Media Archive

Imagine this: It’s January in Minnesota and you’re sitting on a frozen lake. There’s a hole cut in the ice in front of you. You drop a fishing line down into the frigid water below, and wait. And shiver. And wait. It’s unlikely you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey, this would make a great play.” That’s because you’re not Mark Rylance.

One of the world’s great Shakespearean actors reconnects with his youth on a frozen ice lake in his new play.

For Rylance, 55, much of the task as adapter has been figuring out how to link the poetry together to tell a story, set on a Minnesota lake on the last day of ice-fishing season. Connections between one poem and the next might be as small as a single word, or far more substantial. That crossed-out block of text was meant as a transition.

Here the world is a frozen lake in Minnesota towards the end of winter. Two friends, Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl) and Ron (Mark Rylance), have come together supposedly for an ice fishing expedition on the last day of the season.

If the homespun humor and quirky philosophizing that comes to you live from Lake Woebegone via A Prairie Home Companion warms you up on a cold winter’s night, then NICE FISH is your cup of cocoa.

Fishing – at least for those of us who aren’t Bassmasters – often has little to do with the actual catching of fish.

Playwright and actor Mark Rylance has turned the work of Minnesota-based poet Louis Jenkins into a 95-minute presentation at the A.R.T. in Nice Fish. 

Last fall’s most exciting sensation wasn’t a big Broadway musical but a scrappy outsider sneaking in under the radar.

I know, I know: A two-and-a-half-hour sung-through adaptation of War and Peace, performed in an immersive environment, may sound as appealing as the Great Retreat from Moscow. But Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 feels like a party from start to end: lively, intelligent and utterly engrossing.

There’s an air of danger to that kind of unpredictability — and how sexy is that.