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.
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.
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.
Francis’s Fall Picks: Top 10 Must-See Productions in Chicago
Culture, Dance, Music, Theater Add comments
For anyone outside of Boystown and Andersonville, there is so much more going on this fall in Chicago than the Madonna concert (which, for those of you who have just come back to the city from the island of Tuvalu, is scheduled for October 26-27 at the United Center). Everyone (well, the Chicago Tribune and TimeOut Chicago that is) have made up their lists of the top fall live performances (theater, opera, dance) that they recommend you attend, which is a good thing - it’s both the blessing and the bane of living in a great, lively, cultural center like Chicago, that you can go to see a show every night, and still not see it all, so guidance is imperative (plus the fact that no one really has an unlimited art consumption spending budget) . Here then, in no particular order, are From the Ledge’s picks for the must-see performing arts events of the fall - they’re an eclectic lot, showcasing both the best efforts of local Chicago talent as well as top international artists making pitstops in our wonderful town, confirming our stature in the global artistic community. Varied in discipline, theme, and artistic approach, they all, nevertheless, promise exciting, memorable, uniquely impactful nights at the theater. I’ll be at all of them, so if you see me, say hi!
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