July 2018

Sweet Land rode a most unique path toward becoming a full fledged musical. “A Gravestone Made of Wheat” a short story written by Will Weaver, appeared in a 1989 Minneapolis Star Tribune Sunday magazine. In 2005, Ali Selim went on to write and direct an indie movie based on the story and re-titled it Sweet Land. Last year, playwrights Perrin Post and Laurie Flanigan Hegge with the aid of composer Dina Maccabee, tinkered with the premise a bit but held on to the primary characters of the story and transformed the work into a musical. Tap Root is now staging the show’s successful West Coast premiere. The focus of the play is on Olaf Torvik, a hard working Norwegian farmer living in rural Minnesota and Inge Altenberg, a German woman who in 1920 has sailed across the sea from Norway to marry the man she has never met. The current concerns about the acceptance of immigrants into our country naturally resonate throughout the evening, but the natural beauty of this unabashedly romantic love story is Sweet Land’s most important gift to its audiences.