The Rodney Dangerfield of Theater Companies
Image credit: Rose Theater
Drama Queen has been a little irritable lately. News like Libya and runaway legislators keeps her cranky and on edge. So when she gets it in her head that there must be a conspiracy against her "pet" theater, she doesn’t suffer quietly. The theater is Urban Samurai. She confesses to adopting this little group as her own love child after seeing a couple early productions.
DQ believes unabashedly that her Urban Samurai offers some of the best theater in town. They’re not perfect, but really, really good. They are a tight, multi-talented group of actors/artists and theater professionals who consistently push the envelope with new, edgy and socially challenging productions. The small company includes solid acting talent albeit with some gaps--a shortcoming they’ve recently been fixing by casting more outside talent.
And staging is obviously done on a shoestring budget, with sets sometimes resembling a Goodwill store display. But since Samurai tends to excel in scripts and performances, the set design really just needs to support the story by not distracting from it.
Yet audiences are often small and when it comes to award time, it’s as if they don’t exist. Drama Queen doesn’t understand why. She’s looking for reasons to explain this lack of respect because, like all mothers, she worries about her child’s future. Three possibilities arose in her mind, although there are surely more. First, is it the material? Samurai has done some brilliant scripts. But maybe they’re just too confrontational for nice Minnesotans. Or is it the Sabes Jewish Community Center venue? While it may be a little tricky to find the place – it’s at the end of a darkish residential street – the facility itself is nice. Or is it something personal? Who knows? Certainly DQ has no way of knowing.
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