Vancouver actor and playwright Aleks Merilo will take to the stage next month in Magenta Theater’s production of “She Loves Me.”
The show is set in an Eastern European perfume shop in the 1930s. Merilo, a 30-year-old drama teacher at Chief Umtuch Middle School in Battle Ground, plays Georg, a shop employee with a seemingly contentious relationship with his co-worker, Amalia.
“It’s about two painfully shy people who come to grips with how they feel about each other,” Merilo said. “It’s a really sweet show.”
This will be the first musical Magenta has paid royalties to produce (its two previous musicals were written for Magenta by its artistic director and founder, Jaynie Roberts).
“She Loves Me” runs Dec. 3-18. See http://www.magentatheater.com for more information.
In addition to acting and teaching, Merilo writes his own plays. Last year, five of his plays were produced by theater companies and universities around the country.
“It’s a very humbling experience to see someone put so much time and effort into producing something you wrote,” he said.
Merilo received a grant from Northern Michigan University and spent the summer writing in Prague.
He was able “to pretty much live in a castle and write a play for my summer break, which was pretty fun,” Merilo said.
WSU Vancouver professor wins book award
Washington State University Vancouver assistant professor of human development Marcelo Diversi recently won an award with his collaborator, Claudio Moreira of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The duo won the National Communication Association Ethnography Division 2010 award for best book for “Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy & Praxis.”
It was a project that has been a lifetime in the making for the pair.
Diversi, 43, grew up privileged in São Paulo, Brazil, while Moreira’s childhood in the same country was impoverished.
The longtime friends reflected on their disparate backgrounds while writing “Betweener Talk.”
In the book, Diversi writes about how he is viewed as an American in Brazil but is still viewed as a foreigner in America.
“Eight hours, which is the duration of the flight between the two countries, changes my ethnicity,” he said. “This is the kind of stuff we talk about in this book.”
“Betweener Talk” uses the authors’ experiences as a springboard for looking at inequality in the United States, Brazil and elsewhere. “The book is more like a culmination, a destination, of the research we have been doing independently for many years,” Diversi said.
He received word of the award in September, and Moreira accepted the award in mid-November.
“It’s very nice to be recognized,” he said. “To be acknowledged for book of the year when we know all the good work being done elsewhere is a great honor.”
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