Scarecrow on Fire

Playwright and Scarecrow

Playwright, author and storyteller Kevin Kling is a proud graduate of Osseo High School and Gustavus Adolphus College. His plays have been produced in local and regional theaters including Illusion Theatre, The Guthrie, Open Eye Theatre, The Children’s Theatre Company, Frank Theater, Seattle Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse, Mixed Blood, the Goodman, Kennedy Center, Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, History Theatre, Denver Center, Merrimack Rep Theatre, Spoleto and off Broadway at Westside Arts and Second Stage Theater.

Orchestral commissions include the Minnesota Orchestra and, collaborating with composer Victor Zupanc, the Zeitgeist ensemble and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra.

Awards include the Whiting Award, NEA, McKnight, Bush Fellowship, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board and two regional Emmy Awards for PBS documentaries Kevin Kling: Lost & Found and Art + Medicine: Disability, Culture and Creativity.

Kevin is a frequent performer at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. He appears often on TPT’s Almanac and was named the Minneapolis Storyteller Laureate by Mayor RT Rybak in 2014.

Kevin is honored to be included in this amazing 50th Anniversary season and forever grateful to Illusion Theater for bringing his plays 21A and Lloyd’s Prayer to Twin Cities audiences back in the 1980’s! Thank You and Congratulations, ILLUSION!

*member Actors’ Equity Association

Director, Executive Producing Director

Michael founded ILLUSION THEATER in 1974. Over the past 50 years, he has guided nearly 500 plays to production. Most recently Michael directed T. Mychael Rambo's PRESENT, Judy, Joan & Joni (conceived by Michael and Roberta Carlson), the premiere of Michael Egan's stage adaptation Five Minutes of Heaven, and In This Moment...Now. Favorite projects he has directed include Allison Moore’s Ivey award winning My Antonia, Bill W. & Dr. Bob by Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey, James Still’s Miranda, Kate Guentzel in The Pink Unicorn, and Jeffrey Hatcher and Chan Poling’s A Night in Olympus. With Roberta Carlson, Michael created the musical Only One Sophie. Michael is part of the team that created ILLUSION’s Education/Prevention program in 1977 starting with the award-winning play Touch. Michael received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Ivey Award.

Tin Man, Newspaper Man, Toto, Nurse

Dan Chouinard is a St. Paul-based all-purpose pianist and accordionist, sing-along enabler, concert soloist and accompanist, French and Italian teacher and bicycling vagabond.  He's the go-to pianist for a smorgasbord of singers across the Twin Cities and has been writer and host of live history-and-music shows for Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television. He played on a dozen live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion and has toured with Garrison Keillor and Prudence Johnson over the past three years. Recent favorites include gigs with his classic country band, Lush Country; summertime appearances with various folks at ILLUSION’s LIVE at Lyndale Gardens series; and a new music and history show, Rondo ’56: Remembering St. Paul’s Black Main Street. He started working regularly with Kevin Kling and Simone Perrin in 2008.

Dorothy

Simone Perrin grew up on the banks of the upper Mississippi in beautiful Winona, MN. After school and a brief go at New York City, Simone found her way back to Minnesota, where she met and started working with Kevin Kling. A decade ago, Simone moved to rural Wisconsin, where she lives today with her family.  She has appeared on the Prairie Home Companion and has performed with many regional theaters including The Guthrie, Theater Latte Da, Open Eye Figure Theatre, The Cincinnati Playhouse, and The Seattle Repertory Theater, where she and Kevin developed two original plays, How? How? Why? Why? Why? and Breakin' Hearts and Takin' Names. In 2009, Simone released her first album Hummingbird, available to listen on most streaming platforms.

Lion, Dry Goods Man, Guy, Man, Wizard, Doctor, Lab Tech

Stephen is a longtime member of the Twin Cities theater community. He is a founding member of the Mixed Blood Theater, appearing in over 30 productions. At the Guthrie Theater, he has performed in over 80 productions including King Lear, Othello, Burial at Thebes, An Iliad, the History Plays. Stephen was in The Children, The Nether, The Night Alive, The Seafarer, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Jungle Theater. He has performed at Pillsbury House Theater, the Playwrights Center, and at Carnegie Hall with the Minnesota Orchestra. Stephen is a recipient of the McKnight Theater Artists award.

*member Actors’ Equity Association

House of Mercy Band emerged during the first major wave of Americana music. They hosted a monthly live radio show at the Turf Club and shared the stage with legendary artists like Charlie Louvin (Louvin Brothers), Ralph Stanley, and Gordon Gano (Violent Femmes), along with many other local and classic country and gospel acts. In 2005, they won Best Gospel Group at the Minnesota Music Awards. Throughout their career, they recorded five albums while serving as the house band for House of Mercy church in Saint Paul. Star Tribune music critic Chris Riemenschneider praised their sound, saying, “Spirituality aside, I mean, they're just great songs. I compared them to the Jayhawks. Mix that with their gospel touch, and it's some really nice, beautiful stuff.” https://www.houseofmercyrecordings.com/

Cellist

Cellist and composer Michelle Kinney is most inspired when working in improvisational cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary contexts. Recent collaborative creations for dance include Laurie Van Wieren, Ananya Dance Theater, Black Label Movement, BRKFST; and for theater, Kevin Kling, Michael Sommers, Theater Latté Da, and Marya Hart’s Fidgety Fairy Tales.

Michelle also performs her original music with many bands (currently Crime Family and the Tamarack Stylites) and is a regular contributor to some of the Twin Cities’ most interesting music projects led by genre-pushing artists such as Purple Orange, Zeitgeist, Mary Ellen Childs, Chastity Brown, Douglas Ewart, Aby Wolf, Nirmala Rajasekar and Dylan Hicks. Michelle has been recognized for her work by The McKnight Foundation (Composer Fellowship), Two Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Next Step Fund grants, The Bush Foundation (Bush Artists Fellowship), The Jerome Foundation, MN State Arts Board (with Jelloslave), NEA/Rockefeller, Harvestworks/Studio Pass, and American Composers Forum. 

More at michellekinneymusic.com.

Scenic Design

Joseph Stanley previously designed We Take Care of Our Own at ILLUSION THEATER.  His design work has been featured by many theatre, music, and dance companies including Park Square Theater, Frank Theater, Stages Theater, Children’s Theatre Company, Full Circle, Mixed Blood, Theater Mu, Pillsbury House, History Theater, Jungle Theater, Carlyle Brown & Co., Theatre Latte Da, the Minnesota Orchestra, Carleton College, Macalester College, Stuart Pimsler Dance Theater, Zorongo Flamenco, James Sewell Ballet, and others.  Joe received an Ivey Award for scenic design in 2010.  He was a founding Artistic Director of 15 HEAD—a theatre lab.

Costume Designer

Zamora S. is a seasoned Costume, Makeup, and Hair Designer from Trinidad and Tobago, currently based in the Twin Cities. With an MFA in Theatre Design from the University of Iowa, Zamora brings years of costume design expertise and more than a decade of leadership and teaching experience in theatre, film, and dance. Some of her Recent designs includes Mixed Blood’s The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, the regional premiere of Scotland PA at Theater Latté Da, Pillsbury House + Theatre’s World Premiere of A Walless Church: The Black Woman’s Guide To Creating God and Upstream, an immersive theater experience, a collaboration with O.W.L school and Mixed Blood theater. Zamora is excited to be working on her first show at the ILLUSION THEATER.

Sound Design

C ANDREW MAYER has been blessed to work extensively in the Twin Cities including at the Jungle, History Theater, Guthrie Theater, Minnesota Opera, Mixed Blood, Theatre Latte Da, Pillsbury House, Six Points, Great River Shakespeare Festival, and numerous others; and nationally at Austin Opera, Everyman Theater (Baltimore), ACT (San Francisco), Philadelphia Opera, Opera Colorado (Denver), Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and others.  Previously at Illusion, he designed We Take Care Of Our Own, A Play by Barb and Carl, For The Loyal, Finding Fish, and Miranda. He was a 2008-2009 McKnight Theatre Artist Fellow and won an Audelco Award for his design for Carlyle Brown’s Pure Confidence at 59E59 in NYC. In summer he serves as the Producing Director of the Acadia Repertory Theatre on Mount Desert Island in Maine.