First, they optioned Matt Wallner, hoping a trip to Triple-A would help him reset. Edouard Julien was next, and on Thursday, Alex Kirilloff officially became the third slumping left-handed hitter the Twins have sent down to the minors this year.

The move came after a particularly tough last six weeks: Since the beginning of May, Kirilloff is hitting just .143 with a .546 OPS. On the season, he’s hitting .201 and his 86 OPS+ represents a mark that is 14% worse than the league-average hitter.

“He needs to continue to work and we need to help him get back to where he usually is,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Lately, there have been a few different things that we could point to. They haven’t looked like him. It’s not the guy we’re familiar with.”

Typically, when he has struggled at the major league level, it’s been tied to injury. But all accounts are that Kirilloff is healthy and that’s not the reason behind the trouble he has encountered at the plate.

That’s left everyone searching for answers.

“Everyone goes through those sorts of things,” Kirilloff said in May. “It kind of just sucks when you’re going through it. It’s just like, I don’t know what’s going on. You’re mentally just tired of always just trying to think about it.”

And so the Twins hope some time spent making adjustments down at Triple-A might help Kirilloff return to form. Baldelli said they will “continue to experiment” with a couple of different things as they try to diagnose what might be wrong.

“He makes good adjustments and … truthfully, maybe it’s some of the things we bring to the table that help him figure this out,” Baldelli said. “He’s a guy that makes a lot of his own adjustments, too, so I wouldn’t doubt if he found something on his own just experimenting.”

Martin recalled

To fill Kirilloff’s spot on the roster, the Twins have recalled Austin Martin for his third stint in the majors. Since May 21, when he returned to the Saints’ lineup, he is hitting .273 with a .449 on-base percentage. That number was buoyed by one game in which he drew five walks.

“He’s had excellent at-bats at the Triple-A level,” Baldelli said. “He’s been on base all the time.”

Martin was in the starting lineup in left field on Thursday and it seems likely that he might see most of his time in the outfield, though Baldelli said he could find himself at second base — which he’s played extensively in the minor leagues — from time to time.

“It was great to be up and it was great to do what I can to help this team win, but at the end of the day, I still needed to get reps and I still needed to make sure I was prepared to the best of my ability,” Martin said. ‘I think going down there and just getting more reps kind of dialed my eyes in a little bit better, just seeing pitching on a consistent basis.”

Briefly

The Twins will wear their new City Connect uniforms, which they unveiled on Monday, for the first time on Friday. There will also be a postgame Flo Rida concert. … Simeon Woods Richardson will take the ball opposed by right-hander Mitch Spence.

Paris was bursting with American writers, musicians and artists in the 1920s and ’30s, but one of them never really found her way home. Cabaret performer Josephine Baker was the toast of Paris, but, as an African American woman, was stung by rejection whenever she returned to the U.S.

“Once Upon a Time… Josephine Baker” is a new play by Austene Van that premiered Wednesday at Yellow Tree Theatre in Osseo, where Van is artistic director. Presented as a kind of historical fantasia — part chronicle of a life, part meditation on the questions that life inspires — it’s an increasingly involving drama with music that is Van’s first foray as a playwright.

While some exchanges in her script can seem more like historical exposition than conversation, Van is a veteran actor, director and choreographer who seems to know that her play needs a magnetic center point. And it is her. She delivers a simply astounding performance as a woman roiling with conflict and contradictions, a commanding yet vulnerable entertainer who sought to make a greater impact and found mixed results.

Austene Van stars as Josephine Baker, an African-American woman who became the toast of Paris as a cabaret performer, dictating the story of her complex and contradictory life to a young writer (Tolu Ekisola) in Yellow Tree Theatre’s “Once Upon a Time… Josephine Baker,” running through June 30. (Courtesy of Alex Clark)

Thanks to the framing device of a young African American woman sent to Paris by a publisher to aid Baker in completing her autobiography, the audience in the intimate Yellow Tree space gets up close and personal with a woman who burst out of a New York chorus line with a wildly athletic dancing style of expressive abandon, was recruited to Paris in 1925 and became a phenomenon, continuing to perform for 50 years.

She was also a spy for the French resistance and the only woman to speak at the 1963 “March on Washington” where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. But Baker was also something of an enigma, and “Once Upon a Time” demonstrates why, as she frequently scrambles the details of her life, frustrating the young scribe sent to get the facts but encountering a subject more interested in fashioning something like a fictionalized fairy tale.

In Van’s hands, Baker becomes a captivating combination of compelling charisma and helpless vulnerability, sometimes disarmingly capturing that contradiction in her eyes. While she can at first seem a hot-headed, dictatorial prima donna, Van’s Baker is an enthusiastically committed performer, as evidenced by her full-body Charleston in a banana skirt and her sad crooning of “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You).”

Throughout, we experience a woman on a constant quest for adoration and acceptance, driven by dark memories of the lynchings and abuse of her St. Louis childhood and haunted by the periodic U.S. tours on which she was loved by crowds, but stung by critics and rejected by hotels and restaurants for the color of her skin.

Van is complemented well by Tolu Ekisola as the incredulous journalist who throws up unwanted reality checks, JoeNathan Thomas as Baker’s exasperated bandleader and Jim Lichtscheidl as a series of suitors. Director Maija Garcia has crafted a staging with arresting variations in pace and emotional tenor, aided greatly by Sarah Brandner’s set and Samantha Fromm Haddow’s array of eye-catching costumes.

But this is, above all, Van’s show, and, as both author and star, she creates an insightful story and a tour de force performance.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

‘Once Upon a Time … Josephine Baker’

When: Through June 30

Where: Yellow Tree Theatre, 320 Fifth Ave. S.E., Osseo

Tickets: $45-$15, available at 763-493-8733 or yellowtreetheatre.com

Capsule: Austene Van paints a powerful portrait of a 20th-century superstar.

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The Minnesota Department of Transportation is studying potential improvements to Minnesota 61 in St. Paul from Interstate 94 to Lower Afton Road. Prior to a scheduled resurfacing project in 2027, MnDOT is reviewing traffic volumes, crash data and turn patterns with the goal of determining what safety, mobility and accessibility improvements are needed.

MnDOT started the study in June 2023.

The study will be discussed during a community meeting, to be held in person from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on June 27 at the Battle Creek Recreation Center, 75 Winthrop St. South.

An online survey is available until July 14. For more information, visit tinyurl.com/US61Stp24.

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