Unexpected Company’s first project was to create a stage adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic Civil War poem John Brown’s Body. Brian Lynner had written some music for a previous production of the piece for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival some years earlier, and he was keen to tackle his own adaptation. The project was launched in the winter of 2000 with help from a grant from the Iowa Arts Council.
Lynner and Norris dived into research on the Civil War, collecting hundreds of songs, artwork and excerpts from speeches, letters, diaries, newspaper articles and poems from the period. They were side-tracked by a request to put together an evening of Shakespeare scenes and song for a Valentine’s evening event at Salisbury House. The show they developed, first entitled A Shakespeare Valentine, was later rechristened Shakespeare On Love and remains part of Unexpected Company’s touring repertory.
When some issues arose with obtaining the rights for the Benet poem, they abandoned the John Brown's Body project, and created instead a new performance piece – Voices of the Civil War– a compilation material drawn from their research. The work, which includes music and is accompanied by video projections of photographs and artwork from the era., became a second offering in company’s touring repertory.
After creating Voices, the company embarked on another ambitious project in 2001 – the New Voices Iowa Playwrights Competition. After wading through more than 60 submissions of full-length plays by authors around state, a reading committee chose 9 plays, which the company produced as free staged readings. Three of these plays were chosen as finalists, with the winning work – Kin by Orange City author Jeff Barker – was mounted as a full production in the Viking Theatre at Grand View College in the summer of 2002.
Lynner and Norris were in the middle of the New Voices project when they became joint Artistic Directors of the Drama Workshop, a community theatre group, where they remained for two years, making creative contributions and supervising the organization’s 50th Anniversary Season. With no time to perpetuate the New Voices project, they decided to create a new play – a full-length musical – inspired by their Civil War research. An early version of the work – Hearts of Freedom– was performed as a staged reading for the Drama Workshop’s informal workshop series at the Civic Center Stoner Studio Theatre in 2003.
For the next three years, Lynner and Norris took a break from Des Moines theatre to focus on writing projects and build the education and service segments of the company business to generate income. In 2006, they were invited to create a production for the Westminster Fine Arts Series. They chose J.B. – Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning re-telling of the Book of Job – with Norris directing and Lynner playing the title role. Following that production, the company returned to touring, re-mounting Shakespeare On Love in 2006, and Voices of the Civil War in 2007.
In the spring of 2007, with the help of grant funding from the Iowa Arts Council, the partners began a major overhaul of Hearts of Freedom, culminating in a concert workshop of the revised show in 2008. As they continued to fine tune that script and score, they were invited to create a new work for the Iowa State Historical Museum’s History Through The Arts program. The new show, entitled Thursday’s Children, is set to premiere in October of 2010.
Unexpected Company is listed on the Iowa Arts Council’s Roster of Performing Artists. This has allows presenting organizations, schools, and other non-profits to contract or commission work from our company and apply for funding for this from the Iowa Arts Council and Arts Midwest.
Nearly all of our company’s projects past projects have been supported in part by grants from the Iowa Arts Council (a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs) and the National Endowment for the Arts. This support has allowed us to create new work, promote our shows, and pay artists (including ourselves!) We are truly grateful to the Arts Council for helping us to Live The Arts In Iowa.
