Professional actress Michèle LaRue will present a performance of Places, Please, Act One. Please join us 11 a.m. Friday, April 25, at Kidron Hall, Kidron Bethel Village, North Newton, KS.
This event is free and open to the public; no reservation or tickets required. Donations will be gratefully accepted.
Michèle will continue her visit to Newton on Saturday, April 26, with a performance of "The Bedquilt," 3 p.m. at Newton Public Library. For more information on that event, click here. (Free tickets for "The Bedquilt" will be available at the library starting April 1.)
About Places, Please, Act One:
Warren Kliewer called his theatre poems “a glimpse into the private lives of a public art form.” This exuberant spoken-word performance also glimpses into the private and public lives of the author, who grew up in rural Minnesota—in a community of German-speaking Mennonites whose values and traditions condemned frivolous secular pursuits.
Kliewer was a much-published poet and essayist before he ran away to join the theatre as actor, director, playwright, and producer. The conflicting pulls of those dramatic talents and his heritage inform these offerings. From a nightmare-ridden scenic designer to a day-dreaming gardener, from a bewildered New York playwright to a stubborn Kansas farm wife: these poems are tiny one-acts of compelling drama and insightful comedy.
The 35 poems in Places, Please, Act One call upon Michèle to portray 41 characters.
About Michèle LaRue:
Michèle LaRue (actress) was married to and worked with Warren Kliewer, onstage and off for over 27 years. Their joint credits—in New York City, on the road, and in regional theatre—include William Dean Howells’ Bride Roses, John Howard Payne and Washington Irving’s Charles II, Estelle Ritchie’s A New England Legend (a take on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter), and Gayle Stahlhuth’s adaptation of Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle.” Michèle and Warren toured for more than a decade with his staging of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, a solo work she continued to perform for years after his death. She still tours with their later collaboration, Marie Jenney Howe’s Someone Must Wash the Dishes: An Anti-Suffrage Satire. Encouraged by Warren’s example and mentorship, she’s created a repertoire of Tales Well Told: performances of stories by Gilded Age and Progressive Era writers. Newton Public Library will present two of those stories, as The Bedquilt, Saturday, April 26, 3 p.m. Michèle is a member of Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) and SAG-AFTRA. In her other profession, she has been a longtime writer and editor for New York’s Back Stage Weekly and Theatre Crafts. For Watson-Guptill among others, she’s edited books ranging from Memories of a Munchkin to Richard Pilbrow’s brilliant A Theatre Project
