Twain list members:

For any of you in the Chicago area or nearby, a stage adaptation of
Twain's "The $30,000 Bequest" will be produced by the Organic Theater
Company.

There will be only 4 peformances of this very interesting production at
the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St, Chicago (around
the corner from the Newberry Library) on the following days:

 Saturday March 17 at 7:30 pm
 Saturday March 24 at 2:00 pm
 Friday March 30 at 7:30 pm
 Sunday April 8 at 2:00 pm.

I saw an earlier version of this about a year and a half ago and
reported on it to the Forum.   I've been asked to join Bruce Michelson
and the director to be part of post-performance Q & A with the audience
on the April 8th performance.  I'm as eager to hear what Michelson
thinks about the production as I am to see how the production has
evolved.

I paste below my notice of the July 2005 performance.

LH
______________

I had the pleasure of attending a performance of "The $30,000 Bequest"
on Saturday at the New American Theatre in Rockford, IL.  The run will
include at least one more weekend of performances, and I highly
recommend it to anyone within a few hours of Rockford.

This production is adapted and directed by Alexander Gelman of the
Northern Illinois University School of Theatre and Dance.  What's most
remarkable about the adaptation is its steadfast reliability to Twain's
text--not one word has been changed.  This very intelligent decision is
akin to Kenneth Brannaugh's Oscar nominated "adapted" screenplay of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, but where Brannaugh was working already within a
dramatic medium, Gelman exhibits a rare theatrical vision in moving from
one narrative medium to another without violating the original in the
slightest.  In other words, rather than take a narrative and convert it
to the conventions of theatrical performance, Gelman decided to adapt
theatrical performance to the demands of the text: the three characters
speak dialogue and all of the narration, making the performance a kind
of theatrical reading of Twain's work.


That doesn't mean that it's short on theatricality either.  The space, a
turn of the century parlor functions as the set of a drawing room farce,
and the production augments the movements and language of the actors
with some well chosen musical accompaniment fitting the period and the
moods of the piece.  Josh Anderson and Jessica Sanford-Hudspeth turn in
very sensitive performances as Sally and Aleck, whose imaginary
speculations with an inheritance from a misanthropic distant relative
are the central action of the piece.  And Joel Stanley Huff (Tilbury)
provides a lot of comic relief to and moral critique of the avaricious
desires of the speculating couple.  The performance shows how much
Twain's own concerns about the capitalism of his day prove to be
cautionary wisdom still.

One is tempted to wonder what might have resulted if Twain's own failed
attempts to adapt his work for the stage had taken Gelman's tack.  I
have no idea if this would have worked for late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century audiences, but it works very well for a
twenty-first-century audience, precisely because it maintains the
integrity of the original text.  The result is a kind of experimental
theatre, but unlike so much experimental performance art that is too
enamored of its own devices, Gelman's "$30,000 Bequest" has a reach
fully aware of and entirely consistent with its grasp.