From the Ledge

As I’ve mentioned in the previous blogpost, Chicago theater in April is being bookended by two high-profile, unmissable Shakespeare productions:  Bush Theatre Artistic Director Josie Rourke’s very modern Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare and ensemble member Tina Landau’s blow-you-to-smithereens The Tempest at Steppenwolf, the first ever Shakespeare production in the famous ensembles’s 33 seasons.  If you have the cash to see only two plays this month, I would heartily recommend that these are the two you go to, because they are terrific live performance experiences.  So I originally thought I would write a blog post talking about these two together, pointing out the common resonances they contain for us contemporary viewers.  But man, despite how much I admire Rourke’s Twelfth Night, I just can’t stop thinking about Landau’s The Tempest.  This is a fantastic example of a truly 21^st century Shakespearean production, something that other productions I’ve gone to recently have touted themselves to be, but ended up as exciting as stale chips and bland guacamole, despite the use of multi-media, synthesizers, rock scores, and all those other techno gadgets that old-fashioned directors and artists think are “modern”, “hip”, “youthful”.   Landau’s The Tempest IS video-using, rock-and-rolling, cross-dressing, gender-switching, Mac-advertising, hip-hopping, but it is also committedly, excitingly, unapologetically NOW in its casting, its design, its line readings and performance styles, in its overall sensibilities.  Landau and her cast and artistic collaborators have enabled William Shakespeare to speak to 2009 audiences as a 2009 writer, not as a centuries-dead white guy in  bloomers.  Which I think our man Will will approve of.  This is theater for people who truly love theater, who love Shakespeare, who embrace big, bold, messy live performance, who firmly believe that theater is a populist, multi-cultural, interdisciplinary art form.  It is theater that will bring in those elusive new audiences who think Shakespeare is for their grandparents.   It is not theater for those “purists” and “traditionalists” (and there are TONS of them trolling the various Chicago theater blogs) who think theater is a sacred, formal, elitist rite of pursed-lips, homogenous “civilized society”.  

It goes without saying that everyone agrees Shakespeare’s plays are timeless, and are insightful in a variety of settings – that’s one of the reasons why they’re so great.  But I don’t think a lot of productions I’ve seen recently have been able to successfully transpose these timeless themes into our own contemporary perspectives and concerns.  Landau succeeds because I think she just isn’t intimidated by the text – The Tempest is widely-considered to be top tier in the Shakespearean canon – and she finds exciting, fresh, creative ways to bridge the 17^th century verse and the fantastical world of magicians and fairies, with today’s mindsets, connotations, and urban realities.  She starts with Takeshi Kata’s industrial warehouse stage, quite the mélange of zip lines, planks, catwalks, and canvass curtains, which gives the island that the super magician Prospero rules a raw, stripped down, burnt city feel, an extension of the bustling, chaotic global capital that we, the audience, live in, so essentially from the beginning, it feels like we are on that island.  It’s brilliant!   The effect is further heightened by the kinetic staging of many scenes, as the actors run, jump, climb, and zip line through the aisles and balconies of the theater, placing the audience in the midst of the action.

Landau continues with the provocative use of music – there’s the thoughtful original musical score by Adding Machine composer Josh Schmidt, and then there’s the jaw-popping staging of two musical numbers.  The first musical set piece occurs when the persona-shifting Ariel, Prospero’s spirit slave, appears as a “harpy” (Shakespeare’s words) to the drunken, murder-plotting trio of the King of Naples’ butler, Stephano, and his jester, Trincullo, and Prospero’s other slave, the monster Caliban – the scene is staged as a vaguely Euro-chic-rock-concert-cum-Milan-runaway-show, with most of the verse set to Schmidt’s music.  Then when Prospero’s daughter Miranda marries the King of Naples’ shipwrecked son Ferdinand, giant colorful flowers come down from the rafters, a ten feet tall woman is rolled out, and the cast launches into an outrageous, energetic, sexy hip-hop song and dance number.  The fact that the two major set-pieces in the play are musical numbers is so appropriate, I think, for our Ipod-wearing 21^st century society.  People might not dig their Shakespeare, but they certainly know their indie-rock and hip-hop, given that music has supplanted all others as the most popular art form.  As a side note, James Schuette’s fabulous, eye-popping costumes are essential complements to these musical numbers – plus when modernist ballet tutus and metallic hoop skirts are donned by the virile, shirtless trio of ensemble member Jon Michael Hill as Ariel, and Miles Fletcher and Eric James Casady as his kindred Spirits, you could almost hear the gay men (and a few women) in the audience gasp audibly for a defillibrator.

Most importantly, there is the cast of 14, nine of whom are Steppenwolf ensemble members (the most, I think, since August:  Osage County).  Landau has put together a multi-cultural cast reflective of our times.  Then she plays with gender roles, again, an honest echo of today, when gender identity is not as strongly boundaried and more pliable than it had been in Shakespeare’s time.  Then she lets her cast deliver the lines naturally and plainly, but always meaningfully, without the exaggerated British accents or snooze-inducing theatricality that many, many Shakespearean productions are guilty of.  This being Steppenwolf, the high caliber of the acting is to be expected.  What is somewhat startling are the rich nuances that are created by casting a specific actor in a particular role.  The entire Chicago theater community has been buzzing with excitement ever since ensemble member and multi-hyphenate Frank Galati was announced as Prospero.  It’s a role that fits him to a perfect T – being such an important alchemist, as director, actor, and adaptor, in the history of Chicago, no American, theater.  And he infuses his Prospero with a winning, world-weary reflectiveness mixed with the creative’s outsize, spontaneous, visionary temperament.  I loved, loved his line readings – so clearly articulated and so cleanly inflected.  Having the great Lois Smith, in one of her rare Steppenwolf ensemble appearances, play Gonzalo, a male role, the King of Naples’ lieutenant who is also Prospero’s secret friend, is brilliant.  Smith truly, powerfully, makes Gonzalo the epitome of the generous friend and voice of reason that Shakespeare wrote him to be.  To have a woman play this role as contrasted to the murderous, scheming, backstabbing male characters is an interesting feminist reading to a play that, as written, only has one female character.   The intense, always-riveting young Chicago actor Stephen Louis Grush (recently seen anchoring the True West/Topdog Underdog flipflopping at American Theatre Company) plays Ferdinand, usually a swoony pretty boy, as an intense, tattooed, edgy young Prince (is Miranda up for the tumultuous married life that may lie ahead?).  The rest of the cast is excellent – with special props to ensemble member K. Todd Freeman’s multi-layered Caliban, precisely balancing pitiful and proud in his subjugation, sympathetic and maddening at the same time.

Then there’s Jon Michael Hill, who shows again that he is indestructible onstage.   I mean he can act like there’s no tomorrow (but we knew that already from The Unmentionables and Superior Donuts), but he can also sing, dance, climb catwalks, and zipline from thirty feet in the air.  It is a fascinating Ariel, performed as if he’s just a twentysomething from Logan Square and not a playful fairy, very urban, very 2009, butch with a hint of androgyny, well-spoken with a brush of temper, loyal but also a little bit dangerous.  To be honest, because of Hill’s impactful performance, Prospero is a little outshined, which may be more than what Shakespeare intended.  But it’s a performance that works for this particular production, where Gen XY is an opinionated, strong-willed, not-easily-intimidated, fast-maturing lot…uhmmmm, yeah, just like modern-day America, right?  I also loved the fact that Landau has Ariel initiating his magic spells using a Mac laptop, a clever commentary that cutting-edge technology is indeed the new magic.

Shakespeare’s themes of creation, redemption, forgiveness, and the humanistic exercise of power still come through loud and clear, despite having no literal island or characters in Elizabethan dress.   And in 2009, I strongly feel that there is no need for literal interpretations of Shakespeare, instead we need accessible ones, to make his work as vivid and as powerful as it was in 1610.   It took Steppenwolf 33 years to do Shakespeare…with this killer The Tempest, the wait was well worth it.  But now that they have proven that they can do Shakespeare that takes the ADD-afflicted, classics-disinterested contemporary audience by the collar and shake them up (and the vigorous standing ovation at curtain call during the performance I attended can attest to this), shouldn’t we have more of the Bard’s works in upcoming seasons? 

I’m getting ready to buy my ticket for a repeat viewing of The Tempest, it’s that good.  Run and tell your friends, pronto.  The Tempest runs till May 31 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted.