Why They Invented Dancing
Uma Productions

Premiered at Chopin Theatre; selected for New York Fringe Festival

"The libidinous European guy who's hitting on her is having an affair with her mother (and wouldn't mind having one with her brother's girlfriend as well), her friend is kinda sorta in a lesbian relationship with the singer in the local watering hole and her father is dating a younger man. It's no small wonder Tessa (Kate McDermott) is ready to give up not only on men but love. Enter James (John Zinn), who falls madly in love with her on the spot, and seems like the only one who even knows what love is....


10/12/02 - 11/09/02


"The libidinous European guy who's hitting on her is having an affair with her mother (and wouldn't mind having one with her brother's girlfriend as well), her friend is kinda sorta in a lesbian relationship with the singer in the local watering hole and her father is dating a younger man. It's no small wonder Tessa (Kate McDermott) is ready to give up not only on men but love. Enter James (John Zinn), who falls madly in love with her on the spot, and seems like the only one who even knows what love is....
This is the basic setup for Chicago's Umalleniay Productions' Why They Invented Dancing. Weaving together text borrowed from four Chuck Mee plays about love, it's a charming, witty, thoughtful and highly original stab at defining the elusive term. Ten cast members are uniformly strong fleshing out the criss-crossing relationships while an older couple do a fine job punctuating the goings-on with excerpts from the park bench scenes in First Love (which those who saw the New York Theatre Workshop production will remember with Fred Neumann and Ruth Maleczeck). Elaine Robinson sings a host of popular songs, everyone (naturally) dances and Mikhael Garver (who also adapted it with cast member James Estabrook) stages the whole thing remarkably well". www.curtainup.com

?Why They Invented Dancing, Umalleniay Productions, at the Chopin Theatre. The best and worst tendencies of Charles L. Mee were on display in two productions last weekend. Anne Bogart's SITI Company blazed in Mee's joyous Bobrauschenbergamerica, which explores the pop artist's work by creating collages of American iconography, both light and dark. Meanwhile, Umalleniay's Mikhael Garver and Jim Hornor have created their own collage out of Mee's so-called love plays: Summertime, Wintertime, First Love, and Big Love (though little of the latter is discernible).
Quite bluntly, when Mee isn't riffing off work created by another artist--whether Rauschenberg or Aeschylus, the source of Big Love--he simply isn't that interesting. His observations on passion, obsession, romance, and infidelity begin to resemble assembly-line fortunes in stale cookies. Garver's muscular staging is certainly inventive, though it would be stronger if some of the repetition were cut and the intermission eliminated. Scenic designers Alison Siple and Andrew Sopko have cleverly converted the Chopin studio into a kind of pop art cabaret. Kate McDermott delivers a solid, grounded performance as Tessa, the sane daughter in a family of drama queens, and John Zinn brings understated charm to James, the young man who's fallen in love with her. But the senior lovers from First Love (Philip Carlin and Julie Mitre) serve mostly as cutesy-pie old folks sitting on the sidelines, which gives Mee's already thin writing an unfortunate sitcom air.? Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader October 25, 2002

"a new work by Mikhael Garver and Jim Hornor inspired by Charles Mee "love plays." Chicago Sun-Times

Author
MIkhael Garver, Jim Hornor; Adapted Charles Mee

Director
Mikhael Garver

Performers
Paul Gialorenzo, Steven Tod, Michael Armstrong, Alexis McNab, Manny Capozzi, Philip Carlin, Kate McDermott, John Zinn, Julie Mitre, Dan Forsythe, Amanda Christensen, Evelyn Hubbel, Elaine Robinson, Jenna Hastings, Jason Brouwer, Bryant Keeling, Derek Gaspar

Production
Paul Giallorenzo, Lesley Boeckman, Alison Siple, Andrew Sopko, Ellen Willet, Kimberly Kelly

Tags: Theater, American, 2002