Odradek
At the House Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – In a brief story by Franz Kafka, Odradek is a harmless and mysterious living object, described as a kind of spool without the thread. Scholars don’t agree on what Odradek symbolizes, but Bret Neveu found enough inspiration in the critter to write “Odradek,” a 75-minute play now receiving its world premiere at the House Theatre.
Neveu
uses Odradek as a trigger for a creepy and often unpleasant tale about a
disintegrating personality. The personality belongs to Kyle, a young man of
indefinite age but likely a teen-ager who lives with his divorced father. The
publicity for the play states that the locale is a small town in Iowa but there
is no sense of geographical place in the House production. All the activity
takes place in a gloomy house with periodic shifts into a doctor’s office at
one side of the stage. 
Kyle apparently is becoming unhinged because his parents divorced. He goes off the deep end when his father starts a relationship with a new family physician, which extends to her sharing the father’s bed as Kyle sometimes looks on.
The play starts realistically, beginning with Kyle trying to punch out his sleeping father. The man takes his son to the doctor who runs some verbal psychological tests on the lad. At home, Kyle encounters Odradek, a creature living under the stairs who resembles a stuffed burlap sack. Kyle and Odradek exchange elliptical bits of dialogue but the creature has no major place in the narrative until the increasingly hallucinatory final minutes.
“Odradek” isn’t really a horror story but it’s filled with unease. The audience is manipulated into a feeling of discomfort waiting for something nasty to happen. This feeling is encouraged by a cello player sawing away on his instrument above the stage, contributing a continuous flow of mournful and lugubrious sound. There is some self-mutilation by Kyle continued by the doctor in a nightmarish scene in her office. The play ends with the doctor and the father flailing about in separate wild phantasmagorical dances, the ultimate images of Kyle bidding a final farewell to his sanity?
Audiences likely will separate into two schools of thought on “Odradek.” Its supporters will praise the production as resourceful and atmospheric, just the kind of edgy discomforting work we can expect from the House. The show may not always make sense but it’s riveting to watch, a worthy challenge to the viewer.
The other school will condemn the play as unpleasant, pointless, portentous, and pretentious. The pacing, under Dexter Bullard’s directing is excruciatingly slow, and while the three actors deliver committed performances, they serve a highly questionable cause. I belong to this school.
I have nothing but admiration for the acting by David Parkes (the father), Carolyn Defrin (the doctor), and especially Joey Steakley (Kyle). They obviously give what the director and the playwright want. The staging is creative, with Odradek starting out as mostly a shadow play against a wall and gradually growing into a corporal reality. The vaguely sinister mood is nicely sustained by Collette Pollard’s set, Lee Keenan’s lighting, the puppet design by Dan Ker-Hobert and Bernie McGovern, and, of course, the baleful cello sounds played by Ruben Gonzalez.
“Odradek” is clearly a matter of taste. The play might work better as a Halloween fright drama. But beneath all the weird trappings, the show is basically a disagreeable portrait of a descent into madness.
We never learn why Kyle has disintegrated mentally. His father seems like a decent man trying to do his best for his son. We don’t learn details of the divorce that tore Kyle’s mind apart so severely. The mother is an invisible off stage presence. Kids experience divorce all the time, so what made Kyle loose control of reality so destructively? The doctor turns into a sadist, perhaps as Kyle perceives her as a threat because of her involvement with his father. Her sadism is worth a couple of stomach churning shudders, but isn’t really credible.
I suppose the author invites us to speculate about the narrative’s many perplexities as we observe, like watching a mental health train wreck, Kyle’s plunge into psychological darkness. But it didn’t work for me and at the end of the 75 minutes I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Odradek” runs through March 5 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 West Division Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 769 3832 or visit www.thehousetheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of two stars. January 2011
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The Nutcracker
by the House Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO - There is the Tchaikovsky “The Nutcracker,” all colorful costumes, the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing snowflakes, and the Waltz of the Flowers in 19th century Europe. And there is the House Theatre “The Nutcracker,” modern and dark, just a sliver of dance, and a lot of psychological complexity.
The House company has carved out an increasingly expanding niche on the local theater scene with its highly personal interpretations of such family entertainment icons as “Peter Pan” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Now, in the spirit of the holiday season, or perhaps as a counterweight to the easy good cheer of the season, the House has rethought “The Nutcracker” at the Steppenwolf Theatre.
“The Nutcracker” originated as one of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantastical stories in the early nineteenth century. Tchaikovsky adapted a few of the plot elements into one of the most popular ballets in the dance repertoire. In the ballet story, the central characters are a pair of children named Clara and Fritz. A mysterious magician named Drosselmeyer comes to the family Christmas partly and gives Clara the gift of a toy nutcracker. The rest of the story tells how Clara falls asleep and dreams that her nutcracker leads an army of toy soldiers against the King of the Rats.
Aside from a couple of brief dance sequences and a couple of songs, the House show is a straight play. Clara is a young woman eagerly awaiting the arrival of her Marine brother. But during the party the family learns that Fritz has been killed in the Iraq war. The news sends Clara into an emotional tailspin in which she organizes her toys to fight the rats she hears in the walls of her house.
In despair, Clara’s parents plan to send Clara to a home for the mentally disturbed, but her uncle Drosselmeyer presents her with a toy nutcracker in the image of her dead brother. Clara’s toys, also made by Drosselmeyer, come to life and prepare for a final battle against the evil forces but seductive forces of the Rat King.
The House version is heavy with symbolism. Clara’s fight against the rats has the flavor of one of those intense fairy tales in which innocence is challenged by the harsh wa6ys of the world. Clara must find the inner strength to defeat the rats, in reality coming to a closure over her brother’s death so she can get on with her life.
The House production gets off to a slow start. The first act introduces the major characters, both Clara’s real life family and the toys that come to life in her imagination. By the intermission, not much has been accomplished in the storyline beyond establishing the basic situation. As so often happens in a House show, the big payoff comes in the second act. That’s when Clara and her toy followers confront the rats in a really chilling scene (this is not a show for children younger than 10 or 11 unless they are mature for their age).
The House production includes an eight-piece string chamber orchestra that performers at the side of the stage, providing musical accents rather than a full score. Aside from Clara and her parents, the players double as guests at the party and as the toys and rats of Clara’s imagination, as well as the dead brother to returns to life as the nutcracker.
The adaptation by Jake Minton and Philip Klapperich includes some humor but mostly this is a drama about a girl caught in a psychological tailspin that threatens to destroy her sanity. The even sounds grim but it is lightened by Tommy Rapley’s imaginative staging, the resourceful performances by the entire cast, and the atmosphere of fantasy that modulates the realism of Clara’s condition. The feel good ending had the young woman sitting next to me wiping tears from her eyes.
First among equals in the cast is an entirely credible Laura Grey as Clara. We follow her desperation and wince at the inabilit6y of her well meaning parents to understand her private grief. If the House ever adapts “Alice in Wonderland,” the troupe won’t have to look far for its Alice. Jake Minton is perfect as Drosselmeyer, faintly exotic with his eye patch and tales of traveling to strange lands. The uncle alone grasps Clara’s inner struggle and Minton convey’s the man’s sympathy and wisdom with just the right mix of droll observation and serious concern.
Geoff Rice and Fannie Hungerford are wonderfully persuasive as thw parents at the end of their tether, trying to reclaim Clara’s mind while dealing with the loss of their son. Clara’s toys are played with spot-on distinct personalities by Ericka Ratcliff, Seth Bockley, Vanessa Stalling, Maria McCullough, and Joshua Holden. And Joey Steakley is really creepy as the cajoling and malignant rat.
The design team does the show proud, starting with Debbie Baer’s whimsical costumes, Collette Pollard’s set, Beth Wilhelm’s lighting, and Kevin O’Donnell’s original music. Whoever designed the frightening rat puppets and the giant teddy bear also deserves a special bow.
“The Nutcracker” runs through December 29 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 North Halsted Street. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 po.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $29. Call 312 335 1650. For more information: www.thehousetheatre.com
The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.
Nov. 2007
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