Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 36

SundayApril 91989Star Tribune "Hafry and Claire" MOOltiead, GfOW Continued from page IB 'Harry and Claire' is a nutty escape Fargo brace for flooding A review Whoi Written and directed by Jaime Meyer, presented by the Minneapolis Theatre Garage. Whert: Minneapolis Theatre Garage, 711 W. Franklin Minneapolis. Whan: Thursdays through Sun-days at 8 p.m. through May 7.

TickoU; $8 and $9, call 870-0723. Rsviow: Even in a slightly underdone production, Meyer's voice emerges happily foursquare on the side of fantasy, escape and eccentricity. His solutions to what's humdrum in lite are extravagantly imaginative and compelling. By Mike Steele Staff Writer Jaime Meyer's "Harry and Claire" at the Minneapolis Theater Garage is a marvelously nutty comedy about escaping escaping our life situations, our obligations, especially our selves. Even in its current, slightly underdone production, it's a refreshing play in these psychoanalytical times as it puts forth fantasy and just a modicum of madness as appropriate tonics to life's restlessness.

This production under Meyer's direction has neither the idiosyncratic flair Associated Press As many as 500 homeowners in Fargo, N.D., and neighboring Moor-head, have erected sandbag containments along the swollen Red River in preparation for the river's predicted crest Monday. Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich announced plans to tour flooded areas today. The river forms the border between North Dakota and Minnesota. Dean Peterson, a spokesman for the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers, said work on building levees to protect the cities was virtually completed. "Right now, we're pretty much done if everything maintains the way it is," Peterson said Saturday. "We're running a few trucks here and there trying to take care of a few random low spots." international conference on AIDS could be thrown in jail? In the state of Minnesota in the USA? And not released until there were appeals and bonds and asterisks and questions about practicing sex? It can't be happening. It did happen. Pung and Wood did the best they could to make Verhoef not feel like a prisoner.

They put him in a large health services room, not a cell. They made television, radio and a telephone available to him. On Thursday morning they took him to a Perkins for breakfast "We thought he could use a breath of fresh air," said Wood. Mr. Pung and I have discussed, in general, how we should run prisons.

It is our feeling that as much as possible, we want to treat people like we would want to be treated if we were in the same situation." So decent were the jailers, that attorneys for the jailed man and leaders of the Minnesota AIDS Project sent out a news release thanking them for their kindness. However, neither Pung nor Wood could let Verhoef do what he had come to this country to do. They could not let him attend a conference on AIDS. ing played out in the yearning dreams of the two principals. Harry may or may not be involved with Elsa, though at play's end, as she invades the lighthouse, she seems real enough.

He may or may not actually carry on conversations with his fish, the only character in the play with whom he truly bonds (both live in fish bowls and both want to escape, like fish out of water). Claire may or may not really be blind or clairvoyant. During a storm she does get worked up sensing the approach of the other world. At that point the crazed, swaggering Captain Bob crashes into the lighthouse in his hot air balloon. He seems to know her.

Is he real? No matter. He's certainly real to her. Bob is an adventurer just returned from a land where the natives speak only two words, "Yes" and "Aargh." He's an adventurer because he goes Olesen is wonderful as Claire, totally involved in her obsessions yet emanating a sly sense of knowing always where she really is. Joel Hatch turns in a good yeoman rendition of Harry, heavy on the domestic side, a bit less sure on the fantasy end of things. Walton Stanley swaggers well and sends off macho airs as Captain Bob without going far enough to bite into the truly lunatic side of the character.

Sara Eschweiler does nicely in the less-defined role of the waitress, and Steve Lick gets credit for the voice of the fish. There are some loose ends in the play: a less than full-bodied conclusion, the character of the waitress sort of lost in the final goings-on. But this is genuinely fresh, exciting, idiosyncratic writing, and it should be nurtured. Who else today is making such a compelling case for confronting dullness with full-blown It's not just AIDS that sets off alarms among INS officials. The INS, perhaps particularly local INS officials, react in Neanderthal fashion to the whole issue of homosexuality.

Homosexuality "sexual deviancy" in the wording of INS rules that came back in the Reagan years is enough to keep people from coming to America. Minneapolis City Council Member Brian Coyle said local INS officials are infamous for "going by the book" when it comes to dealing with gays and lesbians. There have been recent cases at the Twin Cities airport where gays and lesbians have been told they could not come into the country because they appeared to be gay or lesbian. Such things as a San Francisco destination or a leather jacket are enough to make local INS officials question the sexual preferences of visitors to the land of the free, Coyle said. In the past, the bewildered people who have been stopped in the Twin Cities under the "sexual deviancy" clause have decided to return home rather than try to fight the massive web of regulations that is the INS.

"The triumphant story here is that this is a man who decided to stand up and fight this," said Coyle. "He could have gotten back on a plane and gone home but he didn't." Because he didn't go back, many of us were forced to look at issues -AIDS, homophobia, ignorance that we'd prefer would just go away. Because he didn't go back, issues that were going to be discussed in the abstract in San Francisco became reality in the Twin Cities. "That it was happening here was embarrassing," said Coyle. But, he quickly said, it could have been far more embarrassing had people in the community not acted as they did.

There was shock and there was outrage and there was activism by officials and everyday citizens. Ashton said, "President Bush, somebody in some high office owes this man an apology. This man was coming to this country to learn about how we handle AIDS He's going to write reports. What do you suppose he's going to write?" Peterson said the dikes were being monitored 24 hours a day and would be until the river drops at least 3 feet below its projected crest. The northward-flowing Red River, which caused extensive flooding upstream at Wahpeton, N.D., and Breckenridge, last week, is expected to crest at 36.5 feet Monday at Fargo.

It was measured at 34.75 feet yesterday, more than 17 feet above flood stage. away and comes back, distinguishing him from guys who just wander off. To Claire, he's her romantic dream. To Harry, he's the personification of his urge to escape and soar. In psycho-lingo these are two deeply conflicted people, probably split personalities ripe for treatment.

To Meyer, however, they're Everyper-son, all of us, only with riper imaginations and stronger wills to re-create themselves, to actually become the characters of their fantasies. Both are seeking significance in humdrum lives, and both achieve it. However nor the technical polish of its previous, 1985 Quicksilver Stage With the exception of Nancy Olesen who, if anything, has deepened her dotty portrait of Claire, this year's cast seems more mundane, less committed to the anarchic, eccentric of the piece, a little self-conscious with its over-the-edge absurdities. It's as though Meyer himself wanted to slow it down and search for a more serious, naturalistic center amid the craziness. Nevertheless, Meyer's genuine skills as a comic dramatist will out, and his oblique, ofT-center theatrical voice once again emerges as hilariously engaging and, through the zaniness, unexpectedly provocative.

The play is really a journey through two entwined but estranged sensibilities. Harry is the keeper of a lighthouse in which the light has long since burned out, which doesn't much matter because ships don't pass it anyway. Harry's complete identity, however, is wrapped up in the responsibility of his position. "I am real," he says, "I'm the man in the lighthouse." His fantasies revolve around escaping his present situation and soaring away, preferably into the arms of Elsa, a nymphet waitress who makes a mean malt and is in his fantasies. His wife, Claire, is blind but clairvoyant, in touch with the other world, in communication with aliens from Neptune and a collector of relics from the past and future.

She spends her time trying to guide these aliens into her home. Throughout the play, fantasies and realities collide, and we're never entirely sure what's real and what's be- Dogs to aid search for Pine City boy Authorities plan to use specially Back up to Sunday night. Verhoef had been coming through the Twin Cities airport on his journey from the Netherlands to San Francisco. An AIDS prevention worker in the Netherlands, he was headed to San Francisco for an international conference on the disease. When INS officials discovered Verhoef had AIDS, they invoked rules that allow the INS to detain anybody who has "a contagious disease." Perhaps INS officials believe that AIDS can be caught from a toilet seat.

"It's astonishing," said Ashton. "From our surveys in the state, it appears we have done a fairly good job of educating people about AIDS. Our surveys show that most people in the state understand the disease. But here you have federal officials who apparently don't and they're supposed to be surrounded by experts." the Snake River, less than 200 feet in back of the house, said Pine County Sheriff John Kozisek. The river search has been hampered by rapidly rising water and swift currents, the sheriff said last night.

The search was called off for the day about 6 p.m. yesterday but will resume today, the sheriff said. "We have two dogs coming in that do sniff through water," he said. "They have found bodies sniffing through water so we're trying those and we'll also have the boats back out on the water and people walking the shore." extravagantly it comes, at play's end Claire has her swaggering buccaneer, and Harry, using a bedsheet wrapped around an oar as his sail, has soared off the lighthouse into a world of adventure. Granted, the final adventure may truly be inside their minds, and there is a sense that in the morning Harry will be back pulling down his periscope to search for nonexistent boats and Claire will be going into trances and conking out on the couch.

But, in the meantime, they have escaped the mundane through imagination and fantasy, which, in Meyer's world, is a bold way to meet life, maybe the only way. trained dogs that sniff through water today to search for a 22-month-old boy who has been missing from his home in rural Pine City, since late Friday afternoon. More than 100 volunteers and members of the Pine County Sheriffs Department and Fire Department have been searching for Aaron Anderson, the only child of Steve and Paulette Anderson, who was reported missing about 5:10 p.m. Friday. The boy, who was wearing a green stocking cap, light gray jacket and boots, was playing in the back yard when he apparently wandered away.

A bloodhound followed his scent to "A i ism Wmm Bring your family and friends to our year-long, statewide celebration of South Dakota's centennial. Hop on a Centennial Wagon Train and jounce across the prairie. Put on your walking shoes and hike our new 111-mile Centennial Trail through the Black Hills. Cheer over 20,000 horseshoe pitchers, bowlers, a rim rnn irpF swimmers, archers, sailors, golfers and A I bUjOKAl otneratnletesataSoutnDakota version 1. Sf Yzi -1 Meet us at the Centennial Folk Festival and together we'll enjoy authentic music, art, dancing, crafts and food handed down to us by generations of 1889 1989 v.

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