From the Ledge

With all my theatergoing, inevitably, I will come across that play, where, because of the sheer lack of anything interesting going onstage, my mind wanders to more adrenalin-pumping thoughts (such as the latest hypnotically vulgar episode of Kathy Griffin:  My Life on the D-List-her videotaped public pap smear, anyone?- or the flood of wacky #shakespalin quotes on Twitter).  Joel Drake Johnson’s new play, A Guide For The Perplexed, now in a world premiere production at Victory Gardens Theater, is one such play.  The show’s marketing trumpets Kevin Anderson’s return to the theater he received his Actor’s Equity card from, a very similar angle to the one used for William Peterson’s headlining of Blackbird last summer, but Perplexed is not at all comparable to David Harrower’s masterful work – it is underdeveloped, inconsistently written, at times dispirited, and frankly, unengaging, despite a trio of powerful male performances.  A Guide for the Perplexed is an apt title for the audience experience – who thought that this play would be interesting enough for a paying audience to watch?

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Tags: Victory Gardens Theater

You never know what you’re going to get with a Martin McDonagh or a Bruce Norris play, which is a significant part of the pleasure of going to them.  You may leave the theater aghast with the revelation of what the itch is in Norris’ funny, searing The Pain and the Itch.  You may be repulsed by the tortuous stories in McDonagh’s The Pillowman, certainly one of the best, most provocative plays of the past ten years in my opinion.  You’ll feel unsettled and goaded by writing that doesn’t hesitate to critically expose your fallibilities, or ragingly question your belief systems, but you’ll also feel exhilarated, entertained, and to be honest, enlightened to an extent.  I’m a big fan of both writers, so, of course, in the past couple of weeks I took the opportunity to see productions of their works – in Los Angeles a couple of weekends ago, I caught the Center Theatre Group production and LA premiere of McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, starring Star Trek hunk Chris Pine and staged by its original Broadway director Wilson Milam.  Last weekend I was at Steppenwolf Theater’s world premiere production of Norris’ latest work, A Parallelogram, directed by Tony winner Anna D. Shapiro.  I’m not a big fan of the McDonagh work;  although provocative, I’m not sure I’ll place the Norris work at the top of this favorite playwright’s oeuvre.

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Tags: Center Theatre Group, Steppenwolf Theater

How time flies.  I remember going to the newly-renovated Cadillac Palace way back in 1999 to see the pre-Broadway premiere of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida, directed by Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls. I took away two things from that viewing experience- despite the mega-millions thrown onstage, there was an unfortunately high level of cheesiness in the show (including a heinous fashion runaway scene…yeah, in ancient Egypt); but there was also the wondrous, dazzling, breakthrough performance of Heather Headley as Aida, who, a year later, deservedly won a Tony.  In the newly-revitalized Bailiwick Chicago’s minimalist version of this excess-prone theatrical relic of the go-go 90s, there are still moments that feel like they came packaged from those curd stands lining the highways of Wisconsin, but there’s also a lot more heartfelt emotion, a little bit more urban edge (thanks to impressively muscular choreography from the Artistic Directors of Deeply Rooted Dance Theater), and best of all, a similarly wondrous, scintillating, blow-the-rooftop-off-this building performance from Rashada Dawan as the titular Nubian princess. 

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Tags: Bailiwick Chicago

It has been an unusually busy season for theatergoing in Chicago (in past years, the highlights of the summer theater season have only been Steppenwolf’s season-closer and the remounts at Theater on the Lake) so I’ve been madly dashing from one theater to another over the past couple of weekends, a frenzy that’s been aggravated by my weekly bounce-arounds between New York City and Phoenix for my day job.  Last weekend, I caught Strange Tree Group’s Shakespeare’s King Phycus and Redtwist Theatre’s Equus. Playwright Tom Willmorth breathes life into Shakespearian war horses by devising a world premiere play that mixes together the best and not-so-best elements of Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III into one clever, energetic, eccentric, at times laugh-out-loud funny brew which, with its questionable length, ultimately wears the audience down.  Horses figure literally and metaphorically in Peter Shaffer’s Equus which, despite an impressively atmospheric staging from Redtwist Theatre, really cannot overcome the fact that it is a tired, dated, quite pretentious piece of 1970s-era writing, although often perplexingly revived (a version with Alec Baldwin as the doctor is now playing in the Hamptons in New York, right on the heels of the Daniel Radcliffe-led revival on Broadway last season).

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Tags: Redtwist Theatre, Strange Tree Group

Seeing a play at Mary-Arrchie has always been, for me, the classic Chicago storefront theater experience.  Between its eccentric, grungy location on the second floor of a convenience store and across a gas station on the outer fringes of Boystown, to its wildly-diverse, always-provocative programming, spanning classic Harold Pinter to early Keith Huff to hip Finn Kennedy, staged in a sweaty, gutsy, DIY-budget manner, a night at this theater is always going to be energizing, regardless of whether one actually liked the play or not.  And I think there will be polarized responses to Cherrywood:  The Modern Comparable, its current production directed by David Cromer, hot off his wildly-raved-about A Streetcar Named Desire at Writers’ Theatre, and right before his fall Broadway experiments with Picnic and Yanks.  There certainly were, even in my own tiny group of five people– some of us could barely wait for the ninety intermissionless minutes to end, others, like me, were mesmerized with mouths agape.  I think some people won’t know what hit them with the immersive, plotless, at parts undeniably head-scratching Cherrywood, which playwright Kirk Lynn wrote for his Austin-based experimental theater group, Rude Mechanicals.  Is it a play?  Or is it an un-play – a hipster take on performance art, a post-modern loft rave party with dialogue, a critique on our current socio-political preoccupations masquerading as a kegger (with wild werewolf’s milk instead of beer)?  Whatever is it, I feel very strongly that you should run out and pack the Mary-Arrchie space for the duration of its run: Cherrywood is invigorating, challenging, brilliantly conceptualized – a production that I would argue is even more vital to my experience as a passionate Chicago theatergoer than Cromer’s Streetcar is (which I loved!), because it is contemporary, unsettling, defiant, and talks to a world much bigger and messier than itself.

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Tags: Mary-Arrchie Theater Co.

I’m a big supporter of new plays – I love that sense of anticipation and discovery when you’re waiting for the curtain to rise on a play you’ve never seen or read before.  As an audience member, I bring with me to the theater my preoccupations and my priorities, my opinions and my biases, so the new plays that attract me the most are the ones that traffic in big, global themes, that recognize they are part of a bigger world and enthusiastically engage with it: August: Osage County and its generational dysfunction or Ruined and its socio-political gender struggles (ok, so I just mentioned two Pulitzer Prize winners that received their world premieres in Chicago. Yeah, so shoot me).   I’m quite skittish then with plays that seem to be to be too introspective, too preoccupied with their emotional responses, plays that a New York Times theater review I once read characterized as “hothouse” plays – delicate, sensitive, bent over by the weight of their own brooding. And really, really focused on their playwrights’ worlds, rather than a world at large.  In Chicago last weekend, I saw the Gift Theatre Company world premiere production of Andrew Hinderaker’s Suicide, Incorporated; in New York this past week, I managed to catch the Tony-nominated Next Fall by Geoffrey Naults.  I laud the playwrights for releasing new voices to the cosmos; both, though, lacked the wondrous edge, the sock-to-the-gut experience that I look for in the best new plays.  And in Next Fall’s case, “best new play” is a phrase I would never, in a million years, attach to it.

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Tags: Broadway, Gift Theatre Company