Eva Barr premieres play in Albert Lea

By Geri McShane, Tribune Lifestyles Editor

The Albert Lea Civic Theatre will host the world premiere of an original play celebrating the lives of four Albert Lea residents next weekend.

Albert Lea native Eva Barr, in cooperation with the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council and Albert Lea Community Theatre, will present “Breakfast with Champions” Sept. 24 to 26. Performances will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday.

The play was written in cooperation with its primary subjects: Joanne Barr, Anne Ehrhardt, Nancy Hockenberry and Joan Muschler.

The playwright said she originally got the idea for the play at the funeral of Nancy Campbell, one of the founders of Albert Lea Community Theatre.

“I have admired these people for a long time,” Eva Barr said of her mother and her friends. “I thought it would be a beautiful thing to write an original play about these four people.”

All four of the women hail from different parts of the country and find themselves living in a small town in Minnesota. All have large families (between them 21 children and 43 grandchildren) and enduring marriages (199 years combined). They have a combined age of 294 years.

The common tie that draws them together is their involvement in community theatre. They’ve been in a combined 156 plays.

Barr said she began meeting with the women and had hours of taped interviews and notes to use in writing her play. The piece explores and celebrates life as a cycle composed of smaller cycles. The lives of these four women, all beginning before World War II, span a very particular era of change in America, and in particular the American woman’s experience.

“I’m confident it will be a moving experience,” Barr said.

Barr also shares a common thread with her subjects in that she’s enmeshed in being an artist in a small town herself.

She is a graduate of Northwestern University and co-founder of the Lookingglass Theatre Company of Chicago, an ensemble with the mission to keep live theatre vital in society. She now lives near Wykoff, and teaches drama classes and conducts school residencies and workshops.

She is also directing “Breakfast with Champions,” and has been making revisions as she’s gone along. It’s been great to have official support in the form of a grant, she said, adding that it lends the project legitimacy. “It’s also a great way to start ACT’s 40th season by offering something special.”

The women say it’s felt unusual to play themselves. “There’s a lot of difference playing myself on stage,” Hockenberry said.

“I’ve played a lot of characters that are sort of like me.”

Joanne Barr said her daughter was originally looking to do a play on pioneering or homesteading woman. “But we were as close as she could get,” she said with a chuckle.

Muschler said a couple of the women said getting together and talking while Barr did her research was a lot like therapy session.

“It was very therapeutic,” Ehrhardt said. “We’ve lived through a lot of changes.”

Husbands and other family members have been helping with the production as well. Bob Muschler has been working on the set. Jack Hockenberry has been working on the cereal boxes and some of the music, as have Margaret Ehrhardt and Tom Muschler.

“It will be interesting how the audience responds,” Hockenberry said.

The playwright said she hopes the play can be fully realized here. “We’ll see what happens,” she said. “I didn’t write this just for Albert Lea, although there are plenty of references to it. But it resonates on many different levels.

“But I will be thoroughly happy if it is appreciated by audiences here.”

General admission tickets for “Breakfast with Champions” are available from cast members or at the Civic Theatre, 147 N. Broadway. Call 377-4372 for more information.

(Contact Geri McShane at lifestyles@albertleatribune.com or 379-3436.)