All Wet

The MTSU “Books on Ice” Skaters, who gained national fame for the Murfreesboro school with such productions as “Kafka on Ice,” “Silas Marner on Ice,” and “Little Women on Ice,” have left audiences underwhelmed with their latest production based on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Most of the criticism of “Gore on Ice” seems to be leveled at the point in the second act when, in a vivid demonstration of the global warming theme of the book and movie, all of the ice in the rink melts, forcing the skaters to don hip waders and slog around for the remainder of the show.

“It’s like halfway through they forgot the ‘on ice’ part of the title,” grouses one audience member. “If I want to see a bunch of people sloshing around in rubber boots I’ll go to a trout stream on Memorial Day weekend.”

But the troupe’s longtime artistic director, Dr. Larry Homer, defends the ice-to-water transformation.

“We wanted a dramatic way to illustrate the theme of the book within our ‘on ice’ presentation, and since so much of An Inconvenient Truth revolves around melting ice, we thought this was perfect. Maybe the ice-melting thing is too avant-garde, but we’ve always kind of been out there,” Homer says.

The “Books on Ice” Skaters seem to have a knack for controversy as well as popularity. Several years ago they suspended a production based on a biography of Ronald Reagan following protests that the leaping-the-Berlin-Wall-on-skates set piece trivialized the fall of Communism.

Several years earlier, the estate of Franz Kafka sued MTSU over “Kafka on Ice,” saying that their dazzling skating portrayal of several of the Czech writer’s short stories was an unauthorized performance. In the popular show, billed as “holiday fun for the whole family,” the skaters, some in cockroach costumes representing the Gregor Samsa character in The Metamorphosis, would pointlessly skate around and then “die” at center ice.

“We’ve never exactly been the Rockettes,” says Homer.