For 47 years, St. Paul’s History Theatre has been bringing stories from the past – particularly Minnesota’s past – to engaging life on its stage, not least by being a marvelous incubator for writing talent.

It has produced 147 new plays, and that requires a lot of reading, revising, workshopping and polishing before a script is ready to receive a full-scale production. I always imagined that longtime artistic director Ron Peluso, who retired in 2022, had to be a tough taskmaster to make sure these new shows were stage-ready.

Which leads me to wonder what went wrong in the creation of “Don’t Miss Doris Hines,” the company’s very disappointing season-opening production. I won’t do the forensics on how this clearly unfinished script found its way to the company’s stage, but the upshot is th

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