Candentia
Crave
Location + schedule
U of M Rarig Center Xperimental
330 21st Av S
| Date | Time | My Fringe | Access | Thursday 8/5 | 5:30 p.m. | Add | Saturday 8/7 | 10:00 p.m. | Add | Friday 8/13 | 5:30 p.m. | Add | Saturday 8/14 | 7:00 p.m. | Add | Sunday 8/15 | 2:30 p.m. | Add |
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About the show
Contains Adult language
For ages 16+
Drama, Relationships
Written by Sarah Kane
From Chicago, IL
http://candentia.squarespace.com/
Overall rating
Candentia Theatre Company and The Minnesota Fringe Festival present... Click on the link above to be directed to our home page!
CRAVE
by Sarah Kane
Abandon the typical with this lyrical tour de force on love. Leave this world of deep solitudes to go on a visceral quest for the true self in a valiant search for connection and hope.
Featuring: Sara Michelle Bickweat, Antonio Brunetti, Catherine Glynn and Joel Vining
330 21st Ave S, Minneapolis
$12 + $4 Admission button
Multi-show passes and discounts available
Tickets at fringefestival.org or call (866) 811-4111.
Visit www.candentia.com
Andrea Gail
Role: Director/ Producer
Andrea Gail (Director) is a Chicago-land native and Co-Founder of Candentia Theatre Company. Her whimsical need for travel has led her to New York, where she received her BFA in acting at Adelphi University, across the pond to E15 Drama School (University of Essex) in London where she received her MA in directing, and to the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS) in Moscow for Master Classes. When Andrea isn't directing, producing or learning, she can be found exploring the amazing Chicago culinary scene, doing a crossword puzzle, or hanging out with the monster machine Gabeeliliamaddy.
Sara Michelle Bickweat
Role: Actor/ Producer
Sara Michelle Bickweat is excited to be making her debut at the Minnesota Fringe with Candentia Theatre Company's Production of CRAVE. Sara is a native of Rochester, NY and after nine years studying and working in New York City she is happy to call Chicago her new home base. Her most recent work includes working with this year's Jeff Recommended production of "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" at Circle Theatre (Feb- Jun '10) and "Honky Tonk Angels" at The Old Creamery Theatre this Christmas Season. Some of her New York Credits Include "Man of La Mancha" With The SI Philharmonic (St. George Theatre), "SCROOGE" with Martin Van Treuren, "The Secret Garden" directed by Norb Joerder; "Heart In the Ground", "Metamorphoses" (Westbeth Theater). She has worked with The Actors Studio, TIC Theater Company, Dixon Place, New Dramatists, Manhattan Theater Source and many others. She holds an BFA from Webster U and Adelphi U and an MFA in Acting from New School University. She has appeared in numerous independent films and teaches Voice and Movement & Speech on the Acting Faculty at New York Film Academy. Thank you to her friends and family and Josh for all their continued love and support. Thanks to Andrea her partner and friend on this wild ride.
Antonio Brunetti
Role: Actor
Antonio considers it a thrilling challenge to perform in this production of “Crave” and is quite excited about it " as well as traveling to Minneapolis to do it. Antonio was last seen in “Chaste” with Trap Door Theatre, where he is a company member. Other recent Chicago credits include “G.I.F.T.” with Collaboraction; “Feats of Strength” with Dramatis Personae and “Anung’s First American Christmas” with Vitalist Theatre.Antonio returned to Chicago, where he was born and raised, in 2008, after almost six years living and working in Europe. Stage and film credits there include “Oleanna” and “The Glass Menagerie” with Altesschauspielhaus in Stuttgart, Germany; “Fool for Love” at the 100 Grad Festival in Berlin Germany; “The Graduate” at the StuttgartTheatre Center; a german-language production of “Macbeth” in Friedrichshafen,Germany; a pilot episode of “The Report” in Antwerpen, Belgium and the shortfilm “The Chronoscope” in Dublin, Ireland.
Catherine Glynn
Role: Actor
Catherine Glynn is delighted to be making her debut at the Minnesota Fringe with Candentia Theatre. She's a native of Southwest Minneapolis and is very happy to be back home! She currently resides in Chicago and is an Associate with Collaboraction Theatre. Her most recent work includes dancing at the Chicago Institute of Art's Modern Wing in their After Dark Series-Sound & Vision and Light Me Black, and devising and performing in G.I.F.T. (with Collaboraction) as well as About Face Theatre's production of The Big Tent (at Sketchbook '09.) Other notable adventures have included studying in Toga Mura, Japan and performing in Tadashi Suzuki's Oedipus Rex, and meeting her husband, Jeremy van Meter, at the Riverside Shakespeare Festival while performing in Romeo & Juliet & Comedy of Errors. She cobbles together her living as a commercial actress, a designer, and as an executive speech coach at Voce Veritas (http://www.voceveritas.com) Catherine is a graduate of the College of St. Benedict in Humanities, and both UT-Austin & The University of Delaware's MFA programs. She's a proud member of AEA and is very grateful to her family and friends for their constant love & support. Special love goes out to Antonio for getting her on board, and to Jeremy for telling her to set sail.
Joel Vining
Role: Actor
Joel Vining is a graduate of Western Connecticut State University. He has also studied at Second City and Acting Studio Chicago. Joel has most recently been seen in “Ambrose Bierce: Tales and Times“ with Lincoln Square Theatre and “Letters From Cuba” with Halcyon Theatre . This is Joel’s first appearance with Candentia. Thanks to everybody for this opportunity.
User reviews
Look! Listen!
by Scott Pakudaitis Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
This dense script was beautifully executed. The characters interweave their cravings among themselves with text and movement. The performance was filled with raw emotion. This play is not for everyone - its style is nonlinear and there is no plot. It's a perfect show for the Fringe.
Worthwhile
by M.A. Gavin Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
Sarah Kane is something of an acquired taste. She was a difficult but intriguing playwright, whose dense writing excited some and alienated others. This production is a fine rendering of this play, staged and performed with real commitment. It's a nice and challenging respite from the broad humor that characterizes so much of the Fringe.
Intriguing
by Ahmed N8 Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
The criss-crossing interactions of the four characters created a complex, shifting emotional and intellectual scape. This play requires that one pay close attention but that is what makes it enjoyable.
The Poetics of Romance
by Jesse Field Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
This is a really ambitious show that takes poetry, movement, and acting all very seriously. On the other hand, I'm not sure it counts as "drama" because there are no characters or story per se. It's certainly not for everybody.
First, poetry. One quote I found on the internet goes,
"...don’t say no to me you can’t say no to me because it’s such a relief to have love again and to lie in bed and be held and touched and kissed and adored and your heart will leap when you hear my voice and see my smile and feel my breath on your neck and your heart will race when I want to see you and I will lie to you from day one and use you and screw you and break your heart because you broke mine first and you will love me more each day until the weight is unbearable and your life is mine and you’ll die alone because I will take what I want then walk away and owe you nothing it’s always there its always been there and you cannot deny the life you feel fuck that life fuck that life fuck that life fuck that life I have lost you now."
Much of the play is like this. Not dialogue at all, really, but interthreaded monologues on the deep "craving" for communication and company -- love. The language is filled with hints of pop songs, T.S. Eliot, the Bible, Shakespeare. Clearly the writer was a serious reader and wordsmith -- to find out it was a 20-something-year-old is a shock, because the maturity of the poetic voice is so there. This is probably the best feature of "Crave," and if you fancy yourself a poetry geek or are curious to see some modern English poetry of very decent quality, then this may make the whole show worth it for you.
It would be a disservice to call it a poetry reading though, as the play is filled movement. The Candentia cast clearly approached the work with the love it deserves, swooping in ritualistically to establish a theatrical space of great power from the beginning. They all remain on stage through the whole show, moving constantly: waltzing, pacing, waving their arms, flowing in and among each other at the four corners of the minimalist set. They pace us through crescendoes and decreschendoes, then bring it all down to a ritualistic parting. It all has the character of a weird demonic dream, kind of like "Night on Bald Mountain" or "Danse Macabre" do for classical music.
Bringing the poetry and the movement together is a certain style of speaking which I cannot call "dialogue" because it almost never works as one person talking to another and then another person responds. Rather, they talk at each other, past each other. They talk together as a chorus in round form (1. "Yes"! 2. "Yes." 3. "Yes?" 4. "No."). Antonio Brunetti shined most brightly for me, particularly in a solo he puts in on the progress of a romantic engagement, from its beginning in the bliss of limerence to the transformations, profound and banal, that inevitably makes us wonder if we can ever truly connect with another human being.
These are all wonderful features of a striking, even startling literary voice, Sarah Kane, 1971-1999. Sarah's combination of poetic voice and theatrical vision is so exciting, one just tears up to think what she could have created if she had lived on. But she did not, and there are many signs that this piece is by a young person whose chief concern is, mistakenly, the maddening variety and mystery of romantic love. My engagement with this fairly adolescent sentiment peaked with Antonio Brunetti's long solo, and then began to decline. Before the hour is over, I was thinking "there really is more to life than romantic love, after all. There's friendship, and art, and blue skies, and the world. There is war, and politics, and the world. What is this, some kind of poem by a depressed, genius teenager?"
Apparently it sort of is. Also, as other reviewers have noted, you won't like it if you want a story. I was intrigued at first that the inciting incident of the "plot" was multiple, and vague. Rape? Pregnancy? Need in a general sense? But I kept trying to learn who these characters were, what crises they were building up towards. I didn't figure it out, because there is no answer. From a dramatic point of view, this is not the Aristotelian story structure, but more like a set of really hard acting exercises, every scene its own particular crisis. Fun for young actors, no doubt, but wearying for an audience. So know that if you go and see this show. Try to identify with poetry and theatre as crafts, and you'll see why writers and performers probably tend to enjoy the show.
What do you crave?
by Chris Young Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
If you want a show that follows a linear path, with a clearly defined plot this is not the show for you. This plot is as tangled as they come with a very complex dialog and multiple character identities. This was a blatently sexual play with the cast blasting the audience with powerful almost brutally so emotions. It was rather hard to follow, but I couldn't help but be dragged into the emotional abyss created.
Ouch!
by David Trudeau Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
This spectacularly executed play is so filled with hopelessness and frustration and pain that the line "the absence of grief is sometimes mistaken for ecstasy" seems to be the resolution after a forty five minute crisis of anguished intense unrequited love, lust, drug hunger, PTSD, mistrust and general relationship failure. The author, we are told in the program, was clinically depressed and suicided. The play ends with a suicide of sorts with the characters giving up on each other and themselves, returning to the silent catatonic and yet conflict free isolation from whence they came at the start. Seeing this play is like reading Plathe. One asks where is awe, joy, altruism, humor, appreciation, caring? After seeing Crave I had a distinct craving for these because they are so totally, starkly absent in this dark night of a play. If you see it plan on some provocative and unsettling responses that may require hours of discussion. None of this would happen without the brilliant acting. Antonio Brunetti channels Robin Williams and is superb.
Well done folks, well done.
by Terra Zosel Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
A beautifully manipulative and overtly sexual play. Complex dialogue with multiple character identities are exquisitely executed by the very attractive cast. The sparse set allows for the clear direction to illuminate the empty space. Well done folks, well done.
Excellent Performance
by Richard Heise Follow this reviewer
Rating 5 kitties
Very complex story, difficult to comprehend. Cast did a superb job of reflecting character modes and personalities.
What is craved?
by evelyn blum Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
Edgy, fast moving, exclamations of what is craved, how one reacts to that which is craved. Was this show about drugs, addiction, wants needs, biological clocks, love, hate, relationships, breakups and more? Yes, if you allow yourself to be taken in by your own view, and not need a traditional plot driven show, this is a show for you! I would love to take a poll of people leaving it and ask them, what was this show about? I bet, you would get a list long of differences, for we all crave different things.
Everybody wants a bit too much
by Fringivitis Vulgaris Follow this reviewer
Rating 4 kitties
The strong emotions of the characters are delivered in snippets and exclamations. The story isn't linear, it's as tangled as the guts of the conflicted coveters. If you need a clear plot and well defined heroes/villains, the show will frustrate. Those beauty of this show is in its brutally strong emotions and the verbal choreography. The craving is for whatever Makes Things Better, however temporary.
