From the Ledge

Quartet

francis — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:36:00 +0000

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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Catapulted into the Stratosphere

francis — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:50:09 +0000

It goes without saying that I see a lot of really good theater (of course I see a lot of stinkers too, but that comes with the territory of being a theater aficionado). But it’s a rare, blessed night (or afternoon, for matinees) that I actually see great theater - great with a capital G, so great that I get shivers up my spine, I feel zapped by an indescribable electromagnetic force, I am elevated, enthralled, transformed, enveloped in transcendence. It happened last year at August: Osage County here in Chicago and at Ivo Von Hove’s The Misanthrope in New York. It happened several weeks ago at the Chicago Shakespeare with Sean Graney’s audacious version of Edward II. And it happened again last Friday night at the conclusion of the monumentally epic, hypnotic, seven and a half hour (including a dinner break and two intermissions) production of Gatz, mounted at the MCA Stage by the Elevator Repair Service (ERS), the acclaimed New York-based experimental theater company. But unlike the other three productions, I was initially apprehensive about attending Gatz- it was going to be the longest-running play I would have seen in my theatergoing life (yep, I missed Edward Hall’s five and a half hour Rose Rage at Chicago Shakespeare a couple of years ago, and ahem, I’m too young to actually have seen Trevor Nunn’s legendary eight and a half hour The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickleby on Broadway in the very early 1980s). Eight hours in the theater? That’s a workday of powerpoint presentation decks, or a spa day, or a day of four movies seen back to back. It’s a huge commitment, not only of time, but also of mental and physical focus. The play hinged on a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel, The Great Gatsby. Hmmm. Would I actually be able to sit through the entire play-cum-reading, or would I tarnish my arts and culture vulture stripes by needing to leave at the dinner break? Will Gatz be able to hold my attention, sustain my engagement through all those hours, or would the whole experience feel interminable and gruelling, like hand-stitching an elaborate Tibetan yak headdress? Would this be another pointless exercise in experimental theater? At 10:48 pm, during the curtain call on Friday night, approximately seven hours and thirty eight minutes from the time the houselights dimmed and Scott Shepherd, the lead actor, strolled on stage, I decided that I could have spent another seven hours with this play, these actors, this audience. Gatz renews one’s faith in the heights that theater, art, imagination, and creativity can scale. It also reinforces the belief that an intelligent and cosmopolitan theater audience, such as the one we have in Chicago, will embrace theater that is innovative, challenging, exhausting, but ultimately rewarding and memorable.

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View from Row E, Seat 4

francis — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:20:05 +0000

There’s been a lot of interesting and provocative back and forth in the Chicago theater blogosphere this week about dramatic content, a topic which sometimes seems to be lost in the shuffle with everyone’s (well, drama critics, bloggers, playwrights, artistic staff, and other sundry kibitzers) preoccupation with other “hot topics” such as regional theaters’ business models, etc. I think it’s a valid conversation, but I will leave the critical debate to theater practitioners and critics such as Tony Adams and From the Ledge friend Kris Vire (who both make very good points). Since I’m not a practitioner, but rather a mere audience member, I want to share my thoughts strictly from a theater goer’s perspective. I think the importance of content, the fact that theater should be really, really good, in order to bring in a paying audience, is so much more important now, more than ever, given the economic times we’re in. In conversation with some of my friends, all regular theatergoers and supporters of arts and culture, it is becoming more and more apparent that people are being very judicious in the allocation of their arts consumption dollar. A play a week, or every two weeks, is something that is a tough sell for many people right now; spur-of-the-moment weekend jaunts to the theater because something came up on Hot Tix or Goldstar.com isn’t as common as it used to be, maybe a year ago. I’ve been to the Goodman, the Court, and the Steppenwolf during the past couple of weeks and the houses are still packed, but remember, subscriptions were bought and paid for back in the late spring/early summer. (As an aside, I also think the bigger houses will weather this storm better than the smaller ones, since single ticketbuyers, given the fact that they are taking a hard look at where they are spending their arts dollar on, will be falling back on who has the reputation, who has been reliable, who has been around long enough.) Another friend of From the Ledge, PRekk, asks: “Should bad theatre be run out of town at high noon?” My response is a resounding, unequivocal yes. I really feel that theater critics and bloggers, alike, have the responsibility to honestly, directly, transparently, and, constructively, inform their readers about which plays deserve their money and which don’t. Heinous crimes against the cosmos such as Turn of the Century and Eurydice need to be called out and tagged as unworthy, so folks can go to a Caroline, or Change or a Men of Tortuga or a Steppenwolf for Young Adults’ The Glass Menagerie, instead. In this time of economic crisis, it’s so much more important to continue to support art, culture, and theater and let them thrive and prosper - part of that process is to pull up the weeds. In the past, we may have let sloppy, half-baked, unfinished plays-theatrical hot tranny messes-slip through and have a good run…but right now, we can’t afford to, literally. The pocketbook crunch is making audiences more discerning, more questioning as to which plays can ultimately touch them, introduce them to new worlds and experiences, paint for them human conditions which they can relate to, which hopefully will make theatrical practictioners-playwrights, directors, artistic directors- take a harder, more critical, less indulgent look at the art that they’re creating.

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Sweet November

francis — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:50:58 +0000

This month will be theatergoing month on steroids. There’s a lot of significant productions opening in Chicago in the next several weeks, and I’m hoping I’ll have enough time to go to most of them (I do have to work, too, in my day job, you know, so I can afford to go to all this theater!). Of course, the centerpiece of my month, the one production I am both breathlessly anticipating and apprehensive about is the Elevator Repair Service’s much-acclaimed seven-hour Gatz, on stage at the MCA next week, which combines a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with a play set in a dumpy office, in which the employees start taking on the personas of the book’s characters. This could either be a transcendent experience, or utter folly. I can’t wait- I’ve been preparing like a triathlete for it: reading up on The Great Gatsby (I read the book in high school and saw the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow movie decades ago), meditating, doing extra gluteal exercises (at the gym! get your minds out of the gutter!) to ensure that I can actually sit and focus for seven hours straight. Chris Jones seems to be as excited and apprehensive as I am, and reports that Gatz tickets are going fast- wow! I’m also seeing Radio Macbeth at the Court Theater next weekend, Anne Bogart and the SITI company’s take on Macbeth framed by a ghost story and supposedly using sound as a dynamic and innovative theatrical device. It has already been shown at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, New York’s annual showcase for cutting-edge work, where it received very good reviews. Right before Thanksgiving, the British production A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which sets the famous Shakespeare comedy in the Indian subcontinent and incorporates Indian language, culture, and sensibility, opens at Chicago Shakespeare. This production has toured Europe and Australia, and has received unqualified raves everywhere it’s been staged. Despite the fact that I nearly puked the last time I was at the Goodman because of the horror that was Turn of the Century, I’ll be spending quite a bit of time there this month. I’m catching a preview for Ruined, Lynn Nottage’s new play about the victimization of women during the Congo civil war, co-produced with the Manhattan Theater Club, which will premiere off-Broadway in January 2009, right after it’s Goodman production,with the same cast and director, Kate Whoriskey. The Goodman is also holding a series of staged readings for Noah Haidle’s work-in-progress opus, Local Time, “twelve two-act plays that trace a 24-hour period in the life of a town”, according to the theater’s website. I already have tickets for the first one, 5-7 AM, about a young couple who takes in a baby left on their doorstep and is horrified to see the infant grow into a chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling, human-condition pondering adult in 20 minutes. Sounds precious, and I sometimes feel that Haidle is like the male version of Sarah Ruhl, but it also sounds intriguing. Plus this is a good opportunity to see new work by a playwright with a rising national profile. I’ll be getting tickets for the other two readings depending on what I think about 5-7 AM. At the Steppenwolf, despite what I think is pretty low-key marketing, many performances are already sold out for Dublin Carol, Conor McPherson’s intimate play about an alcoholic undertaker seeking redemption, starring CSI star William Petersen and directed by August: Osage County goddess, Amy Morton. Collaboraction has already opened Jon, a world premiere adaptation of hip novelist (and MacArthur Genius grant recipient) George Saunder’s much-talked about short story. Saunders worked closely with director and adaptor Seth Bockley, and has been doing press to support the play. Although I’ve found many Remy Bumppo productions in the past to be more effective than Ambien and Lunesta combined, I am curious to see their version of Beaurmachais’ The Marraige of Figaro, the basis of the famed Mozart opera, in a new translation by Ranjit Bolt. It’s also being directed by up and coming Chicago theater director Jonathan Berry, so I’m hoping that the snooze factor is low to non-existent. Finally, TUTA (in support of full disclosure, I’m on their Board) is unveiling The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (yes, it’s that famous play by our man Bill) later this month. TUTA is always gutsy, imaginative, and singular in their theatrical concepts, so I’m betting this isn’t going to be stand-and-declaim Shakespeare. Whew, so many plays, so little time!

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Glorious Day

francis — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:21:32 +0000

I am taking a break today from the arts and culture focus of From the Ledge to irrevocably, unequivocally express how proud and hopeful I am, as an immigrant, as a gay person, as a person of color, as someone in the 40 and below demographic, as a citizen of the world, as a Chicagoan, that Barack Obama will be the 44th President of the United States of America. It’s a difficult, anxious, chaotic world we’re living in today, but with President-elect Obama, I sincerely, truly, feel that we have the inspiration and the confirmation that there is a very real opportunity for America, and the world, to change for the better. That’s not hyperbole, that’s heartfelt emotion.

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Weekend Catch-Up

francis — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:46:29 +0000

There’s been very little going on, arts and culture-wise, the past two weeks, other than film, film, and more film, since I basically parked myself at the Chicago International Film Festival almost every night (and most of the day on weekends). So this past weekend was playing catch-up time. Since I don’t typically celebrate Halloween, I decided on Friday night to finally cave in and see the Goodman’s Turn of the Century on its last performance weekend. Well, it was indeed Fright Night at the Goodman, since Turn of the Century was scarier and more heinous than Saw V (or a drunken Lincoln Park Trixie’s version of a sexy French maid costume). On Saturday, I stopped by the American Theater Company for a matinee of their production of Itamar Moses’ Celebrity Row, first written and staged in 2005 but which had been re-written and re-edited for this Chicago premiere by the hot young playwright, who was in town working with the play’s director, my idol David Cromer, the actors, and ATC Artistic Director PJ Paparelli. In the evening, I hopped on over to the Lyric Opera (thanks for the tickets Tom!) for the majestically overwrought production of Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, full of gargantuan Buddha statues, operatic overacting, lighting and thunder effects, and endless views of American opera’s hunk-o-rama‘s, Nathan Gunn’s, magnificently defined torso. I loved it!

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Chicago International Film Festival, Final Entry

francis — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:17:33 +0000

The Film Festival closes this Wednesday, October 29, with the Viggo Mortensen-starrer Good. The divine Viggo is gracing the closing night festivities at the Harris Theater, but despite the temptation of seeing out-of-this-world yumminess in the flesh, I think I’ll be back at the River East or 600 N. Michigan for the Best of the Fest screenings. Hunger (which won the Festival top prize, the Golden Hugo) and Terribly Happy, two of my top viewing experiences during this year’s Festival will be given return screenings, but so will that piece of sheep turd, Dead Girl’s Feast (roll eyes). Check out all the Best of the Fest selections on the website. To close this year’s coverage of the Chicago Film Festival, here are my impressions on the last three films of my viewing schedule:

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Film Festival Focus: Serbis

francis — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:04:40 +0000

I had really low expectations for Serbis, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s film about a day in the life of a family who both run and live in a decrepit theater which is also a hotbed of gay male prostitution, set in the city of Angeles (where the US military bases used to be located), right outside Manila. It was shown at the Chicago International Film Festival over the weekend. First, the reports and reviews from Cannes, where it was part of the Main Competition, the first Filipino film to be invited in 25 years, were disheartening - it was a highly divisive movie that received both ecstatic acclaim (including raves from Jury President Sean Penn) and withering, verging on the disgusted, negative notices (and quite a number of walkouts during its festival screening). Second, I’m pretty cynical about the quality of Filipino films that had been shown at the Chicago Film Festival over the past several years. I grew up in Manila in the 1980s, during a “Golden Age” of Philippine cinema and know the brilliant heights that Filipino directors (such as the late Lino Brocka, the only Filipino director until Mendoza, who had shown a film in the prestigious Main Competition section at Cannes) can achieve, if they put their minds to it, and if they get the right amount of funding and artistic support. The Filipino movies that have rotated through the Festival in the past had been trashy, exploitative, and badly-constructed, including Mendoza’s one-dimensional bore, The Masseur. Oddly, too, they were all focused on the sleazy side of gay sex and life in the Philippines (it almost seems like the Film Festival organizers kept on thinking- oh, we have this slot for a film about male prostitutes, their gay patrons, and the slums that they are all desperately trying to escape from, preferably with lots of gratuitous male-on-male sex and nudity, why don’t we go to the Philippines? Despite what Saturday nights at Roscoe’s might suggest, NOT everyone in the Philippines is gay). Serbis, which refers to the colloquial Tagalog for paid sex, seems to fit this bill quite nicely. Well, Serbis proves that pre-conceptions are meant to be shattered, and expectations exceeded, because it is one of the most astonishing and memorable movies I saw at the Film Festival this year. Imperfect, maddeningly self-indulgent at times, and yes, packed with gratuitous sex scenes and sensationalism, it also has searing social commentary, surprisingly detailed and incisive vignettes about Filipino culture, and the chutzpah to be an uncompromising, no-holds-barred, uniquely gutsy film that you won’t see anywhere else.

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Chicago International Film Festival, Part III

francis — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:57:17 +0000

One of the things that differentiates going to the Film Festival from going to the multiplex on an ordinary day is the need to line up prior to getting into the screening. I’m probably crazy-weird (because there are many folks, whom one can easily tag as film festival newbies, who are infuriated about lining up to see a film when they already have their tickets with them), but I love the lines. It’s so fascinating to see what types of folks line up for the quirky American independent film versus the obscure Hungarian film about incestuous shepherds versus the short film collection of, ahem, “intimate”-themed short films. And I think it’s really cool to be asked by random strangers how many festival films have you already gone to, sort of like a shared badge of honor among battle-scarred warriors. Yes, the lines can be a madhouse (as it was for The Wrestler last week and Quiet Chaos this weekend), but it’s an essential film festival experience, sort of like getting jumbotroned is essential at a baseball game! Here are three more films I’ve seen this past week:

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F for False

francis — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 05:38:27 +0000

I will never pay to see a Sarah Ruhl play ever again. There, I said it. After a lot of ambivalence in the past, I decided that Eurydice, the latest Ruhl play to be staged in Chicago (Victory Gardens joins the ranks of its peers, the Goodman, which produced Clean House and Passion Play, and Steppenwolf, which mounted Dead Man’s Cellphone) would determine which Ruhl camp I’ll be pushed into. Eurydice, a re-telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but from her (instead of his) point of view, and with lots of other extraneous factors thrown in (like her father, who wasn’t in the original Greek myth, and a trio of curmudgeonly Stones straight out of a retirement home, who guard the entrance to the underworld) is insufferably precious, annoyingly dishonest, an intellectual’s abstract concept of the emotion of loss which doesn’t resemble reality at all. I lost my mom two years ago, and I think I have a pretty good understanding of what tremendous loss and grieving feels, and this play does everything in its power to subvert the evocation of those emotions in the audience. It’s quite simply the worst play I’ve seen this year, anywhere.

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