From the Ledge

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:

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Tags: Dog & Pony Theatre Co., Pavement Group, Steppenwolf Theatre, XIII Pocket

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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Tags: Goodman Theatre

Since I’m a pretty frequent theatergoer, I’m probably not as easily impressed by  something as the next guy is (so I heartily snorted with scorn and derision at the suburban soccer dad sitting beside me, over –the-moon with pleasure, at the undistinguished, Broadway-bound trainwreck that was The Addams Family last month).  I see a lot of plays I like, and some that I absolutely love, but it’s pretty rare for me to see something that I’m blown away by.  Something that stops me in my tracks to remind me how invaluable theater can be to living a life intelligently and fully.  It happened in 2007 at Steppenwolf during the unforgettable world premiere of August:  Osage County which indisputably proved the power of great theatrical storytelling.  It hasn’t happened since…well, until this week, when I was at the two necessary nights for Steppenwolf’s Chicago premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s genius The Brother/Sister Plays, which already pulverized with shock and awe New York’s jaded theatergoers, including the New York Times’ Ben Brantley, in their Public Theatre premiere late last year. (My usual full disclosure statement:  I am a member of Steppenwolf’s Auxiliary Council, the theater’s young professionals’ board).  Like August, The Brother/Sister Plays, comprised on one night of the longer In the Red and Brown Water and on another night of the two one-acts, The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, is great theatrical story-telling.  But McCraney’s important magnum opus is more epic, more ambitious, more risk-taking, not only in theatrical form, but in theatrical content as it navigates through explosive threads in the African-American experience (underage pregnancy, homosexuality practiced on the “downlow” among straight men).  The Brother/Sister Plays is heady, intense, exhilarating, wrenching, proof that theater, with its mix of drama, movement, dance, and music, is the most complete live performance experience possible; more importantly, with its scope, its creativity, its emotional magnetism, it’s probably my theater-going generation’s Angels In America.

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Tags: Steppenwolf Theatre

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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Tags: Akram Khan Company, Goodman Theatre, MCA Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre, The Building Stage, The Right Brain Project, Thirteen Pocket

For those of you who have been reading my blog since it’s inception in October 2007, you know how much I love Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer and Tony-winning August: Osage County and think it’s one of the greatest American contemporary plays (something Time Magazine seems to agree with, having selected it as number 1 in its Best Plays of the Decade list).  Curiously though, I have never seen a live production of any of Letts’ previous plays- Killer Joe, Bug, or the Pulitzer finalist Man from Nebraska.  Obviously I didn’t think he sprang fully-formed and awards-ready from a mythical Great Playwright mother pearl, so August, with its almost-perfect dialogue and its mesmerizing storytelling could only be the culmination of techniques and themes that he used in the earlier ones.  I was also very aware of the semi-notoriety that both Killer Joe and Bug have in terms of its raw sexuality and violence, so I was very intrigued to see how Profiles Theatre, the admittedly brazen storefront theater company that I’ve had a rollercoaster love-it/hate-it relationship over the years of Chicago theater watching would stage Killer Joe.  Although I don’t think it has the depth, the impact, and the lingering quality of August (really though, which recent play has?), the twenty year old Killer Joe holds up pretty well, continuing to deliver the goods in explosive drama, and the Profiles production, directed by Letts’ fellow Steppenwolf ensemble member (and original August cast member) Rick Snyder is a (literally) rip-roaring night at the theater.  And it’s still the one play that has the most original use of KFC drumsticks as stage props that I’ve ever seen.

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Tags: Profiles Theatre

When my mom passed away several years ago, which had to be one of my watershed life experiences, I sent out an email to my close friends all over the world to let them know, and I included this quote from Joan Didion’s autobiographical book about coping with the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the prolonged illness of their daughter, Quintana, “The Year of Magical Thinking”:  “…when we mourn for our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.  As we were.  As we are no longer.  As we will one day not be at all.”  I think it’s a beautiful quote, so articulately and delicately crystallizing with a minimum of words that almost indescribable state of tremendous grief, that sense of losing huge chunks of one’s self and one’s past and future with the loss of the loved one.   “The Year of Magical Thinking”  is one of the most important and memorable books I’ve ever read in my life; I finished it a couple of months before my mom entered the hospital for her very rapid, and ultimately failed, battle with kidney ailments, and I couldn’t have realized how prescient the book would be for capturing my emotional responses to my own forthcoming loss.  For Didion, in the book, powerfully, expressively, and relentlessly paints the various emotions that you go through when dealing with the loss of a loved one, and the terrifying possible loss of another – the anger, the discombobulation, the helplessness, the overwhelming pain, the sometimes gratuitous but always searing self-pity.  So I was very excited and curious to see how Didion adapted the book, so emotionally frank, so introspective, into a theatrical piece, now being given its Chicago premiere by the Court Theatre.   Although The Year of Magical Thinking, the play, is extremely well-written, and in the hands of Court Artistic Director Charlie Newell and actress Mary Beth Fisher, is masterfully, at times exquisitely, staged and performed, I missed some of the emotional clarity of the book.  I felt that the play was indeed a portrayal of “magical thinking” versus “magical grieving and feeling” which the book so invaluably, and unapologetically, provided.

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Tags: Court Theatre