Two theater reviews

The lack of posting has been partially due to two of my pieces going to the Maroon. Last week I reviewed both Dead Man's Cell Phone at the Steppenwolf and Four Places at Victory Gardens. I liked them both. Say what you will about Sarah Ruhl, but I do think her sudden popularity is justified. As for Four Places, it's surprisingly one of the better shows I've seen all season, and easily one of the best shows I've ever seen where the average age of the audience was over 60.

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.

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.

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.