Oct 14
Oct 09
At the beginning of the audience talkback right after the performance of Kafka on the Shore, Frank Galati’s radiant adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s novel, that I attended, someone rightly asked Steppenwolf Theater Associate Artistic Director, David New, “So could you tell us what this means?”. I am an avid Murakami fan, and when I read “Kafka” several years ago, I found it compelling, poetic, vividly etched like one of those rare dreams that give you a sense of triumph and boundless energy when you wake up. I also found it elusive, evanescent, intellectually challenging, full of metaphors and references that were almost, at times, indecipherable. It was a great example of a truly metaphysical novel, with the twist of Japanese magical realism- quintessential Murakami. So I was really curious to see how Galati would take the qualities that were great on the page and translate them into equally great theater. Unlike “After the Quake”, the collection of short stories that Galati also dramatized a couple of Steppenwolf seasons ago, I thought “Kafka” - with its reordering of time and space, its fusing of characters points of view such that you wonder whether one was an extension, a doppelganger, or a reverse mirror image of the other, it’s surreal imagery- was more permeable, less able to be taken into a literal context , something that is, most of the time, important in live theater. I think Kafka on the Shore, the play, is terrific, which I enjoyed a lot, but it is not for all theatrical tastes and sensibilities (people who are heavily left-brained, or who have pretty conventional concepts around what theater is, would be terribly frustrated). I admire Steppenwolf for courageously selecting this play as their first play of the new season, despite the risk that it will leave audiences cold and alienated, since it does set the right tone for the theater’s focus on the theme of “imagination” (something that I think we will all be better off if we had some more of; there were a LOT of people who left their rations at home during the performance I attended).
Oct 08
In October of 1998, I just marked my first year of living in Chicago, having moved from Minneapolis and grad school during the summer of 1997. On October 7, 1998, Matthew Shephard, an openly-gay University of Wyoming student, was robbed, heinously beaten, and left for dead tied to a fencepost in the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming by two men who despised Matthew’s homosexuality. It was, and still is, a watershed event for my generation of gay people - we, too, in consonance with Matthew, were brutalized by the frighteningly deep, inexplicable, unconscionable hatred that caused his death. It’s been ten years, but I have to wonder, how much really has changed? Sure, there’s been a lot of “mainstreaming” of gay culture, there’s a lot of “it’s hip to be gay” (or it’s hip to know a gay person) in urban communities such as Chicago, but…. No hate crimes legislation has been signed into law. In February of this year, in Ventura County, California, a 15 year old gay teenager was shot inside his high school’s computer lab by the straight classmate he had a crush on. It’s been ten years, and the circumstances and impact of Matthew’s death seemed to be fading into the soft gauze of memory. So it felt so right, so necessary, that About Face Theater, Chicago’s pre-eminent gay and lesbian theater, staged a one-night only reading of Moises Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project, which dramatized the Matthew Shepard case using interviews conducted with the stunned community of Laramie, Wyoming, last Monday night, to remember the 10th year anniversary of Matthew’s death. It was a privilege for me to attend. I really have to commend new Artistic Director Bonnie Metzgar, who, with the Taylor Mac season-opener and this reading, has infused so much vigor, energy, and yes, much-needed relevance back into About Face in the short time she’s been in Chicago. The Laramie Project reading was a tremendous accomplishment. She got Leigh Fondakowski of the Tectonic Theater Project, one of the co-creators, to direct the reading. She assembled a jaw-dropping Chicago-based cast: Kelly Simpkins, another co-creator of The Laramie Project, who is now actively performing in Chicago; Tony Award-winner Deanna Dunagan; About Face co-founder Kyle Hall; Chicago acting titans such as John Judd, Steppenwolf ensemble member Ora Jones, and Lookingglass Theater Producing Artistic Director Philip R. Smith; rising stars such as Patrick Andrews; and members of the About Face Youth Theater. And with these talents working beautifully together, she made the reading one of the highlights of this Chicago theater-going year. Despite how many times you see the play or the HBO movie, The Laramie Project continues to be powerful, emotionally walloping stuff, taking you through a rollercoaster of grief, vehement anger, helplessness, and consolation in community. There were a lot of sniffling and teary eyes in the theater last night, and I hope many of them were remembering Matthew and rediscovering themselves. The Laramie Project is ultimately about community and seeing Chicago’s theater community, artists and audiences alike, coalescing to honor Matthew’s memory, and what it stands for in gay experience, was touching.
Tags: About Face Theater
Oct 04
Taylor Mac is fierce, fiercer than Christian Siriano or Amy Winehouse or any alumni of Destiny’s Child, hell, at times, fiercer than Cher, and that’s quite an icon to cross. Part of it, I’m pretty sure, is the look - in his one-person show, The Young Ladies Of…, the compelling season opener of new artistic director Bonnie Metzgar’s first season at About Face Theater, the 5′11 Taylor Mac wears a tossed Shirley Temple wig, a helter-skelter Baby Jane-style dress which looks like it was wrung out from an automated carwash line, half a pantyhose, a thong made from brassieres, boatloads of golden eye glitter, and bright-red, lip-exaggerating lipstick. Add to this a ukulele and a vaguely Southern accent that can come off as both seductive and harsh, and you have someone who looks like a cross between a washed-out Bette Davis and Heath Ledger’s Joker character in The Dark Knight, with a dash of gay pornster Chichi LaRue. Taylor Mac, physically, is both intimidating, and strangely fascinating. But more than his physicality, his work defines fierceness - it is courageous, take-no-prisoners, outrageously unfiltered, intellectually stimulating, an intriguing blend of the personal redacting and amplifying the political.
Tags: About Face Theater, Taylor Mac
Sep 30
I am constantly amazed when people tell me that their favorite musical of all-time is Rent or Wicked. And these are people who will vigorously debate the emotional impact of the contemporary pieces in the latest MCA exhibit or who will be eager to sit through and dissect a multi-hour molecular gastronomy meal. But whenever it comes to musical theater, many people, regardless of how worldly, highly-educated, sophisticated-seeming they are, seem to have let their taste get lost somewhere within the Tri-state tollway system. Choosing Rent or Wicked, with their least-common denominator pop scores, over the many glorious classics of the American musical theater? Head-scratching. So I can empathize with the great difficulties that theaters and artistic directors face in getting the great musicals of the 1940s and 1950s, the golden age of musical theater on Broadway, embraced and enjoyed by an audience who would rather have a colonics session than hear Gershwin, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Porter, or Bernstein, performed in all their glory. American Theater Company and the Court Theater recently put on minimalist, stripped-down, plain-speaking productions of Oklahoma! and Carousel respectively, and they were both critical and box-office successes. And now it’s Porchlight Theater’s turn - it is currently staging a no-frills, sparingly re-envisioned production of Leonard Bernstein’s classic, Candide, which possesses one of the most gorgeous scores in the musical theater canon. Although highly entertaining and accessible, guaranteed to make even the most stoic non-musical lover humming “Glitter and Be Gay”, and, as a bonus, marvelously raunchy, Porchlight’s Candide could have been dazzling with an over the top, pull-out-all-the-stops staging.
Tags: Porchlight Theater
Sep 19
Yes, my avid blog readers, I have not posted in a week. That’s what happens when you’re thrown into the crazy business travel circuit - I was in Park City, Utah late last week and over the weekend, staying at a faux Alpine lodge resort (incredibly, the resort staff were wearing lederhosen and trilling “Guten tag” during wake-up calls…I thought I was in a really cheesy dinner theater production of The Producers, uhmm, is that you Franz?), then in Cleveland this week, and Phoenix next week. It’s not ideal to be away from Chicago at this time, since there are boatloads of plays opening every week to launch theaters’ fall seasons, but thankfully I was able to see two of the highly-anticipated ones before I got on the first plane out. The People’s Temple is written and directed by Leigh Fondakowski, a co-creator of The Laramie Project, and is the inaugural production in PJ Papparelli’s first full term as Artistic Director of the re-vitalized American Theater Company. Amadeus, Gary Griffin’s production of the acclaimed Peter Shaffer play, opens Chicago Shakespeare Theater‘ s first season after winning the coveted Tony Award for Best Regional Theater last June. Both are strong, notable productions with some really exceptional acting, but with also significant gaps in conceptualization or staging; regardless, both prove that Chicago continues to be the most exciting theater town in America.
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