TNW Ensemble Theater presents
Sketchy Ideas
Visual art, music and theater in a multi-arts performance
Friday, February 10 - Sunday, February 12
Wisconsin Studio
Age Recommendation
Ages 12 and up
Sketchy Ideas brings to life a series of illustrated letters Madison-based visual artist Randall Berndt began experimenting with more than four years ago. The various topics of these gentle screeds sprang from news of the day, chance encounters on the street while walking his dog friend and random brainstorms. The letters reflect a three-year period in his everyday life – the chaos of the ending of Trump time, haunting threats of Covid and caretaking of his wife, Wendy, during her illness journey with ALS. Berndt’s laboriously hand-sketched and lettered, funny/sad life reports are also a somewhat subdued anti-digital world rearguard action. These cartoonish, illuminated manuscripts are at odds with the cruel speed of 21st century life.
As Berndt’s drawings are projected, four actors, Anthony Novich Leonard, Liz Light, Andrew Lonsdale and Patrick Mahoney, share Berndt’s droll perspectives on everything from “the secret life of plants” to “extravagant thinking in a time of plague,” with staging by Donna Peckett. Violinist Paran Amirinazari underscores and enhances the words and images, making this a thoroughly mixed media event.
See a slideshow of Berndt’s works below.
View the online exhibition below
For best experience click the full screen icon
Berndt’s Sketchy Ideas series operates in the tradition of artist’s letters that flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Berndt sent his own missives across the country in this century. The production came about because Donna Peckett and Danielle Dresden, co-founders and co-producing artistic directors, of TNW Ensemble Theater, are nearby recipients of Berndt’s work. After enjoying Berndt’s mailings for years, one day Peckett decided, “More people need to see these,” and the show began to take shape.
A studio artist, Berndt is a former curator of the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center and worked as an art conservator in the Wisconsin State Capitol restoration project. He has designed sets for several of TNW Ensemble Theater’s productions. TNW Ensemble Theater founded in 1985 by Danielle Dresden and Donna Peckett, creates, produces and performs new, multi-disciplinary works for theater. The company has performed across the United States, as well as in Canada, Mexico and Scotland.
Sketchy Ideas is made possible by support from Pleasant Rowland’s Great Performance Fund for Theater at Overture, the Madison Community Foundation, the Wisconsin Arts Board, with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts; Dane County Arts with additional funds from the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation, The Evjue Foundation, Inc., charitable arm of The Capital Times, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation; the Neil Allen Peckett Memorial Fund; and RoseDot.
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