Performing Arts

A nurturing night

More than a dozen pieces combine for an evening of homage to the people who mother us.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 5, 2000

It would be easy to label In the Name of the Mother as simply a Mother's Day sort of thing, but that would miss the author's point.

Monica Steele is careful to describe the theater piece she wrote and adapted from other writings as "a celebration of those who nurture us." In part, she seeks to expand the female identity for nurturing beyond biological motherhood.

"One of the pieces is called Nobody's Mother and is about all of those people who care for us -- aunts and godmothers and sisters, school bus drivers and teachers, camp counselors," said Steele, who is directing the production at the Off Center Theater of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

In the Name of the Mother is made up of more than a dozen pieces, including stage adaptations of stories by Alice Walker, Margaret Wise Brown and Brenda Miller and poetry of e.e. cummings, Marilou Awiakta and Wendell Berry. Five of the pieces are by Steele, mostly drawn from Northern Lights, an autobiographical monologue she wrote and performed two years ago. It's about growing up in a large Irish-Catholic family in Duluth, Minn.

Nonie's Garden is one of the stories from Northern Lights that appears in the current work. It's a melding of A Midsummer Night's Dream and girlhood memories of a beloved great aunt who never married.

"Nonie was one of the most gentle, patient, sweet women who probably ever lived," Steele said. "She let me help her in the garden, let me read her magazines. I'm sure I could be quite a pest. I'm sure there might have been times she wanted to turn me away, but she never did. I suppose that everybody has somebody like that in their lives, a person who is motherly but not your mother."

Angela Romero, Leslie Shepard and Roz Potenza star in the play. Steele thinks of a slide show she put together as "the fourth character." They're family snapshots taken in the 1950s and '60s by her father.

"I went home in October with the express purpose of going through all these boxes of pictures, which were in a moldy corner in the basement," she said. "I hadn't seen them in ages, but I remembered them and thought they might be a possibility for a visual element to this piece. I looked through 500 or 600 slides and chose slides of my mother and her children, my grandmothers and the grandchildren, my sisters and their children."

Many of the photos were taken during vacations at the family's lake cabin in northern Minnesota. "They're from times when we were all together at the lake, you know, just daily things, hanging up clothes, doing the wash, making dinner, but I discovered other things that, I thought, were surprisingly beautiful, very poignant."

In the Name of the Mother winds up the second season of Women's Work, a series Steele initiated at the Off Center. Other works in the series have included My Left Breast, a one-woman play on breast cancer and other topics, starring Steele, and a number of plays written by and featuring young girls.

Next season, she has landed a coup for the series, with plans to stage Wit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson. Steele will star in November as a cancer patient and scholar, and her husband, Christopher Steele, a member of the theater faculty at the University of South Florida, will direct.

In the Name of the Mother opens tonight and runs through May 13. Tickets are $5 and $13.50. Call (813) 229-7827.

MORE THEATER -- A remote island village off the coast of Ireland is the setting of The Cripple of Inishmaan, a comic drama by Martin McDonagh that opens tonight. It's an early play by McDonagh, whose Beauty Queen of Leenane won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1998. There are nine performances through May 21 in a Stageworks production at the Hillsborough Community College auditorium in Ybor City. Tickets are $12 and $14. Call (813) 258-6757.

Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain, a 1998 Pulitzer finalist, opens tonight at the Asolo Theatre's small Cook Theatre. It runs in rotating repertory through June 25 with Collected Stories by Donald Margulies, opening Wednesday. Stories is directed by Asolo producing artistic director Howard Millman and stars Isa Thomas and Rebecca Baldwin. Margulies' Dinner with Friends won this year's Pulitzer. Tickets for each play are $26 and $29. For tickets, information: (941) 351-8000; http://www.asolo.org.

St. Petersburg Little Theatre gives another of its Lobby Theatre presentations with A Tapestry of Sacred Stories, drawn from religious literature ranging from Islamic poetry to the Tao te-Ching to Biblical stories. Written and directed by A. Paul Johnson, it opens tonight and has six performances through May 14. Tickets are $4 and $8. Call (727) 866-1973.

BRAHMS -- An evening of Brahms commences at 7:30 p.m. Sunday with the centerpiece being his Requiem, sung by the Chancel Choir of Peace Memorial Presbyterian Church in downtown Clearwater, Tim Wilborn conducting. Soloists are soprano Beth Daniels and baritone Edwardo Calcano. More Brahms on the program includes the Chorale Preludes, played by organist Kevin Johnson, and Sonata No. 3, played by violinist Eugene Bazhanov and pianist Olga Glick. Suggested donation is $7. Call (727) 446-3001.

YOUTH -- Two leading musical organizations for young people wind up their seasons with concerts on Sunday. The Pinellas Youth Symphony, led by Thomas Wilkins, plays music of Lalo, Gould, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and others at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Palladium Theater, St. Petersburg. Tickets are $5. Call the PYS hotline at (727) 438-3149.

The Tampa Bay Children's Chorus, directed by Averill Summer, sings music from Scotland and England (where the chorus has a summer tour) as well as other works at 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the Playhouse of TBPAC. Tickets are $8.50. Call (813) 229-7827. The chorus is currently auditioning singers. No experience is needed. Call (813) 988-8936, ext. 2.