My Maroon Review of Shining City at the Goodman

Published here. Chicago finally has a taste of the Irish drama that New York and London have loved for years now.

Martin and Me

That's me with Martin McDonagh, possibly my favorite contemporary playwright in the world, and currently promoting his first feature film In Bruges. My interview with him will be published in the February 8 issue of the Maroon. It was pretty entertaining, so watch out for it.

The rise and fall of Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks has gone through many stages of his career, from TV genius to film schlockmeister to mastermind behind one of the great musicals of the past decade. In the two former fields, he faced an embarrassing decline, and, sadly, it's looking like the same is now happening to Mel Brooks the Tony-winner. After the overwhelmingly negative response to the Young Frankenstein musical, Brooks is increasingly sounding like a bumbling old man with his own reasoning behind the critical thrashing: that critics are mad about the $450 premier seats, and in making this claim he passes the buck to co-producer Robert F.X. Sillerman.

"This was set by the producer who was too ambitious and thought the extra money might go to our backers and cast rather than concierges, scalpers and ticket brokers," Mel said.

Michael Riedel of the New York Post, never one to pass on a verbal beating, lets Mel Brooks have it for blaming Sillerman for a problem that is clearly Brooks' fault, and sadly, I'm inclined to agree.

To be fair, I haven't seen Young Frankenstein (nor do I have any real desire to do so), but I wasn't surprised when it failed. The Producers succeeded mainly because on its unflinching love for Broadway tradition. Young Frankenstein was Mel Brooks best movie for similar reasons, in that it was a love letter to classic film like The Producers was a love letter to Broadway. Frankly, I don't know that many people who had high hopes for Young Frankenstein.

But to remind us all of Mel Brooks' better musical days, I humbly submit this clip:

What's with all the Tarantino-McDonagh comparisons?

Perhaps I should have expected this, but I still find it frustrating as a Martin McDonagh fan: the buzz coming for In Bruges, from Sundance and otherwise, all seems to be comparing Martin McDonagh to Quentin Tarantino (such as here, here, here and here). I guess when you're coming from a film perspective, QT is who you think of when you think of smart dialogue + violence. But anyone who's versed in McDonagh's theatrical work would find the comparison quite strange and misguided.

To be fair, I have seen In Bruges, and McDonagh doesn't fall into the trap of making it too theater-like: it's a living, breathing movie, and a good one at that, if a bit strange. The Chicago critics I saw it with were laughing throughout at McDonagh's dialog, and seemed genuinely taken off guard by how fresh it sounded. I would have been surprised if it was any less fresh.

But other than the mix of impressive banter and gun violence, the similarities between McDonagh and Tarantino end. For one, In Bruges is strictly linear, which goes against an absolutely essential Tarantino touch. There's also a distinct Cockney/Irish gangster flair to McDonagh's dialogue, while Tarantino's dialogue is as rough and tumble American as it gets. There's a macabre and surprisingly humanist touch to In Bruges. I don't need to remind you of Tarantino's lack of taste, (well maybe a little). If the film was based entirely on its trailer, I'd say the comparison's legitimate. But the trailer is deceptive; there's a lot more complexity to the film than the Shoot 'Em Up, Smokin' Aces model in which the film is stupidly being marketed.

Neil Labute hates American theater, and sounds immature doing so

This Thursday I will be seeing This is How It Goes as part of the Profiles Theatre's year long Neil Labute festival. I must say, however, that I will be going into the theater with a bit of a chip on my shoulder against Neil LaBute. He recently railed against American theater in The Guardian, in a column both crudely written and poorly argued. He argues that though theater is not dying, American dramatists are "small writers in America...writing tiny plays about tiny ideas with two to four characters, so that we get produced and nobody loses any money." He also accuses American playwrights of "shying away from politics." He then comes out with this brilliant paragraph:

Let's face it, most writers are pussies. We sit back and watch the world go by, writing down the things we find funny or sad while trying to make a buck off it. We use our lives, or the lives of others, for personal gain, and we defend it by saying it's "in the public domain" or "true", and therefore OK to slop around in someone else's pain.

The fact that the same person who wrote The Shape of Things can spurt out a paragraph like this saddens me, never mind the fact that he ignores the incredible diversity and talent that's coming out of American theater. Has he even seen August: Osage County, or anything by Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Will Eno, or Jose Rivera?

Maybe he was writing the column to self-flagellate, as he notes:

On many levels, I think we playwrights are failing - and again, I include myself in this. I tend to write about small groups of men and women (friends, lovers, co-workers, family), locked in some kind of gender struggle. These are the politics that interest me, and I scour over them like Herman Melville's Bartleby sitting at his little wooden desk. In the course of a decade of writing, however, I have also tried to look at religion, race, art, national tragedy and a host of other social ills. Am I a naturally political writer? Not at all. A writer like Tony Kushner strikes me as someone far more naturally gifted at bringing the private and public worlds of his characters to life: he may be the most obvious link between the British writers I've long admired and contemporary America. But I have a capricious streak in me that likes writing about the unexpected, messing about with what my audience might want to see or hear or experience - and I think of these as positive qualities.

If you admit to reasons for not writing HUGE FUCKING DEFINING POLITICAL DRAMA, then where's the beef? It should also be noted he just mentioned an American playwright who, wouldn't you know it, rights good political theater, making his argument seem even more pathetic.

Ironically, right before I read this column, I was looking over my collection of John Heilpern essays and found a column entitled "The Anglophile New York Times." That column took issue with a published conversation of the New York Times theater critics on the superiority of British theater. Heilpern rightly called it "a vaudevillian act" that displays "a craven need to overcelebrate [British plays] at the cost of the American theater." He noted that London is constantly overripe with "old" plays and noted the lackluster quality of British transfers, especially when compared to American playwrights of the time like "Tony Kushner, the Wooster Group, Suzan-Lori Parks, Danny Hock, Ellen Stewart's La Mama, Margaret Edson, Savion Glover, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, or the staging of Hedwig and the Angry Inch." In short, LaBute's argument is not new, nor has it suddenly acquired any credibility.

George Hunka quickly responded to LaBute's bogus claims, and makes him LaBute look like a fool (and sounds a lot more reasonable as well). He correctly notes:

1) "In the body of his essay, though, he approvingly cites Christopher Shinn, Wallace Shawn, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, David Rabe and Amiri Baraka as fellow countrymen he admires and looked up to as a student in that hard-scrabble, tough-talking environment, the MFA program at the University of Kansas. Half a dozen for the Brits; half a dozen for the Yanks. So there doesn't seem to be any playwright gap, at least not in Neil's world."

2) "On the same day that Neil's article appeared, however, an email arrived in my inbox from a New York theatre company ironically called The Fire Department. It promoted an upcoming show, At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq. The show is a collection of scenes about just those larger issues of the day that Neil feels are being neglected by American dramatists. The scenes include work by Obie-winning playwright José Rivera and by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, whose devised play The Exonerated (about capital punishment in the US) was produced to considerable popular and critical acclaim several seasons back."

3) "If Neil still wants to meet me after school behind the gym, that's fine. But he's not the only playwright these days who "writes about [subjects] of some importance ... with honesty and courage." He's not even the only American playwright who does so. And I'm guessing, by the way, that Britain has its share of shitty playwrights too."

Basically, it's sad to see one of America's premier playwrights loudly and rudely denounce himself and his peers in an article that seems like it was written at 2 a.m. after too much wine and getting an email about The Little Mermaid. Let's hope this doesn't precipitate a Mamet-like decline.

Titus Andronicus Redux: Has Post-modernism Gone Too Far

It's virtually impossible to do Titus Andronicus straight. Even by today's standards, the play's a bloodbath, which has led the likes of T.S. Elliot and Harold Bloom to dismiss the play as one of Shakespeare's worst. Bloom himself speculated that the best person to direct Titus would be Mel Brooks, and while Charles Newell of the Court Theater is not inherently a funny man, he's tried to honor the schlock value of the play with a production of Titus that consistently maintains a wink of the eye to the audience. Hidden in the program is the line "adapted by Charles Newell," but that credit should be taken to heart. Newell's production is staged as a banquet for contemporary soldiers performing Titus melodramatically in jest, carrying scripts and messing up cues. While the initial murders are played in jest, eventually reality overtakes the evening, as art takes over life (or what we're supposed to believe is life). Newell's Titus has as much to do with Shakespeare as a Seder has to do with Exodus.

The problem with adaptations like these, where lines are added and new dimensions opened, is not necessarily matter of Shakespeare purism. The issue is that when people go to a Shakespeare play, even one as ridiculous as Titus, they go to see Shakespeare. True, Newell will be the one judged by the production no matter what he does, but trying to revise Shakespeare outright is more likely to offend your audience than win them over. While the audience laughed at some of Newell's touches, they were mostly cheap laughs. At the end of the night, the audience left the theater feeling cheated.

The other problem is that when you compare your own writing to Shakespeare, even a young, immature Shakespeare, you're bound to lose. While not one of his best plays, Titus still has remarkable poetry and tragic characterizations, which trump Newell's additions even while being suffocated by Newell. Hence, the production feels like there's a better play to be found underneath what's really being seen.

"But look at me!" Newell says. "I'm revising Shakespeare!" Sorry, but that act is not inherently in and of itself noteworthy. The Court's production stretches the limits of postmodernism, and in doing so displays post-modern dramatic theory's inherent weaknesses: revisionism for the sake of revisionism does not make for a satisfying night of theater. When the production finally tries to take itself seriously, it's not believable. The production was clearly intently thought out, rigorously rehearsed, and features impressive technical design and skilled actors. Despite all that, it still feels lazy and insincere. There's no clear vision for the play, other than to say there is no vision. If I wanted to understand that there was no need for vision, I could have stayed at home on a freezing Saturday night curled up with a book of Derrida essays.

My review of A View From the Bridge

The Grey Zelda production of A View from the Bridge was reviewed in Tuesday's Maroon. In short: great acting, terrible use of video. Still worth seeing for those who haven't seen the Arthur Miller classic.

Theater vs. Drama

Allison Krogan at The Guardian poses a question that's trickier than it initially seems: what is the difference, from a semantic standpoint, between "theater" and "drama"? She uses an interesting quote by Edward Bond to launch the debate:

"I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'."

Her thesis, which I'm inclined to agree with, is that "the implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art." One would be hard pressed to find someone who would call The Little Mermaid "drama (Ben Brantley certainly wouldn't), but it's certainly theater. I'd also add that unlike, theater, which usually implies "performance," "drama" is a text-based term, as if it could be a category along with novels and poetry. Krogan's use of Eugene O'Neill here is a particularly good example, although for the wrong reasons. O'Neill was a dramatist first and a playwright second. Of course, as many have argued, that made his plays much more forceful when read than when performed.

Now that I'm taking W.J.T. Mitchell's Theories of Media class, these kind of discussions interest me a lot more.

Teenagers Rule in The Pegasus Players' Young Playwrights Festival

For a play to see on the first day of the rest of my theater-critic life upon my return to Chicago, I picked an apt first show to in the Pegagus Players's 22nd Annual Young Playwrights Festival. I myself entered a similar contest in high school, and had my admittedly immature 17-year-old self's play produced at the City Center in New York City. The Pegasus show is actually on a much grander scale, with a fully teched production of 4 plays, taking a total of 2 and a half hours, and getting reviews in the major Chicago papers. It's more akin to the Cherry Lane's Mentor Project than the one I entered, MTC's Write on the Edge Festival.

The four plays this year, of course, showed the limits of high schoolers maturity in playwriting, but each of the plays showed incredible promise in their own way. Particularly impressive was the surprisingly diverse subject matter, which ranged from high school melodrama to a mock-Elizabethan play to a slave narrative to a Waitress-like Southern restaurant slice of life. I was particularly impressed with how each playwright was able to develop their own voice despite choosing such difficult settings and subject matter.

The first of the plays, Sarah Winter's Daydream Nation, is a series of 2 vignettes, both of which place a heavy emphasis on the Sonic Youth album of the play's namesake. The first vignette featured an after-prom scene with the inevitably ensuing loss of virginity. This scene avoids clichés by focusing on post-graduation neuroses, a subject that only a contemporary high schooler can truly convey. The second scene is the weaker of the two, and clearly needed more time to be fleshed out. It involves a group of aspiring filmmakers torn apart by one's loyalty to his brother in Iraq. Ms. Winters has a good ear for the drabness of teenage political discource, which hopefully in future plays can be fleshed out a little more.

The second play is Molly McAndrew's A Rose in the Royal Court, a semi-modernized reimagining of Shakespeare's life circa Romeo & Juliet, notably distinct from Shakespeare in Love. The play does an impressive job of alluding to contemporary similarities without letting them dominate the play. What's particularly impressive is Ms. McAndrew's interpretation of Shakespeare the man as a playboy incapable of feeling true love. This image may contrast with Shakespeare the writer, particularly, the writer of R & J, but with a heroine as strong as Rosaline, a royal gardener's daughter whom Shakespeare writes into the play, historical pedantry seems unimportant.

The third play, Claire Rychlewski's Coffee Girl, is certainly the boldest in terms of a subject matter, as it takes on a 13-year-old daughter of a slave and a plantation owner who is physically and emotionally abused by the plantation owner's wife. While it's not an easy matter for any playwright to address, let alone a high school student, the play's risks pay off more often than not. Coffee Girl would certainly benefit from being fleshed out to full-length instead of a one act, but it's a bold first play nonetheless. It's also the only play that features a younger actor, as 13-year-old Aaya McDaniel, daughter of noted Chicago jazz musician Nicole Mitchell, plays the daughter in question.

Finally, Laura Fernandez's Blooming Flowers in Weeds is the most lighthearted of the bunch, and also the best. The parallels to Adrienne Shelly's Waitress are striking. Ms. Fernandez displays a natural ear for the spoken word, especially considering she is not a native Southerner. It almost seems to good to be true for a high schooler to write dialogue this fresh or to create such compelling characters. While the play takes a misguided turn towards the tragic at the end and suffers from a couple of logical fallacies, the fact that Ms. Fernandez could create a play like this after a single experience in a southern diner is an auspicious start to her playwriting career.

All of the plays feature a set of professional actors, who, though often obviously overaged, clearly take the subject matter seriously despite the youth of their playwrights. The play also features an impressive technical design and staging at the helm of notable Chicago directors such as Loyola's Jonathan Wilson and the University of Chicago's Tiffany Trent. I remember what a thrill it was to receive a professional production on a weekday morning in high school, but I can only imagine what it must mean to these young playwrights to have their plays treated as seriously as any other playwright in a theatrical community as large as Chicago.

Life mirrors art once again

My lack of posting lately has been mostly to do with being robbed at gunpoint on Saturday night, where I lost all my ID's, cards, and phone. The most important thing, of course, is that I'm alright and not hurt, and though I was shaken up, I will lose no net value after the charges on my cards are returned. The most ironic part of the ordeal was that this occurred on my way home from seeing Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Needless to say, I did not put up any resistance in the slightest.

The movie was great, but I will wait to say more on it until I have cleared my head of armed robbery for the moment. Expect more to come from the blog shortly.

Irish Up Your Theater - A Review of "The Seafarer" by Conor McPherson

Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson have spoiled Broadway theatergoers of late. McDonagh's one creative outburst back in 1993 has fueled four incredible Broadway shows in The Beauty Queen of Lenane, The Lonesome West, The Pillowman, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Along with McPherson's The Weir and Shining City, it would seem the words "Irish" and "Broadway" could do no wrong. The Seafarer, McPherson's latest National Theatre transfer (which he also directed), may be the weakest of all seven, but it still has enough of the black Irish wit that made audiences fall in love with the new Irish playwrights in the first place. As a result, the production I attended tonight got a larger ovation than it probably merited.

The Seafarer centers on a deal with the devil in the form of a stranger named Mr. Lockhart (Ciarán Hinds), and James "Sharky" Harkin (David Morse), a recovering alcoholic with a bad temper and a sour view on life. The concept of selling one's soul to the devil has been played out (ahem) to death, so to make such a matter seem vital calls for extreme creativity and enthusiasm both from the playwright, technical staff, and actors. Mr. McPherson's premise for the transaction, Sharky's soul, a rematch of a game of poker 25 years ago, is somewhat novel. Yet, the initial indication of other-wordliness is a weak flicker of the lights and an even weaker clamping of the chest by Mr. Morse. Morse's performance is otherwise solid, but his lack of enthusiasm in this moment is an unfortunately important lapse.

Another flaw is the amount of time it takes to get to this major premise. We do not meet Mr. Lockhart until near the end of the first act, and most of the first act is filled with the drunken antics of Sharky's brother, the blind and senile Richard (Jim Norton), and friend Ivan (Conleth Hill). While Norton and Hill play decent drunks, The Seafarer proves once again that drunkenness alone cannot carry a play for an extended period of time.

Once we get to the meat of the play, however, the play takes a turn for the better. The humor of Richard and Ivan, which was cheap in the first act, feels more genuine when balanced with the gravity of Sharky and Mr. Lockhart's interaction. Mr. Hinds, too gets to show off his considerable performing chops, none displayed better than his chilling description of hell (which provides the source of the play's title), a monologue that is without a doubt the highlight of the play.

Throughout the play, the Irish meter and humorously bleak view of life that Broadway audiences have grown fond of is on full display. That, along with the fact that the play ends strongly, most likely explains the standing ovation. But there's not much here that McPherson or McDonagh haven't done better before, which may leave the uninitiated to wonder what the fuss was about in the first place.

A Review of the Goodman's Production of August Wilson's "Radio Golf"

"Wilson's last play shoots straight into the bunker"
Published in the Chicago Maroon on January 26, 2007

Too much of the praise of August Wilson is based on the fact that he wrote a play about the black experience for each decade of the 20th century. Not enough of the praise discusses the uncanny ear for the spoken word, fully realized characters, and flawless ability to weave the real with the spiritual that made Wilson one of the most accomplished American playwrights, black or white, of the past half century. Composed before his death at age 60, Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf, premiered Tuesday at the Goodman Theatre, the only American company to have produced all 10 of his plays. With its season pitched as “Celebrating August Wilson,” the environment was so commemorative that it would make any critic feel uncomfortable about fairly addressing the production at hand. Maybe that was intentional because there’s no way of hiding the fact that Radio Golf is an absolute train wreck.

There were signs that this was coming. In The New Yorker’s review of the play’s New Haven premiere in May 2005, John Lahr commented, “By the time Radio Golf makes it through one or two more productions, if he’s true to form, Wilson will have discovered his play; it will be more focused, more poetic, leaner, and more fun.” Three months later, Wilson announced he had liver cancer; two months after that, he was dead. As a result, the perfectionist Wilson was unable to fine-tune the play, and consequently, Radio Golf accomplishes none of the goals Lahr hoped it would.

Radio Golf , the 1990s chapter of the Wilson saga, features characters unfamiliar to past Wilson plays. Instead of hard-working, embittered have-nots, we get a couple of haves. The play centers around Harmond Wilks, a black entrepreneur born into wealth who, with mayoral aspirations, has plans to revitalize Pittsburgh’s decrepit Hill district with the help of Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Barnes & Noble. He and his business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, play golf, and Harmond’s wife, Mame, is up for a position in the governor’s office.

The only thing holding back the operation is a crazed old man named Elder Joseph Barlow, who claims ownership of the run-down 1839 Wylie Avenue that is about to be demolished for the new apartment complex. As Barlow’s claim increasingly gains legitimacy, Harmond is faced with a political and ethical decision he does not initially see coming.

Wilson’s greatest strength was his impeccably precise dialogue. Although some clumsy phrases appear in the first act, Wilson’s intermittently brutal and hilarious dialogue throughout the first act enhances a building plot, and by intermission, the play leaves a lot of hope for a gripping conclusion.

Unfortunately, the play collapses so disastrously in the second act that it’s almost painful to watch. The main problem stems from Harmond’s maniacal decision to attempt to save the house and ruin his career. Although such a decision may be in line with the spiritualism of Wilson’s past works, it feels entirely out of place in a play set in the ’90s.

In the past, Wilson possessed a remarkable ability to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his characters. It’s depressing, then, to see him misjudge his characters to such a degree. It’s not only Harmond, as Roosevelt inexplicably turns from an ambitious right-hand man to a racist robber baron, and Mame decides to leave Harmond, then to stay with him, then to leave him again without reason over the course of one monologue. Add that factor to that the fact that the play languishes about 45 minutes too long, and we’ve got a bona fide flop on our hands.

It may seem fair to give Radio Golf the same treatment as Eyes Wide Shut and attribute the work’s faults to the creator’s death before the its completion. However, as much as it pains me to say it, I’m not sure if even Wilson could have saved Radio Golf. Wilson’s ability to find a spiritual realm in American life seems out of date, as there’s not much mysticism in the corporate America of 1997. Aunt Esther, the lynchpin of Wilson’s vision for the cultural folklore of African Americans, died in the 1980s (see King Hedley II). The Goodman’s bulletin says that one of the aims of the play was to show how Harmond and Roosevelt struggle with the lack of a sense of African tradition. Yet, by the end of Radio Golf, the play seems less like the work of a lost heritage and more like the work of a playwright who has run out of ideas.

Regardless of the quality of the play, however, it would be irresponsible for a theater company like the Goodman to forgo the completion of Wilson’s cycle if given the opportunity. Thus, director Kenny Leon was put in the impossible position of celebrating the career of a fantastic playwright with the playwright’s weakest work.

Not surprisingly, the brightest spot in the cast is Anthony Chisholm as Barlow, the character most in tune with Wilson’s strengths. Hassan El-Amin tries his hardest to make his character believable, but as with the rest of those working on the production, his best effort is not good enough to salvage the play. In terms of effort, the one exception has to be Michole Briana White as Mame; White’s robotic motion and confused delivery was so amateurish, you had to wonder what that type of performance was doing at the Goodman.

While I’m sure it’s not what Wilson had in mind when writing Radio Golf, the story of a highly successful man with everything going for him who inexplicably gives everything away seems, in retrospect, a bit autobiographical. It’s a shame that such a remarkable career–one of the best American drama has ever seen–should leave such a bitter taste in our mouths.

My review of Uma Productions' "Faith Healer"

"Faith Healer’s excellent showmanship gives audience the razzle dazzle"
Published in the Chicago Maroon on January 23, 2007

While the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park is a limited space, director Mikhael Tara Garver of Uma Productions has made the most of it and then some in her production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. Instead of entering through the theater, the audience is led by crew members through a back alley to the cramped basement, just as you would to attend the services of a real Irish faith healer. That introduction makes the makeshift stage and seating all the more authentic, and if you can ignore the Chicago hipster audience, it sets the mood for the play perfectly.

Faith Healer is a classic of contemporary theater and has recently been brought back into the spotlight by a successful Broadway revival starring Ralph Fiennes and Cherry Jones. Garver has given the play a fantastic, remarkably professional production that belies its humble venue. While the set is used effectively, Garver’s greatest accomplishment comes from making full use of her actors potential.

The play, a series of four monologues delivered by three characters, is masterful particularly for the interaction and contrast between the characters takes on the events and for the emotions which all three discuss. What Frank (Chris Hainsworth) says about his relationship with his mistress Grace (Danica Ivanicek) or his manager Teddy (James Joseph) may not be what Grace or Teddy believes. We hear stories of Grace being barren, of Teddy’s career managing dogs before Frank, of Frank’s struggles with his parents, and of the highs and lows in Frank’s success in faith healing. The same stories become constantly updated and put into a larger perspective with each passing monologue. In fact, the monologues mesh so well that they give a better understanding of the characters and narrative than a dialogue-based play could provide.

Although Frank is the title character and the only one with two monologues, the stars of the performances have to be Ivanicek and Joseph. Frank’s introductory monologue does not imply the instability that Ivanicek immediately insinuates, and we see her struggle, and ultimately fail, to talk her way out of her trapped relationship with Frank. Her performance is a remarkable display of femininity, repression, and neurosis, and Ivanicek can change the meaning of a line with the slightest twitch of her face. Joseph, meanwhile, displays remarkably convincing Cockney showmanship, providing a comical element that does not at all seem shallow when dealing with the tragedies the play unfolds.

Hainsworth’s performance does not compare to those of the rest of the cast. However, though it is not nearly as perfect, as an actor he clearly understands his character and maintains a cool confidence crucial to Frank’s character. Although we can see how he could easily acquire someone’s trust, it’s also clear that we are not quite sure of his motivations. In his first monologue, this seems to violate his main strength as a character; how could anyone trust a man who has such a sinister side?

Of course, Frank is not trying to heal us; he is talking about his life, which leads to another great strength of Faith Healer. We are faced with a man who is discussing his life with remarkable clarity, and we immediately accept this relationship with the character. By the second act, however, the circumstances of his presentation become murkier and even a bit supernatural. When Frank delivers his final monologue, it concludes as a message from beyond the grave. This deception, while not really a secret, makes Faith Healer one of the most creatively structured plays of the last century, maintaining a subtlety possible only in theater.

The play’s writing is so crisp and immediate that even the most casual theatergoer can appreciate it, and considering how strong the performances are in a largely actor-driven play, Uma Production’s Faith Healer is already one of the highlights of the winter season of Chicago theater. That such an exceptional production can come in such a small space from an unheralded theater company is a perfect example of the unique, bottom-up nature of Chicago’s vibrant theater scene. While Broadway in Chicago is experiencing unprecedented levels of success, it would be a shame if the large Loop productions eroded one of America’s most inspiring artistic business models. Even so, if Uma keeps putting out productions like this one, not even Wicked can prevent it from becoming one of Chicago’s elite theaters.

My (negative) review of Collage Production's "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

"Sloppy 'Long Day's Journey' makes an ordeal of O'Neill"
Published in the Chicago Maroon on November 4, 2005

Walking into the Gunder Mansion at the North Lakeside Cultural Center is like entering the year 1910. The location feels like the summer house of an upper-middle class family from a century ago, which lends itself perfectly to Collage Productions’ performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. In fact, it lends itself too perfectly: The production seems so realistic that it’s unsettling to sit through. This is not your typical setting for a play—setting a play in a beach house where the actors often stand with their backs to the audience is, shall we say, a tad ambitious. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that it is Clayton J. Horath’s directorial debut, or that Horath chose O’Neill, one of the most difficult playwrights to produce, for his initiation, or that he wrote a score for the play as well.

From the very beginning it’s clear that Horath has taken on more than he can handle, as the actors struggle to delve inside their characters and it becomes impossible to connect the spoken lines with the bodies who speak them. In a production of an O’Neill play, that disconnection can only produce one thing: disaster.

To be fair, much of the blame can be placed on O’Neill, and not Horath, for making the play so impossible to navigate. As Mary McCarthy, the legendary theater critic for the Partisan Review, said in 1946, O’Neill “did not possess the slightest ear for spoken word.” While it is clear that O’Neill developed his complex and conflict-laden characters brilliantly, he seemed to possess no intuition for how to convey such complex characters without having his characters discuss their own psychology outright.

From the first five minutes of the play, O’Neill shoves this down our throats, as the characters discuss the drug addiction, alcoholism, sickliness, miserliness, and depression without any nuance or banter. While that kind of talk is great on paper, it doesn’t reflect how people actually speak. The fact that McCarthy pointed this out is a sign of the fact that O’Neill’s appeal was not theatrical. While more literary-minded critics heralded Long Day’s Journey as perhaps the most realistic portrayal of a crumbling American family in terms of characterization, it’s a painfully unrealistic play to watch for anyone with sensitivity to dialogue.

It’s this type of approach that makes Collage Productions’s rendition so bad. Jeff Helgeson recites the lines of father James Tyrone like John Wayne in his worst movies. As the vagabond older brother Jamie, Jeff McVann seems more focused on remembering his lines—and indeed, he struggles with his lines throughout the production—than understanding his character’s contradictions. As the mentally unstable, morphine-addicted mother, Barbara Button is so unconfident about her lines that she seems afraid to say them. As a result, her voice is so quiet that it’s impossible to hear her.

Long Day’s Journey doesn’t require the actors to think about their characters—every detail of their psychology is in the dialogue. The play requires something much more complex from the directors and actors: They must not only maximize the impact of the dialogue, but also make the dialogue believable. By employing actors who are not only detached from the dialogue but who also don’t seem to care, the worst parts of the play are brought to the forefront, thus making the production impossible to sit through. In fact, the indifference of the actors is absurdly self-referential: Like the characters they depict, the actors are stuck in a position they hate with no concern for how they treat their circumstances or the people they affect (in this case, the audience).

There are other serious problems with the production as well. The set-up of the play’s set, despite being dramaturgically fascinating, is an acoustical nightmare. Lines that are spoken from five feet away seem 50 feet away, so that much of what little power the delivery has is lost. The other main problem is the score, written by Horath himself. In fact, from both the program and his own introduction, Horath seems to consider himself more of a composer than a director. This hurts the credibility of the play, especially when the music—played mostly in major keys—contrasts sharply with the tense arguments that are taking place on stage.

While Horath and his cast certainly took on a difficult job in choosing to produce Long Day’s Journey, they fell flat due to poor decision making and sloppy production. While it may be acceptable for the Tyrones to put on a play at this level, it is certainly not acceptable for a professional theater company in Chicago.

My review of ATC's production of Orpheus Descending

"Orpheus Descending scours depths of human misery"
Published October 18, 2005 in The Chicago Maroon

From the very beginning of the American Theater Company (ATC)’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, you get the sense that nothing but despair will cross this stage. There is desperation in the body of Lady Torrence, the aging shopkeeper whose curmudgeonly husband is on his deathbed. The title of the play comes from the Greek myth about the musician Orpheus’s descent into the underworld and it is not the only supernatural theme Williams calls upon in this play. Orpheus Descending is full of black magic at its blackest, with voodoo curses, witchcraft, and the darkest of Christian themes. Yet out of the haze comes one of Williams’s most rewarding theatrical experiences, and the American Theater Company has shown remarkable courage in putting on an exceptionally despairing view of the worst the world has to offer.

Not surprisingly, this messy, confounding view of the universe rubbed many critics the wrong way in 1957, causing the play to more or less fall off the public’s radar. This is a world where no one has any sense of hope unless it’s at the most useless time possible, where past demons continue to torture and drag down a person years after they first rear their ugly heads. It’s a world of gossip, violence and vice, perhaps the darkest one Tennessee Williams—a playwright known for shocking themes—ever created. Set in the Mississippi outskirts of New Orleans in 1948, Orpheus begins with the gruesome death of Lady Torrence’s father and details its devastating effects on her life and marriage. When Val, a young, handsome former blues musician enters the scene and looks for a job, she views him as her savior and secretly clamors for him to be “store clerk by day, stud at night.” As this fantasy comes to fruition, we see both Val and Lady Torrence stumble into a world beyond redemption, where fragile lives become even more fragile, until the ending, when the characters shatter. While Williams was never one for happy endings, in no other play does the tragedy run this deep, leaving the audience aghast.

It takes an exceptional production—and an especially exceptional cast—to fully impart the play’s despondency and fractured, jarred emotions. Damon Kiely’s production does just that. He’s helped by an absolutely spellbinding display of acting intuition by his two leads. As Lady Torrence, ATC veteran Carmen Roman seems to grasp just how desperately her character is clinging to a hope of finding a way out of the bottomless pit she’s fallen into. Her seduction of Val is at once pathetic and sympathetic. Val, portrayed with remarkable realism by Steve Key, has a surprisingly earnest nature, considering what can be intuited about his past, and we get the sense that the boyish adventurousness in his speech and actions gets him into more trouble than he deserves. Yet, there’s also a dark element to Val’s character that’s barely visible but impossible to ignore. You can tell that the director and actors worked hard on the movements onstage, because while they are entirely natural, they also lend a disorderly, grating feel to the events in the play. The production staff also did its part: Keith Pitts’s set gives an excellent view of a store long overdue for massive reorganization, which is simultaneously a source of comfort and claustrophobia for the characters onstage. Furthermore, Charlie Cooper offers one of the best examples of how lighting can make a play, as his work paints the set with a faint red-orange tint, giving off a sense that while we may be on earth, we are also in the land of the damned.

Tennessee Williams worked on Orpheus Descending for nearly 20 years, so it’s no surprise that it has been called the most “Williams” of his plays. While Lady Torrance does have elements of Blanche DuBois, and Val certainly has the earnest but uncertain nature of Tom Wingfield, these are characters stripped down to their bare nature, victims of no injustice except their own existence. Val says it best: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those that are bought and the buyers.” In their world, no one exists without a price on his body and his soul, and the interactions that occur from people trying to exist on their own create a prevalent sense of disillusionment. But this is not your typical existentialist distress; this is disillusionment in the Macbethian sense, one where from dust we rise, and to dust we shall return. It’s this take on the bare nature of existence that makes ATC’s production of Orpheus Descending one of the darkest nights in theater, and also one of the most rewarding.

A review of the Viaduct Theater's 2005 production of "Him"

"Poet cummings marrie—and divorces—art from reality"
Originally published in the Chicago Maroon on June 3, 2005.

Cummings demonstrated an anachronistic ability to explore the avant-garde. Featuring impossible characters, absurdist dialogue, and perplexing vaudevillian music, Him, like cummings’s poetry, simply cannot be viewed at face value. There are many subtle themes that lend the play continuity. These include an exploration of the problems that plague relationships (partly autobiographical, the play features a frustrated wife of uncertain fidelity); criticisms of capitalism, fascism, and apathy; and the perils of reconciling art with real life. Refusing to give in to the standards of his time, cummings takes a more aesthetic and unique approach to these problems. He had a fascination with so-called “low art”—the flier for Him declares, “Damn everything but the circus!”—yet he was also a brilliant verbalist. Cummings couldn’t have constructed a sentence that wasn’t beautiful if he had tried. This peculiar disparity is utilized masterfully in Him, creating thematic and linguistic eclecticism. Scenes are, at various times, poetic, eccentric, raunchy, experimental, comical, and absurd; but they are never conventional. Yet for all this variety, the play is surprisingly well balanced. This is largely due to director Whitney Blakemore’s extensive cuts. Although it is a shame to think of what is not said in a play like this, the result is a version of the play that is much more approachable than the one cummings provided or intended.

Productive cutting is just one of the many aspects of the Viaduct Theater Company’s consistently brilliant production. All levels of the production work stunningly together—Robert Whitaker’s inspired set design, Rich Peterson and Heather Graff’s complexly layered lighting, Allison Siple’s absurdly masterful costume design, and eerie Chicago vaudeville blues. If the production weren’t top notch, not only would the play be impossible to watch, it would be impossible to perform.

While not as strong as the tech crew, the cast is still quite impressive. Each actor seems perfectly cast, delivering lines flawlessly, although they had not quite memorized their lines as of the preview performance. Each cast member looks appropriately spooky and circus-like, except Him and Me (David Shultz and Julia Siple, respectively), the characters apparently based on cummings and his second wife, who form the narrative core of the play. While plot is obviously not the focus of Him, Him and They do provide the play with much needed continuity, and, despite cummings’s trademark whimsical dialogue, they manage to play the scenes as straightforwardly as possible. This controlled technique helps to underscore the contrast between the real world and the world of the play.

This contrast proves to be extremely essential to the larger motifs of the play. Like perhaps no one since Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, cummings extensively explored the boundary between the world of art and the world we, as humans, actually live in. Cummings had the advantage of working under the auspices of modernism, Freudian psychology, and the history of an enormous war that challenged people’s view of society. One of the main points of the play is that despite the fact that the art world is more beautiful and appealing than ours, the two cannot coexist. Furthermore, those focused on the world of art will, by nature, have problems existing in the real world. Despite recognizing this problem, and warning against it, cummings can’t help backsliding into such inadvisable behavior, and the paltry audience at the Viaduct’s production (the actors outnumbered audience members in Friday’s production) demonstrates the public’s aversion to such indulgence. Yet, for anyone who wants an aesthetic, rich, and incomparable view of the nature of art and life, the Viaduct’s production of Him is an absolute must, one of the highlights of this spring’s Chicago theater season.

My first Maroon Theater review

"Themes of sex, worship still potent in Equus revival"
Originally published in the Chicago Maroon on November 9, 2004

Upon its 1974 Broadway premiere, Peter Shaffer’s Equus shocked and amazed thousands of theatergoers. With its nudity, provocative content, and portrayal of deeply disturbed individuals, it became one of the most controversial, as well as one of the greatest, plays in the English language of the past fifty years. The play’s main criticism is that in a mechanical and bitterly scientific age, a man becomes vulnerable to losing his sense of worship, and therefore losing a part of his individuality. Even so, when one reads the play, one is taken aback by the form that message takes. No reading can do Equus justice. However, the play’s mystical staging, unchanged by the Hypocrites Theater Company, drills the message into the mind of the audience and does not leave them until long after the curtain call.

Equus’s hero is profoundly disturbed, and only after sufficient self-doubting by other characters can we discover our sympathies for him. Alan Strang, an institutionalized seventeen-year-old, is first introduced as a boy who spiked the eyes out of six horses with a spur, and who mutters nothing but television ad slogans. Through the investigations of Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist treating Alan, we begin to learn of possible causes for this incident: an aborted first horseback ride, his mother’s religiosity, his father’s ban on television. The only real clue we get from Alan himself, however, is his muttering of “Eck, Eck…” repeatedly in his sleep.

Alan is loud and resistant, and breaks through Martin’s detached exterior by grilling him on his troubled marriage. Geoff Button excels as Alan, giving him depth as a man who is ostentatiously angry and violent on the surface, but is in reality feeble and shattered. Kurt Ehrmann consistently maintains a forlorn, eternally conflicted Martin, yet he can switch from confusion to rage to fascination in the blink of an eye.

The first act ends with the realization of Alan’s spiritual connection to horses, a motif that is developed in the second act, in which we learn more details about the practices of Alan’s worship, as well as the circumstances that led to his violent act. It is ironic to note that his violence was in step with his coming of age, a product of his profound sense of worship clashing with the adult life expected of him. This point is further emphasized by Martin’s increasing fascination with Alan’s worship, which Martin himself has been striving for all his life.

Martin’s lifeless marriage and halfhearted interest in ancient Greece are no matches for Alan’s immersion in his ritualistic practices. Martin’s fascination conflicts with his duties as a psychiatrist, as he begins to doubt his goal of returning Alan to a “normal” life. In doing so, he would cause Alan to lose his identity. Ultimately, we learn that the two lifestyles are irreconcilable, a realization that had caused Alan to resort to violence against his god.

While the content of the play is stunning enough, we must not forget director Sean Graney’s brilliant staging, a whole other invaluable dimension of the production. Largely taken from the original production (indeed, there is no need to change that staging as of yet), the set is designed like a barn, with actors dressed as horses forming a sort of Greek chorus, chanting and humming at critical moments. Watching Alan interact with these horses while on stage brings to life what would otherwise just be discussed, as we see, at least to some extent, Shaffer’s goal for humanity. Alan’s nudity in front of the horses is intensely emotional and personal, contrasted by shallower nudity of his coworker Jill, portrayed brilliantly by Halena Kays. The horses’ reactions are what drive Alan to aggression, and the stage rotates to further emphasize the point, albeit in a rather gimmicky manner.

In the performance I saw, there were very few flaws of which to speak. Among those few, most notable was Martin’s vocalized idealization of Alan to his coworker, which was constantly screamed by Ehrmann, screamed so much that the meaning, and indeed, audibility of his words were often lost in the process. It was an easy trap into which Graney could fall; Martin’s reaction to Alan is life-changing, and Ehrmann can display fury so skillfully that he relied on screaming too much. While this overindulgence was a tad distracting, it by no means ruined a spectacular production of an intensely moving play.

A return to form

This blog hasn't had a new post in over 2 years, but I feel it's time to revive it. 2008 is the year I graduate, and as it stands I need a constant forum for theater and film-related news, reviews, features, and interviews. I will try to update this blog as much as possible, starting tonight, when I will attend The Seafarer, a new play by Conor McPherson (of Shining City fame.) I'll also be posting some of the best of my reviews for the Maroon, over the course of my first 3 years.