From the Ledge

Of course, I’ve Googled myself (and I’m pretty sure a significant number of this blog’s readers have done it for themselves as well, but too embarrassed to admit it).  I have close to 700 Google entries, ranging from various From the Ledge posts to my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profile pages to random web and media mentions such as the Tribune’s article on Top Chef Stephanie Izard’s Wandering Goat dinners (the last time I could recall seeing the word habitué it was in relation to the regular denizens of Studio 54…am I the Bianca Jagger of the Chicago underground dining scene? Yikes!).  In our world today, technology has not only bridged distances and arguably improved human interaction, but has also heightened virtual voyeurism and scrutiny of other people’s lives, whether they are public personas like celebrities, politicians, athletes, or Levi Johnston or just regular people such as your 7^th-grade crush who’s now living in Wyoming whom you’ve  Googled and friended on Facebook.  Unless you’re Unabomber Redux, your identity DNA is scattered everywhere.  So Fin Kennedy’s How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, now receiving a crisp, riveting Midwest premiere from the Godfather of all Storefronts, Mary-Arrchie Theater Co., is provocative and timely in its starting premise that one can erase one’s former life and dive into a totally new one.   I think it’s a terrific production that should deservedly bring in the Tweeting, Facebooking, Posterousing peeps into that second floor enclave on Angel Island.

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Tags: Mary-Arrchie Theater Co.

For this out and proud actressexual (noun – a male, gay or straight, obsessed with larger-than-cinematic-life actresses, often seen performing in unforgettable, Oscar-worthy dramatic roles, respectfully co-opted from Nat Rogers of TheFilmExperience.net), some of my most memorable recent female images on film have come courtesy of the wonderful Cate Blanchett.  From the last scene of Elizabeth when she slowly, hypnotically walks towards the camera in Kabuki face, to that scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley when she is dreamily flitting around steamer trunks, to her somewhat overbaked, but always fascinating Academy Award-winning impersonation of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, I’ve always found her enthralling, and yes, larger than life, and quite possibly the best actress of her generation.  So when I heard that she was going to bring her acclaimed Sydney Theater Company (where she is co-Artistic Director with her husband, playwright Andrew Upton) production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by the legendary actress Liv Ullmann to the US, but only to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York, I was off hunting for tickets faster than Russell Crowe can throw a phone at a hotel clerk.  Cate Blanchett, Tennessee Williams, Liv Ullmann – man, I was as breathless as if I was wearing three layers of male spanx! Swoon!  But the swooning is highly deserved, since after seeing the production during its DC stop last weekend, I’m pretty certain that theater lovers everywhere, actressexual or not, will find this unforgivingly stark Streetcar and Blanchett’s harrowing, vanity-less, indelible performance, that rare night in the theater that they can proudly and vividly recount to their children and grandchildren for years.

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Tags: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Kennedy Center, Sydney Theatre Company

Midway through the latest MCA Stage production, Anna Halprin/Anne Collod and guests: parades & changes, replays when dancer Laurent Pichaud was transformed into a wacky, flummoxing cross between Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind run through a trash compactor, wearing a variety of disparate costumes and accoutrements, from animal heads to hoop skirts to fur-lined clogs to trash bags to a mop and bucket which the rest of the cast had piled on him while a hypnotic, electronica score played in the background, I had to remind myself that I was neither drunk, medicated, or ‘shroomed.   I have always been an avid fan and passionate advocate of MCA Stage, but this adventurous, highly audience-demanding show, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it plays an essential, irreplaceable role in making sure that our beloved Chicago will never just be flyover country in the minds and hearts of serious performance artists everywhere.  I’m not really sure if parades & changes, replays is dance, theater, bizarro fashion show, or a combination David Lynchian-Burning Man fantasia, but, it is a highly memorable, intriguing, jaw-dropping night of performance (and I guess the New York Times and the audience in this summer’s Athens and Epidaurus Festival, one of the most prestigious dance festivals in the world, also didn’t really know what to make of it, as well.)

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Tags: Anna Halprin, Anne Collod, MCA Stage

I’m always surprised when I’m talking to people at dinner or cocktail parties who proclaim that they’re avid Chicago theatergoers and most of the plays they’ve seen in the past couple of years were at the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Chicago Shakespeare, or Lookingglass (but I politely excuse myself and seek out another vodka tonic when they say Broadway in Chicago, shudder!).  As you all know I have been a fan of many, many productions in these theaters (and in the spirit of repetitive full disclosure, I am a member of Steppenwolf’s young professionals board), so I think they’re absolutely indispensable to the city’s vibrant cultural life.  However, I want to vigorously shake these self-styled culturatis’ awake, because by limiting their theatergoing to the large, established theaters, they’re undeniably missing much of what makes Chicago such an indisputably great town for theater.  One of the pleasures of writing this blog is continuously rediscovering the ever-fluid, ever-dynamic storefront theater scene, and over the past year, I’ve been eagerly watching the ascendance of two young, energetic, impassioned theater companies:  I was bowled over by the Right Brain Project (RBP)’s imaginative and meticulous And They Put Handcuffs On The Flowers earlier this year (but disappointed by their messy Put My Finger In Your Mouth this summer) and I was intrigued by the New Colony’s audacious but somewhat flawed Frat during the spring.  So there was absolutely no second-guessing or hemming and hawing in deciding to go and see these two theater companies’ season openers:  RBP’s and author Brad Lawrence’s retelling of the Frankenstein story, The Modern Prometheus, and the New Colony’s contemporary relationship drama with a twist, written by co-founder James Asmus, Calls to Blood.   And I’m very pleased to report there was no disappointment this time around:  both RBP and the New Colony, with these productions, confirm without a doubt, that they’re doing some of the most exciting, most courageous, most distinctive theater in the city.  Even greater things should be ahead for both; and in cocktail and dinner parties two years hence, I’m pretty sure the same self-styled culturatis will be talking about these theaters, and I can enthusiastically say I knew them when.

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Tags: The New Colony, The Right Brain Project

The name “Lars von Trier” evokes as much dread in me as the words “H1N1″, “chicken feet”, and “I’m staying over tonight.”   After suffering through The Idiots, Dancer In the Dark (and who, other than this oft-accused misogynistic director would make ethereal, eternal cinematic icon Catherine Deneuve carry a plate of spaghetti while singing “My Favorite Things”?  Please, some things are sacred cows!) and parts of The Kingdom, I said I’d rather have my eyes poked out than sit through another one of his films.  So no Breaking the Waves, Dogville, or Manderlay for me.   However, after hearing and reading all the buzz, both heated denouncement and rapturous praise, I wouldn’t be true to my self-proclaimed cineaste status if I didn’t go to see his latest opus, Antichrist, the notorious sensation of the global film festival circuit this year (actually I was just more curious than anything else).  Now on a commercial run after its sold-out screening at the recently concluded Chicago International Film Festival, I must say the film is ridiculous, overblown, and a whole lot of sheep dung for significant parts of it, but it is also undeniably hypnotic, impressively infuriating, and ultimately, for better or for worse, memorable.   And it’s probably the funniest film I’ve seen all year (yes, it’s funnier than Bruno!), hilarious in its self-absorption and pretension, like an eccentric, middling artist at a pseudo-hipster gallery opening.

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Tags: Chicago International Film Festival, Lars von Trier

As avid readers of this blog know, I have pretty definitive ideas on what I like when it comes to theater (challenging material, creative re-envisionings) and on what I don’t (inanity, inauthenticity, audience pandering).  Sean Graney and The Hypocrites are definitely often in the “like” column, and sometimes even in the “very much liked” one; I strongly feel that they have an abundance of collective creative genius which is not often surpassed in the city’s storefront theater scene. Although I admired elements of Graney’s new adaptation of Frankenstein, the first time the Hypocrites, a truly edgy storefront theater group was performing at MCA Stage, a truly edgy performance space and presenting entity (why did it take so long?), I left the show discombobulated, the second straight Hypocrites production (after Oedipus) that I didn’t really buy into. 

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Tags: MCA Stage, The Hypocrites