Ironwood Theatre to Present Play Written by Former Wakefield Resident

IRONWOOD, MI - Friday, July 30, 2010 - “The Rock Farm” is a name that could be given to most farmsteads carved out of the cutover land in the early 1900s in the west end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  But this Rock Farm is a play written by former Wakefield, Michigan resident Donna Salli.

For the award-winning poet and English instructor at Central Lakes College in Brainerd, Minnesota, the short play is her love song to Finnish-American roots. “The Rock Farm” (Kivistön Tila in Finnish) will be presented for one showing only a few miles from Salli’s childhood home, at the historic Ironwood Theatre at 7:30 PM on Saturday, August 7.

Donna Salli was born to parents of full Finnish descent. Her mother and father still live in Wakefield in a home her mother’s parents built. Salli’s play is about family with flavorings of both humor and worry. “The characters are products of the culture and society that I grew up in and were inspired by a time and place that many in the audience will recognize,” she said.

It tells the story of a Finnish-American family one windy, snowy November evening in the U.P.  A group of women-mothers, daughters, sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins-and a small boy await the arrival of the youngest daughter and her family.  The men of the family are absent, in search of the late arrivals, but they are present in the stories the women tell.  Their subjects are Finnishness, family, love, and generations shaped by the loss of one country and the hard edge of life in another.

“The Rock Farm” was translated into Finnish and premiered in Finland in 2008 then in America a year later. The Finnish cast flew to this country to perform the play in Finnish for the American debut. The Ironwood showing will follow the same format with, once again, a cast from Finland repeating the short play in the Finnish language. Donna Salli is expected to introduce her play for the Ironwood audience.

Salli shares the “writing gene” with her sister Doreen, likely passed down  from their great-grandfather Kaarlo Korpela, who was a writer in Finland. Graduating from local schools she attended the University of Wisconsin where she earned a BA in English then received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the recipient of a Mentor Series Award in Poetry from the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Her poems and creative nonfiction essays have appeared in publications across America.

Tickets for the production are $15, $12, $10, and $5  for students and are available at the Theatre box office at 109 East Aurora Street in Ironwood and also at the door. Telephone 906/932-0618 for information or visit the Theatre website at www.ironwoodtheatre.net. “The Rock Farm” is sponsored in part by a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs.