Youngblood Theatre Driven to ‘Arson’

This week, Youngblood Theatre Company debuts a feature-length drama by resident playwright Benjamin James Wilson. Drive Me to Arson is Wilson’s second play for Youngblood. Last year, the theater company debuted Wilson’s God Bridge, a journey into a strange world of ritual psychosis beneath an urban bridge. With Arson, Wilson explores similar territory of the psychologically unstable.

Loosely based on a poem by Rupert Brooke, Arson centers on Avery Cannon, a poet by day who engages in serial arson by night. Cannon finds himself in an endless waking dream, accompanied by his aggravated girlfriend, a psychiatrist, a patient of the psychiatrist, and a janitor. Like God Bridge, Wilson’s new play explores those on the margins of society, but their milieu is not the central focus of the play. “The characters can be seen as almost non sequitur,” Wilson says. “The motives are hidden and their actions are much more important than what they say.”

Drive Me to Arson started life as a one-act by Wilson. The play has been reworked specifically with the Minnesota Fringe Festival in mind—a few days after it closes here, it opens at the festival. Lillian Tillson, who directed God Bridge for Youngblood last year, will direct Arson. The show stars David Rothrock as Cannon. The compelling vulnerability Rothrock showed in Youngblood’s Red Light Winter should work well in the center of the action here. The ensemble includes Youngblood co-founder Tess Cinpinski as Cannon’s girlfriend, fellow co-founders Rich Gillard and Andrew Edwin Voss as the psychiatrist and his patient and Tommy Stevens as the janitor.

Youngblood’s Drive Me to Arson runs July 22-31 at the UW-Milwaukee Studio Theatre.

In addition to Arson, a pair of musicals opens this weekend. Off the WallTheatre’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale mutation Into theWoods begins July 22. Dale Gutzman is set to direct this production, which runs through Aug. 8.

The Greendale CommunityTheatre’s production of Hairspray also opens July 22. The regional community theater debut of this 2002 Broadway hit will benefit from the relatively sizable budget available to Greendale Community Theatre. Hairspray will feature costume design by Michael Keiley and Kate Vannoy, who have recently created some impressive design work for Carte Blanche. It will be interesting to see what they do with the bright, Technicolor world of this retro, ’60s musical. Hairspray runs through July 31.