You can now find Twin City Theatre Company at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, after three years without a home. This season will be a full one, with four shows. Auditions for Leaving Iowa are on February 4th; details are on the Twin City website. The company is also looking for board members; you can apply here.
This season’s shows include:
Leaving Iowa (by Tim Clue and Spike Manton) is the story of Don Browning, a middle-aged writer, who returns home and decides to finally take his father’s ashes to his childhood home, as requested. But when Don discovers Grandma’s house is now a grocery store, he begins traveling across Iowa searching for a proper resting place for his father. This father-and-son road trip shifts smoothly from the present to Don’s memories of the annual, torturous vacations of his childhood. Don’s existential journey leads him to reconcile his past and present at the center of the United States. Leaving Iowa is a postcard to anyone who has ever found himself or herself driving alone on a road, revisiting fond memories of his or her youth. Directed by University Laboratory High School Drama teacher Chris “Fing” Guyotte
The Curious Case of Covingston Manor is an original script by Mia-Belle Shannon, graduate of Unity High School and currently a Parkland College Theatre major. Seven people meet at a mansion of their close friend. When he turns up dead, each of them is a suspect, with a piece of the story to tell, a piece of the story that will reveal the Curious Case at Covingston Manor. Who doesn’t love a murder mystery! Directed by the playwright. (The Curious Case of Covingston Manor will be performed at the Parkland College Theatre Second Stage)
My Little Titus Andronicus (by Don Zolidis) At last, the sparkly pep of My Little Pony meets the violent tragedy of Titus Andronicus. It’s Princess Millennia’s birthday, and Early Evening Glimmer is determined to put on a play. Unfortunately, Shakespeare’s classic is less about believing in yourself and more about the folly of ambition in a polluted world filled with moral ambiguity. Will the ponies put on the play with more musical numbers or bloodshed? Friendship is magic and all nobility is savagery in this delightfully irreverent romp. Directed by Missy Marquardt, Drama Director at Urbana High School
Seascape (by Edward Albeet, Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama) ) On a deserted stretch of beach a middle-aged couple, relaxing after a picnic lunch, talk idly about home, family and their life together. She sketches, he naps, and then, suddenly, they are joined by two sea creatures—lizards who have decided to leave the ocean depths and come ashore. Initial fear, and then suspicion of each other, are soon replaced by curiosity and, before long, the humans and the lizards (who speak admirable English) are engaged in a fascinating dialogue. The lizards, who are at a very advanced stage of evolution, are contemplating the terrifying, yet exciting, possibility of embarking on life out of the water; and the couple, for whom existence has grown flat and routine, holds the answers to their most urgent questions. These answers are given with warmth, humor and poetic eloquence, and with emotional and intellectual reverberations that will linger in the heart and mind long after the play has ended. Directed by Mark Highland, Speech and Drama Professor at Lakeland College.
