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.
Despite all the reading up I did prior to going to see the Wooster Group’s much-talked about take on Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, the explosive initial production of the Goodman’s O’Neill Festival, I still wasn’t prepared for that first glimpse of the great actress Kate Valk in blackface as Brutus Jones, the titular lead character. I was stunned. I was infuriated. I felt highly uncomfortable. But then, as director Elizabeth LeCompte’s brilliantly, savagely, provocatively conjured world, a world greater than the intentions of the text, took shape and grabbed hold, I moved beyond that initial reaction. Some people didn’t and froze at that first view of a Caucasian actress in blackface playing a black man, as was evident during the emotion-laden talkback after the Friday evening performance I attended, and I couldn’t blame them. I think the audience response to this particular production could only be a highly individual one, refracted through the person’s experience and world view. I ultimately felt, as the show progressed, that blackface, or minstrelsy, was one of the theatrical devices (which also included elements of the Japanese Noh theater, video projections, and electronically synthesized sound and musical scores) that the Wooster Group and LeCompte used to construct a production that challenged the audience’s preconceptions about race and gender, yes, but also our views on colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, survivor and non-survivor, civilized and primitive. The production was jarring, thought-provoking, distressing, highly unforgettable; theater, not as entertainment or spectacle, but as a charged debate between the practitioner and his or her audience members. It was theater at the highest level, which cultural-savvy Chicagoans were very fortunate to experience, despite the limited five night performance schedule.
Recent Comments