From the Ledge

Feb 25

Deflated

I’m a big Philip Seymour Hoffman fan. I remember seeing him on Broadway with John C. Reilly in their Tony-nominated performances in the revival of Sam Shepard’s True West and being just blown away. His Oscar-winning performance in Capote is still, in my opinion, one of the most indelible cinematic performances of recent memory. So when I received the Goodman season brochure late last year and saw that he was going to be making his Chicago directorial debut with a world premiere play in the winter of 2010, I started clearing my calendar to make sure I wouldn’t miss its limited run. My anticipation was built up as friends recounted Hoffman sightings at restaurants or at Steppenwolf (taking in a performance of American Buffalo), and the Chicago press published interviews and articles about him and the play. And yes, he was there at the performance I attended, silently observing from the Owen Theater’s mezzanine level. I was very certain I was going to be blown away, mesmerized, by his production of Brett C. Leonard’s newest, The Long Red Road, about a man broken down by the memories of a tragic past, that chills were going to run up my spine, that my jaws would need to be scraped off the floor,…..but I wasn’t blown away, my spine stayed ramrod stiff, and my jaws lay firmly in place. In fact I was pretty disappointed, not so much with Hoffman’s direction, but with the material, which was muddled, unoriginal, and oddly, somewhat sedate and internalized for a play dealing with such harrowing themes as alcoholism, incest, pedophilia, and accidental murder.

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Feb 10

Viewing List

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In the spirit of constructive feedback, my friend Joel suggested I add a blog section listing any upcoming performances I’m attending, so folks like you, my dear, devoted readers, could decide whether you would want to attend the same shows or performances, as well. That’s probably not going to happen any time soon, since my preciously scarce blog real estate is already quite packed with Twitter feeds, blog rolls, and a listing of shows I had recently attended (which provides a general indication of what potentially would be content for upcoming postings). However, I do listen to my friends suggestions, even if they’re delivered a little curmudgeonly (and I say that lovingly, Joel!), so here then are some of the performances I’m planning to go to this month. February in all its cold, snowy glory is always seen as the “dead zone” of the Chicago winter season, but if you judge by the number of intriguing, lively, potentially can’t-miss shows, it’s probably more equivalent to July in Maui, arts-wise.

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Dec 19

2009’s Theatrical Treasures

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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.

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Jun 05

Baby Talk

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I thought it was pretty ironic that on the way home Thursday night from the Goodman after seeing Rebecca Gilman’s latest play, the “to procreate or not to procreate” drama The Crowd You’re In With, a baby was bawling its tonsils out on my Brown Line “L” car. For me, a screaming baby on the “L”, just like Swiss chard on anything or Paula Abdul’s voice on a record, is just plain unacceptable. Yes, I was irritated. I’m probably not as child-friendly as many of my friends (and I am at that age already where a lot of people I know either have year-old kids, or are on their second or third baby), but I’m not as extreme as some of the characters are in Gilman’s play – to be honest about it, I just don’t see parenting in my tarot cards in the near to medium-term future, but I respect those who have decided to undertake this immense responsibility. The Rebecca Gilman plays I’ve seen have always been about big topics contextualized into personal stories, whether it is poverty (Blue Surge), 21^st century feminism (Dollhouse), or racism (Spinning Into Butter). I think The Crowd You’re In With, although intriguing, contemporary, and exceptionally well-written at times is quite slight, and to be frank about it, mundane. I don’t really see anything revelatory about this play, but maybe that’s just my problem, since the themes are too familiar, are too often part of my Sunday brunch conversations, that I feel that I shouldn’t have gone to the theater to see them dissected, even if there are interesting points being made.

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May 30

A Second Look

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I’m a huge Tom Stoppard fan but I wasn’t particularly thrilled when I saw the New York transfer of his London hit, Rock’n'Roll, in early 2008. As I said in my blog entry about it last year, most of the time I felt like I was taking three Ph.d level classes at the same time instead of being drawn into an emotionally thrilling theatrical piece – it was a play full of dense, cerebral ideas, references, and metaphors, with lots of talk, debate, discourse, and hectoring. Of course saying that a Stoppard play was full of dense, cerebral ideas and lots of talk was like saying the Chicago river turns green on St. Patrick’s Day, duh! But Stoppard’s other plays are extremely intelligent too, and they hit the audience squarely in the heart and in the gut. It was a shame that Rock’n'Roll didn’t – its themes around freedom and patriotism were emotionally resonant, red-blooded ones that could not, and should not, stay intellectualized. I found the Goodman Theatre production, under the direction of Court Theatre Artistic Director Charles Newell, to be warmer and more emotionally accessible than the Broadway production, but it’s still tough to sit through. The woman sitting beside me at the performance I was at obviously got lost after the first couple of scenes, and spent the rest of the first act fidgeting, shifting uneasily in her chair, repeatedly unzipping and zipping her purse, unwrapping candy, putting lipstick on, rubbing cream on her hands… I thought she was going to break into a Tai-Chi exercise routine while she was at it! She, and the rest of her four person group, thankfully left at intermission. But I couldn’t say I really blamed them for doing so.

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Apr 17

Delighted, then Disappointed

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Sometimes, when I go to the major Equity theaters in Chicago, it almost seems like I’m sitting down with a Dancing with the Stars DVD marathon. One night, you see dazzling, perfect-leg-kick kind of work ala Shawn Johnson or Melissa Rycroft, and then on other nights, there’s unbelievably atrocious work that recalls Steve Wozniak’s unspeakable, Worm-incorporating samba. So after an ill-conceived Macbeth that undeniably proved that plays with nudity, video-projections, and electronica music scoring could be as boring, unsexy, and old-fashioned as a bocce tournament in a retirement home, Chicago Shakespeare offers up a very modern and hip, cleverly-designed Twelfth Night, directed by the hip and clever British director Josie Rourke. But then, after the once-in-a-lifetime, transformative artistic experience of the Eugene O’Neill Festival at the Owen theater, the Goodman decides to follow those perfect plays with a world premiere of a baffling, incoherent, ultimately soporific “magical realism” play, Asian style, by a highly-regarded female playwright, Naomi Iizuka’s Ghostwritten, one of the greatest disappointments I have had in my recent arts and culture-watching. The highs and lows of Chicago theatergoing can be so maddening!