By Caroline V. McGraw Directed by Erica Weiss Produced by Cole Theatre At The Greenhouse Theatre, Chicago One Half of a Good Black Comedy Tha bros: bachelors who lead ostensibly superficial, booze-fueled lives filled with sex and partying. This is the class of men that is the subject of Caroline V. McGraw’s The Bachelors; and … Read more
World Premiere Musical based on the book by K.G. Campbell Directed by Heather Currie Script by Aly Renee Amidei Music by Scott Tallarida Lyrics by Aly Renee Amidei, Julie Tallarida and Scott Tallarida Playing at Lifeline Theatre, Chicago “An outlandish, oddly humorous story about a fastidious boy named Lester and his not so snazzy … Read more
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Gallery 33 South State Street, 7th floor, Chicago, IL Young talent on display Every year the senior undergraduate class from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) commandeers the largest gallery space located on campus for their thesis show, and every year it is … Read more
Book by Arthur Laurents Music by Leonard Bernstein Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Directed by Jim Corti Choreographed by William Carlos Angulo Musical Direction by Tom Vendafreddo At Paramount Theatre, Aurora Stunning production of West Side Story wonderfully sung and danced Paramount Theatre continues their high standards with an amazingly powerful West Side Story. From the … Read more
“For any big project, love is not enough. You need skill and experience. You need life to make it real.”
The rapid progress for gay people in the United States is a cause for pride and celebration, but has also left a lot of people whose stances “evolved” rather late in the game with reason to feel guilty about the recent past. If you saw Northlight’s production of Terrence McNally’s latest play, Mothers and Sons, you may notice a bit of a pattern with About Face Theatre’s Chicago premiere of A. Rey Pamatmat’s after all the terrible things I do. This two-person drama premiered in 2014 at Milwaukee Rep, and has been widely greeted as a promising sign for Pamatmat. Though the circumstances that inform the characters’ conversations are the sort that result from an author setting up a perfect premise, Pamatmat’s writing deftly and eloquently explores people grappling with things they regret, but can’t put right. To describe the specifics too much would allow readers to figure out things that are supposed to be discoveries, but you may rest assured that Andrew Volkoff’s production and his two outstanding actors tell a story that shows people at their ugliest and most vulnerable, and still treats them with great sensitivity.
When Protest Becomes a Rite of Passage, is it Really Protest?
Occupy Wall Street, the brief movement which provided the earliest evidence of political engagement by millennials, was greeted mostly with confusion, mockery, and annoyance by older observers. It was often used as an example of how millennials possess an alien mindset, but as a college student at the time, I was baffled by the Movement as well. The protesters who took over Zuccotti Park in 2011 in New York City, as well as areas in other cities throughout the country, demonstrated their displeasure at the bleak economic prospects for our generation, and the influence of corporate money in politics allowed by Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission the previous year. However, the unorganized movement quickly veered into radical identity politics and other far-left, neo-hippie causes, and disintegrated within months without ever having clearly expressed any goal or measure for victory. Now, in a Chicago premiere by Theater Wit, Alena Smith’s The New Sincerity explores the interaction between the Occupy Movement and more established leftists during its heyday. Though her comedic drama makes use of archetypes for characters, they are interesting to watch for ninety minutes, and provide a commentary on the Movement whose legacy has continued to reverberate to the present.
Erin Long (Natasha), Drew Shirley (Benjamin), and Maura Kidwell (Rose). Photos by Charles Osgood.
Rose (Maura Kidwell) is a Columbia Ph.D. student who has a gig writing for the literary magazine Asymptote. Located in a comfortable loft near Zuccotti Park, the office is the domain of Benjamin (Drew Shirley), a pompous thirty-something leftist who loathes that he depends for funding on the father of an absentee-partner who is mainly interested in critiquing TV shows. Rose’s recent article on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is much more in line with what he wants Asymptote to become, and he makes Rose a columnist, much to her delight. However, Benjamin is much less pleased when Rose announces her intention to write about the nascent Occupy Movement, which she intends to depict positively. To Benjamin, the Movement confirms that the left is “frivolous and unfocused,” and since his neurotic fiancé Sadie has just written a book on the decline of the American Left, it is important that her thesis be vindicated.
Drew Shirley (Benjamin), Maura Kidwell (Rose), and Alex Stein (Django)
However, a single visit to the Occupy camp is enough to totally reverse Benjamin’s opinion. He quickly becomes an advocate for the Movement, and insists on involving the rest of Asymptote’s office as well. While genuinely inspired for perhaps the first time in his life, part of his motivation is to promote himself and to get closer to Rose. Sadie was jealous of her writing, and Benjamin clearly thinks Rose would be an easier person to be in a relationship with. But Rose feels attracted to Django (Alex Stein), one of the founders of the Movement, and a young man who is as ignorant, humble, laid-back, and goofy as Benjamin is arrogant, uptight, and selfish. Asymptote’s excitable college intern, Natasha (Erin Long), looks up to Rose and has her own reasons for encouraging Rose’s relationships with both men, while Django rejects the concepts of monogamy and commitment. The personal becomes indistinguishable from the political as the four grapple with their political ideals and how to negotiate sex from people they just might be climbing over.
Maura Kidwell (Rose) and Erin Long (Natasha)
Due to the play’s comedic style, the four characters almost, but not quite seem like real people. Natasha is like someone from the movie Juno, a meme-machine and endless fountain of witty pop-cultural references. Benjamin is detestable from the beginning and never gets any better. Besides his enormous self-regard and faithlessness to his fiancé, he also hits on Natasha, who he treats disrespectfully, even though (or perhaps, because) she has been an unpaid intern for three years. Rose is better in that she doesn’t completely view her leftist causes as a means for advancing her own ego, but her infatuation with Django is difficult to understand, since she’s much more mature than he and should have anticipated his back-story. Django is improved a lot due to theatre not being a medium in which we have to smell him, but he vindicates Benjamin’s initial impression of the Occupiers, which makes it strange that Benjamin would change his mind with him still around.
Maura Kidwell (Rose), Drew Shirley (Benjamin), and Alex Stein (Django)
Director Jeremy Wechsler leads his actors through Smith’s verbal comedy at a brisk pace. He successfully establishes the feeling that time is moving rapidly due to the excitement of the protests, and is aided by the viral online content-inspired lighting and sound design of Sarah Hughey and Sarah Putts. Adam Veness, Izumi Inaba, and Vivian Knouse have made the set, costumes, and props accurate and visually engaging. The script’s greatest strength is that it captures the thought processes of the young people who observed each other’s responses to the Occupy Movement, but its biggest problem is that it doesn’t flesh those perspectives out into characters who are complex enough to engage with emotionally. Still, The New Sincerity works as a think-piece with humor. Now is also a good time to revisit the Occupy Movement, since whatever happens with Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, it helped millennials to clarify a lot of goals and establish more effective organizations. It may even have revived the concept of sincerity.
When Federico García Lorca was writing Blood Wedding in 1933, he was also developing his dramatic concept of “duende.” Inspired by the flamenco dancing of Andalusia and the Romantic concept of the ineffable, duende is a tone which is erotic, deathly, and, of course, dream-like. So it makes sense that director and scenic designer Daniel Ostling would be fascinated by it, and want to locate a little duende in the United States. It’s also disappointing how plodding and unfeeling his Blood Wedding is, in a rare misstep for Lookingglass.
By Thornton Wilder Directed by Henry Wishcamper At the Goodman Theater, Chicago “Money,” Dolly says, “is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.” Over-the-top performances reduce The Matchmaker from a romantic farce to an unfunny, silly-stupid endurance battle One can wonder why the creatives at the … Read more
By Jez Butterworth Directed by Joe Jahraus At Profiles Theatre’s Main Stage, Chicago Spirited production suffers from being too authentic and too British. Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem is his 1995 dark comedy, now in its Midwest premiere at Profiles Theatre, that presents a sprawling, high spirited and very British affair about Johnny “Rooster” Byron (Darrell W. … Read more
In Collaboration with The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
Playing at the Steppenwolf Garage
Richard is Alive and Raging Against the World
It wouldn’t be a Shakespeare festival without Richard III. The conclusion of a four-part series of history plays, Richard III is the earliest of Shakespeare’s works which his reputation as one of the world’s greatest writers rests on, and features one of his most memorable villainous characters in the title role. It’s also one of his most frequently revived plays, although nearly always in abridged form (as in Oracle’s adaptation at the DCASE theatre last year). Jessica Thebus’s production, which was intended to be shown at the now-defunct Next Theatre, but is being presented by The Gift Theatre at Steppenwolf’s garage, cuts very little, and even adds a little from Henry VI Part 3. The Gift’s artistic director, Michael Patrick Thornton, is a brilliant and unique Richard, and well-worth seeing.
Michael Patrick Thornton (Richard). Photos by Claire Demos.
Shakespeare’s historical account is highly biased in favor of the then-ruling Tudor dynasty, whose founder deposed Richard in 1485. The play depicts Richard clawing his way to the throne through a slew of political murders, beginning with his brother, and ending with his child nephews. But Shakespeare also made Richard charismatic, cunning, and delightfully eloquent. In Thebus’s production, we first see him reminiscing on how he helped bring his brother, Edward IV (Adrian Danzig), to power by assassinating Henry VI and slaying his teenage son in battle. Now their family is rejoicing in their successful power-grab, but Richard, who is deformed and despised, feels he will never be valued or tolerated outside a war-setting, and therefore must take power for himself if he is to have any place at all.
Olivia Cygan (Anne) and Michael Patrick Thornton (Richard)
An actor’s physicality is always crucial to their interpretation of the role, and this play’s text makes a major theme of the main character’s disability. Thornton, who has used a wheelchair since suffering a spinal stroke over a decade ago, is a remarkably brutish Richard. In his baggy, open-collar sweater (costumes by Sully Ratke), cargo pants, and pearl earrings, there’s no aristocratic charm about him. While his main tactic for emotional manipulation is brow-beating, his appeals to guilt are more subtle than other Richards’, and he keeps his courtly rivals disorientated by threatening physical confrontations he knows they are obliged to back down from. Thornton’s Richard is usually irritable, and he breaks into full-blown lunacy when his nephews laugh at him. But his mastery of speech never suffers; Thornton’s line delivery is naturalistic and always contains a tone of world-weariness. During his moment of triumph, he walks with the aid of robotic braces activated by a remote on his wrist, and is truly an impressive figure.
Jenny Avery (Elizabeth) and Shanésia Davis (Margaret)
As good as Thornton’s performance is, the play can’t depend entirely on him. A nineteen-member ensemble sounds like a lot, but with the number of characters in Richard III and the way they’re divided up, it feels low. The emotional impact of a character’s betrayal does not increase when we are watching the same actor die for the third or fourth time, and most of them do not display distinguishing personalities. But Keith Neagle is a slippery mini-Thornton as Richard’s ally Buckingham, and Shanésia Davis is appropriately pitiful and wrathful as the deposed Queen Margaret. The time period is left vague, since Richard’s mobility devices are clearly modern, while his weapons are medieval. But the play has no problem establishing itself as its own world.
Olivia Cygan (Anne) and Michael Patrick Thornton (Richard) with the ensemble
Overall, Jessica Thebus’s production highlights the reasons why Richard III is such an enduring drama, and that reason is mainly Richard himself. Shakespeare wrote some of his best dialogue for him, and it rolls off Thornton’s tongue with as much freshness and power as if new. Sure, building up other characters around him would have made his actions more consequential, and not too many people would have minded some more cuts, since the show currently is about two and a half hours long. But seeing the play in its full form allows us to delve more into Richard’s character, and setting us inside his point-of-view allows Thornton’s distinct take on him to inform the entirety of the show’s action. Fans of Shakespeare will be glad to see what discoveries are awaiting them.
