![]() That’s because Letts positions The Minutes as allegory – shades of The Crucible or The Lottery or Enemy of the People. And the title itself holds the solution.) But even this revelation is largely beside the point. Why? What happened at the last council meeting will of course be revealed later on. The high school football team? They’re called the Savages. Yet even in the bland first half, hints of something darker persist. 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. ![]() Here’s one: that character is named Mr Oldfield. Many are at the expense of the council’s most senior member, a dodderer played by the beloved Austin Pendleton. There are jokes, sure, though few of them seem especially effortful. On the hyperlocal level, it involves a lot of speechifying, box-ticking, procedure for procedure’s sake. Because wheels of democracy – as anyone who has stuck with C-Span for more than a few minutes can attest – tend to roll slowly, when they don’t get stuck in the mud. Not Letts’s Mayor Superba, not Jessie Mueller’s clerk, not any other member.įor long stretches, The Minutes, is dull, which Letts seems to intend as a feature, not a bug. Where is his friend Mr Carp? And why have the previous minutes not been distributed? But no one is talking. Peel had to miss the last council meeting – he left town to attend his mother’s funeral – and he enters this one slightly confused. He is also, significantly, an incomer, brought to this particular small town, Big Cherry, by his wife. Letts watched over 100 hours of council meetings on YouTube to write The Minutes.Our guide for the evening is Mr Peel (Noah Reid of Schitt’s Creek), a pediatric dentist and a new electee.However, said the playwright, “He was not free to do our production, so I wound up taking the part.” William Petersen, who originated the role in Chicago, was Letts’s first choice. Letts wasn’t intended to also star in his show. ![]() Shapiro also helmed the Broadway production of Letts’s August: Osage County. The Minutes had its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where writer Tracy Letts has worked numerous times as an actor and where his Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County premiered.Get The Minutes Broadway tickets on TodayTix. The Chicago Tribune warns audiences: “Nothing in this explosive 90-minute drama is as it seems.” Playwright Tracy Letts stars in his new play about hypocrisy and greed, which premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2017 and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Peel, a newly elected member - who missed the last meeting - can’t get his hands on the minutes to find out what ensued in his absence. ![]() Maybe the war of words could have something to do with what happened at the council’s last gathering. Small arguments over petty problems turn into an explosive battle of underlying issues in the The Minutes play. The Minutes tickets will be available soon. However, in The Minutes, the small town of Big Cherry is turned upside down when the council members’ true colors emerge. It was supposed to be just another city council meeting.
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