"God Save the Human Cannonball" by Beck Lee

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 Sunday, February 2nd
3:00pm-4:30pm

Join us for a developmental workshop and reading of the play featuring actors Luverne Seifert, Laura Esping, and Jack Bechard with playwright Beck Lee, and directed by Calyssa Hall. 

Event includes lasagna and dessert!

Event Location:   

Marine Village Hall - 121 Judd Street, Marine on Saint Croix, Minnesota

"God Save the Human Cannonball" is a magic realist drama about a former human cannonball who was part of a traveling circus that toured the Midwest in the mid-20th century. Filled with flashes of circus lore, the story picks up in a working-class neighborhood by the Brooklyn waterfront many years later.

“GOD SAVE THE HUMAN CANNONBALL”

Rudy Taconelli, a former circus performer who hasn’t been heard from in 30 years, makes a surprise visit to the Brooklyn home of his daughter, Carol, a single mother with a drinking problem. Carol is hoping to send her musically gifted 17-year-old son, Dexter, off to college, but Dexter hesitates -- worried his mother can’t make it without him. Grandpa, the legendary Human Cannonball of yore, wants to get the show on the road, offering totally unsolicited advice to move things along. As the evening progresses his at-first-mysterious motives become more and more clear.

"Beck Lee has written a beautiful, poignant play with flawed, compelling, complex characters. The wonderful dialogue brings us into a ghostly world of love, loss and forgiveness." LAILA ROBINS

BECK LEE

PLAYWRIGHT BIOGRAPHY

Beck Lee is a New York playwright with a deep and abiding affection for the Midwest. Most of his work in the theater has been as a publicist for diverse Off-Broadway companies, including the Indigenous-feminist Spiderwoman Theater (for which he produced a Midwest tour in early 2024), and the Barrow Street Theatre. His play, “Subprime,” directed by Peter Moore, premiered at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis in 2018.

His comedy with music, "Seltzer Nights," about a Yiddish vaudeville troupe in New York's Lower East Side, will be seen in a workshop production at the JCC in St Paul this winter.

In Minneapolis he heads a non-profit, The Cultural Fluency Initiative, which promotes cross-cultural understanding and collaboration between divergent groups.

"Lee, a man for all people!" The Irish Echo