When I was still joylessly participating in the gruelling gay dating circuit (oh so many years ago during the Paleolithic age), one of the criteria in my mental checklist for moving beyond a second date with a particular guy was whether having kids was one of his non-negotiables. If it was, then it was ”hasta la vista, baby” time after the second date, regardless of how much he resembled Mr. Right for me. Although I love my nephews and niece, I don’t particularly consider myself paternal – I highly value my independence and my non-tethered lifestyle, and the fact that, unlike my straight friends, there really isn’t any pressure for me to respond to socio-cultural expectations and a metaphorical biological timeclock to settle down and create a nuclear family. So Sarah Gubbins’ The Kid Thing, a world premiere co-production between About Face Theatre and Chicago Dramatists, is particularly resonant and unsettling for me, and, I could imagine, for the gay people of my generation. Although I think the script requires some more polish and a little bit more focus, The Kid Thing is quite incisive and thought-provoking, with beautifully-constructed performances, and a punch that lingers with you way after the show has finished.
Where have I been? Looks like everywhere, except for this blog. August was a blur of 15 hour days for nearly two weeks straight in Arizona trying to get my client project completed, attempting to recover from some health issues, and waiting to snap a photo with Cate Blanchett at the stage door of the Kennedy Center after a matinee performance of Uncle Vanya. I’ve just come back from Boston to see what the big hoo-hah was about on the updated Porgy and Bess at the American Repertory Theater (more on that in a succeeding blog post). I’ll be in town, hopefully, for the next couple of weeks so I’ve been perusing my weeks of unread email from theater companies to figure out what to tell my avid blog readers about the upcoming Chicago fall theater season. The season, unfortunately, in one word, is underwhelming. In more than one word: there’s a lot of your usual dead white male playwrights this season. Oh and then there’s Sarah Ruhl, whose plays always make me run screaming back to the dead white male playwrights; at least they knew how to write. Thank goodness, then, for the following shows, my picks for the Chicago fall theater season:
As a bona-fide, pink-union-card-emblazoned, goldstar gay, you’d think I would be rushing breathlessly to About Face Theatre’s world premiere of Philip Dawkins’ The Homosexuals. Well, I did sashay with unaccustomed speed to Victory Gardens, where it was playing, over the weekend, but as I told my friend Fab Jason, I was a little wary about the whole business after reading a summary description of the play on the theater’s website. The Homosexuals sounded like a whole lot of Love! Valour! Compassion! mixed in with some Boys In The Band and drizzled with a dash of Queer As Folk repurposed for the millennial generation. In short the play could be a mishmash of every single circle of gays movie, TV show, or play that we’ve seen over the past decade. Is there something new or fresh that Dawkins would say about the gay experience in the 21st century? Will it talk about what the words “gay” or “homosexual” or “queer” mean right now? And how the definitions and constructs have evolved through the years? I think for the most part The Homosexuals is funny, poignant, captivating, delightfully energizing, a packs-little-punch summer diversion, which is terrific. But, despite the play’s attempt to survey some of the key themes that have and continue to confront the community over the past decade, I feel that, as a homosexual, the play is somewhat of a missed opportunity.
My game-to-see-everything theater buddy Joel has told me that if there is one play he won’t ever go to again, it’s Georg Buchner’s unfinished masterpiece of theatrical naturalism Woyzeck (he, obviously, had been scarred by Greg Allen’s eccentric version produced by the now defunct Greasy Joan & Co. from several years ago, which I thought was actually pretty decent). So at the risk of being snarled at, I didn’t drag him or any of my other theater buds to The Woyzeck Project, a combination of The Hypocrites’ idiosyncratic view of Woyzeck, and About Face Theatre’s world premiere of Sylvan Oswald’s Pony, in my mind, a quite perplexing take on the piece, both running in repertory at the Chopin Theatre. I personally like seeing different productions of Woyzeck because its fragmented, opaque, yet timelessly tragic nature allows brazen, gutsy directors and playwrights to project their own interpretations, preoccupations, and agendas on to it for fascinating theater without really destroying its spirit (in 2008, I scuttled plans to see the hot Icelandic director Gísli Örn Gardarsson’s version at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave Festival which incorporated a circus atmosphere and a large swimming pool where the actors swam laps during the performance). I gotta say though, despite some fascinating artistic choices in the two plays, The Woyzeck Project is somewhat of a missed opportunity in my mind, since both, individually and together, don’t truly present any cohesive, intriguing, and insightful take on Buchner’s work.
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.
Recently Attended Events
- 2/04/2012: Six Characters In Search of an Author (The Hypocrites)
- 2/02/2012: Disgraced (American Theater Company)
- 1/29/2012: Time Stands Still (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 1/28/2012: Ameriville (Victory Gardens Theater)
- 1/22/2012: Enron (Timeline Theatre Company)
- 12/21/2011: Penelope (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 12/17/2011: Spring Awakening (Griffin Theatre Company)
- 11/12/2011: Red Light Winter (Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.)
- 10/16/2011: The Ugly One (Sideshow Theatre Company)
- 10/15/2011: Overweight, Unimportant: Misshape - A European Supper (Trap Door Theatre)
- 10/08/2011: Follies (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre)
- 10/02/2011: Elling (Redtwist Theatre)
- 10/01/2011: Becky Shaw (A Red Orchid Theatre)
- 9/25/2011: Violet (Bailiwick Chicago)
- 9/18/2011: Clybourne Park (Steppenwolf Theatre)
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