Rent
At the American Theater Company
by Dan Zeff
Chicago – As soon as David Cromer was announced as the director, the revival of “Rent” became one of the buzz productions of the season, Cromer being one of the hottest directors in the country. His reputation soared with a revelatory revival of “Our Town” in Chicago and later in New York City. Would he serve up the same magic with “Rent?” The answer is a predictable and satisfying Absolutely!
The production is being co-sponsored by the American Theater Company and the About Face Theatre, with the ATC providing the performance space. That space has been reduced to an intimate open area with the audience placed on two parallel sides. Patrons sitting in the first row are often within easy touching distance of the actors.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
“Rent” has a romantic history. Jonathan Larson, its author and composer, died suddenly of an aortic aneurism on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthday and the day before the musical’s first preview performance off off Broadway. In a matter of months the show had transferred to Broadway where it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and ran for more than 12 years.
Larson based “Rent” on Puccini’s opera “La Boheme,” shifting the time and scene from Paris in the late nineteenth century to the dilapidated East Village area of New York City in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Like the Puccini opera, “Rent” portrays a group of young people living a bohemian life as society’s outsiders. The major characters are variously homosexuals, lesbians, drug addicts, some afflicted with AIDS or HIV positive. They exist in squalor and poverty, but they have bonded into a community, though often a contentious community.
The narrator is an independent filmmaker named Mark Cohen. The chief characters are Mimi, a druggie dancer, and Roger, a composer who expects to die of AIDS and desperately wants to write one great song as his legacy. They are joined by Tom Collins, a gay anarchist professor and his lover, a drag queen named Angel, and the lesbian lovers Joanne and Maureen. The central characters are joined by a swirl of other men and women, mostly denizens of the East Village scene.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Larson’s score is a mix of rock, rap, and gospel, the best-known number being the recurring “Seasons of Love.” The storyline lurches from one short scene to another, more a portrait of marginalized young people as a class than a coherent narrative. Larson may have revised the show had he lived, but we’ll never know. The opening scenes are slow and the show doesn’t really hit its stride until the middle of the first act.
Cromer remains faithful to the spirit of “Rent” but he’s illuminated individual scenes to emphasize their emotional impact and sometimes their comedy. He’s freshened up the musical numbers, assisted by Jessica Redish’s lively and distinctive choreography. The crowd scenes are especially vibrant, topped by the long “La Vie Boheme” scene that ends the first act.
The show still has problems. There is a smugness about the grubby lifestyle of Mimi, Roger, Mark, and their cohorts. The outside world is treated with condescension, with easy jokes about areas like the Hamptons, Westport, and Scarsdale, the bastions of the scorned middle and upper class. If a character has money, he/she is mocked. Periodically the middle class parents of several of the characters telephone their offspring, their calls treated as comedy, as if parental concern for children enduring the disease and poverty of the East Village is a topic for ridicule.
Derrick Trumbly is superb as the anguished Roger, trying to leave some mark behind him as he faces the AIDS plague. Grace Gealey has a strong voice as Mimi but I have always found the character unsympathetic and underqualified for Roger’s love, and Gealey’s performance didn’t change my mind. Alan Schmuckler is fine as Mark Cohen and Alex Agard is the most three-dimensional Tom Collins I’ve ever seen. His grief is the most moving moment in the show at Angel’s funeral, beautifully staged by Cromer. Esteban Andres Cruz is suitably swishy and flamboyant as the drag queen, and Lili-Anne Brown and Aileen May are good as the quarreling lovers Maureen and Joanne. Tony Santiago does what he can with the thankless role of Benny, who married money and is thus rejected as a sell-out by his grungy friends. The seven all-purpose performers who make up the chorus are superior in creating the panorama of East Village characters.
High praise must go to the small band conducted by Timothy Splain. The four musicians sit in a loft above and behind the stage and perform Larson’s multifaceted score with a commendable absence of raucous decibels. Collette Pollard designed the minimalist set, Heather Gilbert the lighting, Victoria Delorio the sound, and David Hyman the thrift shop chic costumes.
“Rent” has been called the “Hair” of the Nineties, an unfortunate comparison. “Rent” deals with a narrow group of characters locked into a small area of New York City. “Hair” encompasses the entire country during the Vietnam War years. The “Hair” music is more varied, and its characters better rounded and more entertaining. But it’s easy to understand why “Rent” attracted such a youthful audience. All those characters living free of humdrum responsibilities must look enticing to youthful patrons leading earthbound middle class lives. But the “Rent” characters have gotten themselves into a bad scene with their sexual promiscuity and drugs. Youthful audiences might romanticize the lives of those East Village free spirits, but I doubt that many viewers would really want to change places with Roger and Mimi and Angel and Tom Collins and their colleagues.
“Rent” is very much a product of its time, and if not dated, its urgency has faded, at least the AIDS element. Fans of the show will be delighted by the drama and theatricality of Cromer’s vision of the play as he weaves a young and enthusiastic company of 15 players into a credible East Village subculture. The revival is also a fine introduction for first time audiences. I respect “Rent” but I still don’t love it. Still, I have nothing but admiration for Cromer and his committed and versatile cast.
“Rent” runs through June 17 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $45 and $50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. May 2012
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Disgraced
At the American Theater Company
by Dan Zeff
Chicago – “Race” is playing at the Goodman Theatre. “Disgraced” has just opened at the American Theater Company. People who attended both shows, and every dedicated theatergoer should, will come away with a pretty bleak vision of culture wars in the United States.
“Race” deals with black-white conflicts and “Disgraced” with American-Muslim relationships. Both dramas see the gulf, whether between blacks and whites or Muslim and non-Muslim Americans, as virtually irreconcilable, largely through intolerance, suspicion, and conflicting views of history. Coincidentally, both plays have only a few characters, a single set, and concise playing times (“Disgraced” runs 70 minutes with no intermission). But that’s plenty long enough for both dramas to push alot of very intense buttons.
“Disgraced,” receiving its world premiere at the ATC, is written by Ayad Akhtar, a Milwaukee-born writer whose parents immigrated to the United States from Pakistan. The story centers on Amir Kapoor (Usman Ally) a hard-driving lawyer and an admitted apostate from his native Islamic faith. Amir is married to Emily (Lee Stark), a white American woman and a promising painter. The other characters are Amir’s young nephew (Behzad Dahu), and Amir’s friends Isaac (Benim Foster), an art museum curator, and his wife Jory (Alana Arenas), who works with Amir at a high-powered law firm.
Photo by Michael Brosilow
Much of the dialogue discusses aspects of Islam distilled through the sensibilities of Muslims and non-Muslims. Amir believes the religion is too wedded to its roots as a seventh-century desert tribal faith that embraced violence as a natural component. There are discussions of the Muslim’s negative image in the United States, inflamed by racial profiling and a general sense of mistrust among non-Muslim Americans to the Muslims in their midst.
Near the end of the play Amir’s nephew delivers an impassioned defense of traditional Islam and a condemnation of the Western world for colonizing his religion over the past 300 years. The lad insists that Islam has been “disgraced” by Western domination, a loaded word that suggests the playwright may be on the nephew’s side. Or perhaps Akhtar is merely giving voice to a certain segment of the Islamic population in this country. In any case, the nephew is eloquent and persuasive, and if his attitude represents the anger and determination of a large percentage of his fellow Muslims, the West is in for a very hard time.
The play does articulate the dilemma of Muslim Americans, trying to make a place for themselves in a country that offers them more opportunity than the lands of their ancestors but often treats them as potentially dangerous outsiders. And at least for Amir, and by extension many others like him, an identity crisis exists. The opposing pulls of Western values with Islam take a severe psychological toll. Even as Amir freely proclaims his rejection of his Islamic roots, he acknowledges that those roots will always be within him, and indeed they surface violently near the end of the play.
The
play is a bit too schematic at times. Isaac is Jewish and his wife is black.
With Emily’s WASP background that conveniently touches all the major ethnic and
religious bases. The assessments and debates that consume much of the play are
verbal arias that have a strong whiff of the didactic, though they are
informative and stimulating. Not many plays approach Western-Islamic relations
from the Islamic point of view and Akhtar gives the audience much to chew over
as they leave the theater.
Photo by Michael Brosilow
Akhtar’s conclusion, at least as “Disgraced” spoke to me, must be that Western values and traditional Islamic values can’t be reconciled. The specters of 9/11 and the Taliban in Western thinking and centuries of Western abuse in Islamic thinking create barriers that will always exist. An uneasy peace may be the best the West can hope for.
The production, under Kimberly Senior’s savvy directing, builds slowly to a ferocious finish. The playwright does muddy the narrative toward the end, injecting matters of adultery that raise the temperature of the action without illuminating the central issues of cultural identity and culture wars. And in having a Muslim, a Jew, an African American, and a Wasp on stage does stack the deck. But if characters are too pat in their diversity, they also provide the incendiary components for plenty of dramatic and unsettling dialogue.
The exemplary cast is led by Usman Ally, who goes from triumph to triumph on the local theater scene. He starts off assured and in control and gradually plummets into violence and finally despair. Lee Stark gives a superbly sensitive and convincing performance as Emily, whose world comes crashing down as the rhetoric heats up, complicated by the adultery element I found unconvincing. Benim Foster and Alana Arenas are outstanding as the interracial couple and Behzad Dabu is excellent as the young spokesman for militant Islam, who still prays fervently to be allowed to remain in the United States with a threat of deportation hanging over him.
The designers make admirable contributions to the production. Jack Magaw designed the set, Janice Pytel the costumes, Christine Binder the light, and Kevin O’Donnell the sound.
“Disgraced” runs through February 26 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com January 2012
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It’s a Wonderful Life
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
Chicago– A stage adaptation of the movie classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” premiered in Connecticut in 1997 and before long the adaptation became a staple of the regional theater circuit during the Christmas season. The show now challenges “A Christmas Carol” has the preeminent live theater attraction of the holidays.
There is something about the stage version of the film that tends to bring out the best in local theaters (there are at least three productions of the play this year). But none is likely to be any better than the marvelous presentation by the American Theater Company.
The adaptation is staged as a radio play, circa 1946, about the same time as the release of the Frank Capra-directed motion picture. The setting is a Chicago radio studio, with the ATC audience as the studio audience for the live radio performance.
Few audience members today would have seen the inside of a radio studio back in the golden age of radio drama, but the ABT set looks authentic. A line of microphones stands at the front of the stage. A pianist provides mood music on the left side of the stage and the sound effects man, presiding over an assortment of noise-making objects, operates on the right side. The actors sit on a row of folding chairs at the rear of the playing area when they are not performing at the microphones. An electric “On the air” and “Applause” sign hangs above the stage. The performers wear clothing and hairstyles of the mid 1940’s.
The radio program format is complete with commercials from actual businesses in the theater’s neighborhood. The audience is invited to sing holiday songs, led by the actors, in the pre-program warm-up. During program breaks, actors read warm and fuzzy holiday messages solicited from the audience.
The format is a fun nostalgia trip but it’s the story that makes the evening such a winner. The narrative of “It’s a Wonderful Life” offers the same unbeatable combination of fantasy, realism, moralizing, and sentimentality that makes “A Christmas Carol” so magical.
In 80 minutes, the adaptation tells the
story of George Bailey, who grows up in the town of Bedford Falls. George is a
dreamer with ambitions to be a great traveler and architect. But the death of
his father keeps him tied to his hometown, where he marries a local girl and
tries to keep the town savings and loan operational against the venality of the
town villain, a skinflint named Potter.
The play opens in heaven, where a pair of angels looks down on George Bailey as the despondent young man considers suicide after hearing from the scornful Potter that he’s worth more dead than alive. Clarence, an angel junior grade, is sent down to earth to rescue George by showing him what a positive difference he has been throughout his life on the people around him.
The story has become a part of American pop culture through the popularity of the movie and now the annual appearance of the stage play. But it’s amazing how strong a hold the narrative retains on the audience. The viewers at the ATC may take an amused, even patronizing, attitude toward the play during the radio studio preliminaries, but once the storytelling begins, their attention is riveted on the narrative. The immediacy and intimacy of the staging draw the audience deep into the story. The performances do the rest.
I have seen productions of the play that tended toward the cutesy in milking the novelty of the radio presentation. At the ATC, once the story begins, the company is all business. The performers act out their multiple roles beyond the requirements of a radio play, where only the voices count. George Bailey and his sweetheart really kiss and at a party scene the actors really do the Charleston, invisible though it would be to a radio audience. But the ATC audience sees it all, and the theatrical three-dimensional performances hugely enhance to the spectator’s enjoyment.
James Stewart played George Bailey in the movie and some live productions try to replicate Stewart’s mannerisms. Christopher McLinden is tall and slender like Stewart but he makes George Bailey his own character, performing with a passion and a depth I’ve never seen before in the role. The production has the good fortune of featuring the inimitable Mike Nussbaum in the cast. Nussbaum, who will be 88 years old on December 29, is priceless in the contrasting characters of Clarence the angel the nasty Mr. Potter. Any play starring Mike Nussbaum automatically is mandatory watching and his performance in this play is a total joy, including his deft stepping in the Charleston.
The cast size for the show is variable. The ABT uses seven performers, including McLinden and Nussbaum, as well as a piano accompanist with the delightful name of Rhapsody Snyder plus Rick Kubes as the Foley Artist (radio talk for the sound effects man). The other actors are Mary Winn Heider, Phillip Earl Johnson, Mike Tepeli, Margaret Graham, and Chris Amos. All play numerous parts and all distinguish themselves whenever they step to the microphone—Heider as Bailey’s wife, Johnson as the head angel, Tepeli as assorted townspeople, Graham as the kind hearted town floozy, and Amos as the suitably unctuous station announcer.
Director Jason Gerace must be credited with drawing out high level dramatic performances from his ensemble far beyond the demands of the script. Tom Burch’s studio set and Christine Pascual’s clothing designs neatly capture the mid 1940’s ambience of the play. Mac Vaughey designed the lighting and Stephanie Farina the sound.
“It’s a Wonderful Life” runs through December 24 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
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December 2011
Photo credit Elissa Shortridge
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The Amish Project
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – On Oct. 2, 2006, a local milk truck driver in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, invaded a one-room Amish schoolhouse and shot 10 young girls, killing five, before killing himself. The shooting rampage by Charles Carl Roberts IV inspired Jessica Dickey to write a 65-minute one act play called “The Amish Project,” receiving its Chicago premiere at the American Theater Company.
Dickey wrote her play for a single actress who plays multiple roles in exploring the tragedy through the testimony of people in the small Amish community. Some of the characters are marginal to the central story and others are intimately involved, including the killer’s wife and the victims in the schoolhouse.
We want this play to succeed because those innocent Amish girls deserve an emotionally honest and dramatically illuminating memorial. The honesty of “The Amish Project” is not in question. Its dramatic illumination, unfortunately, is sometimes wanting.
I am always filled with admiration for actors who perform one-person shows. They occupy the stage without a safety net of supporting colleagues who share the responsibilities of the play. The one-person show requires stamina and an iron clad memory as well as the necessary acting chops. It’s a brave thespian who accepts such a challenge.
ATC company member Sadieh Rifai is the single performer in “The Amish Project” and she does a sincere and resourceful job. She is required to shift from character to character in a split second, with only a change in vocal intonation and body language as her tools. The characters are a diverse lot, including a college professor and a Hispanic checkout girl named America, and not all of them are relevant to the central story. We don’t know these people before the script plunges them into the narrative and Rifai is required to switch characters so suddenly that we often aren’t sure who is talking or why they are significant.
In the most potent dramatic moment in the play, one of the surviving Amish girl delivers a heartbreaking on-the-scene account of what happened in the schoolroom. There are also unnerving words from the wife of the killer (whose name for some reason is changed to Edward Stucky in the script). The wife unsurprisingly is distraught by her husband’s murder spree, but she is also angry and bitter, even turning on the deputation of Amish who visit her in the aftermath of the killings to extend their forgiveness and sympathy.
The play is weakest in trying to establish a motive for the killings. There is an implication that the killer intended to molest the girls, but then why bring guns with him? Roberts may have become mentally unbalanced by the death of a newborn baby years before, or he may have been a sexual predator with a history of molestation going back many years. There is no indication that Roberts bore a grudge against the Amish community. The play doesn’t touch on any of these provocative points, yet surely the audience craves some explanation for such an unprovoked outrage.
The playwright doesn’t create a documentary account of the tragedy. Instead, she weaves a verbal kaleidoscope of shifting viewpoints, all spoken directly to the audience, which try to add up to a comprehensive account of the tragedy and its aftermath. Rifai does her part, but the sum of the parts doesn’t add up to a coherent whole that sends the audience out of the theater filled with pity, grief, and a grasp of how Roberts could have perpetrated such a monstrous offense.
ATC director PJ Paparelli works sympathetically in tandem with Rifai. Lighting designer Jesse Klug has created some riveting effects, notably a glaring shaft of light that penetrates the dark of the theater interior from a doorway to the lobby. William Boles’s set design establishes the pastoral flavor of rural Lancaster County with a row of corn stalks rising against the back wall. The stage itself is bare except for a few wooden chairs Rifai shifts about, mostly to give the play a bit of movement. At the beginning of the show, a stagehand dresses Rifai on stage in traditional Amish clothing designed and made by Amish women in Lancaster County.
Jessica Dickey was influenced in “The Amish Project” by Moises Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project,” about the murder of a young gay man in Wyoming. It’s a worthy model and “The Amish Project” has some of its storytelling virtues but lacks the breadth and depth of the Kaufman work. “The Amish Project” might follow the Kaufman work more fully by increasing the number of actors and lengthening the performing time. A more expansive treatment would benefit a story of a terrible crime that is well worth our attention and understanding.
“The Amish Project” runs through October 23 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
The show
gets a rating of three stars.
September 2011
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The Big Meal
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – There is something irresistible about family chronicles. We watch the characters as they are born, grow up, endure life’s traumas, and often die. Along the way, the spectator bonds with them, and their fates become personal to us.
Dan LeFranc has written a family chronicle called “The Big Meal” for the American Theater Company. The play runs only 80 minutes, but during that brief time the play introduces the viewer to a family that multiplies before our eyes, running the spectrum of humor and dissention and tragedy that makes the chronicle become such an emotionally involving audience experience.
In the opening scene, Sam and Nicole are having an uneasy first date in a restaurant. Nicole specifies that she isn’t looking for a relationship and states that this may be their only meeting. But the young couple does marry and they found a small family dynasty that runs several generations.
LeFranc’s dramaturgy locates all the action in the restaurant, the set being one or two tables with accompanying chairs. The ensemble consists of three men, three women, and two child actors. The three men—first Andrew Goetten, then Philip Earl Johnson, and finally Will Zahrn—all play Sam at various stages of his life. Likewise Nicole is performed first by Lindsay Leopold, then Lia Motensen, and lastly by Peggy Roeder. All six also play additional domestic characters—boy friends, girl friends, in-laws, and offspring. Noah Schwartz and Emily Leahy take the roles of assorted children in pre adolescence.
It may take the viewer a few scenes to adjust to LeFranc’s methodology, tracking the various family members as actors switch roles. The audience has to accommodate the playwright on the fly, because his scenes move rapidly, with much overlapping dialogue. But soon the audience is connecting with the family, eavesdropping on their quarrels, celebrations, and many deaths.
The deaths are represented by “the big meal,” a plate of food served to the character about to die. The rest of the characters watch in frozen silence as the figure marked for death stoically consumes the meal and then leaves the table. Two silent waiters dressed in black remove the plate and the dead person’s chair. Then the action moves on.
The narrative is confined to the family. Little news of the outside world intrudes. One character has a drinking problem, there is a conflict between Nicole and Sam over a possible infidelity, and one son rebels furiously against his family for their perceived shallowness and indifference to the world’s troubles. The final image shows the elderly Nicole sitting in bleak isolation at the restaurant table, a lone survivor of the family’s multi-generational upheavals.
The American Theater Company developed “The Big Meal” and is presenting it as a world premiere. The production is also in a kind of partnership with the Chicago public schools, with high schoolers visiting the ATC presentation, and writing and performing their own scenes for the play. It’s a laudable project, but the ATC production is filled with some extremely salty language one doesn’t associate with high school theater. Still, one could comment that the profanity-laced dialogue in the play might not be much different than what a kid hears regularly on the playground.
Director Dexter Bullard has done a superior job of keeping the fast-moving story coherent to the viewer, especially with the actors switching identities so rapidly. Johnson and Mortensen are particularly effective as the middle-aged Nicole and Sam going through a marital crisis, but all the actors deliver first-rate performances. And Schwartz and Leahy hold their own with the adults in important roles that make considerable demands on the memories and acting chops of the youngsters.
Brian Sidney Bembridge designed the minimalist set and the lighting plan. Tif Bullard designed the costumes and Kevin O’Donnell the sound.
Every successful family chronicle should leave the viewer wistful at the end, if not a little choked up. We have spent time with a group of fictional people who have lived their lives in our presence and we say goodbye to them with some reluctance, having invested a lot of emotional energy in their developing fates. And so it is with “The Big Meal.” The playing time possibly could be doubled to achieve an even deeper attachment to the characters, but as it stands on the ABT stage right now, 80 minutes is just right.
“The Big Meal” runs through March 6 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. February 2011
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Oleanna/Speed-the-Plow
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
Chicago—The American Theater Company is opening its season with a two-play repertory of plays by David Mamet. Both are worth seeing for the committed performances on the ATC stage, but only one is a major play, though the lesser play is likely to stir the most audience reaction.
The lesser work is “Oleanna,” which created a firestorm of controversy when it opened in 1992. On the surface, the play is a hot button exploration of radical feminism, sexual harassment, and political correctness. But the play turns out to provide more heat than light, only sweeping the audience along with the intensity of its action.
“Oleanna” portrays a series of confrontations between a college student named Carol and a professor named John. In the first scene, John has summoned Carol to his office. The girl is flustered, anguished, and confused, and she’s failing John’s course. Carol can’t understand the classroom material or John’s textbook, expressing herself in barely articulate sentence fragments. The girl is angry and lost, and John’s attempts to communicate with her are futile.
By the next scene, Carol has brought charges of sexual harassment against John, who is up for tenure with the college. By the end of the play Carol has destroyed John’s career like an implacable avenging angel (or devil).
The production eliminates the original intermission, presenting “Oleanna” as an extended one-act play. That changes the dynamic of the action. The sense of passing time is lost and Carol’s transformation seems to happen almost instantaneously. The play could use an intermission to inject a sense of elapsed time, at least enough to allow for Carol’s conversion from baffled and uncomprehending student to an implacable destroyer.
Carol’s behavior doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny. Initially she is barely articulate. By the end of the play she is eloquent in her hostility. The shift is too abrupt for credibility, unless Carol was faking her inarticulate verbal struggles early in the play. Was she trying to set up the professor all along? And if so, why? Carol repeatedly refers to “her group,” never specifically identified. Does the group consist of radical feminists who coached Carol to be their instrument in orchestrating John’s downfall? Or is her inexplicable alteration in manner pure contrivance by the playwright?
All the loose ends and improbabilities are effectively camouflaged by the white-hot performances by Darrell Cox as John and Nicole Lowrance as Carol. And director Rick Snyder keeps the emotional temperature at the boil with his fierce pacing. The audience barely has a chance to breath as the action escalates in verbal and finally physical violence. Only after the play ends can spectators reflect that Mamet’s screed doesn’t hold dramatic water.
Still, “Oleanna” is recommended for the splendid performances, and first time viewers should catch the show to check out what all the excitement was about back in 1992.
“Speed-the-Plow” is one of Mamet’s best plays, a hilarious 1988 satire on Hollywood performed at warp speed. Hollywood has always been an easy target for satirists but Mamet moves to the head of the class with his raucous sneering at Hollywood’s power games and crass commercialism.
Darrell Cox is back, this time as Bobby Gould, the head of production at a nameless Hollywood studio. His long time friend Charlie Fox comes to him with a script and director that will be a box office super hit. He just needs Bobby to get the green light for the project from the studio boss.
Charlie is wired to the max, a man who has struggled for 11 years in the Hollywood jungles and now sees his chance to break into the big time, riding the success of the prison drama. But a problem arises in Karen, Bobby’s temporary secretary. The young woman morally and physically seduces Gould away from the prison drama to an artsy script about the end of the world.
Karen fervently believes Bobby should abandon sensationalistic trash like the prison drama for the spiritual uplift of the end-of-the-world story. Bobby, shamed into wanting to do good with his power, buys into the artsy script, and there go Charlie’s dream of crashing the big time.
“Speed-the-Plow is Mamet at
his best. The play is drenched in cynicism and Mamet’s inimitable
faster-than-sound clipped dialogue, vulgar and truthful and very funny.
The play allows Lance Baker to deliver a textbook performance in comic meltdown in the final act. Lowrance returns as Karen, a mystery woman. Karen is either a canny manipulator who wants to insinuate herself into the Hollywood power structure, or she genuinely sees her mission in life as elevating motion pictures into meaningful works of art.
As in “Oleanna,” director Snyder keeps the velocity at the highest pitch. Baker’s warp-speed acting as Charlie is a joy, starting with the man’s elation at finally landing his big project in the first act to his fury and despair when he sees it slipping away in the final act.
“Oleanna” and “Speed-the-Plow” are running in repertory through October 24 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Tickets are $35 and $40. For performance schedules and tickets, call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
“Oleanna” gets a rating of 3½ stars. “Speed-the-Plow” gets a rating of four stars. Sept. 2010
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Welcome to Arroyo’s
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The unexpected sensation created by “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” last season catapulted Kristoffer Diaz into the front rank of young American playwrights. Thus anticipation was understandably high for the opening of Diaz’s “Welcome of Arroyo’s” at the American Theater Company.
“Welcome to Arroyo’s” was Diaz’s first full-length play, so it gets some dispensation as being an apprentice work. In any case, it’s not very good. In fact, for most of the long evening, it’s pretty bad, with unappealing characters thrashing their way through a cluster of indigestible storylines.
The play is located in a Latino bar on the lower East Side of New York City. The set is the bar and a few tables, with two hip hop disc jockeys presiding over turntables in one corner. The brash DJs greet audience members with hugs and high fives, a sure indicator that there will be rocky times ahead once the show begins.
The proprietor of the bar is Alejandro Arroyo (Joe Minoso), a young man of great optimism about his establishment considering it attracts no customers. Alejandro has a younger sister, the bratty and foul mouthed Amalia (Christina Nieves), who fancies herself a graffiti artist. The bar’s disc jockeys (Gregory Qaiyum and Jackson Doran) play hip hop music, go through hip hop routines, serve as a chorus for the action, and weave in and out of character to talk directly with the audience. They are a cocky duo very pleased with themselves.
The two outsider characters are a police officer named Derek Jeter, the same name as the baseball player (Edgar Miguel Sanchez), and a Puerto Rican young lady named Lelly Santiago Sadieh Rifai). Jeter is in continual confrontation with Amalia over the young woman’s painting on a public wall, strictly against the law. says Officer Jeter. He is conciliatory toward Amalia and for his sympathy he gets punched out repeatedly by the gal.
Lelly Santiago comes to the bar as a researcher. She is on the track of a woman who died six months previously who might be the mother of Alejandro and Amalia. But more to the point the woman may be a Puerto Rican who was the first female disc jockey in hip hop history back in 1979. It’s Lelly contention that the woman’s place in the early history of hip hop elevates her into one of the great cultural figures in modern history and a role model for all young women.
Along with the confusing and unpersuasive main storylines there is a perplexing ongoing discussion of sushi that must have fallen into Diaz’s script from another play. And the entire play is drenched in the f--- word in all its various manifestations. The playwright apparently finds the relentless use of the word either funny or expressive. I found it gratuitous and wearisome.
A few stimulating topics can be discerned among all the sound and fury of the production. Diaz is concerned with family, ethnic identity, and the hold that the past has on the present, along with the cultural impact of hip hop on urban culture. But any meaningful exploration of the themes is overwhelmed by the unconvincing confrontations among uninteresting or annoying characters, and all that profanity.
The acting level is adequate but not strong enough to lift the troubled script to a satisfactory level of narrative or emotional interest. The two disc jockeys are the best of the ensemble, though I found their smugness grating. Jaime Castaneda is the director, Keith Pitts and David Ferguson the scenic designers, Christine Pascual the costume designer, Charles Cooper the lighting designer, and Rick Sims the sound designer.
In a press release, American Theater Company artistic director PJ Paparelli called the play “the future of American theater.” I don’t think so. “Arroyo’s” is a misfire, but it doesn’t diminish the wonder of “The Elegant Entrance of Chad Deity.” That play demonstrates that Diaz has the theatrical imagination, verbal skills, and social awareness to create great drama and great theater. “Arroyo’s” being his first work, it’s understandable how the playwright has a special affection for the show and may have been blinded to its defects. Now “Arroyo’s” has had its hearing and Diaz can move on to his next work, which hopefully will be in the glorious spirit of “Chad Deity.”
“Welcome to Arroyo’s” runs through May 16 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
The show gets a rating of two stars. April 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
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Distracted
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Lisa Loomer’s 2007 play “Distracted” asks lots of questions about Attention Deficit Disorder and provides no answers. Indeed, by the end of the play interested spectators may feel more confused by Loomer’s drama than comforted and informed.
“Distracted” is receiving its local premiere in a resourceful
production at the American Theater Company. The central character is a
40-something mother trying to raise a difficult 9-year old boy named Jesse with
minimal help from her husband. Jesse is a handful—foul-mouthed, fidgety,
restless, disobedient —and that’s at home. He’s also disruptive in school, and
has no friends.
The mother has Jesse tested and the diagnosis comes up as ADD. Thus starts her long, painful odyssey to find treatment for Jesse that will normalize the kid. She has to battle her husband, who thinks the boy is just being a boy. Late in the play the husband discloses that he went through the kind of struggling childhood Jesse is enduring. In other words, the father probably had ADD back when the behavioral disorder wasn’t much recognized.
The mother takes Jesse to variety of doctors, including psychologists and psychiatrists. She enrolls him in clinics, gives him drugs (including the controversial but widely used Ritalin), and suffers contradictory advice from neighbors, the lad’s teacher, and her husband. The mother is informed that Jesse’s disorder could come from heredity, diet, a chemical imbalance, or just bad parenting.
It’s a heartbreaking situation for the mother, placing
enormous stress on her relations with her son, her husband, her neighbors, and
her career. In her search for expert guidance, she runs into doctors who seem
as dysfunctional as Jesse. The play further muddies the waters by suggesting
that ADD could really be a product of our modern hyper society. The ACT stage
is enclosed by 16 TV sets all tuned to different television programs and motion
pictures. Adults in the play are constantly sidetracked by cell phone calls.
The implication is that we live in an age of sensory overload that encourage
ADD symptoms.
In the face of so much visual and aural stimulation, it’s no wonder our attention spans are so short. So maybe Jesse’s condition is nothing more than a reaction to all the electronic bombardments around him. And what about the adults? One of the family’s neighbors is bipolar and one of the doctors states he has ADD. In this environment, maybe Jesse isn’t so bad. But he is uncontrollable at home and in school, so something absolutely must be done. Yet consider the cost. Drugs may calm a child but also lessen his creativity and render him passive. He will sleep badly and have little appetite. Is the cure worse than the disease?
The playwright injects plenty of basic information about ADD for audience consideration, and the ATC adds more facts with a theater lobby display. So Loomer is acknowledging that ADD is a verifiable condition, that it afflicts millions of children (mostly boys) but also some adults, and dealing with it can be one continuous frustration.
The playwright does stack the deck a little by portraying so-called experts in the ADD field as woolly minded at best and crackpots at worst. She also includes a psychologically disturbed teenage babysitter who masochistically cuts herself and eventually is institutionalized, perhaps for life. But the girl’s plight is much different and more damaging than Jesse’s ADD so her relevance in the story eluded me.
The play is free flowing, with people talking directly to the audience, sometimes breaking character. Performers help change the set between scenes and morph from one individual to another in the same scene. Jesse himself is kept offstage until the final minutes, represented only by his shrill voice. The subject may be grim but Loomer lays on plenty of comedy. The humor occasionally descends to the facetious, clashing with the seriousness of the narrative.
Donna Jay Fulks carries the production as the mother, an intelligent, sympathetic woman who desperately wants to do right by her son but can’t find straight answers. Fulks is on stage virtually the entire show and gets full marks for creating a character whose grace under pressure is heroic.
Kevin Rich is very fine as the father who resists labeling his son as abnormal. By the end of the play we don’t know if the man wears emotional blinders or is the straightest thinker in the story. The remainder of the excellent ensemble consists of Hanna Dworkin and Dina Facklis as a pair of well-meaning busy body neighbors, Noah Jerome Schwartz as Jesse, Sadieh Rifai as the disturbed babysitter, and Minita Gandhi, Alan Wilder, and Audrey Morgan as assorted experts who provide more heat than light.
P. J. Paparelli directs the fluid staging. Mike Tutaj is responsible for the video design. Janice Pytel for the costumes, Jesse Klug for the lighting, Lindsay Jones for the sound, and Andre LaSalle for the set design.
“Distracted” runs through February 28 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. February 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
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Yeast Nation
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The most unlikely idea for a musical in the past 10 years probably is “Urinetown,” a show about a corporation that assumes control of the world’s bathrooms. It became the unexpected hit of the year on Broadway in 2001. Maybe the second most unlikely idea is “Yeast Nation,” a musical about a colony of one-celled yeasts living at the bottom of the primordial sea in the year 3,000,458,000 B.C.
“Yeast Nation” opened September 23 at the American Theater Company. It took me about 10 minutes to recognize that the show was going to work. It’s funny and clever with a terrific score by Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann and it’s being performed in a dream production directed by ATC artistic director P. J. Paparelli. The show still has a few kinks to work out, especially late in the second act, but as it stands this is tremendously entertaining and creative.
The first question is, How does the musical portray the yeasts? Costume designer Paul Spadone outfits the large cast in black pants suits covered by filmy green toga-like draperies that represent the yeast’s membrane. Inside the drapery the yeasts carry a bulging food supply that makes them look pregnant.
The next question is, What would single-cell yeasts talk about? Kotis’s book establishes the yeast colony with a ruler called Jan the Elder (every character is called Jan the something), who reigns with an iron hand. The yeasts are facing a diminishing of their salt food supply so Jan the Elder prohibits procreation (the yeasts have ostentatiously minimalist sex lives).
The narrative jump starts with Jan the Elder’s son Jan the Second rebelling against his father’s tyrannical rule. The young man travels to the forbidden surface of the ocean where he discovers eatable “gunk” that could revolutionize the yeast existence. Then things really get political with Jan the Wise and Jan the Sly plotting to overthrow Jan the Elder and kill Jan the Second and his sweetheart Jan the Sweet. Leading the show’s chorus is Jan the Unnamed, who looks like one of the witches in “Macbeth.” At the end, the yeasts point toward a hopeful if murky future that eventually leads to life as we know it today, represented by the audience at the ATC.
The storyline is placed in the service of a superior rock score, superbly sung by the entire ensemble. The staging is peppered with droll bits of humor that sometimes gives the evening a look and sound of a mock “Rent” crossed with Monty Python and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber at their most whimsical. But that may not be fair to the originality of Kotis and Hollmann, who can be humorous, facetious, wry, satirical, romantic, and even dramatic. You really need to see and hear what they have accomplished to appreciate the extent of their achievement. I mean, how many composer teams could write first-rate songs with titles like “Stasis Is the Membrane” and “You’re Not the Yeast You Used to Be.”
The ATC has gathered together an uncommonly gifted cast, with major names on the Chicagoland theater scene like Joseph Anthony Foronda (Jan the Elder) and Barbara Robertson (Jan the Unnamed). The scene stealer is paunchy, balding Jan the Wise, a crafty backstabber performed to a comic turn by Phil Ridarelli. If “Yeast Nation” has a future elsewhere, Ridarelli needs to be part of the package.
The pint sized Sandie Rosa is a continuous pleasure as the treacherous Jan the Sly. Rosa has one of the show’s best singing voices and she’s a deft comedian and a toothsome villain. Andrew Keitz (Jan the Second) and Melanie Brezill (Jan the Sweet) are ingratiating young lovers.
Stephanie Kim makes a startling entrance halfway through the show in a skintight red bodysuit as the New One, a creature from the gunk world of the ocean surface come to Yeast Nation as the embodiment of the possibilities of evolutionary life forms. Wendi Weber contributes some witty comic bits as Jan the Famished while looking amazingly like Susan Sarandon. The talented chorus consists of Robert Gerdisch, Bil Ingraham, Bethany Thomas, Briana de Giulio, Govind Kumar, and Trista Smith.
This is not a dancing show but it oozes high energy. Choreographer Tommy Rapley has provided the ensemble with plenty of rhythmic body movement and there is much dashing about and hurly burly that suggests the cast will sleep well after each performance.
The scenic design by Walt Spangler keeps the ATC stage uncluttered but allows for a lot of vertical movement as the physical action shifts from level to level as well as to movable ladders. Jesse Klug’s atmospheric lighting is heavily into small colored lights. Lindsay Jones is the sound designer and Mark Elliott directs the outstanding combo that provides the accompaniment for the rocking score. Paaprelli has put the whole thing together in a spontaneously looking flow that masks what must have been long and hard rehearsing.
How can “Yeast Nation” be improved? The last 20 minutes get a little too frantic as Jan the Sly and her gang try to exterminate the good guys. The character of Jan the Elder loses focus. Is he a patriot, a dictator, or a confused old man? And at the end of the show the cautionary moral issues come at the audience a bit too fast and furious.
But these quibbles are easily fixed, and even if they aren’t, “Yeast Nation” is still a hip, imaginative evening. It just goes to show that anything is possible in the theater when skilled, risk-taking people put their minds to it.
“Yeast Nation” runs through October 18 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org. Sept.2009
The show gets a rating of 4 stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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True West and Topdog/Underdog
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The American Theater Company and the Congo Square Theatre Company, two of Chicago’s more enterprising drama organizations, are collaborating on an ambitious project they call American Classic Repertory. The project consists of two revivals, Sam Shepard’s 1980 drama “True West” and Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002 Pulitzer prizewinning “topdog/underdog.”
The joint venture brings together the ATC, a white company, and Congo Square, an African American troupe, with the ATC staging “True West” and Congo Square “topdog/underdog.” But in a daring twist, the two companies will exchange casts halfway through the run, with the ATC players performing the Parks play and the Congo Square actors taking on the Shepard play. Both plays will be staged at the ATC theater.
A lot connects the two dramas. Both are chamber plays, essentially two-character works that focus on psychological conflicts between brothers. Both plays are saturated with intensity and emotional and physical violence and both are receiving brilliant productions. Each play has been seen in Chicagoland before, but even audiences familiar with both pieces will want to catch the current presentations. Both dramas indeed are modern American classics and the acting is searing enough to peel the paint off the theater walls.
“True West” helped launch the Steppenwolf Theatre onto the
national scene back in 1982. The Steppenwolf transferred its production from
Chicago to New York City where Gary Sinise and John Malkovich blew away
audiences and critics with their volcanic performances.
The Shepard play, set in southern California, explores the relationship between brothers Austin and Lee. Austin is house sitting for his mother, vacationing in Alaska, and working on a screenplay he hopes to peddle to a Hollywood studio. Lee is an alcoholic drifter, a petty thief and a very scary guy who seems ready to explode with rage at any moment.
During the course of the 75-minute single act, there is a role reversal, with Lee becoming a screenwriter and Austin turning to burglary out of resentment because Lee stole his thunder with a Hollywood movie executive. The play has its share of laughs, but the humor is disquieting and serves mostly as an audience release from the ongoing tension between the two brothers.
Matthew Brumlow plays Austin and Stephen Louis Grush portrays a frightening Lee. They are both brilliant under P. J., Paparelli’s directing. Grush in particular moves up a notch in the local acting pecking order with the chilling intensity of his performance.
In the Parks play, directed with scorching ferocity by
Derrick Sanders, Lincoln and Booth are black brothers. Both were abandoned by
their parents when they were adolescents. leaving the pair to raise themselves.
Booth is a big talking loser who scrapes by as a shoplifter. At the beginning
of the play, Lincoln is employed to impersonate Abraham Lincoln in an arcade.
His job is sitting in a chair while customers pay to shoot him. It’s a
grotesque concept made more grotesque by the brother wearing white face makeup
during his impersonation.
The plot turns on three-card monte, a scam card game that once provided Lincoln with a steady income. Then his partner got shot during a street game and Lincoln retired to his Abraham Lincoln impersonation. Booth wants to get his brother back on the street as a card hustler to earn some major money. A three-card monte game between the brothers turns deadly at the end of the play.
Like “True West,” the play is drenched in tension, most of it supplied by the volatile and increasingly desperate Booth, driven to the end of his emotional tether by his girl friend’s rejection and his brother’s mocking him during the three-card monte game. Anthony Irons (Lincoln) and Daniel Bryant (Booth) are overwhelming in the accelerating fervor of their performances.
“topdog/underdog” isn’t an overtly racial play but race provides the subtext. It will be interesting to see what Brumlow and Grush, two white actors, bring to the play from a different cultural vantage point. The same holds for Bryant and Irons when they take on the roles of Austin and Lee in “True West.” The flip-flop casting may turn out to be a gimmick or it may bring fresh insights into a pair of tales about very complex psychological fraternal relationships.
By the end of the run, Congo Square may gain the most from the collaboration by introducing its work to white north side audiences. But audiences of all ethnic derivations will profit from productions of such unrelenting commitment.
“True West” and “topdog/underdog” are running in repertory through March 8 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Tickets are $35 and $40. For performance schedules call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
Each production gets a rating of four stars. January 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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It’s a Wonderful Life
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—During this decade “It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play” at the American Theater Company has quietly carved out a niche for itself as one of the essential entertainment events of the holiday season.
This year’s production is more welcome than ever because the original 1946 Frank Capra motion picture has disappeared from the television scene where it once seemed to run around the clock.
Damon Kiely, the ATC artistic director from 2002 to 2007, conceived of the show as a radio performance from the 1940’s, complete with studio “Applause” and “On the Air” electric signs and a visible sound effects man. An ensemble of seven actors takes on multiple roles to portray the story of George Bailey and what he meant to the small town of Bedford Falls.
The ATC staging is a fine slice of nostalgia, with Tom Burch’s detailed radio studio set replicating the ambience of live radio drama before it was swept aside by television. Michelle Julazadeh’s costumes capture the 1940’s look and the story is periodically interrupted by commercials. In previous seasons those commercials spotlighted the business around the ATC theater on the North Side. This year the production is being sponsored by the Emerald Nut Company so it gets all the commercial time.
Most members of the audience have never experienced a radio drama performance live and the ATC company makes the experience accessible by starting off the show with a round of sing-along holiday songs. The cast also solicits written messages from the spectators before the start of the show to be read during the evening.
It all sounds like a cutesy and agreeably frivolous 85 minutes or so of lightweight holiday amusement. What makes the show so special is not just the concept, it’s the content. As familiar as it may be, the narrative of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is one of the great fairy tales in modern pop culture and the ATC adaptation superbly tells the story with all its inspirational heartwarming sentimentality and drama, as irresistible as the original movie. The ATC adaptation devotes a little over an hour to the actual story, maybe half as much time as the movie, yet all the essential incidents and characters are there.
The audience easily adjusts to the idea of the radio play, with the actors switching roles in the blinking of an eye as the sound effects man creates the noises that ground the story its reality. In a matter of moments the spectators are engrossed in the Capra story because the ATC delivers the storytelling straight, without condescension. The staging may not have the high tech effects of “A Christmas Carol” or the spectacle of “The Nutcracker,” but it casts its own spell through the truthful acting and the potency of the plot.
There have been some changes in the cast this year. But fortunately John Mohrlein returns as both the wistful angel Clarence sent down to earth to rescue the despondent George Bailey and as the Scrooge-like meany Mr. Potter, a terrific Lionel Barrymore performance that gets better every year.
ATC regular Stef Tovar plays George Bailey with enormous commitment and passion. Tovar brings George so completely to life that the rendition compels the audience to hang eagerly on every scene, even if they know what’s coming. John Sterchi, another ATC regular, is first rate as Clarence’s supervising angel and as the fumbling Uncle Billy, among others.
The discovery of the night is Mary Winn Heider as George’s loving wife. This is Heider’s debut performance with the ATC and the company has found itself a true leading lady in looks and temperament and acting chops. She has taken a potentially two-dimensional goody goody character and elevated her into an intelligent and sympathetic human being. Heider is a keeper.
The remainder of the impeccable ensemble consists of Casey Campbell, Sadieh Rifai, and James Lusk as the announcer. Sean Okerberg handles the studio special effects. I missed the name of the studio pianist and she doesn’t seem to be credited in the playbill, but she was very good.
Damon Kiely returns to the ATC to direct with a sure if invisible hand. Everything looks like it happens spontaneously and naturally. A most pleasurable evening.
“It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play” runs through December 28 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars, December 2008
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com***************************
Celebrity Row
At the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Itamar Moses is one of America’s most stimulating young dramatists, but the plot of “Celebrity Row” wouldn’t get a passing grade in a college beginning course in Playwriting 101. The work is being given a brave production in a local premiere at the American Theater Company.
Moses caught the eye of area playgoers a couple of seasons ago with his fascinating “Bach in Leipzig” at the Writers’ Theatre. And the prospects for “Celebrity Row” were intriguing. Guiding the production is David Cromer, the hottest director on the area theater scene. The cast is blue chip, including Larry Neumann, Jr., an actor incapable of given an uninteresting performance.
The play’s real-life premise certainly holds much promise. Four of the five main characters are terrorists and arch criminals—Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and Latin Kings gang leader Luis Felipe.
In real life, these four public enemies were all confined for a time in the late 1990’s to a state-of-the-art maximum-security prison in Colorado. They lived in solitary confinement for 23 hours of every day, totally cut off from any human contact other than communication with their lawyers. The fifth character is Maze Carroll, an idealistic young female lawyer with a small civil liberties law firm working for more humane living conditions for incarcerated felons. Placing these characters on the stage in a single volatile group sets the table for some fierce political drama.
The first act takes place within the prison and meanders along to no particular purpose beyond introducing the main personalities in the story plus some supporting characters. No incendiary political drama in this act.
At the end of the first act, the four prisoners have somehow overpowered a guard, taken him hostage (with his gun) along with the lawyer. The second act is devoted to the four prisoners in control, dictating terms to the prison head and eventually producing a homemade explosive device that will destroy the prison through its air ducts.
Early in the second act the audience becomes aware of how lightly the laws of probability weigh on the playwright. How could the prisoners capture a guard and his weapon in a facility that is a textbook of maximum security? Plus, how could they have constructed the bombing device when all four men were isolated for those 23 hours and under continuous scrutiny the other daily hour set aside for exercise?
Moses is too good a playwright to come up with a complete dud. Much of the second act stops being a play and turns into a high intensity debate, mostly between the lawyer on one side and McVeigh and Yousef on the other. The debate is filled with passion and righteous conviction. We get a glimpse into what twisted ideas of patriotism drove McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. And Yousef provides a chilling but perversely logical insight into what makes an Islamic zealot a terrorist. We had previously gotten some glimpses into the thought processes of Kaczynski and Felipe. Meanwhile, Maze pleads the case for morality and the rule of law.
Before the debates commence, the second act opens with a scene from the lawyer’s family life, presumably intended to give the audience some back story on Maze’s social liberalism. The scene has considerable humor, much of it emitting from the lawyer’s right wing father and clueless mother, but the scene contributes nothing to the narrative within the prison.
At the end of the last act, the four men meekly surrender to prison authorities even though they held the upper hand and, in their desperate situation, had nothing to lose by standing fast with their hostages. Then the play just stops.
It may be unfair to divulge so much of the plot but the events on stage are so difficult to swallow that new viewers should be forewarned that a massive commitment of audience faith will be required to buy into Moses’s storyline. On the plus side, there are those speeches that allow the audience to examine the minds of the terrorists and let them tell their side of the story, sometimes with unnerving eloquence.
Connoisseurs of fine act will have much to relish in the production. The performances are all super, especially Usman Ally as Yousef. Neumann, as always, is outstanding as Kaczynski, explaining his terrorism through a gibberish of mathematical ideas. Joe Minoso is fine as Felipe and Christopher McLinden is genuinely horrifying as McVeigh when he angrily launches into his diatribe about the evils of government in America that justified his destructive act in Oklahoma City. The four actors also perform supporting roles that require them to exit the stage for a quick costume change before reentering in a new persona. Ally, for example, turns in excellent complementary character sketches as the prison head and the lawyer’s mother.
Kelli Simpkins, a newcomer at the ATC, does a superb job as Maze, a role not written with a lot of logic. Simpkins’s heated exchanges with Ally and McLinden in the second act are the intellectual and emotional high spots of the play, almost excessively hyper articulate.
Andre LaSalle designed the minimalist set. Alison Siple designed the costumes, Keith Parham the sometimes dramatic lighting, and Andy Krumreich and Josh Schmidt the evocative sound.
“Celebrity Row” runs through November 16 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. Oct.2008
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@aol.com.
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The People’s Temple
at the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The Jonestown Massacre of 1978 is one of the most bizarre and tragic episodes of the 20th century. More than 900 men, women, and children committed suicide or were murdered in one horrific day in a remote area of the Latin American country of Guyana. At the heart of the slaughter was a religious leader named Jim Jones, who orchestrated the mass deaths and died himself in the holocaust.
A documentary drama called “The People’s Temple” attempts to make some sense out of the Jonestown disaster. “The People’s Temple” doesn’t answer all the questions about Jim Jones and his cult but it does provide a riveting historical journey culminating in the 1978 mass suicides-murders and their aftermath. And it’s receiving a stunning production at the American Theater Company.
Playwright Leigh Fondakowski, who also is the brilliantly resourceful director, has pieced together the story of Jim Jones and his cult from archives and interviews with the Jonestown survivors. A terrific 12-member ensemble plays multiple roles in conveying the Jonestown saga in the words of the people associated with the story, plus audio and video material preserved from Jonestown.
Jim Jones was a super charismatic leader who would have thrived as one of those utopian socialist reformers who made their mark in 19th century America. Initially Jones comes across as an inspired visionary, a man who believed in racial integration during the 1950’s when race relations were at a flashpoint in the United States. He was a champion of the poor and the oppressed and his magnetic personality attracted thousands of followers.
For a time in the early 1970’s Jones was one of the power brokers of California politics, sought out by the movers and shakers on the California political scene. But stories in the press started to emerge about abuses within Jones’s People’s Temple. The paranoid Jones decided to shift his church to Guyana, far from the prying and interference he saw on every side in the USA.
Jones’s followers carved out the town of Jonestown from the jungles of Guyana. But late in 1978 a California congressman named Leo J. Ryan led a delegation to Jonestown to investigate reports that all was not well in the community. Ryan and his party were killed during his visit and shortly afterward Jones decided that death was preferable to facing an invasion by the outside world.
On the surface, the Jonestown tragedy seems like a madman leading his deluded followers to their destruction. But there were many residents of Jonestown who swore by Jones to the end as a genius and a healer. They insisted Jones and his church were misrepresented by a hostile media dedicated to bringing him down. There is much evidence that Jones was something of a con man but there is no question about the devotion of many of his followers.
Certainly Jones was remarkable. His views on racial toleration were far ahead of his time and his reaching out to the poor and disadvantaged seemed genuine. But apparently Jones was corrupted by his power. He turned into an egomaniac-- ruthless, violent, and dictatorial. In the end he led more than 900 people to their deaths because he rejected a world that would not leave him alone to do his work as he saw it.
“The People’s Temple” starts in the 1950’s. It follows the life of Jones and his constituents to that fateful day in 1978 and then beyond to examine the impact of the mass deaths on the Jonestown survivors and the family members in the United States left to deal with the loss of their loved ones in far off Guyana.
The ATC production moves at a rapid pace, the performers switching from character to character with only a brief name introduction. There is rousing gospel singing, the People’s Temple being a very musical group. We hear all viewpoints, from the skeptics in the press to the most dedicated followers. It’s a fascinating mosaic of voices that describes the rise and fall of the People’s Temple. The deaths of more than 900 people point to Jim Jones as a monster, yet his social and racial goals, at least before the Guyana move, seemed enlightened. And for every doubter there was a zealot.
First among equals in the exemplary cast is Darrell Cox, who plays Jones in all his complexity and also Jones’s son, a survivor trying to deal with the calamity precipitated by his inspired and deranged father.
The remainder of the ensemble portrays the multitude of characters with credibility and enormous commitment. Cheryl Graeff, a rock at the ATC for years, is outstanding, but it would be unfair to leave any of the dozen off the honor roll. They are Patrick Andrews, Daniel Bryant, Tim Decker, Kenn E. Head, Amy Matheny, John Mohrlein, Suzanne Petri, Tania Richard, Editha Rosario, and Penelope Walker.
Fondakowski has directed the production with a sureness and fluency that makes the staging look inevitable, like the play could not be presented any other way. Sarah Lambert’s scenic design is dominated by shelves of boxes that contain props and files from the history of the People’s Temple. Betsy Adams designed the lighting, Christine Pascual the costumes, Jake Rodriquez the sound, and Bobby Richards the projections.
There is an inevitable drop-off in emotional intensity following the portrayal of the mass deaths in Jonestown. The play continues for several more minutes to bring the story up to the present. Possibly the drama could have ended with that horrific climax in Jonestown but I suppose the account does require some sense of closure as the people left behind try to adjust to the loss of so many loved ones in 1978. Those last scenes do not diminish an engrossing and disturbing theatrical and dramatic experience.
“The People’s Temple” runs through September 22 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org. Sept. 2008
The show gets a rating of four stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
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Speech and Debate
at the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—“Speech and Debate” is the first discovery of the 2008 season, a small show at the American Theater Company that is humorous, fresh, and observant. The Stephen Karam comedy has its flaws but the rewards are so great that its defects can be dismissed as trivial.
The storyline of “Speech and Debate” does not promise great things. The three central characters are all high school misfits in Salem, Oregon, suggesting that the audience is in for still another exploration of teenaged angst. But the trio is so funny and so quirky that they carry the show on a wave of laughter that is cannily leavened with insight and poignancy and a little pain. Plus, Karam’s script does the impossible. It has something new to say about being gay in America.
The three teens are Solomon, a geek who wants desperately to be a hotshot newspaper reporter; Diwata, a self-involved girl burning with resentment because she can’t get cast in the high school musical; and Howie, who came out as gay at the age of 10 and surfs the internet on gay.com. The modern American theater does not lack for high school characters who are losers and in a strict sense, Solomon, Diwata, and Howie are losers—all living outside the mainstream of life in their high school. And to add to the plot’s cliché potential, Solomon may also be gay and Diwata became pregnant and flirts with an abortion.
From this soap opera raw material comes a play that allows the high schoolers to speak and act like real teen-agers, though it would be difficult to locate three real life high school students as funny as this threesome. They are all immersed in the high tech appurtenances of the teenage world—pod casts, blogging, text messaging, and chat rooms. That allows the production to inject some comical videos and projections to buoy the comedy even more.
The plot loosely concerns the probability that the high school drama teacher may be preying on male students. But that’s just the trigger for a very loosely connected series of scenes among the three kids that lead to assorted, and not very surprising, revelations at the end of the show. Along the way we get some songs, very funny attempts at interpretive dance, and way-out monologues.
Just when the audience is relaxing amidst all the comedy on stage, the characters start raising provocative and disturbing questions about privacy, especially as it intersects with being gay. How much harm did the drama teacher, who we never see, do in his pursuit of willing young men? The town mayor is exposed as a man who encouraged gay relationships, but isn’t that his own business, even if he proclaims himself a staunch conservative publicly?
The play doesn’t turn into a debate about the separation of public and personal morality, but the questions are broached, and in a way that forces the listeners to reexamine what may have seemed like a cut-and-dry issue.
“Speech and Debate” may stir up thoughts about attitudes toward the gay life but it remains a hoot of a comedy. Karam is not only a funny writer, he’s very hip. Diwata rewrites Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” into a musical, with the young would-be witch Mary Warren as the heroine (to be played, naturally, by Diwata). Her adaptation includes lines like Mary’s “Try to hang me, see how strong my neck is.” In one hilarious musical number, Mary Warren meets a gay teenage Abraham Lincoln through the miracle of time travel and Diwata’s over the top imagination.
Karam deftly exposes the vulnerabilities that lurk beneath the bravado of his three teens, as when Diwata yells at Solomon “You use cover-up to hide your acne and think people can’t tell.” Or when Diwata rages at one of the boys, “You read my blog? That’s my private journal.” These lines draw laughs from the audience but they also underscore the loneliness of the characters.
The American Theater Company has located three young actors who look and sound like teenagers, and more importantly they can all act. Patrick Andrews in particular is stunning as Howie, angry and assertive and biting and wary. Only a short distance behind are Jared McGuire as the nerdy Solomon and Sadieh Rifai as the extravagantly conflicted Diwata. And the always reliable Cheryl Graeff represents the adult world with as couple of delectable cameos as a flustered high school teacher and a pompous newspaper feature writer.
Theater artistic director P. J. Paparelli directs this hugely tricky script with a savvy sense of the show’s absurd humor and underlying dramatic tensions. This is a ramshackle script but Paparelli has managed to gather the random scenes into a cohesive whole. The show runs for 1 hour and 40 minutes without an intermission and could be cut at least 10 minutes, but doubtless many spectators would object to being denied 10 additional minutes of fun in the company of the offbeat teen threesome.
Keith Pitts designed the flexible open stage sets. Charlie Cooper designed the lighting, Lindsay Jones and Scotty Iseri the sound, Myron Elliott Jr. the costumers, and Marty Higginbotham and Bobby Richards the critical multimedia video and projections. Ed Kross choreographed the hilarious interpretive dances.
“Speech and Debate” runs through May 25 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 and $35. Call 773 929 1031.
The show gets a rating of four stars. April 2008
For more information contact: www.atcweb.org
Contact Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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Augusta
at the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Richard Dresser’s play “Augusta” holds these truths to be self evident: Marriages may go sour. Men can be sleaze balls in manipulating vulnerable women. There is a class system in America and the class with the least money has the toughest time. The dramatist thereby displays a sharp eye for the obvious.
“Augusta” is being staged by the American Theater Company and the best news is the return of ATC company member Kate Buddeke back to Chicago after successful appearances on Broadway and elsewhere.
The playwright is clearly after thematic big game in his three-character 90-minute comedy drama. He wants to examine survival in the lower depths of American society, and take a few shots at corporate America while he is at is.
Molly (Buddeke) is a middle-aged woman working for a company that cleans houses. She’s the team leader of a two-member female team, her underling being a gullible young blue-collar girl named Claire (Gwendolyn Whiteside). The location is the coast of Maine.
In the opening scene an uncomfortable Claire meets her new boss, a middle management executive named Jimmy (Ed Kross) who is part smiling glad hander and part smarmy intimidator. Next we watch Molly and Claire as they clean the mansion of a rich and pathetically lonely woman named Mrs. Townsend, a character who never appears on stage but is a felt presence throughout the evening. Both Molly and Claire are scraping the bottom of the economic barrel. They have crummy jobs but their meager paychecks are all that stand between them and destitution.
The women are not only broke but they have miserable domestic lives. Molly cares for her husband, put in a wheelchair after a beating by her son, who is in jail for the assault. Claire’s husband is a womanizing layabout who has become a dead weight on Claire’s starry-eyed hope to improve her life.
Jimmy intrudes in the lives of his two lady employees, hitting on Claire and terrorizing both women with his bullying and paranoia over his job security. Jimmy is a caricature of the cliché-spouting company man, plus he’s an adulterer and an industrial strength neurotic.
The opening night audience laughed long and often at the stage action, which may or may not please the author, who thought he was writing a searing indictment of the socio-economic class system in this country. But the play works better if the spectators find it funny. As a profound statement about American society today, “Augusta” is ludicrously oversimplified and implausible. The three characters are cartoonish, especially Claire, a presumably street smart gal who professes amazement and outrage when Jimmy takes her to a company convention in the city of Augusta and then expects some bed time with her as compensation.
New ATC artistic director P. J. Paparelli brought in Chicago actress Nora Dunn to make her directing debut. Paparelli did Dunn no favorites in providing her with a superficial script that doesn’t begin to deliver on its promises. Dunn does get three very watchable performances out of Buddeke, Whiteside, and Kross. In the past, Kross had been one of Chicagoland theater’s best comic actors. In “Augusta” he gets to be funny in a malignant way and also displays some impressive acting chops as a character fighting his own demons as he makes the lives of his employees miserable.
Dresser writes the play in several scenes, from Jimmy’s office to a hotel bedroom to a cocktail lounge to the mansion the ladies clean for a living. Changing scenes involves stagehands rolling large props on and off stage during brief blackouts. Scenic designer Grant Sabina does his best to accelerate the scene changes quickly but they are often clunky and disruptive, in spite of Michael Groth’s functional properties. No problems with Jesse Klug’s lighting, Emily McConnell’s costumes, and Lindsay Jones’s sound design.
“Augusta” comes across as David Mamet lite—with its two women characters representing the American underclass and the lone male a blowhard and a phony. Dresser’s play has less profanity and more superficial laughs than typical Mamet, but he doesn’t touch Mamet’s skill at excavating the moral rot that corrodes the American dream. Still, it’s great to have Buddeke back on a local stage.
“Augusta” runs through March 2 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 and $35. Call 773 929 1031.
For more information contact: www.atcweb.org
The show gets a rating of 21/2 stars. Feb. 2008Contact us : zeffdaniel@yahoo.com