In an unlikely collaboration double Tony Award winning actor Mark Rylance joins forces with Duluth poet Louis Jenkins to create a new play about ice fishing at the Guthrie.
Rylance, who is a Shakespearean by training, wrote dialog to link several of Jenkins' poems about the wonders to be found in apparently ordinary things. Jenkins, who never thought about being in theater before, says he's loving the whole thing.
SPEAKER 1: Duluth poet Lewis Jenkins never dreamed he'd be in theater. And now, he's found himself working at the Guthrie in Minneapolis with an internationally renowned British actor in a world premiere production of a play that seems to be about ice fishing. However, Euan Kerr reports in Nice Fish. The playwright dips lines into much deeper waters than any Minnesota lake.
EUAN KERR: While some people go ice fishing for peace and quiet, in Nice Fish, things get pretty tense when Eric and Ron sitting in their shack on the last day of the season play unwilling host to a patrolling DNR conservation officer. Ron doesn't have a license.
SPEAKER 2: You got a driver's license.
RON: Sure.
EUAN KERR: You're a non-resident?
RON: No, I'm not. I'm American.
EUAN KERR: This is a Wisconsin driver's license. The more the friends try to placate the officer, the angrier he becomes, quoting the exact cost and codes of the different kinds of licenses and trout and walleye stamps.
ERIK: OK, we'll take a non-resident 72-hour individual license for him, and I'll have the trout for $10.
RON: Can I have some fries with that?
EUAN KERR: Ron's innocent smile does not amuse the humor impaired officer. And that's when a strange thing occurs. The DNR guy turns to the audience and begins to speak his thoughts with remarkable poetic eloquence.
SPEAKER 2: Because of my extraordinary correctness and sensitivity of light, I have been elevated to the status of temporary minor saint, Secular. The position comes with a commendation, praising my, quote, "uncharacteristic reticence tantamount to sagacity," end quote. This means that my entire being is now suffused with a pale radiance, somewhat like the light from a small fluorescent bulb only, well, the kind on a kitchen range perhaps only not quite so bright. And that instead of walking, I now float at an altitude of approximately three inches above the ground.
EUAN KERR: This is a Lewis Jenkin's prose poem. It's the kind of dryly humorous observation of people and things which led Mark Rylance to fall in love with Jenkins' work.
MARK RYLANCE: He's an absolute delight, a proper bear of a poet.
EUAN KERR: Mark Rylance is a Broadway star with two Tony Awards. He's huge on London's West End, and that is in addition to his fame as the first artistic director of the reconstructed globe theater, which does what are called original practices productions of Shakespeare plays without lights, amplification, or female actors. Yet, he's no stranger to the Guthrie stage. He was here twice with the globe and then came back to perform the lead role in Robert Bly's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt five years ago. It was through a Bly-edited poetry anthology that Rylance discovered Jenkins work. He was so impressed. He read one of Jenkins prose poems as his acceptance speech when he won his first Tony.
MARK RYLANCE: They published it in The Sunday Times or in The Times in London and in other newspapers. And Lewis had phone calls the next morning from reporters saying, "What do you think of this?" And that was the first he'd heard of me and of his poems being read out loud.
EUAN KERR: Actually, Jenkins says he did know Rylance because he'd seen Peer Gynt. They began exchanging email. And eventually, Rylance proposed creating a play by linking some of Jenkins poems with dialogue he would write.
LOUIS JENKINS: When he first suggested it, I thought, well, that's not going to work.
EUAN KERR: That was five years ago, and Jenkins is now a believer. He won a Minnesota Book Award in 1995 for his prose poem collection, Nice Fish. Many of those pieces appear in their entirety in the stage adaptation delivered by the main characters, Ron, Erik, and a number of others who turn up on the ice.
LOUIS JENKINS: I'm excited by the whole thing. It's so unlikely a thing to happen to me, I think, to be suddenly involved in theater.
EUAN KERR: Ice fishing skeptics might roll their eyes at claims that this is a sport that meets human needs in a primeval, philosophical, and poetic way. Both Jenkins and Rylance acknowledge they have had their own moments of doubt, but then talk about the profound experience of sitting in silence in the cold in a perilous position out on the ice. Rylance calls it pregnant with possibility. He wants Nice Fish audiences to experience that sense, too,
MARK RYLANCE: I hope, like with Lewis's poems, they'll see the beauty in mundane things that a lot of things in the people around them and in the nature around them, which they took for granted, they'll see are actually very amusing or very beautiful.
EUAN KERR: Rylance tells the story of during a past visit to Minnesota, walking out onto a frozen lake on Christmas Eve and meeting a divorced father. ice fishing. As part of the settlement, the man agreed his children would always spend the day with their mother. In turn, he always spent Christmas Eve ice fishing alone, just thinking. "It was beautiful," says Rylance, "Lonely and sad, but beautiful." Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio news.
SPEAKER 1: You can hear some of the poems from Nice Fish in their entirety at MPRNews.org
Digitization made possible by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
Views and opinions expressed in the content do not represent the opinions of APMG. APMG is not responsible for objectionable content and language represented on the site. Please use the "Contact Us" button if you'd like to report a piece of content. Thank you.
Transcriptions provided are machine generated, and while APMG makes the best effort for accuracy, mistakes will happen. Please excuse these errors and use the "Contact Us" button if you'd like to report an error. Thank you.