After a three and a half year hiatus, Saint Paul’s Frank Theatre eased back to the stage last October with a banger of a production, produced in their small rehearsal space that seats only 40 people. It was a play called “FETAL,” by Trista Baldwin, set in the waiting room of an abortion clinic the day Roe v. Wade got overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“FETAL was a great kind of trial run for us,” says artistic director Wendy Knox. “It was a great play for us to come back with because it was just like a punch in your face. You know, this is fucking important, damn it.”
The run went so well that Frank is bringing the show back, but first, they’ve got a different play, “Ironbound,” by Martyna Majok, running at Gremlin Theater. It opened last weekend. Both plays fall in line with the work Frank tends to produce: gritty, meaty scripts that intersect with social and political issues.
Knox has been at it for 35 years, producing the first Frank Theatre play, Franz X. Kroetz’s “Farmyard” at the Lil’ Pony Theatre in Saint Paul, in 1989. That same year, Knox directed “Mud,” by María Irine Fornés, with At the Foot of the Mountain, a significant feminist theater that would close two years later.
Knox tells me in the early years of Frank, people would ask her if the new theater would take the place of ATFOM as a feminist company. While Knox says she considers herself a feminist personally, she was hesitant to use the term as a defining element of the organization. “We consciously made a decision when we did our mission statement to not put something in there about feminism because at that point, we just didn’t want it to be marginalized,” she says.
Still, Frank often produces work by female playwrights, and that engages with feminist issues.
Knox came upon “Ironbound,” when she was searching for new material for the season. Majok’s play, “The Cost of Living,” about the relationships between disabled and abled characters, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2018. Majok also wrote “Sanctuary City,” a play about two best friends who are immigrants, who marry so that the undocumented friend can become a citizen through his naturalized friend.
With “Ironbound,” Majok draws on her own mother’s experiences in a play about a Polish immigrant woman struggling to survive. Jumping back and forth through time, it depicts Darja’s tenacity, her shortcomings, and also her capacity to care.
Much of the action takes place in front of bus stops— a symbol in the world of a play for the underclass and its lack of access to the ultimate American possession: a car. In Frank’s production, Joseph Stanley’s set makes the bus stop a dilapidated, trash-ridden corner.
Darja, played by Brittany D. Parker, works a series of low-wage jobs, first at a factory that eventually closes, and then as a house cleaner. Her first husband, played by Benjamin Dutcher, leaves her and her child for a music career, her second husband (unseen in the play) abuses her, and then she finds a boyfriend, played by Carl Schoenborn, who is serially unfaithful.
Majok paints a grim picture of America and of capitalism, where hard work doesn’t equal prosperity or even the ability to live. In Parker’s portrayal, Darja faces her lot with both resignation and practicality, and often engages with her relationships transactionally. That’s in part because she has to. She does what she must to survive, and to care for her son— another unseen character who we understand to have his own battles with mental illness and addiction.
Besides Parker, Schoenborn gets the most stage time. He gives Tommy a vulnerability to the point where you almost forgive him for being such a doofus.
Meanwhile, Dutcher’s Maks is sweet, even if he fails Darja, too. An experienced performer in opera and musical theater, “Ironbound” is Dutcher’s first non-musical drama. Knox says at the audition she was hesitant to cast him at first given his lack of experience doing this kind of theater. She changed her mind at callbacks, though.
“In the callbacks, he had to do this thing where it refers to him singing a Polish blues song and playing the harmonica,” she says. “Ben came in, he had researched the song, and sang it in Polish.”
He got the part.
As the lead, Brittany D. Parker also brings experience different than scripted plays. Much of Parker’s career has been in theater improvisation, comedy and film. Parker adds lightness, even a fight, to the character, and is able to tap into the often tamped down emotion as well.
In total, three of the four cast members of the show have never done a show with Frank (Schoenborn has worked with the company previously.) Knox says that’s in part because the acting pool has changed in the Twin Cities. “People got tired,” she says. “They pivoted and got a new job.”
Frank has also lost longtime collaborators to death, adding an element of grief to the work of carrying the work forward. Meanwhile, union rules have changed, audiences have changed, and altogether, the landscape for theater is still evolving, Knox says.
But she’s not ready to be done any time soon. At 67, “I’m still game,” she says.
You can catch “Ironbound” through February 11 at the Gremlin Theatre in Saint Paul ($30). Meanwhile, “Fetal” returns to Frank Theatre’s rehearsal space in the Ivy Arts Building February 22- March 10. More information here.
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