The play
It is the last Friday night at the Lindahl Supper Club, a lakeside institution in a northern Wesconsin resort town, and nobody has told the regulars. Over one dinner service, which means 140 plates of fried walleye, a relish tray, and old fashioneds made the way they have been made since 1958, three generations of the Lindahl family argue about whether to sell to the developer across the lake, who is also a regular and is also, unfortunately, at table six.
The Supper Club is by Joanna Fjelstad, a Wesconsin playwright whose plays about small-town institutions have been staged around the state. Porter’s production is the play’s first university staging. It is funny for most of its length and then, in the last twenty minutes, it isn’t. Brekke joins the opening-weekend audience for a talkback after the Friday, October 16 performance.
Dates and tickets
| Date | Time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Thu, Oct 15 | 7:30 p.m. | Opening night |
| Fri, Oct 16 | 7:30 p.m. | Talkback with the playwright |
| Sat, Oct 17 | 7:30 p.m. | |
| Sun, Oct 18 | 2:00 p.m. | Open-captioned |
| Thu, Oct 22 | 7:30 p.m. | Audio-described |
| Fri, Oct 23 | 7:30 p.m. | Family Weekend |
| Sat, Oct 24 | 7:30 p.m. | Family Weekend; ASL-interpreted |
| Sun, Oct 25 | 2:00 p.m. | Relaxed performance |
Thorsen Theatre, Applied Arts Building, 312 seats. Tickets are $12 adult and $5 for seniors 65+, youth and other colleges’ students. Porter students get in free with a Porter Card if they reserve ahead. Buy at the box office. Family Weekend performances (see Family Weekend) usually sell out by mid-October.
Running time and content advisory
Running time: about 2 hours 10 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission. Late seating at the first scene break.
Content advisory: strong language throughout; on-stage drinking (prop beverages, real cherries); a non-graphic, sustained conversation about a parent’s dementia; a brief offstage kitchen fire suggested with sound and theatrical haze. Recommended for ages 13 and up. Scene-by-scene notes are available at the box office for anyone who wants to know exactly what to expect.
The company
- Director: Colin Ferris, professor of acting and directing
- Scenic design: Hannah Antonelli. The set is a working supper club bar, built in the Applied Arts wood shop by the Stagecraft class, with a lake view painted on muslin.
- Costume design: Bruno Brenner
- Lighting design: Amara Bergström, with a student assistant from Stage Lighting
- Stage manager: a senior in the theatre minor, majoring in supply chain management, who says the two jobs are the same job
- Cast: nine students. Four are theatre majors or minors, and the others study nursing, mechanical engineering, hospitality, apparel design and early childhood education.
The production crew of 22 includes eleven first-year students.
Around the production
The lobby display, built with the Furlong Gallery staff, collects matchbooks, menus and swizzle sticks lent by supper clubs in Porter County and by alumni. Several of the lenders are coming to the October 17 performance, and the cast has been warned. A lobby fish fry was proposed and declined: Facilities was clear about open frying in a theatre lobby. Instead, the student hospitality club sells relish trays and brandy-free old-fashioned sodas at intermission, with proceeds going to the theatre’s student travel fund.
Students in THEA 1000 Introduction to Theatre attend the October 22 performance as a class and stay for a short conversation with the designers about how a 312-seat proscenium stage was made to feel like a low-ceilinged dining room. Anyone with a ticket that night is welcome to stay. The season continues in February with What the Coulee Keeps.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. The Supper Club, its playwright, its supper club, cast, crew and performances are invented; there is no such play and no production to attend.