There’s a whole lot of shaking going on at Steppenwolf’s Garage Theater with three of Chicago’s up-and-coming theater companies being given Steppenwolf’s formidable resources to stage their plays in rotating repertory. It’s a very generous, very admirable move from one of the stalwart arts organizations in the city, and overall I can recommend all three, to varying degrees of enthusiasm. I think this is a terrific shot in the arm for Chicago’s storefront theater scene and all three theater companies stepped up to plate. Here’s what I think:
One of my most infuriating theater experiences last year was the Victory Gardens production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, a play which attempted to portray grief and personal loss through the lens of a whimsical, stylized take on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I have major issues with Ruhl’s playwriting as a whole, but I had a particular issue with how she treated the subject matter of grief in that particular play- in a blatantly artificial, shallow, unbelievable manner. I wished she took some playwriting lessons from Jenny Schwartz, whose abstract but wonderfully touching play God’s Ear (an off-Broadway sensation last year), essentially about a family who loses its eldest child, is currently being given a knock-you-senseless production by the up-and-coming storefront theater Dog & Pony Theatre Co. Having lost my mom two years ago, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of how it feels to lose someone so close to you, and I just didn’t recognize myself in any of Ruhl’s characters or situations, that’s how dishonest I felt the play was. In God’s Ear, though, I recognized the overwhelming disorientation, the inability to communicate, the continuous loop of ache, the sense of abandonment that losing a close loved one creates in you, despite the fact that like Ruhl, Schwartz packs her tale with outrageous whimsy (a flossing Tooth Fairy anyone? What about a transvestite flight attendant? Or maybe a GI Joe toy soldier that comes to life?). I think that’s the difference though between real playwriting, and well, hack playwriting.
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