Another Kind of Love Infusion Theatre

Three Stars - "Skillman has crafted a poignant portrait of a family"! - Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune

Recommended -  "A female-driven punk-rock masterpiece"! - Chloe Riley, Chicago Reader

"An unapologetic, electrified, darkly funny look at a family of rock musicians"! - Erin Fleming, ChicagolandMusicalTheatre.com

Thu-Sat 730p; Sun 3p

 

Tickets: $15 (Stud./Ind.); $20 (seniors); $28


May 2015 - June 2015

Thu-Sat 730p; Sun 3p


Three Stars - All-girl rock mythology in 'Another Kind of Love: A Punk Rock Play' - Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune 5/20/15 - "The recent HBO documentary "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck" gave a piquant and forlorn glimpse into the tortured soul of the Nirvana frontman. But though Cobain and Courtney Love's daughter, Frances Bean, served as a producer on the film, we only saw her on screen as an infant, not as a young woman today dealing with that complicated parental legacy.

Featuring an original punk-inflected score by Heidi Rodewald (who composed the music for Stew's celebrated musical autobiography "Passing Strange"),  "Another Kind of Love" takes place 15 years after the suicide in Olympia, Wash., of rock mama Melanie Singer. Her three daughters, who performed together for a while as the Dark Hearts (any similarity to Joan Jett's Black Hearts, as well as to Jett's first all-girl band, the Runaways, seems intentional) are reuniting for one night only. Well, more if avaricious former bandmate-manager Roger (Brady Johnson) can pull it off.

It's more a play with music than a musical, but director Mitch Golob and musical director Jefferey Allen Thomas of Mucca Pazza mostly integrate the songs — from rough rehearsal snippets to fuller performances — without pulling from the emotional arc. (The high-ceilinged Chopin space is a bit unforgiving on dialogue from time to time, however.)

Kit (Annie Prichard) is the one who ran away to stardom. Tanya (Courtney Jones) is the one who stayed home, got clean (or clean-ish), and raised her daughter, Max (Alison Hixon), away from the limelight. Fifteen-year-old Max desperately wants to sing her own songs and has sent homemade demos created with the help of her sorta-boyfriend, Nate, (Tyler Young) to her famous-but-troubled aunt. Baby sister Collin (Amber Kelly) longs to get another bite at the apple and resents the drama of her older sisters' conflicts for getting in the way of rekindling that dream.

Skillman's script — she and Caroline Dorsen also collaborated on the lyrics — mostly threads the needle between earnest and acerbic, as the best punk-rock songs do. And the songs themselves neatly capture the full-throated, full-throttle expression of all the ugly mess taking up space in the characters' psyches. Skillman also has a keen but subtle sense of generational difference — both Max and Nate (especially the latter) understand the infrastructure of the music industry has changed since grandma's day. Why wait for a record deal when you can shoot a video in rehearsal and send it out immediately?

There are some shaggy moments — despite his oily charm, Johnson's fake-Brit Roger and his machinations get a little too much attention for my taste. And I wanted to hear a bit more about the Singer sisters' back story, growing up with the ghost of a mother reduced to a guitar and a record on the wall. But ultimately Skillman has crafted a poignant portrait of a family that can't run away from its own desires or demons — they simply have to learn how to find new songs for old pain".


 

InFusion Theatre delivers a female-driven punk rock masterpiece - Riot grrrls come to terms with
 the past in Another Kind of Love, with music from Crystal Skillman and Heidi Rodewald -
Chloe Riley, Chicago Reader 5/21/15 - "Life isn't about avoiding pain but plumbing its depths and managing the results wails Another Kind of Love, a female-driven punk-rock masterpiece by Crystal Skillman, now receiving a debut production from InFusion Theatre Company. Maybe masterpiece isn't quite the right word—it suggests something lofty and out of reach, where this play banks on raw and accessible if festering emotions.  But an artistic achievement it is.

The Brooklyn-based Skillman has previously tackled angsty relationships and paid fan-girl tributes, but this time she gives us sisters, those lovable/hateful creatures simultaneously in each other's arms and at each other's throats. Here there are three of them, ex-members  of a Riot Grrrl-era band, now in their 30s and struggling to find a way forward. The oldest, Tanya, stayed in Seattle's suburbia with her 15-year-old daughter, Max, while the others, Kit and Collin, cashed in on fame to varying degrees. They haven't seen each other since the band broke up, but after urgings from Max—herself a punk rocker in the making—the sisters reunite on the anniversary of their rock-star mother's suicide.

That's the premise for the play Skillman started work on three years ago, which until February lacked another critical component: live music.  Then she ran into composer Heidi Rodewald, who with her collaborator Stew had success with the Tony-nominated Passing Strange (2008) and last year's Family Album, both shows about older rockers trying to navigate the wild unknowns of middle age. Rodewald's organic, reverb-laced songs sound like they come from someone who's actually played in a band (she has) while still taking into account a wider audience whose relationship with grunge may not go beyond Nirvana. Rehearsal involved a month of band practice before scene work even began.

The women of this remarkable cast are badasses, their acting as fierce as their guitar shredding. And while all the proper nods to  90s punk are in place—Cobain, Bikini Kill, Unwound—this isn't a play about punk rock. It isn't even a play about women, at least not  according to Skillman, who maintains that the sisters represent the sheer power of discovering one's artistic voice. In Max we have something of an anomaly: she's an underage girl who drinks, skips school, talks openly about sex, and amazingly, this play doesn't  punish her for any of that. Max doesn't pride herself on her relation to her mother, father, boyfriend—her greatest connection is to herself. Her pain comes not out of familial absence but out of what she's yet to come to terms with internally. She wants fame, but more importantly she wants autonomy. We watch, praying she gets it.

Skillman jokes that while in rehearsals for her 2012 play Wild, the crew used to tally the show's F-bombs—more than 300, they estimated.  There could easily be that many and more here, another refreshing deviation from a gendered norm. The show's fucks represent a freedom  of their own—the uninhibited women who utter them don't give one. As Bikini Kill once screamed, "Does it scare you boy that we don't need you? Us punk rock whores don't need you."

 

 


Another Kind of Love/Infusion Theatre - Alex Huntsberger, NewCity Chicago 5/25/15 - "There’s a problem sometimes at music festivals where you’re too far away from the band to hear them. Sometimes it’s because you didn’t get there early enough to get a good spot. Sometimes it’s because the amplification at said festival really sucks. But other times it’s because the band’s sound just isn’t made for a large festival stage. They are best-suited to playing clubs, not arenas.

This same problem plagues InFusion Theatre Company’s “Another Kind of Love.” Performing in the Chopin Theatre’s main space, with its high ceilings and deep stage, the director and actors fail to bring a show that can fill it. Voices drift up into the rafters and stick there. Performances are flattened out till they become a kind of pizzicato monotone.

Written by playwright Crystal Skillman with original songs by “Passing Strange” co-writer Heidi Rodewald, the play follows the living room reunion of three ex-bandmate sisters: lead guitarist Kit (Annie Prichard), drummer Collin (Amber Kelly), and bassist Tanya (Courtney Jones). Their mother, Melanie Singer, was a famous rock star in her own right before committing suicide when the girls were young. (Set in Olympia Washington, the play leans into its Kurt Cobain parallels.) Their band, Dark Hearts, is reuniting to play a one-off benefit concert commemorating their mother’s death. Tanya, fifteen years sober, hasn’t picked up a bass in just as long, focusing instead on raising her daughter Max (Alison Hixon) who nonetheless fancies herself an aspiring rock goddess and worships her aunt Kit.

Skillman has created a fun family reckoning even if the musical aspects feel a bit like “Behind The Music” clichés. And the show could definitely use more of Rodewald’s dark, grungy anthems.

But it’s director Mitch Golob who hides the performers behind a wide wooden deck—used for the concert finale—that puts them at too much of a distance. A lack of shape to the scenes and the individual character arcs, sacrificed for what seems like a punk-infused emphasis on speedy dialogue, only heightens this disconnect. The audience is left stranded at the back of the crowd, straining to hear the music".


Infusion's "Love" child is a funny, eclectic, insightful punk - Erin Fleming, www.ChicagolandMusicalTheatre.com -

"InFusion Theatre’s Another Kind of Love is an unapologetic, electrified, darkly funny look at a family of rock musicians that takes on some timeless questions:  What control do parents have over the legacy they leave their children? Why does it seem that despite parents’ best efforts, children are destined to imitate their parents’ mistakes and inherit their faults? And then there’s that age-old dilemma: Should a defunct sister-band perform their rock legend mother’s most famous song during the concert honoring the anniversary of her fatal heroin overdose?

Who hasn’t grappled with that?

In 1990, Melanie Singer burned out instead of fading away, leaving her three daughters, Kit, Tanya and Collin to make their own way in the world.  They chose her world, forming their own punk-rock sister act, “The Dark Hearts,” in 1998, which lasted a few years until Kit went out to begin a slightly more successful musical career on her own, breaking up the act and the family.

Now, after 15 years apart, Kit is back in town, and the sisters are reuniting for a Melanie Singer tribute concert. There is talk about re-forming  “The Dark Hearts,” as well as public outcry for the three to perform their mother’s final song at the concert. And there is Max, Tanya’s 15-year old daughter, an aspiring guitarist and songwriter who wants nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of her famous Aunt Kit and the grandmother she never met. It is a pressure-cooker of nostalgia, grief, resentment and anger.

There is something refreshingly old school about a straightforward family drama, and something instantly compelling about the dynamics among three sisters. Dramatists drink from this well again and again, from Shakespeare’s King Lear and  Chekov’s The Three Sisters to Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart and The Brady Bunch, writers are fascinated with the competitions and conflicts that come up in a triangle of siblings, and so are audiences. Maybe because out of the interplay between “Firstborn”, “Middle Child” and “The Baby,”everyone of us can identify with
at least one of them. These iconic relationships are so familiar that stories about them risk becoming formulaic. Playwright Crystal Skillman and Director Mitch Golob gamble with that risk and come out big winners.

Most of that win is due to an extraordinary ensemble cast, but part of it has to be attributed to setting this story in the world of punk rock, the appropriate back drop for all this raw emotion. Another Kind of Love is a play with music, rather than a musical, so there isn’t a song in  every scene, but the audience gets to see how the family communicates most easily when they are playing together. And it gets to experience the cathartic release of a hypnotic baseline, unrelenting drumbeat and loud-as-hell guitar and vocals along with the characters when they rock out. And the audience needs that release, because Sisters. Don’t. Play. Fair.

Fifteen years may have passed, but here in their family home, the sisters pick up right where they left off. They are brutally funny with their barbs. They push each others’ buttons; they talk at each other instead of to each other. They jab, blame, deflect, rinse and repeat. All this provides great contrast to tender moments where they vulnerably ask for each others’ approval and forgiveness. In a family of musicians, the  most dangerous question might be “What do you think of my song?” They seek the impossible prize of their mother’s attention the only way they can get it: through each other.

Courtney Jones is heartbreaking as the hard-candy shelled Tanya, the older sister left holding the bag of family responsibility at the expense of her own dreams. Patrons melt with her as she desperately tries to steer her daughter away from following in her footsteps, all the while  repeating her own mother’s mistakes.

As Kit, the prodigal rebel who gets out and makes something of her life, only to find it unrewarding, Annie Prichard brings a likeability that  audience members almost resent feeling despite themselves. It’s easy to see why her niece idolizes her. She’s selfish. She’s tortured. She’s  reluctanly beautiful. She’s badass. She’s everything we want in a rock star. Her brooding finds a nice foil in Amber Kelly’s exuberant Collin. 


Kelly injects energy and humor into her scenes, forcing the pace when it’s needed, like any good drummer. She is especially delightful when she’s screaming at her family to actually express their ANGERRRRRR.

Brady Johnson is hilarious as Roger – a former professional and personal collaborator of the sisters, pushing for all kinds of reunions. His motivations are a bit suspect, but he’s only fooling himself. The Singers have his number and ultimately decide what to let him get away with, which infuses humor even when he is at his most creepy and swarmy toward teenage Max.

In contrast, Tyler Young’s Nate is endearingly earnest and equally as funny as Max’s boyfriend. We root for him to break through Max’s doubts and insecurities. These actors hold their own in what is clearly a woman’s world. Romantic relationships take a distant backseat to family, art and career.

And then, as Max, Alison Hixon steals the audience’s dark hearts. From the first moment she’s seen trying to master a challenging guitar riff, she is exhaustingly authentic as a young woman bursting with ambition, searching frantically for the direction to match that ambition. On  opening night, her last word, the final line in the play, elicited gasps from more than one audience member.

Details in the set and costumes will reward those who look for them. The women dress in classic rock armour of tattered jeans and black boots,  signaling just how little they care about what anyone thinks of them. Where another family might hang a picture of their mother, the Singer’s  walls are adorned with Melanie’s guitar and framed vinyl albums of what are assumed to be her hit records – relics of her fame and public persona.   And, for all of Max’s protestations that she wants to be more like her Aunt Kit, the rock star, and less like her mother Tanya, her teenage room
is decorated in her mom’s favorite color at the same age. History repeating.

Both on and off-stage, Skillman is a champion for young voices, known for mentoring young writers and for the respect she gives to their emotional  world in her plays. There is no smug mocking of Max’s struggles here. There is no dumbing down of  her dialogue with Nate. They are both portrayed  as smart, fully drawn people, getting their toes wet in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll with much greater cultural awareness and grace  than the older generation before them.

The play itself is in its adolescence of sorts. Although it has been workshopped and developed at several theaters, the infusion of music is a recent (and essential) addition for this production. The creative team of veteran lyricist Caroline Dorsen and Passing Strange’s Heidi Rodewald produces some great music and some amazing moments of watching four women rockers just killing it. It also presents some new logistical challenges for the production, not the least of which is how to transition from a makeshift rehearsal space in a living room to a live concert stage. Golob makes a strong attempt through lighting and crowd noise, but there are some kinks to smooth out there, for sure.

Like a band learning a new song, there’s a bit of a drag to the pace of the first act, followed by a second act that seems to rush some scenes along. It’s easy to imagine it getting a little slicker, a tad tighter in the future. But there’s excitement to be had  in catching Another Kind of Love where it is in its development right now: it is pure energy, rough but honest. Like an argument between sisters. Like punk rock"

 

 

 

 

 



“Another Kind of Love” Review- Kurt Cobain Remix - By Amy Munice, Splash Magazine. - "It takes  but a few minutes for the cast of Infusion Theatre Co.’s “Another Kind of Love” to immerse you  in a punk rock universe.  In part, the script by Crystal Skillman charts the way for you to know the emotional territory --highs and lows-- of a punk rock mindset.  


More than the script, it’s top-notch acting at work—Annie Prichard as Kit; Brady Johnson as Roger; Tyler Young as Nate, Alison Hixon as Max; Courtney Jones as Tanya; and Amber Kelly as Collin. Infusion’s cast is so realistic and persuasive (Director:  Mitch Golob) that some  of us begin to fidget and look about for the exit door because narcissists with microphones
 isn’t our cup of tea.  That said, if the narrative of Kurt Cobain’s life and demise and/or the punk rock sound captures your imagination you’d be well served to clear your calendar to catch this show before the run ends on June 14.

It’s a very female variant on the Cobain themes of drugs, sex and punk rock.  Three sisters and one daughter are living out an anniversary of their famed punk rock star mother’s suicide  years before.  The three sisters were children then and it seems that little maturing has happened in the years that followed.  The emotional depth of the adult characters, barely a
millimeter, doesn’t vary a tad from that of the15 year –old, whose shallowness seems more in keeping with her years.

Not billed as a musical but rather as a “punk rock play”, there are songs (Heidi Rodewald, Composer; Lyrics by Crystal Skillman and Caroline Dorsen) that are musical enough to let  you get a fleeting suggestion of Courtney Jones’ golden chords.


Fans of punk rock might find more to the music here than those of us who walked in stereotyping the genre as meh-music.  A note of thanks to the Musical Director Jefferey  Allen Thomas of deliriously creative Mucca Pazza fame and Eric Backus (Sound Design) for keeping the amps tamed such that we could happily sit in the front row without suffering ear damage.

You’ll get a warning at the ticket booth that the play has adult themes of sex.  Don’t get your hopes up- there’s not much here you’d call adult.

Author
Crystal Skillman

Director
Mitch Golob

Performers
Alison Hixon; Brady Johnson; Courtney Jones; Amber Kelly; Annie Prichard; Tyler Long

Production
Composer - Heidi Rodewald; Lyricists - Crystal Skillman, Caroline Dorsen; Musical Director - Jefferey Thomas; Stage Manager - Kate Stewart; Production Manager - Ali Drumm; Scenic Design - Sarah JHP Watkins; Lighting Design - Claire Chrzan; Costume Design-Rachel Sypniewski; Sound Design - Eric Backus; Properties Design-Angelas Campos; Dramaturg - Rose Sengenberger; Fight Director-David Blixt; Technical Director-Max Lawson; Master Carpenter-Travis Barnhart; Master Electrician-Maya Fein; Carpenter-Nic Belanger; Front of House-Erin Crenshaw

Tags: Theater, American, 2015