A couple of photos of this year’s performance of “The Fundamentals, with Mother Antonia” at the St. Catherine University Reunion. I think you can see that the actor, Megan Campbell Lagas, is enjoying herself. The enjoyment was catching! When she described the Katies’ 1920 basketball victory against the Gophers, the audience cheered. Last year’s performance...
Tag: Mother Antonia
A one-act monologue about M. Antonia McHugh, the first president of the College of St. Catherine.
Grudge Match
I asked Stacey (over at the Alumnae Relations department at St. Kate’s) if they wanted any rewrites on the Mother Antonia piece before starting to rehearse it for this year’s reunion. Stacey mentioned that after last year’s performance, someone had shared the story of how Mother Antonia gave permission for the basketball team to wear...
Me and Mother Antonia, part 2
In the wake of the monologue I wrote last year about their first president, Mother Antonia McHugh, the Alumnae Relations Department at St. Catherine University asked me to write about her for their magazine. A new book has just come out about the chapel she built at St. Kate’s. No matter how many articles and...
getting the word out (part 2)
For Worse: putting cast bios on the Fringe website. Mother Antonia: Found a couple of images on the St. Kate’s Reunion Flickr album:
the test
Mother Antonia: Performance at the St. Kate’s Reunion. A full house. After Mother Antonia enters, her first line is, “I trust you have all come prepared for the test,” and when this drew a (somewhat uneasy) laugh I knew we were going to be fine. Almost all the jokes I tried to plant got laughs,...
it’s not what’cha do but the way howt’cha do it
Mother Antonia: First rehearsal. Megan and Anya begin to dig in, question and experiment. It becomes really, really clear that I have borrowed a great deal of “Mother Antonia”‘s shtick from my 12th-grade English teacher, Mr. Slevin. Who was Jesuit-educated, so I suppose it fits. Today’s post title, in his honor, is one of his...
effulgence, flink, whelming
Mother Antonia: Phone call with Anya to hear her thoughts & questions. A foray into the CSJ’s digital archive to try to get a better handle on the limits on where and when the Sisters could leave the house; the Sister at the reading last night pointed out that the community tended to be pretty...
to-do list
The Last Game: Talked with Heather H. about her observations of/suggestions for the script. Among other thoughts, she raises the idea of a second act set some decades into the future. This doesn’t click for me; though it’s difficult to pick apart how much it fails to click on its own merits, and how much...
and again, go team!
It’s All Good: The quest for a stage manager continues (as does the quest for a title). Lisa Conley will design costumes & Sadie Ward will coordinate set – this is great news. Mother Antonia: Next reading tomorrow night. Director Anya Kremenetsky will be with us.
prunestone
Mother Antonia: 6 hours at the Sisters of St. Joseph Archive. A little while ago, the archivist got in touch to ask if the play would include anything about Mother Antonia’s relationship with Sister Ste. Helene? Because they just happen to be working on processing Ste. Helene’s papers….So spent most of the day reading Ste....