Long Time Coming

Girl Friday’s “Street Scene” didn’t happen overnight.

Image credit: Richard Fleishman

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Girl Friday Productions Presents STREET SCENE

By: Quinton Skinner |   July 2011   |  From the print edition

“It took a while,” says Girl Friday Productions founder Kirby Bennett on the process of choosing her company’s latest play. “I did a lot of reading and looking at plays—for nine months at least.”

That kind of gestational period would be unthinkable for a single show for most local theater companies, who try to balance their seasons with a variety of material that will (in theory at least) appeal to the widest audience. Girl Friday takes a different approach, producing one show every two years since 2005.

“We’re the only ones with this model,” adds Bennett. “Our past three shows have been on a deliberate two-year cycle, one larger-scale project every two years. So we have to be thoughtful in our planning.”

Girl Friday’s last two productions were plays by Thornton Wilder: 2007’s Our Town and 2009’s wooly and ambitious The Skin of Our Teeth. Both had large casts and were distinct and accomplished takes on the slippery notion of American self-image. This time out, they’re staging Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, an epic 1929 drama that revolves around a New York tenement. Just to keep things interesting, a sterling team of 23 local actors will take on nearly 60 roles.

“I joke with Kirby, ‘You’re the little theater that does really big plays,’” says Craig Johnson, who directed Our Town and returns to the helm for Street Scene. “It’s remarkably strange. Kirby is so self-effacing, she’s not producing a showcase every other year for herself—which is remarkably generous.”

Bennett has appeared in the last three Girl Friday shows as a performer, and while she ably treads the boards, she’s also the company’s driving force. Her two Wilder productions represented a strong local revival for a playwright whose work can come across as fatally quaint or trite.

“Kirby championed (Our Town),” Johnson says. “I thought, ‘Huh. I wonder what we can do to make that play sing again—how can we rescue this from all those bad high-school productions?’”

Bennett in turn credits Johnson for focusing her attention so strongly on Street Scene. Admitting a predilection for “old theater exploring American society,” she’s also candid about her first reaction to staging Rice’s sprawling, intricate work: “I don’t know if we can bite that off right now.”

“It’s a large panoramic canvas of American society,” says Johnson. “And what it means to be an American in the 20th Century. It has a spiritual kind of yearning. It’s so ginormous.”

Bennett mentions that the Minneapolis Theater Garage, a venue well known for its mixed bag of advantages and drawbacks, is actually a secret weapon for Street Scene—which requires what she calls a “gritty urban environment.”

“Street Scene is Our Town grown up,” Johnson laughs. “And then it goes to the big city and falls on hard times—and has to deal with it.”