Often the least interesting thing about a theater company is its mission statement, which for most Twin Cities theaters seems to be lifted from some widely available template: promising plays that challenge the audience in some vague way while enriching the community through some unexplained process. More instructive, usually, is the list of donors that accompanies a program. Sometimes, surprising casting choices can be understood when one sees that the actor's father gave generously to the production (although whether he gave before or after the cast list went up is difficult to ascertain definitively). Learning to read the donors' list in this way takes a sharp eye, and an audience member who is able to suss out backstage dramas from the clues left in the program can truly congratulate herself for a keen understanding of local theater. As the Gremlin Theatre provided no such list of donors in... More >>>