strangely life-affirming piece.

Table 12 is where the misfits at this particular wedding have been stashed away. Here we find the freaky next-door neighbors, the newly made husband's boss, the sort-of family member (he divorced the bride's sister), the embarrassing friend, and Charlie.

Charlie's a very special case. He's family (a cousin of the groom) and he dated the bride for a couple of weeks in the past. He's also crashed the rehearsal dinner by singing a full set of altered love songs to express his life to a woman who had chosen another man.

Cute in a romantic comedy. Stalker-ish in real life. Family connections kept Charlie at the wedding, but there are some rules, which are closely enforced by the table's waiter.

That's the set up. What happens is what you would expect from a gathering of mismatched souls lubricated by alcohol and either angry at their place at the wedding, or resigned to the fact that they are at the losers' table.

It's howlingly funny, too. Like a lot of comedies, there are people here you probably wouldn't want to spend much time with in real life, but are a lot of fun to watch. It's not just a zoo exhibit. Eventually, you begin to side with them -- even sad-sack Charlie and drunk Amy, who invited a blind date to the wedding; a date that didn't show.

Table 12 comes with a prologue as well: two pieces from another Fringe show, An Adult Evening with Shel Silverstein. The pieces are equally absurd slices of life. In one, the worst father in the world gives his daughter her 13th birthday gift (it doesn't go well). In the second, a husband confronts his wife about her habit of raiding garbage cans (it goes worse).

The shows are presented in rep with We Just Clicked: A Festival of Short Plays about Online Dating at the Phoenix Theatre. Find the details online.

Photo by Heidi Bohnenkamp

A couple of notes about other recent shows seen:

Ed confession time. I don't get Disney musicals. I mean, I know why they are popular and understand at an intellectual level what the appeal of them is for audiences. Yet, since I grew up during the dark times for the company, so unless they produce musicals based on The Rescuers or The Black Hole, I'm not going to have any nostalgic connections to the material.

That doesn't mean I can't have fun at the shows, it's just that certain bits expected by the rest of the audience leave me cold. This brings me to Beauty and the Beast, now at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres.

It's a handsome, well-directed and performed production that still  had me looking at my watch more than once. Much of that was during the scenes involving Gaston, the vain real villain of the piece. The show spends so much time with him -- and away from building the relationship between Belle and the Beast -- that I started to wonder who the stars of the show were supposed to be.

That slows the show down, but there is eventually enough good will to win you over, especially with the winning performances by Ruthanne Heyward and Robert O. Berdahl in the title roles; Mark King as Lumire; and Scott Balckburn as Cogsworth. Also, special note to Rich Hamson's terrific costumes, which bring all of the cursed souls of the castle to life in a much more limited budget than your Broadway, or even touring, production. The show runs through Sept. 24 at Chanhassen Dinner Theatres.

Finally, you only have a week left to do this, but if you haven't made it over to the Jungle for Two Gentlemen of Verona, you definitely should. Sarah Rasmussen's all-women production is a pure delight.

We could talk about the politics behind putting women into these highly "masculine" roles, but really what we have here is a chance for a terrific ensemble of actors to work together. And really, the chance to see the likes of Sha Cage, Christiana Clark, Mo Perry, Wendy Lehr, and a host of others work together should be enough to get you to Lynn-Lake.

And if that's enough? Well, there is Bear the dog playing Crab the dog -- complete with a Elizabethan ruff. Two Gentleman of Verona runs through March 27 at the Jungle Theater.

Happy Days: No, not that one...

Courtesy Open Eye Figure Theatre.

A couple of years back, one of the Twin Cities theaters announced a production of a musical version of Happy Days. My heart cheered for a few moments, until I read on and realized it was the Fonz and company version of Happy Days, not some music-loaded rendition of Samuel Beckett's play.

No matter. Beckett's odd creation about a woman buried up to her waist in rocks -- and not feeling too bad about herself -- offers tremendous rewards even without a song or two, as the new production at Open Eye Figure Theatre proves.

Under the watchful direction of Michael Evan Haney, Amy Warner (also Haney's wife) stars as Winnie, the woman so long trapped by her circumstances that life has been reduced to the most mundane of routines. She greets each day's morning bell with a smile, and then fills the time with incessant chatter about the contents of her bag, her tattered memories of a long-ago normal life, and the way she fills up the endless hours of each endless day in her trapped state.

She isn't alone. Her husband Willie (a shirtless Michael Sommers) pops up from behind the rocks from time to time, reading an ancient newspaper and making the occasional comment.

As difficult as Winnie's state is in act one, it gets worse in act two. Her limited mobility is cut even further, leaving her almost entirely alone with her words and thoughts.

When I saw earlier productions of Happy Days, I relished in the sheer absurdity of the script and the action. Now that I'm older, I know more about Winnie's state of mind. The endless chatter, the forgotten names and terms, the sense that you are frozen in place while everyone else moves freely about you is a perfect description of middle age.

The show is also an extreme acting exercise. It's one that Warner takes up quite well. The happy facade of the first scenes eventually melts away into the final moments of desperation. Some of the moments in between are a bit wobbly. It seemed that the tone at the top of act two was pushed too hard. A softer touch there would have made the final moments all the more effective.

Sommers -- who also provides the simple but effective set design -- makes the most of his brief moments on stage. He is able to wring out the humor of the most simple gesture or action. He also looks great in act two, when Willie finally gets to be in front of the rocks -- and appears in full evening dress, like the demented cousin of Vladimir and Estragon.

Happy Days plays through March 19 at Open Eye Figure Theatre.

Guthrie goes for critical mass with double feature

The cast of The Real Inspector Hound (Photo by Scott Suchman).

Nobody likes a critic, but artists are in a unique position to strike back beyond letters to the editor wondering if the writer in question had "seen the same show."

Playwrights classic and modern get their digs in the Guthrie's double header of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's (by way of Jeffrey Hatcher) The Critic and Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound. Yet for all the jabs directed the ink-stained set, much of the humor in the pair comes at the expense of theater itself.

The pieces come to the Guthrie by way of Washington D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company, where they were first produced, for a mostly delightful evening of wild comedy.

In The Critic, Sheridan sets up a farce where a pair of critics (the lovely named Mr. Dangle and Mr. Sneer) take down an aspiring colleague -- Mr. Puff -- by encouraging him to adapt and twist his new play to the supposed whims of the unseen Sheridan himself.

Their commands sound like demented improv games. Sheridan, they tell Puff, can't abide Spanish names. That's a problem, as the play is about the Spanish Armada. Poor Puff and his sorry cast has to work on the fly to remove the name of the hero at every turn, with increasingly comic effect.

While bad acting and overcooked historical dramas are the name of the game in The Critic, it's the English country-house murder-mystery on the dock for The Real Inspector Hound.

This time, we have a pair of critics, Moon and Birdboot, watching a dreadful English country-house murder mystery. While the Noises-off-like disaster plays out on stage, the pair find themselves drawn into the action, eventually taking over in the show, while a pair of the former characters sit and watch them act out the show.

So, typically Stoppard, but well played and produced. It's the stronger half of the evening, though both offer plenty of fun. There's just a bit more bite to what Stoppard has to say, though the outright comedy side belongs to The Critic.

The Critic and The Real Inspector Hound run through March 27 at the Guthrie Theater.