Rosebud Theatre 2017: All under one big sky

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Rosebud Theatre’s 2017 season celebrates the theme “Under a Big Rosebud Sky.”
“All of us — refugees, big businesses, small businesses, moms and dads and kids, Muslims, Christians, atheists, you name it – we all live under the same sky,” explained Morris Ertman, Rosebud Theatre’s artistic director. “If you just kept following that horizon line, walking toward it, you’ll find yourself walking around the world.”
The Skin of our Teeth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder, opens the season, March 31 to June 3.
“Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus and their two kids, who live in suburbia, happen to have a pet dinosaur,” Ertman said. “The ice [age] is coming and it’s scooping up houses on its way. They kick the dinosaur out, and they bring refugees in. They start to sing Christmas carols around the fire they make in the middle of the living room to keep warm. We’re going to take chairs and break them and throw them on a fire on the stage and sing Christmas carols. It’s crazy. But the feeling of it will be so outrageously inviting, I hope people just bubble with hope.”
The Spitfire Grill, a folk musical by Lee David Zlotoff, runs June 16 to Sept. 2.
“This play is saying that three women can change a community and a world,” Ertman said. “One is an old woman who runs a cafe called the Spitfire Grill. She just wants to retire.”
She and two young employees, one of them just out of prison, plan a contest, inviting people to submit $100 and a description of the grill. The best description wins the grill.
“And of course,” Ertman said, “if enough people send their $100 in, she’s got her retirement.”
An Almost Holy Picture by Heather McDonald comes to the BMO Studio Stage, June 29 to Sept. 2. Ron Reed is guest director.
David Snider will play a man who’s given up the pastorate, because he grapples with painful events, like the fact his daughter’s body is covered with excessive hair.
“It’s really a story about prayers and angels and miracles, and how to make sense of things that are impossible to make sense of,” Ertman said. “It’s a play that really, really kind of digs into where people are at when it’s not working out really well. This is going to be a piece that really touches people’s hearts.”
The Christians, by Lucas Hnath, will appear on the Opera House stage, Sept. 22 to Oct. 28. A minister tells his congregation he doesn’t believe there’s a hell, after hearing about a Hindu boy who died after rescuing his sister from a fire.
“This minister can’t reconcile himself with a God that would condemn such heroes [to hell],” Ertman said. “So it opens up this rift in this church. Everybody’s raving about this play as a turn-the-page, on-the-edge-of-your-seat drama. It challenges our sensibilities about what inclusiveness looks like.”
The season’s final show is Cariboo Magi by Lucia Frangione, Nov. 10 to Dec. 23, directed by Paul F. Muir.
“It’s about four haphazard people, hapless people,” Ertman said. “One of them doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know whether he’s Scottish or First Nations. All of these people wind up coming to the Christmas story, in a way that makes the Christmas story radically different than it’s ever been done before. The whole story is just crazy funny.”
Rosebud Theatre will also host Wingfield on Ice, Feb. 23-25, and The Wheatland Band, Sept. 8. The Theatre for Young Audiences presents Snow White, March 2-4.
“Come to Rosebud, because you know what?” Ertman said. “We’re about the things that are happening in the world and we have a particular way of looking at them that says that there’s hope.”