For me, as a regular Chicago theatergoer, the one thing that makes the recent Chicago Shakespeare Theater Tony Award for Best Regional Theater so well-deserved, and so important for the city, is that they’re the one Chicago theater company, bar none, which has consistently and visibly brought to Chicago audiences the great work being created in other artistically vibrant countries. Over the years, their World’s Stage series has brought in Peter Brook multiple times, France’s James Thieree and La Comedie Francaise, the UK’s Complicite and Cheek by Jowl, South Africa’s Foundry Theater, and Ireland’s Abbey Theatre; this year the program includes the British director Tim Supple’s acclaimed Midsummer Nights Dream, spoken in eight languages, and set in the Indian subcontinent. I am passionate in my belief that we are a great theater town, in terms of the variety of work on view, the brilliant creativity of our homegrown talents, and the sophistication of our audiences, but if there is one thing we lack, in my view, which our sister North American theater capital New York City has, it is access to theater coming from different countries. In addition to Midsummer and the other World Stage production, Sweet William, this coming theatrical season will also see Ivo von Hove (whose astounding New York work I’ve been privileged to attend) and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s version of Mourning Becomes Electra, and Brazil’s Compania Triphal as part of the Goodman’s Eugene O’Neill festival, as well as Japanese performer-director-writer Toshiki Okada’s chelfitsch at the MCA’s performance series. As far as I know, that’s it.
Probably one of the factors probably is that we don’t have anything like New York’s BAM Next Wave Festival, which this year is bringing in not only Von Hove/Toneelgroep also (doing a stage version of John Cassavetes’s Opening Night), as well as the exciting Icelandic director Gisli Örn Gardarsson directing a version of Buchner’s Woyzeck that includes aquarium swimming (!). But it’s also not like a lot of these international theater pieces are only being seen in New York: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear with Ian McKellen was at BAM, and then at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater last fall; the Dutch company Dood Pard and their reconstructed version of Medea called medEia was at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston last year, and then went to the Berkshires; the German theatrical phenomenon Michael Thalheimer’s “fever dream” version of Emilia Galotti which was at BAM two years ago is now playing at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival; and the most surprising of all, the National Theater of Scotland’s Black Watch which was acclaimed as the best play of 2008, in both New York and the UK, made a stop this summer in Norfolk, Virginia (yes, that Norfolk, the land of naval base duty-free shopping) on its way back to a return engagement in New York’s St. Ann’s Warehouse this fall. I have to grit my teeth, seethe in jealous envy, and knock my head on the wall as I see these major theatrical productions bypass Chicago. Why aren’t these productions coming here? Is it a question of expense? I have to think that’s some of it, although Chicago Shakespeare has had no trouble bringing in theater companies from other countries. Is it a question of audience? I have to give it to Chicago audiences, we’re a pretty evolved, theater-savvy, and passionate but discerning lot. And Peter Brook’s Fragments and Thieree’s Au Revoir Parapluie at Chicago Shakes had “standing room only” performances (actually not literally, since overflow audience members were sitting on cushions on the floor) so we’re going to come if it’s being offerred. Or is it that the decision- and taste-makers in our theatrical community, such as the artistic directors and management staff of our bigger theaters, and theater critics and bloggers may be a little too preoccupied with our own backyard, a little too fascinated with navel-gazing, maybe, (pained gasp) a little too parochial in mindset? We like to celebrate Chicago theater, as we should, but hopefully, not to the exclusion of the much bigger theatrical world out there. Yes, we have great playwrights and directors and we are “exporting” them to Broadway and beyond, but my own personal feeling is that for a cultural capital to be truly a cultural capital, in spirit and in mindset, not just in self-proclaimed name, it needs the inflow, the sustenance, the give and take with artists from outside its community, from outside its country of origin. We have fantastic theater companies doing world-class theater, but I think we all need to constantly remind ourselves too that great theater is happening everywhere else, not just in Chicago.
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