This month, Milwaukee theater veterans Isabelle Kralj and Mark Anderson stage an adaptation of the ancient Greek legend of Electra in their Theatre Gigante production. It's a tale of revenge that has echoed throughout

 "When you want to know what grief means, remember me," Electra tells the Chorus of Female Slaves in The Oresteia, the 2,500-year-old dramatization by the Greek playwright Aeschylus of King Agamemnon's bloody

 Dreaming about something and living it are two completely different things. The fact that this premise has become a cliché is very telling about contemporary culture. Perfection is a moving target and we never seem satisfied. It's a deep-rooted cultural understanding that seems to be hammered into the very fabric

    There's a ladder in the background and a pile of simple wooden chairs on one edge of the thrust. Mark Anderson is dust mopping the floor of the stage at the Studio 508 Theatre in Kenilworth. The show's about to begin. As brief as it is, the show about to begin covers a good portion of everything in about an hour's worth of more or less uninterrupted stage time. It's actually kind of an inte...

Chance, circumstance and more than a bit of genius have made Thornton Wilder's Our Town one of the most influential American plays of all time. Nearly 75 years after its debut, the drama remains as popular as ever...

Theatre Gigante continued to show a playful sense of diversity in its programming this past weekend. The company has a delightful penchant for staging dazzling, little one-weekend shows that evaporate into memory almost as soon as they open. The latest show, staged at Studio 508 in UWM’s Kenilworth Building, was a celebration of the lives of the two of the most legendary figures in contemporar...

Walking in on a Theatre Gigante�production opening night is always kind of like opening a present. As the company does almost exclusively premieres of new material, one never knows what to expect. Walking in on The Lears, the set feels like a surprisingly satisfying video installation by Iain Court. The space looks like a stylized version of the inside of someone�s head�a massive video projec...

� I wish I would’ve had the presence of mind to do the theatre preview on Theatre Gigante’s show rather than the Skylight’s this week. There are a couple of reasons for this . . . the most selfish probably being that I’d like to have had the opportunity to have spent more time with the show. � Theatre Gigante’s�one-weekend only Three Other Sisters only has two more performances a of th...

Theatre Gigante’s  Man In A Magic Square only had a few performances. I had the pleasure of seeing the final one. A reasonably small crowd packed the Off Broadway Theatre on a brisk Saturday night. The stage was set with a few lamps of a number of different  styles and a few chairs. Theatre Gigante founder Isabelle Kralj addressed the audience from a darkened stage—just enough light to see p...