THE SUNRISE CAFE

"A greasy-spoon story served up with gourmet flourish." Its creators maintain that "The Sunrise Cafe" is not a play but rather "a wildly imaginative performance piece that doesn't leave its audience behind."... "The Sunrise Cafe"... seeks to illuminate the motivations of a trio of lost souls and what happens to them in an out-of-the-way greasy spoon that gives the work its title... We've got a waitress with dreams. A trucker on a quest who patronizes her establishment. And a short-order cook with a past. Their story is a familiar one to anyone familiar with playwright Sam Shepard- disillusionment, love triangles, spiritual quests, all set in a nameless Western locale that has been goosed up to mythic proportions... Where the Theater Gallery people think they're on to something is in their presentation. Their story is told in an off-kilter fashion with interpolated music, movement and a heavy overlay of morose humor and fate. Even the programs are handed out as tri-fold diner menus. The goal, I think, is to give the piece an overarching sense of transcendent atmospherics... Herwig, Jennifer Ilse and Joshua Scrimshaw all throw themselves fearlessly into their roles- inhabiting their respective stereotypes and then imploding them. The scratchy, country-fried music, composed and performed by Marc Doty, wryly aids and abets the production."

- Dominic Papatola, ST PAUL PIONEER PRESS, 1/2003

"This weekend could be your last chance to see this strange, goofy, and often-beautiful performance piece. So I feel compelled to echo the endorsement of my theatre-beat predecessor Max Sparber, who included Theatre Gallery's original staging of The Sunrise Cafe at Patrick's Cabaret on his Best of 2002 list. The titular cafe is a desolate Southwestern truck stop where three misfits come together for flapjacks, sausages, and surrealism. But forget what its' "about." The show's real pleasures are aural and visual: how yellow spotlights illuminate Jennifer Ilse's lonesome waitress and Paul Herwig's searching trucker like an Arizona sun; the funny-yet-spooky fossil masks; the economical, transporting set; and Marc Doty's tempestuous sound design and whimsical cowboy ballads."

- Dylan Hicks, CITY PAGES A-List, 1/21/2003

"... this Theatre Gallery production, which breaks my heart... is about the most haunting work of theater I saw in 2002. The Theatre Gallery consists of Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse, who here portrayed a lonely, meditative long-haul driver and an exhausted waitress in the last hours of their unsatisfying lives. The play was something of a mournful musical, with a score consisting of a few country ballads by Marc Doty, played on an old-fangled synthesizer. This sounded for all the world like the sort of tinny, excessively weepy stuff that might whine from a '70s-era portable radio. The cast also included Josh Scrimshaw playing a silently sinister short-order chef. The Theatre Gallery will remount this play in January of the coming year. Go see it."

- CITY PAGES "The Ten Best of the Twin Cities", 2002, 12/4/2003