The Minutes Reviews - Theatre In Chicago - Play Reviews Michelle Obama and Bruce Springsteen Tore Up the Stage with Glory Days. The Minutes, by Tracy Letts - The Pulitzer Prizes The high school football team? But messy is too mild a word for the goings-on in The Minutes,opening tonight on Broadway. Tracy Letts political satire and haunted history lesson, Broadway Cheap Seats: How to Get Discount Tickets to Spring 2022 Theater, Broadway Nixes Vax Chex, Keeps Masks. Tracy Letts was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for August: Osage County which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2007 and later played on Broadway, at London's National Theatre, and at theatres around the United States and internationally. Carrie Coon and Namir Smallwood in the Steppenwolf production of Lettss Bug.. (Those moments also indicate why Armie Hammer, the original Mr Peel, accused by. Critics' picks for spring dance, theater, music and art, Insights and reporting on the people behind the news, Tracy Letts skewers Americas shames in stunning debut of The Minutes, Theater is more than ready for a springtime reseeding, Opera returns, trios emerge and all-stars abound as the classical world comes back in full bloom, Its all stops out again in the museum world, with show years in the making on tap, Inside a sweaty D.C. media tradition: Getting the cool kids to sit with you at nerd prom, In Arizona, new TV deal for Suns and Mercury is decidedly old school. . Review: In 'The Minutes,' Tracy Letts skewers America's shames - The In "The Minutes," Tracy Letts's scathing new comedy about small-town politics and real-world power, the writer who brought you "August: Osage County" exposes the ugliness behind some of our most closely-held American narratives while asking each of us what we would do to keep from becoming history's losers. American Buffalo review David Mamet returns to Broadway with a thud, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. The American experiment, Letts suggests, is a devils bargain, which the final moments nudge toward the literal. ", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Minutes_(play)&oldid=1133667320, A city council meeting room in Big Cherry; November, Outstanding Scenic Design (Play or Musical), Outstanding Lighting Design (Play or Musical), Outstanding Sound Design (Play or Musical), This page was last edited on 14 January 2023, at 23:31. The Minutes by Tracy Letts CHARACTERS: MR. PEELMAYOR SUPERBAMS. Paperback - March 7 2023. But "The Minutes" manages to be both a hilarious satire, and a harsh history lesson that's indistinguishable from a horror story. Letts has arguably prepared us with subtle little jabs throughout the play. They require revealing and so does the furious backlash that inevitably greets attempts to do so. The Minutes. Yet Letts, a master of the American Macabre, makes something quite different of these middling workplace comedy ingredients: not a Parks and Recreation, nor even a Miles for Mary, but a deeply troubling play about history and horror. And in truth, the show is never all that dull, in part because Anna D Shapiro, the outgoing artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre, has a true-blue acumen for pinpointing the talents of her cast, most of them Steppenwolf veterans, who wring the blood and plasma from each motion and vote. Well, I suppose you are. Now that Mr. Peel is back in their chamber, the other councilors are being weirdly cagey about whatever happened the previous week, and they refuse to distribute that meetings minutes. Director Anna D. Shapiro heightens the atmosphere of suspense with thunder and lightning (its raining outside), and the flickering and occasional shutdown of the fluorescent lights inside, which only Mr. Peel seems to notice. A cheesy effort at democratic grandeur is also a good description of many of the 11 characters in The Minutes. The cast, a starry ensemble, deliciously capturesthe pettiness, pomposity, self-dealing and general surreal lunacy of local politicos when they meet, with only the slightest of comic underscoring as anybody who has attended any such meetings in real life can attest. 'The Minutes' Is a Political Parable Become Prophecy | Observer The design team and several members of the cast from the Chicago production signed on, though Slusher was replaced with Blair Brown, Chamberlain assumed Anderson's role and was replaced with Armie Hammer, Meredith was replaced with K. Todd Freeman, Petersen was replaced with Tracy Letts (also the playwright), Burch was replaced with Jessie Mueller, and Guinan was replaced with Austin Pendleton. The Minutes, the record-breaking hit production from Steppenwolf Theatre Company, takes a hard look at the inner workings of a city council meeting and the hypocrisy, greed and ambition that. But the questions Letts poses what are you willing to do, what are you willing to ignore, what are you willing to forget to preserve your cocoon of comfort? His touch is so perfect and light when hes doing realism that reality obliged and caught up to him. Reid already beloved from his role on Schitts Creek and new to Broadway has the wide eyes of a rookie; some of the drifting menace in the room is our vicarious sense of what it feels like to be a young actor with a thousand years of collected theatrical experience arrayed before him. To go in knowing little or . Armie Hammer and Tracy Letts in The Minutes Michael Brosilow. SETTING: A city council meeting room And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud,and was buried in the blizzard. White People - J. T. Rogers 2006 . But Letts insists the idea for the The Minutes came well before Trumps election, as he watched the national rancor build leading up to the 2016 campaign. What is happening in local city councils, school boards, libraries, and state legislatures the book banning, curriculum censorship, voter suppression, the passage ofblatantly unconstitutional culture war laws has made Letts play feel less like allegory and more like a prescient dramatization, if one filtered through the playwrights imagination, sense of humor and sense of outrage. Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like Dickens, hes a connoisseur of folly he rolls human silliness against his palate as if hes testing it for notes of stone fruit.