Opening weekend offers more than the show itself
Eminent Domain Black Hills Community Theatre | Studio Theater, Performing Arts Center of Rapid City Opens Friday, May 1 | 7 p.m. Continues May 2, 8, 9, 15, 16 at 7 p.m. | May 3, 10, 17 at 2 p.m.
Written by Nebraska playwright Laura Leininger Campbell, directed by Truax with assistant director Lynne Mazzone.
Playwright Talkback with Laura Leininger Campbell:
Friday, May 1 immediately following the opening night performance
Playwriting Workshop with Laura Leininger Campbell:
Saturday, May 2 | 10 a.m. to noon | 4th Floor Rehearsal Room | Ages 14 and up | RSVP to merlyn@bhct.org
Shannon Truax, making her mainstage directing debut at BHCT, came into Eminent Domain reading it as a fight between ordinary people and a pipeline company. A family farm threatened by eminent domain, a patriarch digging in, a corporation with the law on its side. It was a story she thought she knew, but by the time the cast got deep into rehearsal, she understood she had been wrong about what the play was actually about.
“I have come to understand that this is really the story about the negotiations and compromises that happen inside of relationships,” Truax says, “especially in the face of a fight you might not be able to win.”
Nebraska playwright Laura Leininger Campbell wrote a play that uses a pipeline dispute as the pressure that cracks a family open, not the subject of the story itself. Rob MacLeod is fighting to save his farm. His daughter Adair left years ago and has her own calculus about what the land is worth. His son Bart has stayed, and has his own accounting of what that loyalty has cost.
Truax says she wants the audience shifting allegiances throughout. There are no villains in this production, and the director has built the show around that ambiguity, asking actors to sit inside uncomfortable spaces, listen to each other, and resist resolution. The Studio Theater makes that work visible in a way a larger stage wouldn’t.
“The audience is only an arm’s length away, so there is no distance to hide behind. The audience can feel the shifts in energy, the silence, the tension. The actors can feel the audience’s reactions. This space demands honesty from the actors and it invites the audience to be part of the experience, not just an observer.”
For audiences in the Black Hills, the material carries particular weight. Land rights, infrastructure projects, the legacy of family farms, these are not abstractions here. Truax, who works in Public Works, brings that familiarity to the production. The MacLeod family’s fight maps onto conversations that happen in this region in ways that a coastal production of the same play might not reach.
A Playwright in the Room
Playwright Talkback with Laura Leininger Campbell:
Friday, May 1 immediately following the opening night performance
Playwriting Workshop with Laura Leininger Campbell:
Saturday, May 2 | 10 a.m. to noon | 4th Floor Rehearsal Room | Ages 14 and up | RSVP to merlyn@bhct.org
Laura Leininger Campbell’s plays have been recognized by the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, one of the most competitive development programs in American theater, and have earned distinction from the Henley Rose Playwrights Competition, Seven Devils Play Foundry, and the Great Plains Theater Commons. She writes out of the Midwest, about the Midwest.
Following Friday’s opening night performance she joins the cast for a talkback. Saturday morning she leads a two-hour playwriting workshop in the 4th Floor Rehearsal Room, open to writers 14 and up, new and experienced alike. For anyone serious about writing for the stage, or curious about what that process looks like from the inside, this is a working playwright with serious credentials willing to talk about her craft. Bring a notebook. RSVP to merlyn@bhct.org.
BHCT closes its 58th season with Eminent Domain by Laura Leininger Campbell. The run extends through May 17, but opening weekend is when Campbell is in the building, and that is worth showing up for early.
