Goodman(Albert) Theatre - ChicagolandTheaterReviews

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark

At the Goodman Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Somewhere among all the clichés, caricatures, and stereotypes, a significant social satire struggles for air in “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.” But the Goodman Theatre production settles for easy laughs, confusing set designs, and muddled character interpretations.

         The play is the work of Lynn Nottage, as hot a young playwright as we have in the American theater. It got respectful reviews and enthusiastic audience response when it played off Broadway two years ago, which suggests that New York City received a more incisive, credible production than what’s on display at Goodman.

         “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” starts out as a nostalgia trip back to the Hollywood of the early 1930’s, garnished with tart comic views of the struggles of black actors and actresses to catch a break in the white-dominated film industry of the time. Vera Stark is a young and presumably talented young black actresses saddled with the kind of roles reserved for black women in the movies—slaves, mammies, and maids.

         Vera (Tamberla Perry) shares an apartment with two other aspiring black women. Anna Mae (Amelia Workman) uses her light skin and the casting couch to further her career, passing herself off at a hot-blooded Brazilian lady. Lottie (TaRon Patton, and very funny throughout) knows she’s got the stuff of a quality actress but has no illusions about her chances.

The first act is mostly concerned with Vera in her maid’s role during the filming of a costume epic called “The Belle of New Orleans.” The star in the film is an insecure prima donna named Gloria Mitchell (Kara Zediker) who plays a self-dramatizing octoroon dying, Camille-like.

         The opening act has plenty of humor carved out of how blacks struggle for a foothold in the movie, fighting a losing battle on the slippery slopes of racial prejudice. There is some edgy comedy that suggests what the play could have been with a stronger directorial hand. But most of the act is at the level of a decent TV sitcom that accommodates occasional bits of very sharp racial humor.

         The second act goes back and forth between Vera’s appearance on a vapid 1973 TV talk show and 2003 where three black pseudo intellectuals parse Vera’s career and influence during a seminar awash in backbiting and academese posturing. The 1973 Vera is now a skittish and boozing has-been with very loud opinions. She’s paired on the program with a surprise appearance by Gloria Mitchell from the “The Belle of New Orleans.” Mitchell, now in retirement, is every bit as shrill and self-centered as she was back in the early 1930’s. There is also a strong hint of a relationship between Mitchell and Vera that comes as no surprise to any spectator paying attention. The relationship revelation probably is intended to ironically underscore the arbitrary injustice of racial discrimination in the movies but it comes across as artificial and gratuitous (but not as gratuitous as the pointless appearance in the 1973 TV talk show of a strung out British rock performer).

                                                                                                                   Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

         The second act, shuttling back and forth between the 1973 TV show and the 2003 seminar, uses film and projections to give the staging some theatrical variety. The play ends with an insistent note of ambiguity, leaving open what finally became of Vera Stark, to which I could only comment to myself, Who cares?

         That’s the chief problem with the play, or the production, or a combination of the two. We don’t have any emotional involvement with the characters. We may laugh at some of their racial commentary but they never emerge as living people who should matter to us. Tamberla Perry’s Vera, who looks about the same in 1973 as she did in 1933, never suggesting that she embodies a great talent martyred to racial intolerance. “The Belle of New Orleans” is proposed as a landmark in movie history for Vera’s performance as the maid. But as presented in film clips at the Goodman, that movie is so insipid and so silly that it libels the movies of the early 1930’s, which were pretty sophisticated and arguably more advanced thematically that the Production Code inhibited films made later in that decade.

         Potentially the most interesting and challenging character in the play is a young black musician named Leroy Barksdale (Chike Johnson), who romances Vera and wants to be a composer and raise the level of black music in America. He comes to a bad end, narrated off stage, but his story would be worth telling, either as satirical comedy or tragic drama. There are also cameo portraits of a Russian émigré director (Ron Rains) in conflict with a dictatorial Jewish studio head (Patrick Clear). Their heated debate about whether “The Belle of New Orleans” should be a happy film to lighten the country’s Depression gloom, or a gritty slice of raw realism was the most literate exchange in the play.

         The set design by Riccardo Hernandez uses the Goodman turntable in the first act to go back and forth between Vera’s apartment and Gloria’s apartment. While Gloria is wealthy and Vera and her roommates barely by economically, the two apartments look pretty much the same. We never get a sense of place in a very site-specific Hollywood in 1933.


                                  Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

         Director Chuck Smith goes for the laughs throughout the show and when the play turns serious in the second act the audience isn’t prepared and so the spectators chuckle when they should have been engrossed. The recreation of the idiotic “The Belle of New Orleans” drains away any dramatic intensity that might showcase Vera as a serious actress. In particular, her interaction with the inane dying octoroon character was unfunny comedy when it should have honored Vera’s presumed genuine acting skills.

         The play is far too long. I was amazed to look at my watch at the end of the first act and that only 70 minutes had elapsed. I would have bet the time was closer to two hours. The show actually runs 2 hours and 20 minutes with an intermission and had the time been used more profitably, the length would have been more than acceptable. Not so as the play drones on in its present condition.

         For the record, the rest of the design team consists of Birgit Rattenborg Wise (costumes), Robert Christen (lighting), and Ray Nardelli and Joshua Hovath (sound). They did what they could.

         “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” has its moments as an occasionally sardonic trip down Hollywood memory lane, and some of the verbal and visual comedy works. But overall, not a strong balance sheet for a play with aspirations to explore racial identity and the insidious impact of racism in American culture.

         “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” runs through June 2 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $81. Call 312 4432 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org/Vera.

The show gets a rating of 2½ stars May 2013

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Measure for Measure

At the Goodman Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” has been called a comedy because it ends happily. It’s also been called a problem play because it’s an uneasy combination of serious, almost tragic events and broad comedy. Robert Falls’ production at the Goodman Theatre is certainly comic. I’ve never heard an audience laugh so much during the play, especially in places that normally are treated dramatically. And the problems exist in abundance, some of them built into the script and some injected by Falls’s directorial decisions. The revival can be viewed as either an audacious take on a difficult play or a version that offers misfires and bull’s-eyes in equal amount.

“Measure for Measure” was written in 1604 but the Goodman’s action is legitimately set during the 1970’s. It’s is very much a “now” play and spectators should have no trouble identifying with the story’s rendering of an urban society thriving on raucous sex (and sexual harassment), political corruption, hypocrisy, and moral ambiguity.

At the beginning of the play, the Duke of Vienna turns over the affairs of the city to Angelo, his ascetic deputy. The duke, testing Angelo’s moral sincerity, charges the deputy with introducing reforms to a Vienna that has become lawless and licentious. In one of his first acts, Angelo sentences Claudio to death for making Juliet, his fiancée, pregnant, in violation of a seldom enforced civic law. Claudio asks his sister, Isabella, to plead for his life with Angelo. Isabella, devoutly religious and about to become a nun, visits Angelo and urges him to show mercy and reprieve her brother. Angelo, stunned to find himself suddenly sexually attracted to Isabella, tells the young woman he will lift Claudio’s death sentence if she will go to bed with him. The outraged Isabella refuses, claiming that her virginity is of greater value than her brother’s life.

The first half of the play deals with Angelo’s betrayal of his public trust and Isabella’s refusal to sacrifice her virginity to save her brother. It’s hard to sympathize with Isabella’s choice, but in her deeply religious world, chastity is eternal and life is temporary. She takes no pleasure in the prospect of her brother’s execution but she is obeying a higher calling.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

The second half of the play is consumed with the plotting and intrigue, much of it hard to believe, that ends up saving Claudio from death, preserving Isabella’s virginity, and exposing Angelo. The moral questions introduced in the early action are never properly answered as good triumphs over evil through highly artificial plot gimmicks.

On the positive side, the modern setting provides a credible background for the main storyline. Walt Spangler’s set replicates the tawdry environment of Times Square in New York City before the area was cleaned up. The city has sunk into depravity and desperate measures are needed. Angelo seems like the stern, no nonsense administrator who can upgrade the moral climate, even if he is a humorless prig. Alejandra Escalante’s Isabella is a plainspoken young woman who pleads for her brother’s life with common sense arguments and later defends her chastity with eloquence. She’s a gutsy young lady.

I had problems with the casting of the usually excellent Shakespearean actor Jay Whittaker as Angelo and James Newcomb as the Duke. Whittaker plays Angelo like a young preppie disconcerted to discover Isabella turns him on. His agonized recognition that he wants to bed the virtuous nun-to-be drew lots of belly laughs from the audience, defusing what should have been a scene of emotional drama. Angelo’s sudden attempted rape of Isabella jars badly with the first part of the scene.

The play calls for the Duke to impersonate a priest, returning to Vienna in disguise to see how Angelo is doing. Newcomb channels the clergyman into a kind of Barry Fitzgerald Irishman and his Duke is a bit of a moralizing blowhard. Neither Whittaker nor Newcomb sufficiently conveys the weight and gravity of their characters. The two draw plenty of giggles but at the cost of trivializing the narrative.

The play is a ramshackle affair. An early scene deals with a clown policeman named Elbow and his claptrap charge that a couple of city lowlifes named Pompey and Froth were trying to corrupt his pregnant wife. The scene has nothing to do with the main action, but it’s still pretty funny, thanks largely to a fine comic performance by Sean Fortunato as Elbow, a linear descendant of the farcical constable Dogberry from “Much Ado About Nothing.” Fortunato returns later in the action with his fellow policemen brutalizing Pompey in jail in a disturbing scene of police brutality. All the shenanigans in the last scenes to save Isabella and Claudio and expose Angelo rest on improbabilities that only Shakespeare could get away with. And would the modest Isabella strip down to her undies in front of the priest as she changes clothes?

The most controversial moment in the production comes at the end, with a sudden unprovoked act of violence that makes no sense in any previous context in the story and should leave the audience open-mouthed with amazement and confusion.

The ensemble consists of more than two dozen actors. Laudable supporting performances come from John Judd as Escalus, the Duke’s wise advisor, A. C. Smith as the humane provost, and especially Jeffrey Carlson as the bombastic Lucio. Aaron Todd Douglas contributes a few moments of streetwise modern humor as the pimp Pompey.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

The production does have plenty of energy with lively crowd scenes and even disco dancing at the end with a voiceover of Donna Summer singing “Last Dance.” The physical production is eye catching with Spangler’s complex sets abetted by Ana Kuzmanic’s garish costumes, Marcus Doshi’s evocative lighting, and the original music and sound design by Richard Woodberry.

First time spectators aren’t seeing this play in all its complexity. Some of the directorial ideas work and some are distracting or misleading. More important, questionable interpretations of the Angelo and Duke characters undercut the depth of the narrative. Still, as an idiosyncratic take on “Measure for Measure,” the staging should engage the viewer’s attention. Even those who have seen the play numerous times will be startled by this version. The performers deliver their lines cleanly and the show comes in at a tight 2 1/2 hours, including an intermission. Whether it all works ultimately resides in the eye and mind of the beholder.

“Measure for Measure” runs through April 14 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $86. Call 312 443 38700 or visit GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of 2½ stars. March 2013

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Other Desert Cities

At the Goodman Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Jon Robin Baitz has written some of the most stimulating American plays of the last 25 years, but he’s slipped badly with “Other Desert Cities,” his latest drama now receiving its local premiere at the Goodman Theatre.

Baitz’s play mines that over-familiar dramatic territory, the problems of the rich and privileged in this country. In “Other Desert Cities,” the rich and privileged belong to two generations of the Wyeth family, living the good life in Palm Springs, California. The time is Christmas in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush, when our Iraq military intervention is roiling the country.

Lyman and Polly Wyeth are arch conservatives, pals with former Republican President Ronald Reagan. Naturally, the younger Wyeth generation rebelliously leans heavily toward liberalism in their political and social thinking, especially daughter Brooke, a writer who has been institutionalized for depression. Her brother Trip is the producer of a lowbrow TV reality series, an intelligent and articulate young man who gets little respect from his family because of his TV connection. Then there is a third child and the family’s collective burden, a young man who got involved with a radical anti-war left wing group resembling the Weathermen back in the 1970’s. The son presumably committed suicide, distraught after the group bombed a military recruiting center, killing one person. His death also saved him from the likelihood of a long prison term.

The first act seldom rises above the level of a mid-grade sitcom. The family members, especially the acerbic Polly and her alcoholic sister Selda, who is currently currently living with the family in a kind of medical protective custody, exchange wisecracks and mild insults. Some of the zingers are aimed at Ronald and Nancy Reagan and other conservatives of their ilk, which tickled the liberals in the opening night audience. Finally, the narrative gets to the real meat of the play. Brooke has written a memoir that fills her parents with foreboding. The memoir, at least to Polly and Lyman, pillories the family and their friends, ridiculing their conservative attitudes and generally embarrassing the Wyeth family name. Polly and Lyman want Brooke to cancel publication of the book to spare the family grief. The stakes ratchet up higher when Brooke announces that the book has been optioned to The New Yorker magazine for publication in two months.

The second act is an ongoing overheated debate about whether the book should be published, with Polly and Lyman pleading and threatening on one side and Brooke and Selda defending on the other (with Trip as mediator). Polly and Lyman naturally urge the work be suppressed, or at least withheld until after their death. Brooke claims the book represents six years of her life and she has earned the right to its publication. Tensions escalate and Polly and Lyman state that if Brooke doesn’t withhold publication, the family will be destroyed. That bites because, for all the recriminations, each Wyeth announces frequently that he or she loves everyone else in the family.

At the eleventh hour, Baitz introduces a new, but scarcely surprising, wrinkle into the narrative that casts a different light on the book controversy. Much of what we’ve heard from Polly and Lyman suddenly turns into camouflage that disguises a secret they have held closely and painfully for years. The couple finally let their cat out of the bag and leaves Brooke in agony over what to do next.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

Here’s my problem with “Other Desert Cities.” I don’t care about the problems of the Wyeths and I was annoyed by how vital they consider their domestic difficulties would appear to the outside world. We live in a culture that wallows in celebrity revelation and scandal and the Wyeths flatter themselves if they consider their exposure through Brooke’s memoir will cause any seismic impact in the country. All their shouting back and forth assumes the aura of a stereotype therapy session. One waits for Dr. Phil to step through the plate glass doors into the living room and sort everyone out. The revelation near the end of the play does mitigate the elder Wyeth’s strident opposition to the book publication, but that means all their previous arguing ultimately is misdirection and beside the point.

The Goodman cast taps into the highest levels of the Chicagoland acting community. As Polly, Deanna Dunagan reprises her slash-and-burn performance from “Autumn: Osage County.” Chelcie Ross delivers a stentorian performance as Lyman, a man who feels he is a custodian of traditional American virtue. Tracy Michelle Arnold is the conflicted Brooke, put through the emotional ringer in the second act. Linda Kimbrough is the waspish Selda, a boozing Greek chorus with left wing sensibilities. John Hoogenakker is Trip, the most balanced personality on the stage and the only one who continuously provides sensible commentary amid all the sound and fury erupting between Brooke and her parents.

Hoogenakker gives the most convincing performance, mostly because he is granted the most rational dialogue, but his Trip is an oasis of common sense as the verbal wars churn around him. Arnold holds nothing back in an overwrought role. Kimbrough isn’t a good fit as the sardonic Selda, a role that Linda Lavin executed to sharp-tongued perfection in New York City. Dunagan and Ross represent the conservative Wyeths credibly, but their anguish before and after the second act revelation just didn’t engage me.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

Henry Wishcamper directs the show, giving the cast its collective head in the second act to rant away after an opening act dominated by glib comedy, which the opening night audience ate up. Thomas Lynch designed the Wyeth very upscale California home, bathed in lighting designed by David Lander. Kaye Voyce designed the costumes that reflect moneyed informality appropriate to the Wyeth lifestyle, and Richard Woodbury contributed the music and sound design.

Let the record show that “Other Desert Cities” has received high praise from reviewers in New York City and Chicago. They applauded Baitz’s incisive dialogue, his absorbing characters, his pinpoint sense of time and place, and his pungent exploration of social issues of the day. I wish I saw the play they did. It should also be noted that numerous readers’ reviews quoted in the New York Times blasted the show.

“Other Desert Cities” runs through February 17 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $86. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of 2 stars. January 2013

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Sweet Bird of Youth

At the Goodman Theater

by Dan Zeff

Chicago – “Sweet Bird of Youth” is not top drawer Tennessee Williams. Its Southern Gothic excesses are a self parody of the playwright’s never never land Deep South. But the play still has some of the Williams lyricism and humor and at least one sharply etched character.

The Goodman Theatre is staging “Sweet Bird of Youth” in a much anticipated revival, largely based on the red hot director David Cromer at the helm and Diane Lane as the featured star. The production has its moments, but it’s an uneven presentation that doesn’t compensate for the script’s weaknesses.

The action takes place in the town of St. Cloud in a nameless state on the Gulf coast. A 29-year old gigolo named Chance Wayne has returned to his home town with Andrea Del Lago, a faded middle-aged film star who now goes by the name of the Princess Kosmonopolis. Wayne uses Del Lago to advance his failing acting career while the woman exploits Chance’s youth and sexual prowess, along with drugs and alcohol, to block out her loss of youth and fear of aging.

Years before, Wayne had been run out of town by Boss Finley, a local racist politician and demagogue, because Chance had seduced his teen-aged daughter Heavenly and infected her with a venereal disease that led to an operation leaving the girl barren. Finley has sworn to have Chance castrated if he returned to St. Cloud. After a lot of pontificating about youth and its passing, Chance, resigned to facing Finley’s thugs. elects to remain in St. Cloud after Del Lago leaves for her revived Hollywood career.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

The play received its share of positive reviews but also absorbed criticism for its overheated story—political corruption, venereal disease, drugs, sex, booze, and racism. Some viewers may have been shocked back then but today who would consider the behavior on stage outrageous? Nobody in the society we live in today.

The play’s structure also is problematical. The show is divided into three acts, the first dominated by Chance and Del Lago. The short second act shifts to Boss Finley and the denizens of St. Cloud, and then brings Del Lago back in the final act. She is the strongest character in the play and she is much missed during her long absences from the stage. The actress is a flamboyant figure, living on drugs and her nerve ends. Diane Lane takes a realistic approach to the lady, especially in the third act, which works against the character’s grain.

Paul Newman played Chance Wayne in the original production and invested the character with a doomed poetic quality. Finn Wittrock, with his Southern accent slipping in and out of place, is a physical hunk, but he’s a prosaic Chance, a toy boy with silly dreams about an acting career, egotistical, and a little dim. The chemistry between him and Lane is also minimal, or maybe Williams didn’t sufficiently flesh out the relationship that connects this odd couple.

The usually reliable John Judd turns Boss Finley into a stereotype cartoon of Southern white supremacy. Finley should be a menacing, scary figure but at Goodman too often he’s comic relief. Kristina Johnson makes the most of her brief appearances as Heavenly, the only really tragic character in the play, but her role is woefully unwritten. The plot cries out for a strong confrontational scene between Heavenly and Chance, but it never happens.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

Williams has more success with his minor characters. Jennifer Engstrom is just right as Finley’s blowsy mistress Miss Lucy. Penny Slusher contributes a welcome bit of human warmth as Aunt Nonnie, and Vincent Teninty is excellent as Finley’s bullying son Tom, Jr. Credit Goodman with employing a full 17-member ensemble, retaining several characters who are basically walk-ons.

Photo by Greg Gorman

James Schuette’s set designs attempt a dreamlike atmosphere, with floor to ceiling gauzy curtains and the use of a revolving stage, which is more distracting than dramatic. Schuette’s costume design properly locates the narrative in the late 1950’s. Keith Parham designed the lighting, and Josh Schmidt the sound and composed the original music.

For all its weaknesses, the production moves right along, and the three-hour running time has no dead spots. But the disjointed plotting and the two-dimensional grotesques who populate the story mark this show as second tier Williams. All the lines about the passage of time and the slippage of youth may have been a very personal statement by Williams, who was undergoing severe emotional crises at the time, but they are pseudo philosophical and repetitive (the play originated as a one-act drama called “The Enemy: Time.”)

Before he is taken away to be castrated, Chance recites the play’s final lines directly to the audience: “I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in all of us.” I doubt that many spectators will recognize Chance in them, unless they are pill-popping gigolos deluding themselves with impossible pipe dreams and harboring a very slender sense of survival.

“Sweet Bird of Youth” runs through October 28 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $27 to $88. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of 2½ stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. Sept. 2012

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Crowns

At the Goodman Albert Theatre

by Dan Zeff

Chicago – The most exciting moment at the 2004 opening of “Crowns” at the Goodman Theatre was watching a stream of African American women taking their seats, each woman wearing a marvelously distinctive hat, the “crowns” of the show’s title. Unfortunately, those dramatic and colorful entrances were the most entertaining minutes of a show that meandered along, leaving no particular impression.

Writer/director Regina Taylor has overhauled her 2004 vehicle and the improvement is heartening. “Crowns” now has a stronger narrative thrust along with lots of powerful singing and droll humor. It’s still not perfect. The storyline, though bulked up, still is too thin to sustain an intermissionless 1 hour and 45 minutes of playing time, but the pleasures of the evening are considerable, especially for spectators who revel in African American music—gospel, hymns, spirituals, soul, and rhythm and blues, embellished with snatches of traditional African music.

Photo by : Liz Lauren

“Crowns” starts and ends in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, an all black area on Chicago’s South Side. A teenager named Yolanda (played with great intensity and conviction by Marketta Wilder) has just lost her brother in one of those shootings that have become a plague to the city. So her family ships her to her grandmother in Darlington, South Carolina, where presumably the change in scenery can help the girl deal with her grief over her brother’s violent death.

The rebellious Yolanda initially rejects the matriarchal African American way of life she finds in Darlington. Yolanda expresses herself in urban rap music. The women of Darlington are steeped in the religious music of the black Southern culture. Gradually, the warmth and female bonding connects with Yolanda and she returns to Englewood with her self-confidence renewed and her anger ad bitterness channeled toward the positive. That makes “Crowns” is a typical “triumph of the human spirit” saga that should send the audience out of the theater feeling pretty good.

The women’s hats are symbols of African American womanhood, a means of self-expression, assertiveness, independence, ethnic pride, and identity. They are also fun to wear (one character says she owns more than 200 hats, and these are not wealthy people). The women sing about the importance of hats in their lives and the lives of their ancestors. Every Sunday they go to church to worship and to show off their headgear in a weekly fashion show.

The women of Darlington are played by five actresses, every one with a big voice and a saucy manner. The ensemble is led by Felicia Fields and E. Faye Butler, the one-two punch of African American singing in Chicagoland theater for decades. Fields is Yolanda’s grandmother, a wise senior citizen who reaches out every way she knows how to relate to the resistant Yolanda until the girl’s psychological barriers finally come down. Butler has her share of large musical moments in the production but a star of her magnitude should play a bigger role in the story. She sings and then fades into the group of other women. It’s Fields’s show and she does marvelously, but Butler deserves a bigger slice of the action.

Photo by Liz Lauren

The other principals are all first rate, whether they are singing or acting. First among equals might be Alexis Rogers, but that’s not meant to slight the work of Jasondra Johnson and Pauletta Washington. David Jennings more than holds his own as the only major male in the show, a local preacher who rouses his parishioners every Sunday with that down home old school churchy music. A dancer named Yusha-Marie Sorzano is all over the stage, performing everything from Katharine Dunham-style modern ethnic dance interpretations to exuberant reactions to the Holy Spirit. The rest of the ensemble consists of Shari Addison, Melanie Brezill, Kelvin Roston, Jr., and Laura Walls. They all sing and dance with passion and their motor never runs down.

“Crowns” is a warm show that occasionally verges on the touchy feely. It portrays a black community with only a single minor reference to the white world. There are no racial tensions in the show. The Darlington characters live in their own self contained society in which the white world seems to play no part, except for a brief multi media return to the civil rights movement of the Martin Luther King, Jr., days. “Crowns” is about family, and faith, and heritage, not about racial conflict or injustice.

Maruti Evans’s set is a series of large sliding panels. The panels are serviceable but give the production an antiseptic look reinforced by clean and modern ceiling fixtures each holding a hat. The set creates a slick modern visual look that runs counter to the comfy atmosphere established by the homespun lifestyle evoked by the Southern characters. Karen Perry’s costumes, and presumably the hats, are handsome and striking. Maya Ciarocchi designed the projections, Kenneth Posner the lighting, and Richard Woodbury the sound.

As it plays now, “Crowns” is at its best as a rousing concert of African American music, both secular and religious. Strides have been made to establish a meaningful storyline but more work needs to be done. Still, there is a lot of grade A talent on the Goodman stage and lots of great hats.

“Crowns” runs through August 12 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. p.m. Tickets are $31 to $88. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of three stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. July 2012

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The Iceman Cometh

At the Goodman Albert Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” is a towering play, 4 hours and 45 minutes with three intermissions and a cast of 16 major characters. Yet its theme can be summarized in five words—We need illusions to survive.

The Goodman Theatre is reviving a basically uncut “Iceman” (one character has been dropped) in what certainly is the Chicagoland production of the year. The flagship actor is Nathan Lane, best known for his musical comedy performances on Broadway. But the revival is an accumulation of stunning performances, including several by notable Chicago actors who can deservedly bask in the rave reviews the show will get nationally.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

The play takes place in 1912. The location is Harry Hope’s saloon and rooming house in New York City’s Bowery. Every day, and usually every night, a collection of down and out characters gather to drink away their blighted lives and comfort themselves with the illusion that they are not so badly off. The three young hookers call themselves tarts, a more genteel term for their streetwalking profession. A black man named Joe Mott dreams of opening his own gambling house for the colored trade. They all kid themselves that they will soon break out of their prison of failure. Tomorrow will be the day they recapture their lives (one of the characters is nicknamed Jimmy Tomorrow) but deep inside they know it won’t happen, so they get through the days and nights with bravado and booze.

The play turns on the annual visit by Theodore Hickman, fondly known as Hickey, a traveling salesman born to be the life of the party. For years Hickey has come to Harry Hope’s establishment, telling jokes and buying drinks, jump-starting the dreary lives of the inmates, if only for a few days. But this year’s visit is different. Hickey starts out as his usual expansive glad-handing self, but he has an agenda. He insists the habitués of Harry Hope’s saloon need to divest themselves of their illusions so they can recognize the truth about themselves and make peace with their condition. Hickey’s evangelizing creates tensions and conflicts among the other characters who want no part of facing their true selves.

Photo Credit: Liz Lauren

“The Iceman Cometh” is a great play but it also is victimized by verbal repetition and an overloaded storyline. Every character mouths “pipedreams” over and over throughout the play, the talisman word for the illusions that Hickey states are holding the other characters captive. “The Iceman Cometh” isn’t the only O’Neill play with clunky dialogue but because of its length it may be the worst offender. And a majority of characters all fall into the same cookie cutter pattern, each man and woman hiding behind transparent illusions to avoid facing the reality of their tawdry lives. The play could probably be reduced in length by at least a third and provide the same impact, but that wasn’t O’Neill’s way and the audience must accept the excesses along with the play’s power and humor.

Under Robert Falls’ superb direction, the play holds the audience for all four acts. I was glad when it was over but it was still a thrilling ride from 7 p.m. to nearly midnight. I did notice numerous patrons meandering in the lobby during the third intermission, gaunt with fatigue but determined to gut it out for the final hour-long act.

The collection of outstanding performances is likely to be remembered for years to come. Every character has at least one major speech along with the ensemble interaction. This is easily the most emotional reading of “Iceman” of the three productions I’ve seen. There is an edge of hysteria among the characters that underscores their desperation. The staging is naturalistic but the acting often achieves an operatic intensity.

The climax of the evening is Nathan Lane’s long monologue that consumes much of the final act, an extraordinarily demanding set piece that display’s Lane’s breath of acting as he confesses to murdering his wife with a rising crescendo of agony, self loathing, and despair. After a while, the piece comes across more as a showcase for Lane’s acting chops that an expression of Hickey’s tortured psyche, but blame O’Neill for his typical over the top writing.

Lane’s Hickey is the centerpiece of the production, though the character has less stage time than the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon. But the complementary performances give the revival its magic. By the sheer force of his personality, Brian Dennehy dominates the play intellectually as the one-time anarchist Larry Slade (Dennehy played Hickey in the 1990 Goodman revival of “Iceman.”) Dennehy’s Slade is the most self aware of the characters, trying to put on a front of “above the fray” cynicism that masks his cowardice and fear of death. While the other characters joyously return to their life-sustaining illusions at the end of the play, Slade sits apart, bleakly staring into the distance.

The ensemble is an extended advertisement for the excellence of Chicago acting. There are illustrious performances by Larry Neumann, Jr. (Ed Mosher), Marc Grapey (Chuck Morello), John Judd (Piet Wetjoen), John Reeger (Cecil Lewis), James Harms (ultimately heartbreaking as Jimmy Tomorrow), John Hoogenakker (Willie Oban), Patrick Andrews (Don Parritt), and Kate Arrington (Cora), all mainstays of the area theater scene, along with Lee Stark (Margie) and Tara Sisson (Pearl). Imports include John Douglas Thompson as a brilliant Joe Mott, Stephen Ouimette of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as Harry Hope, Lee Wilkof, both heroic and pathetic as used up former anarchist Hugo Kalmar, and Salvatore Inzerillo as the saloon bartender Rocky Pioggi, who pimps the play’s three whores (the bartender refuses to recognize himself as a pimp claiming it’s a sideline because he has a regular job, another ego saving illusion).

The production is largely conversation and monologues, with the characters spread horizontally across the Goodman stage in small groups gathered around the saloon tables for three of the four acts. Kevin Depinet’s set is realistic yet has the haunting quality of an Edward Hopper painting. Natasha Katz’s chiaroscuro lighting suffuses the characters in shadows with bright highlights. Merrily Murray-Walsh’s costume designs capture the grungy look of life on the bottom rung of life in the Bowery 100 years ago. There is no sound design. This is a production that relies on visual atmosphere and exceptional acting.

Is “The Iceman Cometh” too long, too schematic, and too wordy? Certainly. But when will we ever get a chance to attend a full length revival of the play at such a lofty level of performance and staging, and when will we ever get another opportunity to watch Nathan Lane stretch his acting abilities in such a high risk role? All in all, “The Iceman Cometh” reflects honor on everyone associated with it, including the audiences willing to invest 5 hours of their time to connect with one of the treasures of modern drama.

“The Iceman Cometh” runs through June 17 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Ticket prices (subject to change) are $61 to $133. Call 312 443 3800 or visit GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars. May 2012

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Camino Real

At the Goodman Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Even the most zealous playgoer likely has never seen a production of Tennessee Williams’s “Camino Real.” Williams wrote at least 10 plays that are more accessible and commercially viable than this perplexing symbolic drama. So when the Goodman Theatre placed “Camino Real” on the company’s 2011-2012 schedule, anticipation ran high. Would the Goodman production uncover a hidden masterpiece, or would the revival validate that “Camino Real” deserved its obscurity in the Williams canon?

To direct the show, Goodman imported a Spanish director named Calixto Bieito to direct. Bieito had carved out an international reputation for his experimental work, and he has made “Camino Real” his own work (the playbill credits him as author of a new version of the script, along with Marc Rosich).

Bieito has discarded a slew of characters from the original, altered the play’s structure, and added material, including considerable simulated sex and gore. The production runs almost two hours with no intermission and by the final blackout the audience still can’t evaluate whether Williams wrote an important play or just a self-indulgent mish mash. This is the director’s play, not the playwright’s.

Williams set “Camino Real” in a tropical seaport that could be anywhere in the world. The Goodman version locates the play in a Spanish setting. Neither the original nor the Bieito version has a coherent narrative. Williams injected a number of real life and fictional characters into the play, like Don Quixote, Lord Byron, Esmeralda from Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Baron de Charlus from Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” Jacques Casanova, and Marguerite Gautier (the tragic courtesan from the play “Camille”) who mingle with Williams’s own offbeat creations. The play may not tell a logical story but the overall feeling is one of pessimism and defeat. Williams wrote the play in 1953 and he could not have been a happy man at the time.

The original play was divided into a prologue and 16 scenes, called “blocks,” with a man named Gutman as the narrator who escorts the audience from block to block. The Goodman staging omits the block format, so the action flows uninterrupted, with no connecting narrative tissue. Bieito’s adaptation does preserve much of the original text, especially the ripe poetic recitations that wash over the spectator’s ears like beautiful noise. Incidents come and go but nothing like a graspable plot emerges. “Camino Real” requires considerable patience from the audience and I’m sure a significant percentage of viewers will give up on the show a few minutes into the evening, hostile to a play that seems arbitrary, unfocussed, and often distasteful in its gross sex, its bloodshed, its general atmosphere of cruelty, and occasional vomiting.

A central figure in the play is Kilroy (Antwayn Hopper), the omnipresent American figure from World War II, portrayed here as a black prizefighter trying to brazen out a life in a downward spiral. Kilroy is humiliated by Gutman, who forces him to wear a clown suit. Kilroy also seduces Esmeralda and ends up with his chest slashed open, all of this in the Williams script but with a gloss of violence on the Goodman stage.

Bieito has discarded Williams’s specific directions for the basic set, instead opting for a backdrop of prisonlike floor to rafter grillwork (set design by Rebecca Ringst). The stage is often bare except for cavorting characters, but periodically there are dazzling lighting effects (designed by James F. Ingalls), notably a gigantic and spectacular arrangement of gaudy neon signs that descends from above. In Bieito’s vision, the Camino Real is a bleak state of mind, a dreamlike (or nightmarish) location that drives characters to seek an escape, to anywhere away from this claustrophobic and brutal place.

The Goodman ensemble certainly gives its all to realize Bieito’s vision. The cast includes many of the area’s most familiar performers, including David Darlow as Casanova, Matt DeCaro (especially chilling as the menacing Gutman), Marilyn Dodds Frank as Marguerite Gautier, Mark Montgomery as Lord Byron, Barbara E. Robertson as the ostentatiously sluttish prostitute Rosita, and Jacqueline Williams as the blind singer La Madrecita de los Perdidos.

The production imported Chicago favorite Andre DeShields to play the simpering decadent aristocrat Baron de Charlus. The baron has a small role in the Williams original but the Goodman revival inflates the character with new material, topped by a grotesque scene in which the masochistic baron is sodomized and finally strangled by a police officer (Jonno Roberts) in a very tough scene to watch. The baron is restored to life near the end of the show (not in the original), allowing DeShields a strong song-and-dance number. The rest of the cast, working very hard to give concrete presence to their characters’ ambiguous personalities and actions, consists of Carolyn Ann Hoerdemann as the Gypsy, Travis Knight as the Survivor who bloodily does not survive, Monica Lopez as Esmeralda, and Michael Medeiros as the Dreamer. The costume credits belong to Ana Kuzmanic and the sound design and composition to Richard Woodbury.

It would have been nice to attend a revival of “Camino Real” directed by Goodman artistic director Robert Falls. I suspect Falls would display a respect for Williams’s original that Bieito sacrifices for his own bizarre take on the show. Unquestionably, “Camino Real” is a demanding project, technically, thematically, and maybe spiritually. It invites, even requires, interpretive risk taking. Goodman earns the highest props for going out on an artistic and commercial limb to present the show. But for all of Bieito’s directorial flamboyance, I would have much preferred a production that came closer to Williams’s highly personal vision. Who knows when we will have another chance to assess just how good, or defective, a play Williams wrote?

“Camino Real” runs through April 8 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $29 to $79. Call 312 443 3800 or visit GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of 2½ stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. March 2012

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Race

At the Goodman Theatre

by Dan Zeff

Chicago – David Mamet’s “Race” looks at the racial situation in this country and sees an unbridgeable chasm between blacks and whites in our society. It’s a bleak vision, fortunately delivered with scintillating dramatic tension and some very funny dialogue. Indeed, audiences will spend much of the evening laughing at what’s happening on stage. But after they leave the theater, patrons may reflect that what they just saw isn’t so comical.

“Race” had a decent run on Broadway after it opened in 2009, but the reviews were mixed. That suggests the current production at the Goodman Theatre may trump the New York version. A staging this accomplished should still be running out east.

The action of “Race” rakes place over a two-day period in the law office of an upscale firm in New York City. Attorneys Jack Lawson (white) and Henry Brown (black) are considering whether to accept the case of Charles Strickland, a white multimillionaire accused of raping a black woman. The lawyers go back and forth over whether to take on the high profile and racially sensitive case. The play has numerous plot twists that it would be unfair to divulge. But it gives nothing away to state that Brown and Lawson express their vision of racial relations in America in terms that some people would call deplorably cynical. The lawyers would call their views clear-eyed and realistic.

“Race” is divided into three scenes, the second and third separated by an unnecessary intermission. The production runs about 90 minutes, plenty of time for Mamet to dramatize his jaundiced view of the American racial divide. Along the way he takes his shots at the American legal system, where “truth” and “justice” and “objectivity” are mere buzz words. It’s all about shaping a jury’s understanding of the evidence. Any audience members scheduled to face a jury trial will come away from “Race” with a considerable feeling of unease unless they are confident their attorneys can manipulate the system in their favor. The rights and wrongs of a case are of no consequence. Perceptions are everything.

For Brown and Lawson, racial attitudes consist of stereotypes, prejudices, and muddled motivations. The blacks wallow in shame, the whites in guilt. Suspicion and paranoia are everywhere. Racial assumptions are based on the fear of being considered insensitive or intolerant, but deep down we know how we really feel about the other race and it isn’t pretty. After generations of racial conflict in America, the society is so tied up in knots over the issue that any kind of resolution appears impossible. There is too great a separation between what we ought to believe and what we really think deep down inside ourselves.

None of this may be new but it sounds fresh and disturbing in “Race.” Mamet is at the top of his game in eloquently and incisively staking his claim that our national racial conflict has become too ingrained to admit of any solution. His characters speak sentiments that we should dismiss as outrageous in their insensitivity and cynicism. But they sound so persuasive, and that’s what makes the play unsettling for the audience.

The first two scenes ride on waves of dark humor. The momentum slows down in the final 15 minutes with a plot reversal (easily anticipated by the attentive viewer) that injects an element of melodrama into the story. The ending dispels any audience hope that somehow a shred of racial accommodation can emerge from the characters. The distrust and downright hatred run too deep. It was ever thus and will ever be so.

Lawson and Brown carry the narrative, but there are two other characters in the play, Charles Strickland and Susan, a newly hired young lawyer in the firm who is black and female. The millionaire defendant in the case is an opaque figure in Patrick Clear’s performance. Strickland insists he is innocent of the rape charge but seems conflicted in his moral, if not physical, involvement in the deed. I couldn’t get a handle on the character, who exists ultimately as a plot device. Susan is played as a mostly silent presence by Tamberla Perry for much of the play. In the final scene Susan moves to center stage, an abrupt switch from her passive existence early on that makes some demands on audience credibility.

No criticisms can be leveled at Marc Grapey’s Jack Lawson and Geoffrey Owens’s Henry Brown. They soar with Mamet’s razor sharp, no holds barred language. Grapey has the best lines, meaning the most caustic, R-rated, and abrasive, and he has a ball. What Lawson says is continuously offensive but he goes on with such relish that Grapey’s performance becomes almost endearing. Owens’s Henry Brown matches Lawson in skepticism but has less stage time to blister the audience with Mamet’s knee in the groin dialogue. The world views of the two men may be deplorable, but they are an intelligent and articulate pair, not a couple of bigoted rabble-rousers. They see race in American society with unblinkered eyes and they earn our attention, and they would suggest, our sympathy. After all, in their minds they are merely telling it like it is.

Credit director Chuck Smith with keep the pace brisk, with the racial slurs, obscenities, scorn, mockery, and derision cascading over the audience like a verbal tsunami. The energy is consistent throughout the evening, the plot-heavy final minutes only a minor blemish. The production fits snugly in Linda Buchanan’s authentic-looking law office interior. Birgit Rattenborg Wise designed the costumes, Robert Christen the lighting, and Ray Nardelli and Josh Horvath the sound.

“Race” runs through February 19 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $94. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org .

The show gets a rating of four stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. January 2012

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A Christmas Carol

At the Goodman Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – The Goodman Theatre is the custodian of the most popular tradition in Chicagoland holiday entertainment, “ A Christmas Carol.” The 2011 production does not depart in any major way from the 33 previous presentations (excluding a disastrous revival many years ago that turned the story into a circus). There may be a few tweaks in the staging, but attending the 2011 revival will be like visiting an old friend. It’s the same irresistible blend of Victorian sentimentality, fantasy, preaching, and realism.

The current edition retains the fine Tom Creamer adaptation, which veteran audiences can almost recite by memory. Everyone on stage is colorfully outfitted in mid Victorian costumes. The dances and carols presumably are authentic nineteenth century, and the cries for social justice and sympathy for the poor and the outcast are Dickensian to the core. “A Christmas Carol” remains a sacred trust for this theater and revisionists need not apply. Some past Goodman productions have displayed more spectacle and special effects, or had more music but the play remains the thing. I doubt we will ever see the show presented in modern dress or Scrooge played by a woman on a Goodman stage.

Any presentation of the play takes its coloring from how the leading actor interprets Scrooge. Larry Yando is back for his fourth shot at the role and he obviously is having great fun with the part. In the opening scenes Yando’s Scrooge is the nastiest of curmudgeons. By the end of the story when Ebenezer has seen the error of his ways and turns into a good guy, Yando cavorts around the stage in joyous glee. But there is still subtlety in his acting. Near the end, Scrooge visits his nephew Fred and announces in both embarrassment and hope that he has accepted Fred’s invitation to Christmas dinner. It’s a genuinely moving moment and says as much about Scrooge’s conversion from miser to humanitarian as all the character’s previous laughing and dancing about.

The production is Goodman’s gift to the Chicagoland acting community, employing almost 30 actors and musicians during a time when most theaters are dark until after the new year. In the spirit of the story’s plea for tolerance, the production once again is strongly interracial and multi-ethnic. Bob Cratchit’s wife is African American and their little boy Tiny Tim is Asian. But what might jar the spectator in another context perfectly suits the spirit of this show.

The supporting cast is a mix of new faces and veterans of the Chicago stage, like Lisa Tejero (Mrs. Crumb), Ross Lehman (Fezziwig), and Karen Janes Wooditsch (Mrs. Cratchit). But first among equals for the fifth straight year is Ron Rains as Bob Cratchit. Rains takes a role that could easily drown in bathos and turns Cratchit into a warm and decent human being. His weeping over the death of Tiny Tim is sincere and unaffected and for the fifth straight year brought a lump to my throat. The acting honors list should also include Elizabeth Ledo as the perky Ghost of Christmas Past and Joe Minoso as Scrooge’s nephew.

The physical production is dominated by Heidi Sue McMath’s vivid and authentic recreation of Victorian fashions and by Todd Rosenthal’s large architectural sets that roll on and off stage to put the action in Scrooge’s bedroom, his office, and elsewhere in London. Complementing the costumes and sets are Robert Christen’s lighting design and Richard Woodbury’s sound design. Andrew Hansen composed the original music performed with great skill by four onstage musicians. Steve Scott directs with an appropriate respect for the show as a holiday icon.

I saw the show at a weekday evening performance in an audience heavily populated with children. Several of the youngest viewers couldn’t make it through the entire two-hour evening, but I didn’t heard a disruptive whine from any of the kiddies and adolescents in the crowd, the ultimate tribute to the spell Dickens’s morality tale/ghost story has cast for almost 170 years.

“A Christmas Carol” runs through December 31 at the Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6:30 p.m., with some noon matinees. Tickets are $25 to $92. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars

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Photos Courtesy of Goodman Theatre December 2011

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Red

At the Goodman Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – The final moment of “Red” at the Goodman Theatre captures the artist Mark Rothko standing in his darkened studio gazing at a red rectangle radiating with luminous color on a canvas. It’s a magical visual moment and a fitting climax to John Logan’s scintillating drama about modern art and lots of other things.

“Red” is a 100-minute two-character exploration of Rothko’s heart and soul. Rothko was a leader of the abstract expressionist movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s and one of the most fascinating personalities in the turbulent and contentious group that grabbed the leadership in contemporary art for the United States.

Rothko won international fame for giant canvas that are boldly simplified abstract compositions. He relied chiefly on color and ambiguous boundaries enclosing rectangular. Rothko sardonically acknowledged that some people will sneer that a child could paint in his style. But for the artist, his paintings were complex organisms that should elicit a mystical response from the sensitive viewer.

Rothko was a curmudgeon of the first rank. He did not suffer fools gladly, fools that included the art public, art critics, gallery owners, other artists, and his new assistant, a young man named Ken. For much of the play Rothko uses Ken as a sounding board for his aesthetics, bullying and harassing the young man with his monomania and his all-consuming dedication to his art.

Ken absorbs Rothko’s abuse silently until near the end of the play the young man erupts, calling the older man out as a hypocrite and a fraud among a cascade of other derogatory epithets. For Ken, Rothko is a washed up artist in a school being bypassed by the emerging pop artists. The art world now belongs to Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, all artists Rothko dismisses as ephemeral talents who create only for the moment and not for the ages. But is the older man really anxiously looking over his artistic shoulder at a new generation displacing him and the other abstract expressionists?

The action takes place in 1958 and 1959 in Rothko’s Bowery studio in New York City. There he is working on a commission to complete a series of paintings that would hang in the plush dining room of an upscale new restaurant called the Four Seasons in the new Seagram Building in downtown Manhattan. The commission becomes a classic devil’s bargain between art and commerce, as Ken points out as he lambasts his employer. Rothko himself agonizes over the Four Seasons project, shuddering with the knowledge that his precious paintings will hang on walls as a backdrop for power lunches for rich executives unworthy of his art.

“Red” probably makes for stirring reading on the printed page, but this is one play that must be seen and heard to capture its full impact. It’s not just the words but the passion behind the words that makes the work so special. And in guest star Edward Gero and local actor Patrick Andrews, Goodman has cast a pair of actors with the performing chops to bring Rothko’s world alive.

Gero’s volcanic performance brings Rothko’s slash and burn personality to explosive life. Much of Rothko’s dialogue amounts to an advanced art appreciation class, but with Gero fulminating with his brawling opinions, art rampages out of the classroom and the museum and into real life, or at least real life as Rothko lived it. Audiences will love the over-bearing and ill-mannered tyrant, but they aren’t in the artist’s line of fire. We can listen happily to Rothko’s churlishness all night, but when the play probes the rarefied realms of aesthetics and high art, we are riveted, even if the back and forth discussion of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites is philosophically arcane. So “Red” is dramatic, but it’s also funny and informative. This isn’t art talk to sooth and flatter audience middlebrows. This play really shows how art works, for the artist and the viewer.

It’s fascinating to watch Patrick Andrews play Ken as Rothko’s verbal whipping boy for much of the play. We sense there is a wound-tight intelligence within the young man and his explosive attack on Rothko comes as no surprise. He’s been biding his time and when his moment arrives, he’s armed and ready. And what is Rothko’s response after Andrews/Ken concludes his lambasting? “You give up too easily.” Gero’s Rothko may be a boor but he’s not thin skinned.

Along with the intense verbal byplay between Rothko and Ken, the audience gets to eavesdrop on actual acts of artistic creation, climaxed by a feverish painting spree by the artist and his assistant as they slather red paint on a giant canvas with silent ferocity.

Under the direction of Robert Falls, “Red” cleanly shifts between comedy and debate. The language seems so right for both characters that one is tempted to believe that Logan was a fly on the wall in Rothko’s studio, copying the words as Rothko and Ken delivered them and then rendering them verbatim in the play. The audience will leave the theater feeling assured that they have seen the real Rothko in all his complexities.

The designers are full partners in the success of the evening. Todd Rosenthal has designed an authentic looking art studio that encloses the action. Birgit Rattenborg Wise’s costumes are just right, and all praise goes to Keith Parham’s lighting, down to the unforgettable final image. Richard Woodbury composed the original music that interweaves with the classical music Rothko liked while working.

“Red” runs through October 23 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $84. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com September 2011

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Chinglish

At the GoodmanTheatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago—By now the buzz is out that the Goodman Theatre is offering a very hot show in “Chinglish.” The comedy has already been extended and is announced for a transfer to New York City this autumn. All this recognition is well earned. “Chinglish” is a hugely entertaining play with its deft blend of pure comedy and engaging substance.

“Chinglish” is the creation of Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang, who uses his observations of both Eastern and Western cultures to validate the Rudyard Kipling line that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” Kipling was referring to the gulf in cultural understanding between Great Britain and India in the nineteenth century. Hwang’s subject is the gap between China and America today.

“Chinglish” centers on the attempt by Daniel Cavanaugh of Cleveland to establish his family’s sign business in China. Daniel’s pitch is that signs in public places in China have been guilty of laughable gaffs in translation between English and Chinese. His immediate goal is convincing the culture minister Cai to buy his proposal. The locale is a city called Guiyang, a small town the minister admits, with only 4 million people.

The opening scenes in “Chinglish” are devoted to the comical misunderstandings that emerge from garbled translations of the negotiations between Cai and Daniel as filtered through an inept young Chinese translator. Daniel has the apparent advantage of employing an Australian consultant named Peter who has lived in China for almost 20 years. Peter is fluent in Chinese and claims to be hip to all the subtle social conventions Daniel must conquer on the road to cementing his deal with the minister.

Peter is the play’s most interesting character, a Westerner who casts his lot with the East and ends up as a man accepted by neither. He’s a poignant figure at the end of the play, a man simultaneously with two cultures and no culture. Cai, the corrupt minister, earns some unexpected sympathy as he goes off to jail at the end of the play, wearing his old Cultural Revolution uniform with dignity and a brave acceptance of his fate in a country where justice is a shadowy concept.

In the early scenes, the play looks and sounds like it will cheerfully coast on the comical confusions that result from the hilarious back-and-forth verbal exchanges between Chinese and English. That would make “Chinglish” basically a one-joke play, though a continuously funny joke. Much of the dialogue is conveyed through subtitles flashed onto the set that convey the Chinese side of the dialogue, making the play as funny to read as to hear.

But gradually “Chinglish” takes on dramatic heft. Daniel starts an affair with Xu Yan, the attractive vice minister of cultural affairs and initially Daniel’s adversary in the proposal negotiations. Hwang explores the divergent attitudes toward love and marriage and male-female relations between America and China. Especially in matters of romance, the two sides are never on the same page. Seeing such matters through Chinese eyes offers some startling perspectives on matters Americans might consider cut and dried.

Hwang’s insight into the conflicting mindsets of East and West elevate “Chinglish” from a thoroughly enjoyable sitcom into a more provocative two hours. The play wisely doesn’t go overboard on sociological analysis and doesn’t take sides. The playwright fires his mockery and satire in equal measure at both cultures.

James Waterston is superb as Daniel Cavanaugh, the seemingly naïve young man way over his head in dealing with the nuances of Chinese social and business practices. Waterston is expert at conveying Daniel’s innocence and frustration but he also digs deeper into the man as Daniel reveals his startling back story in the second act. Stephen Pucci, who looks a lot like Ringo Starr, is outstanding as Peter, a character who isn’t what he originally seems to be.

The rest of the ensemble consists of Asian American actors, led by Jennifer Lim as Xu Yan, whose attitude toward sex and love and marriage throws Daniel for a loop. Larry Zhang delivers a fine comic performance as Cai. Johnny Wu, Angela Lin, and Christine Lin fill out the cast nobly in a variety of supporting roles.

Leigh Silverman’s directing keeps a nice balance between the humorous, often farcical, elements of the play and its more incisive and occasionally serious moments. She could have allowed the play to ride along as a simple laugh riot but she makes sure the depth of Hwang’s script gets a clear and thoughtful hearing.

David Korins has designed a complicate set that fluently rotates among the play’s several interior settings. Korins’s designs even include what looks like a very workable elevator. Anita Yavich designed the costumes, Brian MacDevitt the lighting, and Darron L. West the sound. And major props to Jeff Sugg for his invaluable projections.

“Chinglish” runs through July 31 at the Goodman Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Most performances are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $73. Call 312 443 3800 or visit GoodmanTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com July 2011

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