It has been an unusually busy season for theatergoing in Chicago (in past years, the highlights of the summer theater season have only been Steppenwolf’s season-closer and the remounts at Theater on the Lake) so I’ve been madly dashing from one theater to another over the past couple of weekends, a frenzy that’s been aggravated by my weekly bounce-arounds between New York City and Phoenix for my day job. Last weekend, I caught Strange Tree Group’s Shakespeare’s King Phycus and Redtwist Theatre’s Equus. Playwright Tom Willmorth breathes life into Shakespearian war horses by devising a world premiere play that mixes together the best and not-so-best elements of Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III into one clever, energetic, eccentric, at times laugh-out-loud funny brew which, with its questionable length, ultimately wears the audience down. Horses figure literally and metaphorically in Peter Shaffer’s Equus which, despite an impressively atmospheric staging from Redtwist Theatre, really cannot overcome the fact that it is a tired, dated, quite pretentious piece of 1970s-era writing, although often perplexingly revived (a version with Alec Baldwin as the doctor is now playing in the Hamptons in New York, right on the heels of the Daniel Radcliffe-led revival on Broadway last season).
The biggest laugh I had over the weekend (more so than the bellyaching guffaws I tried hard to suppress while watching pseudo-hipsters pretend to look impressed by some atrocious art during the West Loop gallery openings last Friday, but that’s a topic for another blog post) was over New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood’s almost sheepish admission – in print, for everyone to read -that New York theater, specifically Broadway, should be considered the east side of Chicago, given the number of Chicago-originating productions and artists currently on stage in New York. Thank you, Mr. Isherwood, but our fair city already has an east side, so we don’t really need to annex New York City. It was still pretty hilarious, though, to finally see the snobbish, self-promoting, out-of-touch Times theater section admit what many of us passionate theater aficionados have known for a while now – that the vital center of American theater has already migrated from the Big Apple to the City of Broad Shoulders. So while one-step-behind New Yorkers will be drooling over chi-town exports Superior Donuts, A Steady Rain, and David Cromer (making his Broadway directing debut with revivals of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound, running in repertory) this fall, theater-forward Chicago audiences will be immersing ourselves in some of the best theater this side of the Atlantic. I’ve compiled below my annual list of the ten must-see theatrical events in Chicago this fall, most of them world premieres, never been seen anywhere; hopefully I’ll bump into many of you in some of them. You never know, but that obscure, low-key, storefront production you paid twenty bucks for may be next year’s frenzy-inducing hot ticket in New York (exhibit A: A Steady Rain).
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.
For me, the highlight of Collaboraction’s 2008 Sketchbook Festival was an eccentric, conceptually brazen, and very funny piece called “Cowboy Birthday Party” by Chicago playwright Emily Schwartz. It was so creative and so astounding, so in-tune with the exciting new work that Sketchbook has showcased in the past (unlike the disappointment of this year’s edition, but you could read about that in my previous blog post), that I was eagerly awaiting Schwartz’s next full-length play. I know she wrote Mr. Spacky…the Man Who Was Continuously Followed by Wolves which was much buzzed about last summer, and which actually won an Orgie award for best theatrical ambience or something like that (yeah, you read it right, the Orgies are theater awards supposedly given by anonymous critics/judges/audience members to the freshest, most creative, and tragically overlooked gems of the Chicago storefront scene, sort of like the antidote to the more conventional, fuddy-duddyish taste of the Jeff Awards). So I was looking forward to seeing her latest opus, The Mysterious Elephant and the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins…who kill him, currently being staged by her theater company Strange Tree Group in the basement of the Chopin Theater (which, notably, has hosted a bounty of theatrical delights this year such as the Hypocrites’ Our Town and TUTA’s Uncle Vanya). After several false starts given my wacky schedule nowadays, I finally made it to see the play last Sunday. Although Mysterious Elephant is not quite the must-see theatrical event of the season that some people have anointed it to be, I personally think it is unique, impressive, engaging, balls-out creative, and definitely deserves a wide audience. And I think it’s safe to say that Emily Schwartz and the Strange Tree Group are inarguably major talents on the rise, the ones to watch, the ones whom we can safely entrust the future of Chicago theater to.
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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