House, Divided
 La Tempestad
 The Ballad of John Wesley Reed
 Girl Science
 The Allure of Oriental Wisdom
 Memorial Day (formerly Varia)
 Pride of the Lion
 The Dostoyevsky Man


 Monica for Chanukah
 Angie and Arnie Sanguine
 Edward and Ellie Supine
 The Lion Eats His Lunch
 The Lion in His Lair
 The Lion Leaves His Mark
 Prayers


 But Who's Counting?
 Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium


 Just Before the War Between the Plates
 I Can Handle That


 Talking  with Lee Blessing

...with Tom Coash
...with Mary Fengar Gail
...with Richard Kalinowsky
...with Jamie Pachino
...with David Rambo
...with Jason Sherman
...with Naomi Wallace
...with Tom Gibbons
...with Dick Goldberg

It has taken nearly seven years for Richard Kalinoski's play Between Men and Cattle to come to stage. This is not untypical in the world of new plays today. What is unusual is the long commitment InterAct has had to the development of the play.

Richard had the germ of the idea for Between Men and Cattle in 1993. "I saw interview on 60 minutes with a 12 year old African American 7th grader in Milwaukee. His school, an experimental charter school, one of the first in the nation was the subject of the story. The administration had apparently identified him as a spokesman. I was taken with the boy's energy and his unusually global perspective for a 7th grader. I was living in Rochester NY, working on Beast on the Moon, at the time, but I was struck by several things: his vulnerability, his diction and his ability to articulate thoughts about the world. He spoke about politics, about Collin Powell, about the gulf war and about the United States' incursion into middle east. I'm from Wisconsin so it was convenient for me to track him down. In the course of our interview the boy kept asking me why I wanted to interview him. I finally said that I was fascinated by his maturity and sensibility. When he probed further, I was unable to really elaborate on my answer. Examining my own motives later, I decided if I had seen the same interview with a white kid I probably wouldn't have made the effort to meet him, which more or less lead me to the notion of the young reporter undertaking the task of discovering the boy."

As the play took shape, Richard's probing and self reflection continued. "I actually questioned myself all the way through the process. He was so winning at some level, I actually thought for a while that I might mine a play from the interview. Somewhere along the line I realized the story was in the impulse of pedestalizing this child. But I didn't exactly know how to do it or even where or how to start. In that situation I almost always try to go inward and find my own motivation. I imagined the boy at breakfast with this taken- with-his-own-liberalism reporter who is himself very young. I had no idea how it was going to shape up. Arthur Miller always talks about having a notion at the beginning about how things will end up, but I didn't have a notion of where it would go."

Initially, Richard thought the whole play might be the first act. "I kept thinking about the daunting task of looking at these men years after their first encounter, but that second encounter seemed pretty interesting to me. I needed to demonstrate that they (Ernest and Jerry) faced a kind of unnamable problem between them, and that that needs to be quietly accepted by both of them. Ernest's perception is that Jerry is picturing him as something other than human, but in some way above human. Jerry's response to Ernest suggests a kind of covetousness that is tainted by race - in the sense that Jerry has discovered a kind of gem who is also black. By the end of the play I am reaching toward the notion that they can't finally have an answer about what is between them, but they accept that they can't. Near the end they agree they don't know each other. The implication is they aren't going to be able to. The play moves towards Ernest's reluctant recognition if not acceptance of his societally-ascribed blackness. The simple fact of his skin color impacts and shapes perceptions of him - and he struggles with that."

Before it got to InterAct, Between Men and Cattle had several readings in Rochester in San Francisco, workshops at Brown University, Bloomington, Illinois, and the Eugene O'Neill Center. Finally, there were readings at InterAct Theatre Company, and a staged public reading as part of the 1999 Showcase of New Plays. "The real development of the play -- what lifted the play to its current level of sophistication, occurred because of the involvement of InterAct, director Mark Hallen and the current cast who came to Oshkosh where I teach."

Richard also notes that "the various black casts have been really influential" on how Between Men and Cattle has evolved. He says, "I needed two kinds of help and they gave it. First, I needed the general support which gives a writer confidence to continue working. Second, I needed the sort of specific aggregate wisdom the various cast members offered about their experiences. The various workshop casts sort of pummeled me about issues they thought I needed to think about more deeply, and that helped me get the play to where it is now. Also, the assiduous and rigorous aesthetic sensibility of Mark Hallen made it possible to continue to work on the play." Mark and Richard's relationship goes back to when Mark directed Richard's earlier play, Beast on the Moon, at Venture Theatre. "There has been so much goodwill in the reading and rehearsal projects, but Mark has been there in between those times. And his contribution is inestimable."