by It started as an assignment her freshman year for the BFA acting program at the University of Minnesota. Elisheva Scheuer, a fourth-year acting student, was asked to go interview anyone and then become them.
“It’s in the style of verbatim theater,” Scheuer said. “Which I believe is a very powerful way of doing theater where you sort of imitate and become a real life person.”
Scheuer said she chose to play her neighbor, Frank Sturner, and in doing so, got to know Sturner a lot more. Scheuer performed the piece for her class and went on to perform as Sturner again at the end-of-the-year freshman show.
Three years later, for her senior project, Scheuer said she decided to take on the role of Frank once more — this time, along with a few other people.
“I just started sort of interviewing a few people,” Scheuer said. “I interviewed my dad, I interviewed Bud Selig who’s from Milwaukee. I interviewed Dorone who’s my dad’s cousin. And then I interviewed Tessie, on a whim.”
Tessie Bundick, a make-up and costume design professor at the University, said Scheuer was a student of hers. Budick said Scheuer went to her with the idea of putting on a one-woman show about aging and life stories.
“She wanted to talk to older people because they have more stories, because we’ve lived longer,” Bundick said.
Each person Scheuer played told a story plucked from a moment in their lives.
“A person falling off a cliff and a story of surviving the holocaust and a story of integration,” Scheuer said. “A lot of people, you know, told stories that, in some ways, paralleled each other throughout these long interviews.”
Through these stories, Scheuer says a few audience members told her they had recognized someone from their own lives.
“Whether they had similar themes or similar things they were going for in life or similar heartbreaks, we’re all human.”
