EAU CLAIRE — The American Chamber Theater Ensemble will close this season of the Artists Series with a performance Monday, April 9, at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
          The concert of American short stories titled “An Evening in America” will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Zorn Arena.
          The American Chamber Theater Ensemble combines theater, mime, storytelling and dance in a celebration of the written word. Touring throughout the United States, as well as internationally, the three-member ensemble has appeared by special invitation at the Singapore Festival of the Arts, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and the Edinburgh Festival.
          The Topeka Capitol Journal praised the American Chamber Theater Ensemble for its “exuberant choreography, pointed dialogue and a physicality best described as athletic.” A Seattle Weekly reviewer called the group’s show “the most elegant text-driven performance I’ve ever seen.”
          “An Evening in America” will feature interpretations of four works by three authors:

• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber (1894-1961), the writer and cartoonist who captured the urban man as one who escapes into fantasy because he is befuddled and beset by a world that he neither created nor understands.

• “Cathedral” and “The Trestle” by Raymond Carver (1928-1988), the short-story writer and poet who chronicled the everyday lives and problems of the working poor in the Pacific Northwest.

• “The Dance of the Chicken Feet” by Bailey White (born 1950), a first-grade teacher and storyteller whose humorous accounts of Southern eccentricity have enchanted listeners of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

[Administrative Offices] [News Bureau]

Updated: March 26, 2001