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Greeks , But Not The Ones You Usually Expect At IU

two characters

As the play Sing to Me Now opens in IU's Wells-Metz Theatre the muse Calliope, Emily Harpe is center stage in scenic designer Kevin Nelson's lovingly fashioned ruined Greek temple. Calliope is the superior of the nine muses a figure of inspiration, justice and serenity, but you'd never know it from the mess the playwright Iris Dauterman has her in.

Calliope is overwhelmed. Her desk is piled with way too many pedestrian requests and way too little respect. Despite the sympathetic efforts of Sam Barkley as her friend, Mo, she's grouchy, short tempered and fed up with the humans that she's been serving for four thousand years.

The muses' realm is the world of imagination and dreams ,and it's in a dream that Yankee, the hard working Lauren Sagendorph finds her way to Calliope and becomes her intern. Dauterman's play has a neat way of mixing the ethereal with the too human…Yankee is an idealistic college grad who's been rejected for a counter job at a fast food establishment.

Things in the realm of the muses of Sing for Me Now are just awful. The ladies have been getting too close to the world and the lives that they're supposed to be inspiring and it's killing them. Sagendorf plays out a few of their stories from Calliope's dream memories. Clio the muse of history died in the fire that destroyed the library in Alexandria. Thalia the protector of comedy, depressed by WW I, disappeared into DaDa and absinthe.

Wandering in and out of the scenes is my favorite character, Calliope's charmingly ditzy mother Mnemosyne, Mara Lefler. Mnemosyne is cursed with the ability to see everything at once with no sense of time. Sometimes she's in the present, but often her mind simply wanders through her history. The only healthy figure in the old pantheon is Hades, "old doom and gloom" played nicely by John Putz.

The IU Theatre's technical expertise is very much on display in Sing to Me Now with sound design by composer Brad Berridge and light design by Bridget Williams. Matt Ebel worked out the lovely "Dream Jars" that Calliope and Yankee use to catch and release inspirations.

Both the playwright and her director Rob Heller clearly delight in puzzles, in hints and suggestions, in bringing the eternal magical and the temporal into human and all too human contact. If this is something you've been hoping for in the theatre for a while, you're in luck. Iris Dauterman's Sing to Me Now plays Mar 27, 31 and April 2,4 in IU's Wells-Metz Theatre. You can find an interview with the playwright at WFIU dot ORG.

At the theatre for you, I'm George Walker.

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