I’m not a theater critic, nor a theater practitioner. I’m just a regular, passionate theater aficionado who writes a blog (and who pays for most shows that I go to see). And it was wonderful to be a regular, passionate theater aficionado who wrote a blog in 2009 in Chicago, when great-not merely good, not just serviceable-theater was available every weekend night. 2009 began with the Goodman Theatre’s Eugene O’Neill Festival, a singular, unsurpassable program of theatrical bravado that I will always remember, and which even long time Chicago residents marveled at. But 2009, for me, was also a year of getting a thrilling first look at world premieres; of seeing plays in random places, whether it was in a warehouse in Ravenswood, inside the rehearsal hall of the Goodman theater, or on the actual stage of the MCA; of discovering new theater companies putting on plays with so much impressive, balls-out fierceness; of finally being validated in my very firm, vocal belief that it is Chicago, not New York City or any other self-proclaiming town, that is the theater capital of the US.
Chris Jones reports that the Goodman Theater’s O’Neill Festival, which concluded last weekend with the Neo-Futurists’ controversial take on Strange Interlude (which I sadly missed), has turned in “recession-busting” numbers: average of 90% capacity in the theater, 50,000 audience members, $1.1 million gross for Robert Falls’ Broadway-bound Desire Under the Elms. This is terrific, terrific news, which just goes to prove that good, stimulating art is alive and well in this economic downturn. And I think the numbers are accurate, since, in all the performances I attended during the Festival (and I saw all the productions except for Strange Interlude), the Goodman was packed with people, many of them the “non-traditional Goodman audience” kind – people of color and people below forty. I think the results of the O’Neill Festival once again proved what I continue to harp on from my soapbox here on this blog: that we, the Chicago theater audience are generally a pretty sophisticated lot, so if a theater appeals to our intellectual level and artistic sensibilities, we will come; and if they don’t, we’ll find something else to do. People flocked to see an Emperor Jones that stunningly mixed minstrelsy and Noh theater (Wooster Group), an eloquent and elegant Cardiff that was performed in Portugese without any surtitles, letting the imagery speak to the audience directly (Companhia Triptal), a memorable Desire Under the Elms without any elms but with boulders, a floating house, a vague time period, and a Bob Dylan musical score (Goodman), a flawed but mesmerizing Hairy Ape performed in three performance levels and with a re-conceptualized final scene (The Hypocrites), a world-class Mourning Becomes Electra that powerfully used video and technology (Toneelgroep Amsterdam), and a Strange Interlude performed in its original five hour length and as an almost-parody of the text (Neo Futurists). Man, the Festival was the height of provocative, cerebrum-busting theater! But the Festival’s productions, more importantly, respected the audience, and engaged us to be thinking, introspecting, reflecting, and passionate participants in O’Neill’s work; the plays didn’t give us a hallway pass for a relaxing, catatonic night at the theater, which so many nights seem to be; rather, they made us think, feel, explode (just check out these passionate responses to Strange Interlude in Chris’s blog). I know some theater companies in Chicago are loudly bellyaching and constantly sounding mournful doom and gloom bells about the impact of the recession on the arts. I agree that all of us, artists, audience members, and critics alike, who have a stake in Chicago’s vital arts community need to be aware and concerned. But the audiences are out there, and we will give theaters our money- just don’t give us another round of The Cherry Orchard, or another tedious play by some hot-shot, MFA-stamped, self-absorbed New Yorker, or an original play about a teenage girl that brings together a Midwestern community that suspiciously sounds very similar to that original play you’ve already trotted out a couple of years ago.
It has been “all-theater, all-the-time” during the month of January. Hey, I’m not complaining – the extraordinary, singular, multi-month Eugene O’Neill Festival at the Goodman Theater, for one, is worth every single freezing minute on the Brown Line “L” platform painfully waiting for a train to arrive. This city’s cultural audiences owe a huge debt of gratitude to Goodman Artistic Director Bob Falls for devising, curating, and tirelessly promoting this fantastic Chicago cultural event of the season, if not the year. But there were also a lot of other must-see productions to go to in the Chicagoland area, some of them immensely satisfying, others gravely disappointing, some of them flawed but still a great night of live performance. Here are impressions on other plays I’ve seen during the last month:
After last week’s combustible, jaw-dropping Wooster Group production of The Emperor Jones, the Goodman’s O’Neill Festival unveiled this week the first of three one-act adaptations of O’Neill’s early Sea Plays from the Brazilian theater company Companhia Triptal, the marvelous and creative Zona de Guerra. Triptal, which is making their US debut here in Chicago, will have one new production in the Festival for the next two weeks; I am particularly looking forward to the last one, their acclaimed staging of Bound East for Cardiff, called Cardiff, which will have 30 actors, and which will reconfigure the Goodman’s Owen Theater to allow for audience participation in the play’s merchant ship setting. Zona de Guerra, although much more conventionally-staged, is quite the stunner also. Both the Wooster Group and Companhia Triptal incorporate so many well-thought out, specific, insightful, fresh artistic choices in the shows they’ve brought to the O’Neill Festival that they make many of the recent theater I’ve seen seem like community college productions. Zona de Guerra, an adaptation of In the Zone, about sailors in a merchant ship during World War I who suspect that one of them is a German spy, is so richly and imaginatively conceived by Triptal Artistic Director Andre Garolli, that this staging really transcends O’Neill’s text. The very specific, World War I-set original story about the suspicions and rivalries of a claustrophic group of men becomes a powerful commentary on fearmongering, xenophobia, mob mentality, social status resentments, themes that are so relevant and contemporary to audiences anywhere in the world, not just the US or Brazil. Also, as my fellow theater blogger Rob Kozlowski mentions, the first ten to fifteen minutes of this sixty minute play is stunningly performed in silence, the better to evoke the world of the play and to enthrall us and ease us into it, complete with a visually arresting tableaux of the actors where you can’t figure out which limb belongs to whom and where one body ends and another one begins. I also felt very privileged to attend the talkback last night where the smart, articulate, accessible Garolli (who looks like an intellectual cousin to Cristian Ronaldo twice removed) spoke of his vision and directorial touches (in Portugese too, with a translator), elements that O’Neill probably had no inkling could be derived from his play: the use of animal movement to characterize each sailor’s persona and reactions to the situation; the integration of Catholic symbolisms to cleverly comment and expound on the sailor community’s rituals and superstitions, which border on religiosity; the imaginative use of space to communicate social hierarchy. Beautiful! With the brilliant, sparkling, one-of-a-kind first two weeks of the O’Neill Festival, I feel the Goodman has already regained a lot of the luster it lost when it foisted the heinous Turn of the Century on the unsuspecting Chicago public. There are four more performances of Zona de Guerra: Saturday, January 17, at 2pm and 8 pm, and Sunday, January 18, at 2 pm and 7:30 pm. Run to get your tickets!
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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