As I said in my previous blog post, I flew lots and lots of miles over three continents in the course of 2011. But when I was in Chicago, I made sure I slid my butt into a theater seat (over the objections and recriminations of friends and (ex) lovers who I ended up not seeing during those so few weekends). So I still managed to go to a significant number of shows this year despite feeling as if I lived at O’Hare instead of my Ravenswood loft. No regrets on this end, since Chicago continued to be a dazzling North American capital for live performance, with a bounty of world premieres, Chicago stops of great touring productions, and storefront theatrical treasures. Here, then, is my annual top ten list of Chicago theater:
Sometimes Chicago can be a city of theatrical size queens. And no, gutter-dwellers, it’s not what you think. Over the past several years the city has seen ambitious, grandiose, unapologetically lengthy theatrical events: in 2009, the Neo-Futurists put on a six-hour deconstruction of Strange Interlude as part of the Goodman Theater’s Eugene O’Neill festival; just last year, The Building Stage mounted a non-operatic, movement-based, six-hour condensation of Wagner’s The Ring Cycle while Steppenwolf Theater staged Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unforgettable The Brother/Sister Plays over two evenings. So The Hypocrites’ four-hour Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses, an adaptation of all seven existing Sophocles plays (Oedipus, In Trachis, In Colonus, Philoctetes, Ajax, Elektra, and Antigone) by Founding Artistic Director Sean Graney should be a cakewalk. But I still came to the production with a little trepidation – really, four hours of Greek tragedy, with its unceasing bloodthirstiness, its outrageous melodrama, its hysterical reliance on oracles, choruses, and incestuous relatives, and its archaic speech patterns can send even the most jaded, committed theatergoer (well, me) screaming towards the exit pulling their hair and scratching their eyes out. Also, I am a huge, like really huge, fan of Sean Graney, and greatly and deeply admire his tremendous love for theater, his imagination, and his ballsiness; when he succeeds (Edward II, The Mystery of Irma Vep, 4.48 Psychosis), in my opinion, there is no one more creative and ovation-worthy in this town. When he doesn’t quite succeed though (uhmm, Frankenstein?), even his biggest fans (well, me) will be running screaming towards those exits as well. His production of Oedipus a couple of years ago was compelling but it was also marred, in my opinion, by messy symbolism and precocious hipsterism. Well, I am very happy to report that despite (spoiler alert) being showered by stage blood and dirt, I didn’t run towards any exit in the course of Graney’s four-hour epic. Actually, I wasn’t even aware that four hours had passed, since Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses is fresh, funny, brave, accomplished, resonant, beautifully and ambitiously written, a perfect match between the source material and the sensibility of the writer-director and his theater company. Honestly, I could have sat at the Chopin basement theater for another four hours – the show was that good.
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:
My game-to-see-everything theater buddy Joel has told me that if there is one play he won’t ever go to again, it’s Georg Buchner’s unfinished masterpiece of theatrical naturalism Woyzeck (he, obviously, had been scarred by Greg Allen’s eccentric version produced by the now defunct Greasy Joan & Co. from several years ago, which I thought was actually pretty decent). So at the risk of being snarled at, I didn’t drag him or any of my other theater buds to The Woyzeck Project, a combination of The Hypocrites’ idiosyncratic view of Woyzeck, and About Face Theatre’s world premiere of Sylvan Oswald’s Pony, in my mind, a quite perplexing take on the piece, both running in repertory at the Chopin Theatre. I personally like seeing different productions of Woyzeck because its fragmented, opaque, yet timelessly tragic nature allows brazen, gutsy directors and playwrights to project their own interpretations, preoccupations, and agendas on to it for fascinating theater without really destroying its spirit (in 2008, I scuttled plans to see the hot Icelandic director Gísli Örn Gardarsson’s version at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s New Wave Festival which incorporated a circus atmosphere and a large swimming pool where the actors swam laps during the performance). I gotta say though, despite some fascinating artistic choices in the two plays, The Woyzeck Project is somewhat of a missed opportunity in my mind, since both, individually and together, don’t truly present any cohesive, intriguing, and insightful take on Buchner’s work.
It is that time of year again when I’m making lists – from things I’m going to give up in the new year (eating pork belly being one of them) to places I’m going to visit in 2011 (return trips to Hong Kong and Vancouver and a first trip to Rio de Janeiro on top of that list) to the various ways I can meet hot chefs in the city (oops, ok, that’s a secret list). I’ve also compiled my annual ten best theatrical experiences for 2010, a list, as always, compiled from the point of view of a passionate audience member. It was another strong year in Chicago theater, and I saw plays everywhere in the city, from the major houses like the Goodman and Steppenwolf, to most of the storefronts, to the basement of an apartment building in Uptown where folding seats were set up in front of washers and dryers. Fantastic!
Man, this year quickly whizzed by like Sarah Palin on an Alaskan dog sled. It’s been a terrific year of many personal milestones, though, so I have nothing to complain about. I’m getting ready to publish my annual From The Ledge list of the most memorable theatrical productions in Chicago (look out for the list sometime over the weekend), but before I do that, I just wanted to wrap up another year in Chicago theater viewing with my comments on a couple of productions that opened over the past several weeks. Before I left for Asia in the last week of November I managed to catch the opening of Hubris Productions’ mounting of Terence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; after I got back from Asia, I headed over to see the wacky goings-on in the Chopin Theater basement with The Hypocrites’ version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.
Recently Attended Events
- 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)
- 9/16/2011: The Kid Thing (About Face Theater and Chicago Dramatists)
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