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:
When I saw Chicago Shakespeare was opening its 2010-2011 season with Romeo and Juliet, I audibly groaned. I need another Romeo and Juliet as much as I need another tetanus shot in the derriere. But I’ve heard of Australian director Gale Edwards, and more specifically about her acclaimed Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC a couple of years back, so I thought maybe this poke in the bum would be worth checking out. And am I glad I did. As my blog readers know, I have a pretty ambivalent view towards Chicago Shakespeare, which, despite its massive financial resources and organizational infrastructure, can still put on unqualified stinkers like Cymbeline and Richard III that infuriatingly reinforce the misguided audience perception that Shakespearean plays are unappealing to a demographic younger than retirement community age, side by side with dazzlers like Twelfth Night. Watching Edwards’ energetic, inspired, strongly visionary Romeo and Juliet, though, made me, for the first time in years, want to sign up for a subscription. If Chicago Shakespeare Artistic Director Barbara Gaines continues to bring forceful yet thoughtful directors like Edwards to Navy Pier, hey, I’ll gladly sign up for anything. This Romeo and Juliet is not like your typically mushy, dewy-eyed, low-rent Franco Zeffirelli-like versions staged anywhere and everywhere. I am very impressed with Edwards’ ballsiness in viewing this play not as a tragic love story, but more as a cautionary tale of how a world that is angry, divisive, polarized, and belligerent will always crush youthful passion. I love the macro perspective that she takes towards this play, a perspective that resonates strongly in the world we live in right now, where tea parties mask xenophobia and religious defense propagate intolerance. But, as importantly, Edwards’ Romeo and Juliet is fresh, contemporary, and incredibly entertaining, as all great plays should be.
With all the theatergoing I do, I sometimes come across shows that I feel, even before I see them that I have to, must, like them, otherwise I’m bottom-feeding pond scum. Itsoseng, currently playing as part of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s stellar World Stage series, about bitter disillusionment in post-apartheid South Africa, written and performed by an extraordinary hyphenate Omphile Molusi, is one of them. The War with the Newts (Mr. Povondra’s Dream), Next Theatre Company’s world premiere adaptation of Czech writer Karel Capek’s 1936 short story about the rise of a salamander species, initially exploited and enslaved by human beings, to world domination, is another one. Both, however, left me uncomfortably cold and unengaged.
Every year when I receive Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s high-gloss, visually arresting season brochure, I hesitate for a couple of seconds and stop to think that maybe this year is the year that I will finally purchase a regular season subscription. But I don’t. However, like Kanye West in front of a bottle of Hennessy, I lose all self-resolve during the year and purchase single tickets to most, if not all, of the season’s productions (which makes the theatergoing more expensive). And I don’t know why; is it because, most of the time, going to Chicago Shakespeare, with its classy interiors, well-dressed patrons, hushed ushers, plush seats, and dramatic view of the lake and the Pier from every window (including the men’s bathroom’s), evokes this unmistakable feeling of going to THE THEATRE, and all the intellectual heft and palette superiority that THE THEATRE implies? Probably not, since I have a more egalitarian, more embracing view of the power of live theater than some people. I think it’s simply because I am always optimistic and hopeful that the production I purchased a ticket for would turn out to be more like the exuberant and contemporaneous Twelfth Night than a boring turkey like Cymbeline or a disingenuous wanna-be hipster like Macbeth. Unfortunately, this year’s season opener, Richard III, one of Shakespeare’s most interestingly potent tragedies, follows in the tradition of disappointments at the theater jutting out onto the lake, with a production that is not just soporific, but also befuddling and, frankly, quite lazily staged. Maybe I should get a clue from Kanye’s tips on how he laid off the cognac.
Without sounding too conceited, I have to admit that I consider myself to be a pretty smart, introspective, globally-savvy guy. So it’s a little unsettling for me when I go to an arts and culture event, and I end up feeling uninformed, inadequate, unimaginative, an intellectual lightweight. That’s how I felt on Sunday when I went to see an extraordinary production of Peter Weiss’ famous Holocaust-themed play The Investigation from the Rwandan theater company Urwintore, already highly-acclaimed in London and Paris, and currently onstage at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater as part of it’s exemplary World’s Stage Series. The matinee performance was bookended by two fascinating events: a pre-show discussion called “Perspectives on The Investigation” which had intellectual heavyweights Chicago Humanities Festival and well-known New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, educator and writer Elliot Lefkovitz (who worked with Steven Spielberg on the Survivors of the Shoah project), and Northwestern Professor of Performance Studies and human rights activist D. Soyini Madison on the panel to provide not just context for the production, but also their rich, thoughtful perspectives on the complex intersection of theater, history, and socio-political reconciliation. More impactfully, the performance was followed by a post-show discussion with the actors, including director, adapter, and Urwintore founder Dorcy Rugamba, who lost close family members during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. At the end of the day, I was intellectually and emotionally spent (so much so that I forgot I actually spent five straight hours at that pit of excessive commercialism, Navy Pier, where the Chicago Shakes theater is located), but it was a deeply rewarding experience, full of new learnings and insights, and a especially shattering one – seeing these fantastic actors, survivors of a recent genocide speaking and acting out words related to the biggest genocide in history, was too devastating for words.
In the past twelve months, I’ve seen a lot of takes on the Scottish Play. There was Greasy Joan & Co.’s Macbeth set in a minimalist, frigid Putinesque Russia-like country in the spring. Then there was The Living Canvass’ Unsex Me Here, which was a unique pastiche of naked actors, a “greatest hits” collection of the play’s dramatic speeches, and train-stopping, eye-catching video projections in the summer. Then, in the late fall, at the Court Theater, there was Anne Bogart and the SITI Company’s Radio Macbeth, a version of the play set in an abandoned warehouse during the 1940s with sound design as the key differentiating element. Plus, of course there’s the real-life telenovela that is Illinois politics, much stranger and resonant than any stage production could be, but let’s not even go there. So I was curious to see what director Barbara Gaines and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater would do on their Macbeth, their first production of the play in twenty years or so. To give Chicago Shakes a lot of credit, this contemporary-set Macbeth is flashy, daring, sexy, multi-tasking, it’s a play that should successfully bring in non-traditional audiences (read, younger and hipper) into one of the traditional bastions of conservative, greying, “we-like-it-straight-up” theater-going in the city. But it’s also a Macbeth that I have to recommend to friends and fellow theater aficionados with reservations. First of all, there’s so many showy gimmicks, gadgets, and devices in this staging, that sometimes I felt like I was watching Shakespeare as done by JJ Abrams. There is a reason why Shakespeare tragedies are considered timeless; there’s a lot of profound themes and beautiful language in them that should be clearly heard; unfortunately in this production, these are sometimes obscured or buried under all that strutting and showboating. More problematic for me though is my sense that the artistic choices (nudity, video projections, electronica, etc.) were made not because they came out intrinsically or organically, from some incisive, expansive theatrical vision of the text, but because someone thought, in a theoretical, distanced, non-pragmatic way, that they would bring into the theater the coveted Twitter generation. Some parts of this staging ultimately feels forced and disingenuous. My reaction to seeing this production of Macbeth is akin to my reaction when one of my friends’ moms sends me a Friend Request on Facebook – grateful and amazed that they’re embracing of-the-moment technology, but also awkward, somewhat embarrassed, quite mystified as to why, at their age, they would want to read my wall posts and status updates.
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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