From the Ledge

Throughout the year, my standard response to friends, acquaintances, and random cocktail chit-chatters alike when they told me they were going to New York City to see a play was: “Save your airfare. Spend it on Chicago theater instead.” 2008 was, undeniably, a phenomenal year for Chicago theater. Local boy Tracy Letts won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play for the stupendously successful August: Osage County, which was conceptualized, incubated, fleshed out, and first performed by Chicago’s leading theater company, Steppenwolf Theater. Legendary director Peter Brook came to Chicago this year (Fragments at Chicago Shakespeare), but so did acclaimed contemporary playwright Lynn Nottage, who premiered her latest work, the shattering Ruined, at the Goodman Theater. Horton Foote, still spry and vibrant at 92, was also at the Goodman, gracing activities for it’s Horton Foote Festival. Elevator Repair Company, Tim Supple, the Shaw Festival, Marta Carrasco, Mike Daisey, William L. Petersen (more of a comeback than a visit), the best and the brightest of the world’s stage were all in Chicago, interacting with a live theater audience that was as sophisticated, critical, open-minded, educated, and enthusiastic as any in the world. But the great thing about our Chicago theater community is that our local heroes continued to thrive, expand, inspire, and astound this year too. Directors David Cromer and Sean Graney staged some of the most brilliant, world-class theater in any time zone. Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey continued to demonstrate that she has the keenest, bravest, most uncompromising artistic sense among arts leaders in the city by opening a season that followed the August high with a highly-impressionistic, dense, intellectually provocative original adaptation of a Haruki Murakami novel. Great performances abounded, showcasing the almost limitless talent pool in the city: E. Faye Butler in Caroline, or Change, Hollis Resnick in Grey Gardens, John Judd in Shining City, Steve Pickering and Jen Engstrom in Fatboy, the list goes on and on. The storefront theater scene was energetic and impressively original, with inventive work coming from groups as diverse as the Hypocrites (every single play they staged this year), Collaboraction (Jon), Strange Tree Group (Mysterious Elephant), and TUTA (a haunting Uncle Vanya), introducing new theatergoers to the magic of live performance. It was a great year to be an arts lover in Chicago.

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Tags: About Face Theater, American Theater Company, Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Collaboraction, Court Theater, MCA Stage, Strange Tree Group, The Hypocrites

I have to admit I’m a bit of a Scrooge during the holidays (well, a lot of my close friends would probably say it’s not just “a bit”…).  I really can do without the materialism and sentimentality, and to be frank, insincerity (I can’t believe I get Christmas cards from people I haven’t heard from since the previous year…if they really wanted to keep in touch, they probably should have sent an Easter card, or better yet picked up the phone instead) that’s prevalent during the Christmas season.  I normally can’t wait for December to be over, but this year, I can’t get this month to move fast enough. If I’m going to spend Christmas, I’d do so in January 2009 since that’s the start of the most highly-anticipated theatrical event of the winter season, the Eugene O’Neill festival at the Goodman. It’s an ambitious, unique, highly commendable project to bring the best of world-class theater to Chicago, and I’ve been breathless with excitement and tingling all over since the line-up was announced a couple of months ago.  The Goodman is offering a terrific value with it’s O’Neill Explorer pass, which at $124, offers a 20% savings on the total cost of seeing seven of the eight plays being showcased in the Festival.  Desire Under the Elms, O’Neill Festival curator and Goodman Theater Artistic Director Robert Falls’ Broadway-bound version is not part of the Explorer Pass.  I’m convinced that it’s worth it to buy tickets for Desire Under the Elms (it’s one of the more histrionic O’Neill dramas, which I LOVE), especially after seeing this promotional picture:  I can’t wait to see Brian Dennehy’s Owen Wilson-meets-Carol Channing-on-crystal-meth blonde wig! I think January’s highlight though will be the play that kicks-off the Festival in the first week of January- the acclaimed, experimental New York theater company Wooster Group’s Emperor Jones.  Regular Wooster Group leading lady Kate Valk plays Brutus Jones, the lead role, played in previous productions by acting titans like Paul Robeson and Ossie Davis.  Yes, Kate Valk is female; yes, she is white; and yes, she will be playing the role in blackface, as she did in New York and Philadelphia.  It’s a performance whose power and impact the New York Times’ drama queen, I mean drama critic, Charles Isherwood has compared to Sandra Bernhardt’s in La Dame aux Camelias, Laurette Taylor’s in The Glass Menagerie, and Maria Callas in Tosca.  Wow, that’s quite a pantheon to live up to.  I think this production of Emperor Jones will be provocative, political, and highly contemporary, and I can’t wait! The other January productions will be the three one-act plays that comprise O’Neill’s Sea Plays.  The Brazilian theater group, Companhia Triptal, will stage a US premiere under the umbrella title, Homens ao Mar.  It seems that these plays will be highly-theatrical, and staged in surprising, boundary-expanding ways.  I haven’t heard a lot about Zona di Guerra (In the Zone) and Longa Viagem de Volta pra Casa (The Long Voyage Home), but I’ve seen a video of Cardiff (Bound East for Cardiff) where the audience is right up there on stage with the actors.  Delirious! 

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Tags: Goodman Theater

I’ve had so much Shakespeare this past few weeks, that I almost feel like Judi Dench (well, turning the 40th year milestone did that too).  There’s always something Shakespearean going on somewhere in this city’s energetic arts community, but to have both Anne Bogart and the SITI Company’s experimental take on Macbeth which had already drawn raves in New York’s Under the Radar Festival of cutting-edge work, as well as British director Tim Supple’s vibrant, highly-acclaimed, polyglot version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in the Indian subcontinent, on stage at the same time, is some kind of special. I saw both last weekend, but unfortunately, both shows have already closed as of this writing. 

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Tags: Anne Bogart, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Court Theater, SITI Company, Tim Supple, TUTA

The economic crisis has already began making it’s unwelcome and frightening presence felt with arts organizations.  There’s been some talk in the Chicago theater blogs lately about grant money getting scarcer by the day and several theater companies sending out year-end donation ask letters that give off a scent of panic and, it kills me to even write this, desperation (I have been deluged with many donation request letters over the past couple of weeks, even from theater companies I don’t regularly go to, but I haven’t received that one letter from that one theater group that Kris’s blog commenters mention.  I think I know who it is, and I’m floored that they even contemplated, much less sent, a letter like that to their subscribers and ticketbuyers).  My two cents on all of this is that this is the time for winnowing, where theater companies that consistently provide compelling, truthful, and impactful theatrical experiences to its audiences will survive these calamitous times, and be the stronger, more robust, and more mature for it.  As I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog post, I’ve seen a lot of self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing, indifferent-to-the-audience theater in this town, and no arts group can afford to act in that way anymore right now; it’s change or die. 

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Tags: Collaboraction, Drury Lane Theater

I’m on my regular Thanksgiving sojourn in Minneapolis this week, but I couldn’t help but take note of the to-be-expected phenomenal reviews that our very own Steppenwolf Theater’s London transfer of August:  Osage County received after opening on Wednesday night at the National Theater.  Deanna Dunagan, Amy Morton, Rondi Reed, Ian Barford, Jeff Perry, Sally Murphy, Maryann Mayberry, Kimberly Guerrero, and Troy West all reprise the roles they created here in Chicago and took to Broadway; Steppenwolf ensemble member Gary Cole (recently of Desperate Housewives), Broadway understudy Molly Ranson, and newbies Chelcie Ross and Paul Vincent O’Connor (taking over from original Chicago and Broadway cast member Francis Guinan, who had stayed in Chicago to be part of the soon-to-open The Seafarer on the Steppenwolf main stage) join them.  Our very own Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune was first on the scene, saying August “kicks London in the gut” and finally, after three reviews, calls Amy Morton’s shattering performance as the eldest daughter Barbara “one of the great theatrical performances of the modern era”.  The London critics were a little bit more reserved than that, but the usually crotchety Guardian drama critic Michael Billington admiringly compares Tracy Letts to British dramatic icon Alan Ayckbourn in his four-star review, singles out the performances of Dunagan, Morton, Perry, and Reed, and says the whole play is full of “buccaneering vigor”.  Although Charles Spencer at the Telegraph says he isn’t “persuaded that this is the the first indisputably great American play of the 21st century”, he gives it four stars and calls the production “consistently gripping, moving and often wildly funny”.  Benedict Nightingale, at the Times, rightfully gushes at the ensemble acting, and says the actors give performances that are so “so robust yet so punctilious they’d have had Stanislavsky dancing round Red Square.”  OK, so the Brits liked the play a lot.  It’s so wonderful to see the continuous triumph of this proudly Chicago-made play in the great, discerning, been-there-seen-that theatrical capitals of the world, New York and London, but …. when do we see August again at home, in this production, with this cast?

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Tags: August: Osage County, Steppenwolf Theater

With Chicago’s ascendant star in the national cultural scene, it has been a delightful fall arts season in the city, since there’s been quite a diversity of the productions on view. Where else in the country, except for New York City, can you go to a rarely-produced play by an acclaimed Irish playwright starring a major television actor returning to his Chicago theatrical roots and directed by a Tony Award nominee on one night, and then hop on over the next night to the world premiere of a politically-charged new play by a hot young playwright and MacArthur Genius grant recipient, right before it’s New York City premiere? So, in less than a week, I was at the Steppenwolf to see Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol (which was not part of the theater’s subscription season) starring William Petersen, on leave from his last season on CSI, and directed by Amy Morton, in between Broadway and London August: Osage County jaunts; and at the Goodman for Lynn Nottage’s new play, Ruined, which will play off-Broadway with the same cast and director, at co-producer Manhattan Theater Club’s home turf in January. But what is so uniquely thrilling about Chicago (and a key differentiator from New York, IMHO) is that the storefront theater milieu, the vibrant roots of Chicago theater (where Petersen and Morton both emerged from), continues to thrive, admittedly with mixed results, amidst all these major theatrical events. So in the same week as Dublin Carol and Ruined (and the altered-state-inducing triumph, Gatz, too), I also saw Greasy Joan & Co.’s collection of Chekhov short stories, Chekhov’s Life in the Country, and A Red Orchid Theater’s brazen A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, which, I can bet, will be one of the wackiest, most unique, most fall-off-the-chair-and-hope-you-don’t-crack-your-spine production you’ll see this season, or any season.

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Tags: A Red Orchid Theater, Goodman Theater, GreasyJoan and Co., Steppenwolf Theater