Seeing a play at Mary-Arrchie has always been, for me, the classic Chicago storefront theater experience. Between its eccentric, grungy location on the second floor of a convenience store and across a gas station on the outer fringes of Boystown, to its wildly-diverse, always-provocative programming, spanning classic Harold Pinter to early Keith Huff to hip Finn Kennedy, staged in a sweaty, gutsy, DIY-budget manner, a night at this theater is always going to be energizing, regardless of whether one actually liked the play or not. And I think there will be polarized responses to Cherrywood: The Modern Comparable, its current production directed by David Cromer, hot off his wildly-raved-about A Streetcar Named Desire at Writers’ Theatre, and right before his fall Broadway experiments with Picnic and Yanks. There certainly were, even in my own tiny group of five people– some of us could barely wait for the ninety intermissionless minutes to end, others, like me, were mesmerized with mouths agape. I think some people won’t know what hit them with the immersive, plotless, at parts undeniably head-scratching Cherrywood, which playwright Kirk Lynn wrote for his Austin-based experimental theater group, Rude Mechanicals. Is it a play? Or is it an un-play – a hipster take on performance art, a post-modern loft rave party with dialogue, a critique on our current socio-political preoccupations masquerading as a kegger (with wild werewolf’s milk instead of beer)? Whatever is it, I feel very strongly that you should run out and pack the Mary-Arrchie space for the duration of its run: Cherrywood is invigorating, challenging, brilliantly conceptualized – a production that I would argue is even more vital to my experience as a passionate Chicago theatergoer than Cromer’s Streetcar is (which I loved!), because it is contemporary, unsettling, defiant, and talks to a world much bigger and messier than itself.
A quartet of twentysomethings throws a party in some urban loft in an unnamed city. It’s not clear who owns the loft and who these people are and why they’re having a party. More twentysomethings arrive, with a sprinkling of older people. The majority of the partygoers are white. For the first delirious half hour, this party gets into full swing, and the audience is immersed right in the middle of it – since Cromer and his terrific scenic designer Andre LaSalle have reconfigured the Mary-Arrchie space such that the audience seats encircle the performance space, and the actors use every other available space in the theater to sit, stand, dance, hangout, do whatever, everyone in spitting distance of each other (at one point, my flipflops were very close to digging into actor Ryan Martin’s, uhmm, well-developed back). It is exhilarating as the audience eavesdrops into the evocative party conversation, some self-important (an argument on world wars), some inane (trying to name bands that start with the letter “A”), some poignant (the party wallflower, the excellent Noah Simon, saying when he watches the news he tries to remember what the headlines were a year ago to see how much the world has changed since), some bizarre (Geoff Button and Derek Garner’s homoerotic but unsexy exchange about drinking the werewolf milk). Then a gun goes off, someone says he was shot but refuses to go to the hospital, the partygoers try to organize themselves to respond but fail and decide to just continue to hangout, everyone gets a box with a tsotchke in it, all 49 actors break out into a group dance number set to a version of “Like a Prayer” that is NOT Madonna’s, a pizza delivery guy arrives and says he owns the loft, everyone leaves. Huh?!
But Cherrywood is as much about a true-to-life urban hipster party as, well, True Blood, is about vampires and werewolves. The party invitation (which is also the cover of the show program given out at the end) says “Party tonite for anyone who wants to change.” The partygoers drink milk shots which will change them to werewolves and lose their human vulnerabilities. But they also talk about changes that should happen that is bigger than physical change; the changes that should happen in a world wracked by war, by disaffected youth, by socio-economic inequality. What’s particularly fascinating to me, as someone who works on organization change for companies in my day job, is, given how these partygoers are portrayed, can they really effect the change they’re talking about? Or is it all ineffectual talk? These partygoers- pretty homogenous, mostly young, seemingly well-educated, are also disconnected, delusional, self-involved, paranoid, uninformed and unengaged with the world (one of the lines that really struck me is when the neighbor character says she refuses to watch television because it’s all news all the time). If these people can’t even agree on what to do with an alleged shooting victim (Take him to the hospital? Call the police? Just leave?), how do they think they can mobilize to come up with universal health care or fair-value consumerism, some of the changes the play talks about? Do they actually have the capacity to change from within? Cherrywood also makes vivid points about group dynamics and leadership – who sets the agenda for a group? In this group, it’s not the person with the true change vision (not that you can tell which of them has it, maybe Ryan Bourqe’s character?). Is it the person who speaks the loudest and firmest? Or the person who has the cojones to say “I’m the leader” in a way that no one will question him or her? Or is it the person with the gun? There are so many interesting readings that Cherrywood offers, and I may have taken away a more cynical one than others did. I also think it’s intriguing that Cromer cast an African-American actor, D’Wayne Taylor, as the pizza delivery guy/loft owner, who ultimately evolves into the de-facto leader of the group, telling them when they can leave the party, giving this production of Cherrywood a strong resonance for current American politics.
Cherrywood isn’t perfect. Lynn supposedly wrote the play as a series of lines and stage directions which the director and the cast assign among themselves, and with 49 actors, there are no fleshed-out characterizations. The strongest impressions, then, are given by the strongest actors: The Hypocrites’ Button; Simon; Mary-Arrchie Artistic Director Rich Cotovsky as the alleged shooting victim; Molly Reynolds as an older partygoer; Allison Cain as a neighbor. The exuberant dance number, choreographed by Patrick Andrews, is an engaging diversion, but a diversion from what? I just don’t get why it’s there. But this Mary-Arrchie production is such an important one in my view – because it is so artistically rich but unabashedly un-commercial, because it showcases dozens of Chicago’s best young actors acting their heart out, because it continues to prove that David Cromer’s directorial brilliance encompasses more than those elegiac mid-century American classic plays that the New York critics (and some Chicago ones) are trying to peg him in– that they could have played the whole show in darkness, and I would not have complained. Cherrywood is, quite simply, a must-experience must-see.
I’ve raved enough. Cherrywood is at Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co., Angel Island, 735 W. Sheridan Road, until August 8.
Tags: Mary-Arrchie Theater Co.
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