The Play's the Thing

Area women say passion for the theater fuels their lives. There’s the dream: taking a bow as the curtain closes and admiring fans throw flowers on the stage. And there’s the reality: hours spent rehearsing and digging into the personality of the characters, selling tickets in the box office and mopping the floors after the show closes. But for Coulee Region women who have made theater their life, it is all worth it to be able to immerse themselves in the creative process and to discover anew with each performance the connections that art inspires. Wisconsin to New York and back “I like the whole creation process,” says actress Vicki Elwood, and that includes costumes, set design, even promotion. “I have a very playful spirit. I have a need to create. I am definitely an artist.” After 30 years of involvement in the theater, all of that creation now is her own. She and her husband, Don, recently completed a six-year renovation project in a historic La Crosse church and in February opened the Muse Theatre with the production Bat Boy: The Musical. “It offers the complete expression of my creativity,” she says, but it has also required hours of hard physical work to turn a nearly condemned building into a unique artistic venue.The Eau Claire native, who spent several years immersed in the theater scene in New York City, said that she started playacting as a young child and has never given it up. While New York City is her favorite city, the call of family and nature brought her back to Wisconsin to create her ultimate dream of having her own theater. “I’m working to have a professional theater,” she says, which will bring edgy, off beat, even outrageous works to La Crosse audiences, on par with what is seen in the Twin Cities, Chicago and even Manhattan. The plays she chooses are “something you won’t see at the community theater,” she says, including the currently running The Great American Trailer Park Musical. But they will examine, with wit and music, realities to which audiences can relate. “I like things that have charm, and I like to inspire people,” Elwood says. The Great American Trailer Park Musical plays at the Muse Theatre Fridays and Saturdays throughout the month of June. Finding connections onstage and off It is the sense of communion and shared experience with the audience that touches Adrienne Sweeney and makes what she does meaningful. Especially, she says, as she traveled this spring with the Commonweal Theatre Company’s tour of the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler, in which she played the lead role. “The audiences were super-attentive, the talk-backs were really driven and the questions were really pertinent,” she says of audience response after the shows. “It’s a connection that just doesn’t happen any other place. The only other place it might happen is church.” Sweeney, who started acting after several years of working in marketing and public relations, says she has found the perfect combination in the Lanesboro, Minn., theater company, where all of the resident artists also share administrative jobs. In addition to acting, Sweeney is the Commonweal’s director of marketing and is the coordinator for the theater’s annual Ibsen Festival. “I love the energy in the theater. It’s a community, and I love that,” she says. “It’s like a family business. We all are here all the time or we are thinking about it. It is the thing that we do that is our lives’ passion. “The real challenge is that split between artist and administrator,” she admits, “turning off my brain, leaving the office and coming to the rehearsal hall.” A Philadelphia native, Sweeney had pictured in her mind something exactly like the Commonweal where she could work for a specific theater company rather than go from audition to audition before she even knew that business model existed. “I just wanted to work in the theater for my living, for my life,” she says. “When I first got here, I was just completely blown away that this theater company was exactly what I wanted I wonder if [I made my] reality because I said it, without ever knowing that this place existed.” Theater runs in the blood For Mary Leigh Christine, the stage is not only somewhere she loves to be, but somewhere she feels completely at home. The recent Viterbo University graduate’s mother is a costume designer at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and her father has been directing and performing with theaters since he was in high school. “They both live for the theater, so it is a family thing,” Christine says, adding that she grew up involved in dance and acting, including playing the leads in some of her high school musicals. After graduating from high school in Milwaukee, Christine was drawn to Viterbo’s tight-knit theater community, where she studied for a bachelor’s degree in musical theater. “It was easy for me to decide to do it for my career because I like it, and I’m good at it,” says Christine, who recently played the part of Ulla in the La Crosse Community Theatre’s spring production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers. “I love [acting] because it is an indescribable feeling,” she says. “The audience is giving you energy and you’re giving them energy. Nothing is ever the same twice I leave the stage never feeling better.” Getting to that point isn’t easy, though. Besides the auditions, there are the hours of rehearsals and research that go into perfecting a character. “Rehearsals are definitely taxing it’s a lot of self-discovery,” Christine says.