O’Neill Festival Week 2: Zona de Guerra

Jan 16

After last week’s combustible, jaw-dropping Wooster Group production of The Emperor Jones, the Goodman’s O’Neill Festival unveiled this week the first of three one-act adaptations of O’Neill’s early Sea Plays from the Brazilian theater company Companhia Triptal, the marvelous and creative Zona de Guerra. Triptal, which is making their US debut here in Chicago, will have one new production in the Festival for the next two weeks; I am particularly looking forward to the last one, their acclaimed staging of Bound East for Cardiff, called Cardiff, which will have 30 actors, and which will reconfigure the Goodman’s Owen Theater to allow for audience participation in the play’s merchant ship setting. Zona de Guerra, although much more conventionally-staged, is quite the stunner also. Both the Wooster Group and Companhia Triptal incorporate so many well-thought out, specific, insightful, fresh artistic choices in the shows they’ve brought to the O’Neill Festival that they make many of the recent theater I’ve seen seem like community college productions. Zona de Guerra, an adaptation of In the Zone, about sailors in a merchant ship during World War I who suspect that one of them is a German spy, is so richly and imaginatively conceived by Triptal Artistic Director Andre Garolli, that this staging really transcends O’Neill’s text. The very specific, World War I-set original story about the suspicions and rivalries of a claustrophic group of men becomes a powerful commentary on fearmongering, xenophobia, mob mentality, social status resentments, themes that are so relevant and contemporary to audiences anywhere in the world, not just the US or Brazil. Also, as my fellow theater blogger Rob Kozlowski mentions, the first ten to fifteen minutes of this sixty minute play is stunningly performed in silence, the better to evoke the world of the play and to enthrall us and ease us into it, complete with a visually arresting tableaux of the actors where you can’t figure out which limb belongs to whom and where one body ends and another one begins. I also felt very privileged to attend the talkback last night where the smart, articulate, accessible Garolli (who looks like an intellectual cousin to Cristian Ronaldo twice removed) spoke of his vision and directorial touches (in Portugese too, with a translator), elements that O’Neill probably had no inkling could be derived from his play: the use of animal movement to characterize each sailor’s persona and reactions to the situation; the integration of Catholic symbolisms to cleverly comment and expound on the sailor community’s rituals and superstitions, which border on religiosity; the imaginative use of space to communicate social hierarchy. Beautiful! With the brilliant, sparkling, one-of-a-kind first two weeks of the O’Neill Festival, I feel the Goodman has already regained a lot of the luster it lost when it foisted the heinous Turn of the Century on the unsuspecting Chicago public. There are four more performances of Zona de Guerra: Saturday, January 17, at 2pm and 8 pm, and Sunday, January 18, at 2 pm and 7:30 pm. Run to get your tickets!