Inner Life, Curious Theatre Branch, at the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe. The imaginative, deliciously smart work of Wisconsin writer Angela Woodward comes to life in Curious Theatre’s adaptations of her stories for a series called Inner Life. The first in the series is “Mr. Distar,” which Beau O’Reilly claims to have carried around in his book bag for 3 years because he liked it so much. It depicts a provocative encounter between two former college friends, one a professor completely lost in the ivory tower of her theories and the other a near-homeless woman broken down by a system that filled her teaching position with a robot. The tension between the women artfully reveals human reactions to (and denial of) change, resulting in dark humor as well as tragedy; Curious Theatre justifies its departure from self-scripted material with a staging that’s as thoroughly absorbing as a great, tersely written short story.
