To borrow a line from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, There “are known knowns… We also know there are known unknowns… But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” And so it is with The 28th-annual Ostrander Awards. The known knowns are these: The astonishing Mark Chambers will host the ceremony at the Memphis Botanic Gardens on August 28 (Get your details here). We know that Ron Gephart is being honored with the Eugart Yerian Award for lifetime achievement in Memphis Theater. We still don’t know who the other winners are yet but now we have the nominees. And who can ever predict what will happen when Memphis’s entire theater community gets together under one roof?
This year Ostrander judges for the college and university division seemed to like several U of M productions including Stuff Happened, a docudrama about events leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq (hence the Rumsfeld quote), Tennessee Williams’s classic A Streetcar Named Desire, and Bat Boy, a musical ripped from the pages of the Weekly World News. They also liked Rhodes College’s perverse musical adaptation of Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom and their straightforward take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
In the community division we have a pair of Chaperones (POTS and Harrell) battling it out to see who’s the drowsiest. They’re competing for play prizes against Crazy For You (Theatre Memphis), [Title of Show] (Next Stage), Grey Gardens (Circuit), The Wiz at Hattiloo, and Playhouse on the Square’s epic remount of Ragtime. .
Footloose (POTS) and Shakespeare’s Richard III (NextStage) both make surprisingly strong showings. Other popular plays include August: Osage County, (POTS) Black Pearl Sings (Circuit), From Up Here (Circuit), and Amadeus (TM) with some notible shout outs to Picnic (TM), Dividing the Estate (Circuit) Dixie Swim Club (GCT) and a Delicate Balance (TM).
Check out the complete list of nominations below the fold then let me how you think the judges did. Who should win and who got robbed. And stay tuned to Intermission Impossible for gossip, interviews, inside dope, picks pans and all manner of Ostrander season coverage.
