After the Revolution

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Evanston - “After the Revolution” is a chewy new play about family dynamics and the difficulty of making moral judgments, especially after the fact. For audiences thirsting for a literate, intelligent, stimulating, and accessible new play, this one will fill the bill nicely.

        The Amy Herzog drama premiered in 2010 to strong reviews and has been picked up by the Next Theatre in a solid production that features three generations of very fine local actors.

                                                                                                                                                                 Photo by Elissa Shortridge

    “After the Revolution” centers on an East Coast Jewish family of ostentatiously liberal political and social views. Ben Joseph (Mick Weber) is an in-your-face Marxist, a high school teacher who loves to roil the PTA with his outspoken left wing views. His daughter Emma (Christine Stulik) is a 26-year old woman who just graduated from law school and heads the Joe Joseph Fund, a legal fund dedicated to battling social injustice and named after her recently deceased grandfather. The fund’s current high profile cause is getting a new trial for a Black Panther leader convicted of killing a white police officer.

        Emma’s hero is her grandfather, an iconic martyr to leftists for refusing to name names before congress in the 1950’s, costing him his government job and earning him a place on the McCarthy era blacklist. Emma’s ideals are shattered when her father informs her that Joe Joseph passed U.S. government secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. Her sainted grandfather was actually a Russian spy who lied about his espionage activities under oath.

        Emma is distraught over her grandfather’s perfidy and infuriated with her father for withholding the information, especially after he told her sister Jess (Dana Black) four years previously. The revelation leads to a rupture between Ben and Emma, with the peripheral characters weighing in with their opinions to soothe the troubled domestic waters. These characters include Ben’s female companion Mel (Tasha Anne James), his brother Leo (Phil Ridarelli), Ben’s stepmother Vera (Mary Ann Thebus), an elderly fund donor named Morty (Mike Nussbaum), and Emma’s boyfriend and fund co-worker Miguel (Marin Quijada). It takes time for the spectator to sort out these relationships and identifiers in the playbill would be helpful.

                                                                                                                                                              Photo by Elissa Shortridge

        While Emma seethes with outrage over the revelation about her grandfather, people around her take a more temperate view. After all, the Soviet Union was our ally during the war and was making far greater sacrifices to defeat the fascists than the United States. Plus, the espionage took place decades ago (the play is set in 1999) when attitudes were far different. Family members imply that Emma should cut her grandfather some slack. He was imperfect (as we all are) but he was still a fearless foe of social injustice.

    The play brings up challenging questions about the difficulty of assigning moral blame for acts that happened years ago in different circumstances. Emma disassociates herself from her father, who is crushed by her alienation, and the domestic fracture filters through the entire family. To her credit, Emma eventually undergoes a sea change in her social sensibilities. The civil rights movement is united in believing that the Black Panther was railroaded by a racist trial with a racist judge presiding. All this may be true, Emma says, but what if the man is guilty of murder anyhow. Surely that counts for something. Emma’s sudden wavering over the certainties of the liberal position about the Black Panther is anathema to ultra liberals who wear blinders in holding up the Black Panther as a victim of a racist society, as if his guilt or innocence is irrelevant.

        Emma is the lightning rod for Herzog’s play, but the character is also flawed. Emma’s reaction to her grandfather’s espionage comes across as a little prissy and self-indulgent. Emma’s anguish is more like a snit, assuming a judgmental stance that oozes self-righteousness. But then again, her disillusion is genuine so maybe it’s unfair to criticize her as a spoiled young woman angry that she’s been left out of the family loop about her grandfather’s espionage activities. That’s just one more matter audiences can argue over.

        Stulik makes an impressive Next Theatre debut as the passionate, self-involved Emma. She is nicely matched with the dominating, and domineering, presence that Mick Weber gives Ben Joseph. As the senior citizens in the play, Mike Nussbaum and Mary Ann Thebus are a total joy in their few scenes, Nussbaum’s Morty being compassionate and droll and Thebus’s Vera feisty and opinionated (she has the play’s last words, and they are not conciliatory). There is also a good complementary contribution from Ridarelli as the peacemaking Leo, who refuses to see issues in black and white doctrinaire fashion like a true far leftist. Quijada and Black are also fine in roles that don’t get much playing time but still add shading to the story.

    Kimberly Senior’s directing allows the script’s literacy, wit, and emotion to shine through with credible realism. Keith Pitts designed the detailed all-purpose interior set, Elizabeth Flauto the costumes, Christopher Kriz the sound, and Heather Gilbert the lighting.

     It’s fashionable to sneer at political and social conservatives as intolerant ideologues, but “After the Revolution” paints left wingers with the same brush. It’s a novel position in contemporary American theater and one to give the thoughtful viewer pause. Can liberals like the Joseph family claim ownership to the moral high ground? Maybe, maybe not.

        “After the Revolution” runs through May 13 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.    Apil 2012

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The Girl in the Yellow Dress

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Evanston – The two-character romantic play typically follows a set pattern. A man and a woman have just met. They are very different in lifestyles and initially they don’t hit it off. But gradually they connect, and by the end of the story they are either in a happy-ever-after clinch or they ruefully separate.

        That’s the broad arc of “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” an unsatisfactory play by South African dramatist Craig Higginson that attempts far more than it accomplishes at the Next Theatre.

        The play’s action is located in an upscale apartment in Paris (a beautiful set by Jacqueline and Richard Penrod). The apartment is occupied by Celia, a young Englishwoman obviously with no money problems. Celia earns a few extra francs and occupies her time giving English lessons. Enter Pierre, a young African from the Congo studying art at the Sorbonne university in Paris who wants to improve his acceptable but rough English so he can enhance his chances for success in an English-dominated world. . So, boy meets girl and can romance be very far behind?

        Higginson’s play runs 90 minutes without an intermission, long enough for the storyline to take a number of improbable, not to say ridiculous, turns. There are references to incest and kleptomania. Both characters lie about their earlier lives and there is even a foot fetish bit to unsettle the viewer.

        Celia is wary of Pierre at first and then hostile before suddenly taking the young man as a lover, a radical plot twist that left me wondering if I’d missed a short scene that made that narrative shift the least bit plausible. The play also has ambitions for social relevance. Pierre announces that white people are often intolerant of black people, unfortunately true but scarcely a revelation. Likewise, a cultural gap exists between black Africa and white Europe. Again, true but not a cutting edge observation.  And that’s about as far as the play takes its social relevance.

The play’s bursts of dialogue about race and culture temporarily distract the viewer from the absurdities of the romance. Celia turns out to be a far different woman than we meet at the beginning of the play. She’s a nice young lady but does she ever need counseling to sort out her personal life. Pierre gets plenty of racial animosity off his chest and by the end of the play he at least can claim that his English has improved through Celia’s tutelage. As far as the ascent and descent of their love affair, I didn’t believe a word of it.

The most interesting element in the play is Celia’s explication of the various tenses and moods woven into English. I hadn’t realized what a subtle and complex mode of expression our language is, and I marvel that any foreigner can learn English accurately. But I suspect that’s not the chief message Higginson expects the audience to take from his play.

The play is watchable because of the fine performances by Carrie Coon as Celia and Austin Talley as Pierre. Both actors master their accents (props to dialect coach Eve Breneman). Coon, a very hot young performer right now, plays her role with a sensitivity and intensity that indicates she understands and respects the motivations of her character, however improbable they may be. Talley has a strong stage presence and his explosions of anger at the racial divide he faces daily are expressed with conviction and eloquence.

Joanie Schultz is the director. She’s gotten committed performances from Coon and Talley but the play’s weaknesses cannot be masked by any directorial wizardry. Marianna Czaszar designed the costumes, including a whole wardrobe of outfits for Celia, ending with the yellow dress of the title. Thomas Dixon is the sound designer and Diane Fairchild designed the lighting.

“The Girl in the Yellow Dress” runs through February 26 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 ext. 2 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

       The show gets a rating of two stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.                   February 2012

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Maple and Vine

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Evanston – Katha and Ryu are a married couple fed up with their harried lives in the year 2011. Ryu hates his 60-hour workweeks as a doctor and Katha is discontented with her job in front a computer screen. Plus, she is drenched in depression following a miscarriage.

    Katha accidentally meets Dean, a well-groomed and outwardly mild mannered middle-aged man who lives within the city in a gated community totally dedicated to living life as it was lived in 1955. Katha and Ryo are tempted by a vision of a simpler, happier life in the era of “Ozzie and Harriet,” when gender roles were clear-cut. Women were homemakers and men were the breadwinners. So the couple walks away from their 2011 life and joins the re-enacted world of 1955.

   That’s the intriguing narrative premise in Jordan Harrison’s new play “Maple and Vine,” opening the 2011-2012 season at the Next Theatre.

      The play’s concept can go several ways. It can be a fantasy in the “Twilight Zone” mode. It can be an exercise in nostalgia along the lines of “Back to the Future,” or it can take a darker path into social criticism, playing off the “good old days” against today’s technology obsessed society. “Maple and Vine” flirts with all three but never settles on a clear line. The audience likely will leave the theater unsure where the play wants to take them.

   The adjustment of Katha and her Japanese-American husband to the 1955 community outwardly seems placid under the mentoring of Dean and his ostentatiously agreeable wife Ellen, the leaders of the community. Residents are expected to go the whole hog in transferring back to the mid 1950’s. All synthetic fabric clothing has to be discarded if the fabrics were invented after 1955. Grey Goose vodka is out, the brand being post 1955, but Smirnoff is fine.

The community has a standing committee of authenticity to ensure that the lifestyles don’t wander beyond 1955. As a concession to modern times, Dean keeps a cell phone locked in a drawer for use in emergencies only. Otherwise, electronic gadgets and other forms of social networking are out of bounds.

        By intermission, “Maple and Vine” seemed like a one-joke comedy drama that had no place to go. But in the final act Harrison injects a couple of plot devices to intensify the action. We learn that Dean is gay and is having a passionate affair with Roger, Ryu’s boss at the box factory where he has been assigned a menial job. Ryu is also subjected to blatant racial abuse because of his Japanese background. Homophobia and racism are openly accepted, even encouraged, in the community, so maybe those good old days weren’t so good after all.

        By the end of the play Dean and Roger have fled together into the real world where presumably they can live together in the more enlightened 2011. But Katha and Ryu have settled in nicely in their 1955 environment. Katha even has a baby and has usurped Ellen’s leadership role in the community following Dean’s abandonment. Katha even insists that the residents accelerate their intolerance toward her husband in keeping with the authentic racist spirit of the time.

    

        Taken realistically, “Maple and Vine” tells a preposterous story. It’s inconceivable that a community could exist as an island of historical purity within a large modern city. And the picture of the 1955 as all “I Love Lucy” and “I Like Ike” stacks the deck toward wholesomeness. The time also included the young Elvis Presley and the counterculture Beat Generation. The passionate homosexual affair between Dean and Roger comes out of nowhere in the second act and doesn’t connect with anything else in the story. Katha’s encouraging the community to step up its racial attacks on her husband stretches audience credulity beyond the breaking point.

        The play succeeds best at the comic level, with back and forth contrasts between the lifestyles of today versus 1955. Those contrasts provide easy, comfortable laughs, especially for spectators of a certain age who recollect the fashions and slogans of the 1950’s. It isn’t very deep but it’s entertaining.

I suspect that the playwright had serious matters in mind beneath the play’s humor, but if so they need clarifying. The play premiered at the 2011 Humana Festival, where it created something of a stir, so we may be witnessing a work in progress that will be improved by firming up its talking points. Is the present time an impersonal age shorn of human contact as we allow electronic gadgets to do our communicating for us? Or are we more advanced today than the 1950’s, once we cut through the seductive haze of nostalgia that suggests a less complicate, thus better time? Such questions worth exploring and the playwright may feel he’s addressing them, but the script lacks focus.

        The play is staged as a series of short scenes with the characters (and stagehands dressed in the style of the 1950’s) sliding panels back and forth to change scenes. The five-member cast is led by Molly Glynn as Katha and Jenny Avery as Ellen. The two female characters are the sturdiest and most interesting people in the story and Glynn and Avery bring them alive nicely. Lawrence Grimm (Dean), Paul D’Addario (Roger) and Peter Sipla (Ryu) do what they can with the less rounded male characters.

        Damon Kiely is the director. The first act meanders, but that may be more the script than the directing. Keith Pitts designed the sets and Alex Meadows designed the historically authentic costumes. Lindsay Jones is the sound designer and Diane Fairchild designed the lighting.

        “Maple and Vine” runs through December 4 at the Next Theatre, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m., with some Saturday matinees. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 or visit nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.

           Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.   Nov. 2011

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The Metal Children

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Evanston – “The Metal Children” is about censorship and the clash of values, among other things. It’s those other things that muddy what could be a stimulating and relevant drama.

       Adam Rapp wrote “The Metal Children” partly based on his own experience of having a young adult novel banned from a Pennsylvania high school because of R-rated material. Rapp’s play is receiving its Midwest premiere at the Next Theatre.

        Tobin Falmouth is an author of young adult novels and one of the many male losers who populate Rapp’s plays. Tobin is in deep emotional distress. He’s separated from his wife, who left him for a younger man, and he has no respect for his literary accomplishments. Tobin slouches through the entire play, depressed and insecure and self-pitying, and involuntarily the center of a furious controversy in the small town of Midlothia  in “America’s heartland.”

 

        Tobin wrote a book a few years called “The Metal Children” that deals with teen-age pregnancy and abortion among other sensitive, divisive issues. The Midlothia school board ordered the novel withdrawn from the school curriculum and scheduled a public hearing to determine if the ban should be permanent.

        The sad sack Tobin reluctantly goes to the town so he can lend his voice to the emotional conflagration surrounding his novel. As soon as he checks into a local motel he plunges into a maelstrom of vigilante terrorism and violence waged by opponents of “The Metal Children.” High school girls, under the spell of his book, are deliberately getting themselves pregnant and plan to leave town to start a commune in Idaho where they will raise their children in seclusion. At the same time, boys in the school wearing pig masks are scurrying around town defacing property. Finally, one of the masked boys attempts to kill Tobin.

        The narrative’s pay-off obviously will be the school board public meeting, an event that doesn’t take place until the start of the second act. Several speakers address the meeting, for or against banning the book. The meeting, at least in the Next production, tilts the discussion away from the opponents. The moderator is obviously biased against “The Metal Children.” The adult who speaks against the book makes articulate comments (and she is even more articulate and cogent in a scene later in the play). But otherwise the adversaries are portrayed as religious right stereotypes.

        Still, Rapp deserves some credit for allowing the conservative adult to state her case with intelligence as well as passion. Perhaps the book banners aren’t all cartoon bigots threatening liberal verities of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry with their intolerance. Maybe authors can be condescending and elitist. Maybe people have the right to establish the values they believe are right for their community. The play obliquely raises the issue of whether artists need to be held accountable for the consequences of their art, no matter how innocent their intentions. Likewise, should proponents of book banning be held responsible for the violence their well-meaning stand may arouse?

        Curiously, Tobin has little to say for himself when it’s his turn to speak at the meeting. He delivers a hangdog and wandering monologue that mostly sidesteps the censorship issue. He says he wrote the book for no greater purpose than the necessity of getting it out of his system and he certainly never intended to hurt anyone—scarcely a forceful defense of freedom of speech. Tobin further abandons the moral high ground by allowing himself to be seduced by one of his 16-year old admirers from the high school.

    For audiences anticipated a fiery give-and-take about family values and censorship, “The Metal Children” is a bit of a puzzlement. Rapp slithers around the subject, concentrating on his indecisive mope of a central character. The play also stretches the credulity of the spectator. It’s difficult to accept that a bunch of high school girls could get pregnant and move en masse to create their own society in Idaho. Tobin’s seduction is both distasteful and improbable.   And “The Metal Children” sounds like a very weird book whose appeal to teen-age readers seems questionable. And those boys in pig masks running around vandalizing and assaulting are ludicrous. Finally, the play ends on a lame note that resolves nothing.

        As Tobin, Sean Cooper is the heart and soul of the play. Cooper delivers a nuanced performance in a difficult role that must largely be played in an emotional monotone. Tobin isn’t a particularly sympathetic character, with his whining and relentless glumness, but Cooper makes him interesting and often witty in a droll way.

     The large supporting ensemble includes some well-known names in area theater, notably Laura T. Fisher as the spokesperson for banning the book, Bradley Mott as the town meeting moderator, Marc Grapey as Tobin’s agent, and Meg Thalken as the motel proprietor. There is also capable work by Caitlin Collins, Paul Fagen (a fine performance as the liberal English department head who suffers the most from the conservative campaign), Caroline Neff, and Nicole Ripley.

 Joanie Schultz’s directing doesn’t totally overcome the meandering nature of Rapp’s script. Chelsea Warren designed the multipurpose set, Joanna Melville the costumes, Jared Moore the lighting, and Nick Keenan the sound.

        “The Metal Children” runs through May 8 at the Next Theatre, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Saturday matinees are also scheduled for April 23 and 30 and May 7. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.  April 2011

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Madagascar

 

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Evanston – “Madagascar” portrays how the mysterious disappearance of a young man impacts on three people close to him. That sounds straightforward enough, but nothing is straightforward in this J. T. Rogers drama now receiving its Midwest premiere at the Next Theatre.

        “Madagascar” takes place in a dingy hotel room overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome. Three actors portray the three essential people in the play along with numerous peripheral men and women of no consequence in the story.

The dialogue consists of fragmentary and elusive (and allusive) monologues that criss-cross among the three characters. The characters rarely talk to each other and mostly are unaware of the presence of the others in the room.

     

For much of the opening act the narrative makes little linear sense. The trio on stage speaks of events and thoughts and people as yet unfamiliar to the audience. I spent the first 30 minutes of the act trying to connect the dots among the figures on stage as they shifted in time and place. Toward the end of the act the storyline starts to clarify and the second act solidifies the narrative. But early on it is tough, frustrating going for the spectator.

The chief characters are Gideon Paul Doyle, the young man who mysteriously disappears, his twin sister June, and their mother Lillian, and Nathan Sanders. He’s a middle-aged economist who is having a long-running adulterous affair with Lillian, continuing right up to the painful death of Lillian’s husband, Arthur, a far more eminent economist and Nathan’s colleague.

Gideon Paul disappears, apparently on purpose, and his absence devastates his sister and mother. Lillian, already dealing with the guilt of her affair with Nathan and the death of her husband, is overwhelmed by guilt over her son’s vanishing. We get a cloudy portrait of the young man as charismatic, handsome, and willful. He flees to Madagascar to engage in some kind of humanitarian work, but his purpose obviously is to distance himself from his mother, probably out of resentment for her affair with Nathan. But like so much else in the play, the young man’s motives are never clarified and much of the story is recounted by characters with conflicting memories of the past.

Rogers coats his play with a veneer of melancholy profundity and metaphors as the characters toss off clusters of verbal cadenzas that probe their grief and confusion. There are references to classical mythology and classical sculpture surely intended to enrich the story, but they never connect with the storyline. Indeed, there seems no reason to confine the story to that desolate hotel room in Rome except that it’s a location that briefly intersected the lives of the missing Gideon and his sister and mother.

        

The storyline has a strong whiff of soap opera, but the playwright dresses up his talk with musings about themes like social responsibility and guilt.  The characters are self involved and estranged and it’s difficult to relate to any of them, even Lillian with her multiple sorrows. June and Lillian end tragically and Nathan is left alone with his regrets and sense of loss, but I didn’t much care. The characters, for all their suffering, never moved me.

Fortunately, the Next Theatre favors “Madagascar” with a superior production. The assured performances by Carmen Roman, especially brilliant as the anguished Lillian; Cora Vander Broeck as June; and Mick Weber as Nathan make the playwright’s language sound more poetic and meaningful that it deserves. Director Kimberly Senior orchestrates the movements among the three characters to vivid visual effect. Her sensitivity and insight preserve the physically inert drama from lapsing into tedium and disguises the faux profundity that too often oozes into the language.

Jack Magaw’s set—a dingy and almost bare room leading out to a balcony--establishes the emotionally chilly tone of the play. It’s a perfect visual representation of the alienation of the characters, like an Edward Hopper painting. Sean Mallary’s dramatic lighting joins with Magaw’s set to sustain the Hopper-like mood of isolation. Christine Pascual designed the costumes and Chris Kriz designed the sound and composed the original music.

“Madagascar” runs through February 20 at the Next Theatre, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 485 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of three stars.  January 2011

           Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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The Piano Teacher

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Evanston – For the first half of “The Piano Teacher” at the Next Theatre, a pleasant elderly woman named Mrs. K chats directly to the audience. She even directs an usher to pass out cookies to spectators in the first row. But we know that any play opening in such an unassuming manner is headed for deep emotional waters.

        Mrs. K is a retired piano teacher, a widow who lives alone in a conventional lower middle class home in an unidentified city. She uses the name K because the full name of her late husband is much of a mouthful. To relieve her loneliness, Mrs. K starts telephoning her former piano students, but only two respond, a woman named Mary and a man named Michael. She also received repeated phone calls from someone who refuses to talk at the other end of the line.

        Halfway through the intermissonless 90-minute play, we know there are some hidden depths beneath the story’s superficially placid surface. It would be unfair to future audiences to go into too much detail about the plot, and I’m not sure I understood all the points that playwright Julia Cho was trying to make. A sinister atmosphere of ambiguity hangs over the narrative. The name K also appears in the works of Franz Kafka and there is a definite Kafka-esque unease to the storyline.

        Without giving away too much, it can be said that the crux of the play resides in the character of Mrs. K’s deceased husband. He lived in some small European country and survived the horrors of warfare over there. The Holocaust isn’t specified but it’s implied. His experiences apparently left psychological scars, mental damage he carried into his resettlement in the United States and his marriage to the much younger woman who became Mrs. K. The dysfunctional Mr. K left a grim legacy revealed with the appearance of Mary and Michael.

   There are some perplexities in Cho’s narrative. How much can we believe Mrs. K as she chats, amiably at first and with increasing tension as the play continues? We see her take phone calls from the silent caller. But Michael mentions that he has called her and she repeatedly hung up on him. Who should we believe? Does Michael perhaps exist only in Mrs. K’s imagination? And how could Mrs. K claim total unawareness of her husband’s psychological disruptions? Can denial run that deep? Or is she willfully dissembling to the audience. Early in the play she notes some advice she received from her mother: "Never be 100 percent honest." Is she deceiving us for some self-serving reason?

        The theater does not lack for plays about families concealing dark secrets. In these dramas, the placid surface of family life is disturbed by explosive revelations, usually in the final scenes, exposing what has been buried for many years. That’s the core of “The Piano Teacher.” But I left the theater not quite sure what to believe. Something dire must have occurred in Mrs. K’s home while her husband was alive, something inflicted on impressionable children that they carried into their adult lives. But my perception was clouded by uncertainty as to how reliable a guide Mrs. K is. And if there were monstrous things happening to her young students, why did they continue with her for so long?

        The play is carried by Mrs. K, who delivers most of the show’s language in what is really a vast monologue broken only by the late appearances by Mary and Michael. It’s a daunting role that Mary Ann Thebus carries off with distinction, in spite of a handful of line fluffs on opening night. She persuasively makes Mrs. K’s mental shifts from pleasant to puzzled to fearful to outraged to desperate and defeated.

        The key to the play is Mrs. K’s encounter with Michael, her most gifted student, who returns for reasons never clarified for me. Manny Buckley’s monologue as Michael holds the key to the story but it doesn’t quite come off. And the overall impact of the play suffers as a consequence. Sadieh Rifai is more successful in the sketchily written role of Mary.

        The physical production underscores the shadowy atmosphere as the narrative unfolds, thanks to the detailed interior set by Keith Pitts, the costumes by Alex Meadows, the moody lighting by Gina Patterson, and the original music and creepy sound design by Victoria Delorio.

        Lisa Portes is the director. Her directing is unobtrusive but I sensed that she left too much of the play’s subtext unexplored. There is a lot in “The Piano Teacher” that the audience can only speculate about, but even with all the ambiguity, the narrative could stand some sharpening. Some of the problem falls on the playwright, who refuses to give us firmer information about Mr. K’s horrific experiences in Europe (we never even learn his nationality or ethnic roots). But “The Piano Teacher” still remains worth doing and worth seeing, if only for the Thebus performance. It’s a tantalizing, elusive, frustrating playgoing experience.

        “The Piano Teacher” runs through December 5 at the Next Theatre, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org .

             The show gets a rating of three stars.

                Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.       November 2010

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Return to Haifa

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        EVANSTON—“Return to Haifa” originated as a 1968 short novel by the Palestinian writer and political activist Ghassan Kanafani. It was made into a motion picture in 1982, possibly the first Palestinian film. In 2008, Israeli writer Boaz Gaon adapted Kanafani’s book into a play. Now the Chicago playwright M.E.H. Lewis has created a new version, also called “Return to Haifa,” receiving its world premiere at the Next Theatre.

        Kanafani’s novella tells about a Palestinian couple forced to flee from their home in Haifa amidst the chaos surrounding the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. In the confusion, the couple left behind their infant son. That son was discovered by the Jewish couple who took possession of the home and raised the child as an Israeli.

           

        Twenty years later, the Palestinians, now living a grim life in the Ramallah refugee camp, revisit their Haifa home during the opening of borders between Palestine and Israel. The Palestinians find their home occupied by the Israeli couple and their infant son now grown into a strong young man serving in the Israeli army. The Palestinians confront the young man as his biological parents, but he rejects them, feeling a complete identification with his Israeli upbringing and resentful that his biological parents abandoned him in his crib. The story ends on a bleak note, with both sides standing on either side of a giant chasm of mistrust and hostility that can never be bridged.

        The Gaon and Lewis plays attempt an even-handed approach to an incendiary topic that likely will arouse indignation on both sides of the narrative. Both the Palestinian and Jewish characters state their case with passion and some eloquence. Sarah, the Jewish wife, takes the most bipartisan position, empathizing with the plight of Palestinians who fled their homes in panic in 1948 and now live in squalid circumstances with a simmering sense of injustice.

        But the story deals with more than the rights and wrongs of the politics in the Middle East. The story raises issues about identity. Does the young man belong to his biological parents or to the couple who nurtured him from infancy? And who really owns the land? These are heartbreaking questions with no adequate answers.

       According to Next director Jason Southerland, the Lewis play was in revision practically up to curtain time. Unfortunately, the script still needs much work. The heart of the play is the meeting between the young man and his Palestinian biological parents within the walls of the house in Haifa that originated as Palestinian and is now Israeli. But the meeting doesn’t happen until the end of the play in a long final scene overloaded with political debate on top of the very human conflict between the two families.

        The first act consists of a confusing prologue and eight scenes that do little more than introduce the audience to the Palestinian and Israeli couples. We hear the back-story of the Jewish couple, survivors of the Holocaust and the loss of their young son to Nazi violence. The Palestinian husband takes a sanguine view of the political ferment of the time, insisting that Jews and Arabs can live in harmony. But mostly both couples banter and bicker affectionately for an hour before intermission, carrying the narrative up to the flight of the Palestinians and the Israeli discovery of the baby left behind. All this could have been telescoped into a couple of scenes to advance the story to 1967 and the central meeting between the two families.

        The final scene is so emotion-laden it taxes the powers of the viewer to absorb all the passions expressed by both families, escalated by the appearance of the young man claimed by both sides. As written, the scene belongs to the wives (the husband of the Jewish wife had been killed 11 years previously by an Arab bullet). Both Saren Nofs-Snyder (Sarah) and Diana Simonzadeh (Safiyeh, the Palestinian mother) pull out all the stops as mothers and symbols of the Arab/Israeli divide. The scales tip toward Safiyeh because she’s the mother who lost her child and sympathy naturally goes to the losers in a battle and the Palestinians as painted in this play certainly are the losers, whatever the merits of the Israeli point of view.

        Lewis should rethink the structure of her play, getting to the meat of her story sooner and then allowing more stage time to explore the grievances and claims of both families so the audience isn’t overloaded by the operatic bursts of passion that saturate the final scene.   

        Along with the strong performances by the two actresses, there is excellent work by Anish Jethmalani as the Palestinian husband who descends from optimism to embittered pessimism by the Palestinian defeats in war after war with Israeli. Jethmalani’s performance is a model of realism, intelligence, and sensitivity. Daniel Cantor plays the Israeli husband and Miguel Cohen the son under psychological siege. Todd Garcia rounds out the ensemble in multiple roles.

        Tom Burch designed the effective all-purpose indoor and outdoor set. Whitney McBride designed the costumes, Jared Moore the lighting, and Nick Keenan the sound.

        “Return to Haifa” runs through March 7 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.    February 2010

      Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology  Pageant

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—The meanest critic in the world wouldn’t have the heart to write a negative review of “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant,” the 2003 show now playing at the Next Theatre. How can anyone take shots at little kids singing and dancing their hearts out?

        The show explores the life and thought of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology in a one-hour satirical musical performed entirely by children. As theater concepts go, this has got to be one of the nerviest ideas of the new millennium.

        The Next Theatre has assembled a cast of eight youngsters from the northern suburbs who look to range in age from about eight to 12. They all play multiple roles as they sing and dance through the saga of L. Ron Hubbard, his rise and almost fall as the controversial leader of a controversial new religion that has gained international notoriety with the highly publicized allegiance of John Travolta and Tom Cruise.

        The show has a whiff of what “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” may have resembled in its origin as a 15-minute musical in an English school back in 1968.  “Very Merry…” is fetching, cute, funny, and even informative in enunciating the rules and regulations of Scientology. No disrespect to the late Hubbard (he died in 1986) and his followers, but Scientology comes across as one weird faith in this show.

        Yet many people claim to have found personal salvation and spiritual rebirth as members of the church. To the show’s credit, the presentation attempts to be even handed, giving roughly equal time to both the advocates of Scientology and to its opponents, including the United States government.

        Anyhow, the pleasures of “Very Merry…” reside in its playful qualities rather than its documentary efforts. Spectators who insist on a minimum level of professional gloss in their theater may not be entertained. The eight members of the Next ensemble are an enthusiastic and hard working lot, but they are, after all, children. Their acting and singing will be a delight to their fans and ungainly to their detractors.

        The production has an amateurish appearance that I suspect is calculated. The costumes and sets have the homemade look of mothers at sewing machines and props manufactured in school shop classes. Credit Grant Sabin (scenic design), David Hyman (costumes), Mac Vaughey (lighting), and Nathan Leigh (sound and orchestrations), for the artless but whimsical physical character of the show.

        “Very Merry…” was originally written and composed by Kyle Jarrow from a concept by Alex Timbers and became a minor cult hit in New York City, winning a 2004 OBIE award. Jarrow and Next Theatre artistic director Jason Southerland have revised the show, adding four new musical numbers as well as new scenes and characters. Considering the musical runs only 60 minutes, the changes amount to practically a new vehicle, though one in sync with the spirit of the original version.

        Jason Krause takes on the demanding role of L. Ron Hubbard. Krause has an impressive list of TV, radio, and stage credits and gets through the role of Hubbard with commendable stamina. His colleagues consist of Jennifer Baker, John Compton,  Lauren Delfs, Sara Geist, Shaina Jones, Nicole Rudakova, and Kevin Wyant.  They give it their all, and they were rewarded with continuously appreciative reactions throughout the evening from the opening night crowd, which I’m sure included a high percentage of proud family members.

    “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant” runs through January 3 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $25. Call 847 475 1875 or visitwww.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3½ stars.  December 2009

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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End Days

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—Say this for Deborah Zoe Laufer. She’s got quite an imagination and she doesn’t shy away from risks. Consider her new play “End Days” now at the Next Theatre.

        Laufer’s comedy-drama includes a teen-age Elvis impersonator, a Jewish atheist now a born again Evangelical Christ preparing for the Rapture, her daughter who is a 16-year old rebellious goth, and her husband who has been in a near catatonic depression since he was his company’s only survivor in the 9/11 terrorist attack. To round out the character list, there are guest appearances by Stephen Hawking and Jesus Christ (if only in the minds of the wife and the goth daughter).

        “End Days” sounds like a recipe for a pretentious and confusing muddle, but it’s really a humorous and whimsical play that asks some challenging questions about our need for meaning in life, whether it comes from religion, science, or the family.

        The core characters are the Stein family--husband/father Arthur, wife/mother Sylvia, and goth daughter Rachel. The family fled New York City for the suburbs following the 9/11 disaster, where Arthur has lapsed into a nonfunctioning state, hanging around the house in his pajamas and robe and sleeping most of the day. Three months earlier Sylvia became a born again Christian and spends virtually all her time trying to convert her friends, family, and neighbors to Jesus in time for the Rapture that will separate the saved from the damned.

        In reaction to her dysfunctional parents, Rachel has turned goth as protective coloring, yet the girl isn’t just a misfit. She’s potentially brilliant in math and science if she could just work her way through her family’s hang-ups. Into the Stein home comes neighbor Nelson Steinberg, an awkward, innocent, gabby, and endearing teenager with the Elvis complex and a fierce crush on Rachel.

        There is a lot of comedy in “End Days” and even some suspense as Sylvia awaits the imminent approach of the Rapture (she coaxes from Jesus the information that the Rapture will take place that Wednesday).  The audience knows the Rapture isn’t going to happen but as the countdown begins, Sylvia’s intense belief filters across the footlights to the spectator. How is the woman going to react when the big event doesn’t occur? The playwright stirs the pot by injecting an unexpected electrical storm that Sylvia mistakes for the start of the Rapture. And then Nelson disappears and Sylvia fears he’s been taken to heaven while the woman and her family have been left behind.

        The play has its farcical, not to say ludicrous, moments but Laufer has some thoughtful things to say about our need to connect with something or someone to get through life. The most obvious connection, at least for Sylvia, is her uncompromising religious faith. But the droll apparition of Stephen Hawking makes a strong case for science. And Nelson just wants to belong, attaching himself to the Stein family like a surrogate son. Apparently Nelson’s parents, actually stepparents, have no problem with the boy virtually moving in with the Steins. Like Jesus with Sylvia, Nelson becomes a kind of savior, drawing Arthur out of his shell and introducing Rachel to Hawking’s theories and breeching her antisocial behavior.

       Laura T. Fisher carries the production as Sylvia by making the woman’s religious fanaticism credible. Fisher doesn’t allow us to patronize Sylvia as a deluded loony tune. Her Sylvia is all business in her religious mania, formidable and rigid but still human. We know Sylvia is misguided, but she’s above ridicule and mockery. When was the last time we saw a religious fanatic on the stage or in a movie that we didn’t patronize, or fear?

     Fisher gets a lot of help from the other four members of the ensemble. Adam Shalzi endows Nelson with charm, sweetness, and the grit to accept life’s hard knocks with open arms (he witnessed his father’s suicide by hanging as a boy). Carolyn Faye Kramer is a delight as the feisty, foul-mouthed Rachel with her goth clothes and makeup as tools of survival in the bizarre Stein household. William Dick has the play’s most difficult role as Arthur, traumatized by guilt as the only company survivor from 9/11. He is affecting in his low-keyed inertia, though Arthur’s sudden breakout into normalcy near the end of the play is hard to swallow. Joseph Wycoff doubles as Jesus and Stephen Hawking and makes both fantasy characters believable, but he needs to project more loudly as the wry Hawking.

    Director Shade Murray keeps this unlikely theatrical and dramatic brew on track, a considerable achievement for a show that could fly off into caricature and sentimentality under a less insightful and steady hand. Andre LaSalle’s domestic interior set is built on angles to reflect the off kilter atmosphere of the action. Lee Fiskness designed the lighting, Melissa Tochia the costumes, and Nick Keenan the original music and the sound, which includes some ear-splitting thunderclaps on Rapture night.

      “End Days” is just the kind of play that turned the Next Theatre into a major venue for cutting edge new drama in the past few years. The play has its flaws, including a wan ending and too much touchy feely emotion as the play winds down. Minor defects notwithstanding, the play remains engaging, stimulating, funny, and relevant, and the performances are uniformly up to the mark. What else does the intelligent playgoer need?

        “End Days” runs through November 29 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Art Center, 927 Noyes Street. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nextheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.        Nov. 2009

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boom

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—We don’t lack for movies and books portraying the end of the world. But there is always room for a fresh spin on this perversely popular subject, like Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s  comedy-drama “boom,” now receiving its local premiere at the Next Theatre.

        The playwright gets high marks for a fresh take on how life ended on earth and how it was rebuilt. Unfortunately, Nachtrieb’s concepts are stronger than his execution. His storyline is provocative, but even at only 80 minutes with no intermission, the play can be a longish sit, especially in its final third.

       “boom” may be about the cataclysmic end of the world, but it doesn’t have all the pyrotechnics of “The War of the Worlds” and literary and cinematic spectacles of that ilk. The play is confined to a single room and offers only three characters.

        The action begins in the underground laboratory and living quarters of a geeky young marine biologist named Jules.  He is playing host to a young journalism student named Jo. The girl is unhappy with her social life in general and her sex life in particular.  So she answers Jules’s Craigslist ad online offering “intensely significant coupling.”  That’s a good-enough come-on for the sex-starved Jo.

        The first date does not go well, especially after Jules informs Jo that he is gay. Then he unfolds his theory of an impending apocalypse. While doing research on a deserted island, he notices strange sleeping habits of the fish. From this phenomenon he extrapolates the idea that a comet is about to strike the earth, destroying humanity. The theory sounds ludicrous to Jo but Jules turns out to be right. The mismatched couple may be the last living people on earth, charged in Jules’s mind with the responsibility of restoring the human race. The fact that Jules is gay and Jo hates babies is a serious impediment to Jules’s salvation mission, but where there’s a will there’s a way.

        The third character in the play is a woman named Barbara. At first she silently provides loud percussion noises from the rear of the stage but eventually we learn that the Jules and Jo story is really a kind of live museum exhibit, with Barbara manipulating the Jules and Jo characters, sometimes with levers.

        So instead of a realistic tale of Doomsday featuring Jules and Jo, what we see is Barbara’s speculation on how the world ended maybe thousands of years ago and how life began again. The resumption of life, in a deft twist at the end, resides not with Jules and Jo but with four fish swimming in a large tank in Jules’s laboratory, a tank the audience has been in the audience’s view throughout the play.

       This may be giving away too much of the plot but foreknowledge shouldn’t inhibit the audience’s interest. What is bothersome is the facetious, sitcom-ish nature of much of the play. There are too many reaches for easy laughs in the improbable romance between the awkward Jules and the bitchy Jo. The girl’s character is a major problem. Either in the writing or in Kelly O’Sullivan’s performance, Jo is all attitude, swearing a blue streak, attacking Jules physically, and generally making herself an unpleasant, strident shrew.

      John Stovkis has better luck with the more rounded Jules, an unlikely candidate for repopulating the world but a young man trying to do his best in what surely is a daunting assignment. Stovkis has a nice flair for physical comedy and should have a good future in the theater playing schlemiel type characters.

        Shannon Hoag plays Barbara, an elusive character with her own back story to flesh out her position as the orchestrator of the Jules/Jo narrative. Hoag takes a breezy approach to the role, though she rises to some nice intensity near the end of the play.

        Next Theatre artistic director Jason Sutherland directs the play with an emphasis to its humor, possibly blunting the nuances of the serious story beneath the laughs. There are thoughtful and intriguing ideas embedded in the narrative that tend to get buried in all the comic sound and fury.

        The Next cannot draw on great technical resources in its theater, but the team of designers has done a creative job in endowing the production with a strong visual and aural presence. Commendation goes especially to Seth Reinick’s lighting, complemented by Andre LaSalle’s persuasive realistic set, Chelsea Warren’s costumes, and Nathan Leigh’s sound and original music.

        “boom” runs through October 11 at the Next Theatre in the NoyesCulturalArtsCenter927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.   Sept.2009

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com  .

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Overwhelming

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—Over a two-month period in 1994, roughly 800,000 men, women, and children were brutally massacred in the east central African country of Rwanda. The outside world took little note of the savagery and most Westerners probably couldn’t even locate Rwanda on a map.

        Playwright J. T. Rogers has written a drama called “The Overwhelming” that attempts to probe what happened in Rwanda 15 years ago when the Hutu faction in the country launched a genocidal attack on the Tutsi people.  The play opened in London in 2006, premiered off Broadway in 2007, and is now receiving a searing production at the Next Theatre.

        “The Overwhelming” is a riveting, disturbing play that asks lots of incisive questions and comes up with very few satisfactory answers, mostly because there are no satisfactory answers. Rogers frames his play around an American academic named Jack Exley who is in the country to obtain material for a book he needs to publish to gain tenure at his Illinois university. The white Exley unaccountably brings along his family--his African American second wife Linda, and his rebellious and troubled 17-year old son Geoffrey—into the danger zone that is Rwanda.

        Exley tries to make contact with Joseph Gasana, a college friend and now a doctor in Rwanda who operates a children’s hospital. But Joseph has disappeared, and Exley’s search for his friend thrusts him into the whirlpool of Rwandan ethnic and political conflict.  Exley thrashes about in an environment where nobody is what he seems and trust is a fast track to disillusion at best and destruction at worst.

        “The Overwhelming” is the kind of drama Graham Greene or John Le Carre would have written had they been playwrights. The story is drenched in moral ambiguity. Exley is an American innocent abroad, completely out of his depth amid the hatreds that roil Rwanda, hatreds dating back to the brutal Belgian colonial rule of the nineteenth century. The Hutus and Tutsis fear and despise each other, killing without qualm in the name of their people.

        Exley demands that the American government do something to stop the violence, at least assist in locating his missing friend. But a variety of white officials—American, French, and South African—remind him that they are outsiders in the country. The United Nations force in Rwanda is a corrupt joke. An American embassy official named Woolsey is a spokesman for the realpolitik of Rwanda. The United States can do nothing to limit the killings in the country even if it wanted to.  The Rwandan factions are determined to slaughter each other, but it’s their country and their problem. As Woolsey notes, Rwanda isn’t the United States, with our democratic institutions and society of law. So stand aside and try not to get hurt.

        The play starts slowly, the first act introducing the main characters who mostly talk a lot. The emotional temperature ratchets up in the second act, leading to a final scene of extreme intensity that ends with Exley making a shattering moral choice. The audience leaves the theater somberly aware of how unstoppable historical forces can be.  White characters in the play initially seem callous in their skepticism about the efficacy of intruding on Rwandan internal affairs in the name of humanity, but the skeptics are also realists.

        The Next staging employs a terrific ensemble of black and white actors under Kimberley Senior’s taut and fluent directing. Si Osborne makes one of his lamentably rare local stage appearances as Jack Exley, the American who learns that our ideals of democracy and tolerance cut no ice with the rival Hutus and Tutsis. Tamberla Perry is Exley’s wife and Rob Fagin is their son. Both are excellent and Fagin is especially good in evoking the confusion and hostility of a teen-ager in a situation beyond his understanding. He asks “Why is everyone here killing each other?”, a simple, naïve question that’s unanswerable.

        The other whites in the drama are played by Jamie Vann as the American embassy official and John Byrnes, as the Frenchman and the South African, character transformations so complete it is hard to believe they are played by the same actor.

    The Rwandan characters are all superbly performed, starting with Dexter Zollicoffer as Joseph and Kenn E. Head as an affable Rwandan government official of indecipherable loyalties. Christoph Horton Abiel is very strong as a servant in Exley’s household. Lily Mojekwu is Joseph’s wife with John Nyrere Frazier and Mildred Marie Langford rounding out the ensemble.

        Tom Burch has designed an effective all-purpose set that relies on sliding rear panels decorated with abstract African art designs. Whitney McBride designed the costumes, Charles Cooper the lighting, and Tamara Roberts the sound.

   I entered the Next Theatre with little enthusiasm, expecting a play that mixes bludgeoning violence with soap box preaching. But what “The Overwhelming” delivered is a story of unnerving complexity, rendered with evenhanded intelligence and knowledge. The result is political drama that is informative and challenging and wonderfully acted.

        “The Overwhelming” runs through May 17 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street.  Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $23 to $38. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars      April 2009.

                   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Dying City

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—How much content can a 75-minute one-act play hold? Christopher Shinn’s “Dying City” at the Next Theatre touches on the Iraq war, the psychology of violence, the 9/11 disaster, and even the TV show “Law and Order” and the writings of William Faulkner. But these all turn out to be periphery issues yielding to a portrait of a fractured marriage and the mysterious death of one of the three characters.

        Shinn’s drama is constructed around a therapist in her late 20’s named Kelly, her husband Craig, and Craig’s identical (and gay) twin brother Peter. The twins are played by the same actor. The action takes place over two nights, the first in July 2005 and the second in January 2004. The setting is Kelly’s apartment in New York City.

        In the opening scene, Peter pays an unexpected, and not necessarily welcome, visit to Kelly. During the course of their initially awkward conversation, we learn that Craig had died in Iraq the previous year of a self inflicted gunshot wound. Was it an accident or a suicide? The official ruling was an accident, but Peter claims “Everyone there knew that dad taught us, from the time we were little, how to shoot, how to handle weapons…” But if Craig’s death was a suicide, then why?

        The 2004 scenes take place on Craig’s last night in New York before he ships out to Fort Benning, Georgia, and eventually to Iraq. Craig is sullen, angry, and distant. Kelly is desperate, seeing her husband slipping away from her emotionally and helpless to get him back. A year later she is still grieving, and still confused. Her conversations with Peter only aggravate her sense of loss and confusion.

        In “Dying City,” truth is elusive. We never learn for sure how and why Craig died in Iraq. He was never explicit in why he fell out of love with the devastated Kelly. Maybe he didn’t know himself. We just know that he was unhappy and bitter, perhaps going back to his relationship with his father, a man scarred by the violence of his service in the Vietnam War. Is it possible to hand down a predilection for violence from father to son?

     Peter is the better written of the two brothers, more appealing, more humorous, and perhaps just as tragic as his dead twin. Peter is a successful actor with at least outward contempt for his work. His homosexuality stresses him out personally and professionally. And Peter, like Kelly, must deal with the problematical death of his brother.

        Shinn shifts the presence of the brothers from scene to scene by the simple device of having one character walk off stage on some pretext, like making a phone call. Then the other brother enters a few seconds later, with a slight change of clothing but a radical change in attitude. Craig is brooding and intense. Peter is outgoing, eager to connect with a reluctant Kelly, and unlike the emotionally withdrawn Craig, he wears his emotions on his sleeve.

        The dying city of the title refers both to New York City and to Baghdad. The disillusioned Craig e-mails his brother from Iraq “It’s clear to everyone now that we are not equipped to bring this country back to life. The city is dying and we are the ones killing it.” And yet the play is not overtly political soapbox attack on the war. It’s a launching pad for the personal demons Craig carries with him into battle.

        “Dying City” premiered in London in 2006 and was critically praised after its off Broadway opening in 2007. The production at the Next Theatre is continuously engrossing, but how much credit goes to the play and how much to the superior acting rests in the eye and ear of the beholder.

        The performances by Nicole Wiesner as Kelly and Coburn Goss as the twin brothers are stunning under Jason Loewith’s taut and sensitive production. Wiesner and Goss have multiple acting credits in local theater but this is the first time both performers have had this kind of platform to display their talent. Wiesner is amazing, especially because for much of the play her character mostly reacts to Craig and Peter. But when she hears from her husband that he no longer lovers her, she breaks down in weeping despair that is wrenching to observe.

        Goss makes credible the two brothers, a device that could come across as stagy and gimmicky. Nothing can completely disguise the artificial nature of the character switches but Goss is so good at establishing the separate personalities of Peter and Craig that the spectator accepts the exits and entrances as a natural convention of the play. Coincidentally, Pablo Schreiber, now starring in the powerful Goodman Theatre revival of “Desire Under the Elms”, played the role of the twins off Broadway.

        Jim Davis designed the effective apartment set. Kristine Knanishu designed the costumes, Keith Parham the lighting, and Nathan Leigh the atmospheric sound.

        I left the theater not sure whether I had seen an important play or just an interesting play elevated to importance by tremendous acting. In the end it doesn’t matter. “Dying City” is an absorbing audience experience and a further testament to what ex artistic director Jason Loewith has meant to the Next Theatre and indeed to the entire Chicagoland theater scene.

        “Dying City” runs through March 8 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street. Most performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $23 to $38. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars.  February 2009

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Well

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—“Well” is an oddball little play that is part performance piece, part social commentary, part autobiography, and part mother-daughter bonding, all presented in a style that recalls Thornton Wilder and Luigi Pirandello in a playful mood.

        The play, which premiered off Broadway in 2004 to laudatory reviews, is receiving its local premiere at the Next Theatre.

        “Well” was written by Lisa Kron, who has gained considerable recognition as a solo performer. The central character in this play is the author, named Lisa Kron. Addressing the audience directly at the beginning of the play, Lisa announces “This play is not about me and my mother.” Instead, it is a “theatrical exploration of health and illness in the individual and the community.”

        Early on, Lisa’s goals for the play are swept away. The show is very much about Lisa and her mother, a frumpy old woman who is dozing off in a recliner chair as the audience enters the theater and is on stage for most of the 100-minute intermissionless evening.

        The play also tosses theatrical convention to the winds. Characters talk directly to the spectators. The actors break character, reverting to their real identities. A girl who bullied Lisa as a child forces her way into the play much against Lisa’s will. The tone shifts back and forth from realism to what might be considered controlled wackiness. Ultimately, the actors, fed up with Lisa’s writing, abandon the stage altogether and the actress playing the mother discards the role for her real persona to lecture Lisa on the failings of her script.

                        
        It all sounds either pretentious or cutesy but the dramaturgy works nicely. It doesn’t take the audience long to plug into the off-the-wall flavor of the show, adjusting their perspective as the people and action on stage shift gears.

       “Well” is more than just an exercise in theatrical tomfoolery. Kron’s mother genuinely is ill and the script raises thoughtful point about illness as it impacts on both the sick and the healthy. Kron’s mother was a social activist in East Lansing, Michigan, during the late 1960’s, fighting for racial integration in her neighborhood in spite of her perplexing and debilitating illness, which she ascribes to severe allergies. Much of the play takes place in a hospital where Lisa is tested for various allergies, a vaguely disturbing set of scenes for all their comic overlay.

        Lisa bickers with her mother, who disputes the ac- curacy of her daughter’s presentation of the older woman. Lisa is also in frequent conflict with an increasingly rebellious cast of supporting performers. She complains that she’s lost control of her own play, yet the show never seems ramshackle. It’s only after leaving the theater that spectators will reflect that they have just witnessed a pretty sophisticated piece of playwriting masquerading as a “what next” slice of spontaneity.

        At the Next Theatre, the crucial role of Lisa Kron is played by Lia Mortensen, an effervescent young woman who resembles Ellen De Generes in her stage personality. Mortensen receives perfect support from Mary Ann Thebus as the mother, a strong personality battling a weak body. The supporting cast all plays multiple roles, both children and adults, and play them well—James Krag, Kat McDonnell, Lily Mojekwu (particularly fearsome as Lisa’s childhood tormentor), and Andre Teamer.

        Director Damon Kiely deftly orchestrates all the clashing moods and styles, keeping the action coherent, fluent, and often funny. Set designer Jack Magaw divides the stage into a highly detailed living room on the left occupied by the mother and her recliner, and a basically open stage filled at various times by large props moved on and off stage by the actors. Debbie Baer designed the costumes, Ray Nardelli the sound, and Charles Cooper the lighting, which plays a central mood role in spotlighting an isolated Lisa and then merging her into action with the other characters.

        While “Well” does explore some meaningful personal and social issues, I didn’t detect as much dramatic substance to the play as other observers. For me Kron’s work succeeds primarily as a well-acted and well-staged exercise in theatrical slight of hand.

        “Well” runs through December 14 at the Next Theatre in the NoyesCulturalArtsCenter,927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $23 to $38. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.nexttheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.         November 2008

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

               

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The U.N. Inspector

At the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

EVANSTON—In 1836 Nikolai Gogol wrote a political satire variously translated as “The Inspector General” or “The Government Inspector.” The comedy predictably attracted the notice of the censors in Tsarist Russia but still became the most popular play in Russian drama.

        In 2005, British playwright David Farr updated Gogol’s play as “The U.N. Inspector,” changing the main character into an Englishman. Now the Next Theatre commissioned Chicagoland playwright James Sherman to adapted Farr’s adaptation, changing the English protagonist into a Chicago loser named Michael Fitzgerald Murphy.

All this puttering hasn’t done the Gogol original any favors. “The U.N. Inspector” is an overlong farce occasionally interrupted by a couple of moments of serious, even dark, theater that don’t mesh with the low comic tone that dominates the evening.

 Gogol’s play describes how the corrupt officials of a provincial Russian town mistake a petty clerk for a visiting government inspector.  Fearing their malfeasance will be exposed, they load the clerk with bribes and the mayor even offers the puzzled man his daughter. The clerk and his servant grab the loot and clear out of town at the moment the officials discover the visitor isn’t a government inspector after all. Just as they learn of their blunder the real government inspector is announced.

At the Next Theatre, Michael Fitzgerald Murphy is a failed real estate agent from Chicago come who travels to a grungy former Soviet satellite state to try to cash in on the opportunities for plunder. Murphy and his companion are languishing in a local hotel, broke and hungry, when the state officials mistake him for a visiting United Nations inspector. The country’s president and his henchman (and henchwoman) ministers fear the inspector will demand an accounting of the $600 million the International Monetary Fund has given the country, money the officials have grabbed to line their own pockets. 

Fearing exposure for their corruption and human rights violations, the officials suck up to Murphy, who doesn’t realize until late in the play what’s elevated his status in the country. But Murphy is happy to accept the bribes the officials fling at him as well as the president’s bimbo daughter.

 Most of the play treats the government officials as caricatures, bumblers who fall all over themselves to placate the U.N. inspector. The officials may be cartoons but they are also brutal and cruel in suppressing their country’s population to preserve their own cushy positions. The play encourages us to laugh at the manic fear of the officials and their toadying to the bogus inspector and then pull back to be horrified by their viciousness. The abrupt shift in tone doesn’t work.

 The satire in “The U.N. Inspector” is virtually nil. There are a couple of decently cynical lines about flaws in the United Nations and the USA’s approach to disadvantaged foreign countries, but the characters are so two-dimensional that they lose their value as satirical targets.

The humor includes one running gross-out gag involving the severed tongue removed from a troublesome local journalist imprisoned by the president. The play ends on a nasty note that intends to highlight just how unprincipled and callous the government officials can be in protecting their turf. Point taken, but it’s not a very illuminating point. We don’t need a double adaptation of the Gogol classic just to inform us that governments can be corrupt. We need wit and insight, elements in short supply in “The U.N. Inspector.”

The Next production, under Jason Loewith’s strident directing, does not lack for energy. The show is worth seeing for Joe Dempsey’s bravura performance as Murphy. Dempsey, who looks and sounds remarkably like Jerry Seinfeld, delivers a brilliant comic impersonation. Dempsey especially soars in the scene where Murphy’s blowhard bravado inflates as he ingests glass after glass of plum brandy in the company of the country’s fawning officials in the presidential palace. Dempsey carries the show, a blessed comic relief from the endless hand- wringing and plotting by the government officials as they seek damage control against the threatening visiting inspector.

The rest of the large cast carries out its assignments with professionalism and comic commitment. Bill McGough is first rate as the overwrought president, though his operatic near breakdown near the end of the play is way over the top. All the corrupt ministers are good in their one-note roles—Joseph Wycoff, Douglas Vickers, Will Schutz, Mark Mysliwiec, and Elizabeth Laidlaw. Tony Bozzuto is excellent as Murphy’s fretful sidekick and Cliff Chamberlain and Alex Goodrich are effective as a pair of thugs who serve as presidential aides. Susan Hart and Kathryn Hribar are solid as the president’s hard-edged wife and her libidinous, pampered teenage daughter.

Grant Sabin designed the clever set that morphs from the president palace to Murphy’s hotel room. Amy Gabbert designed the costumes, Diane Fairchild the lighting, and Misha Fiksel the sound and music. Dialect coach Claudia Anderson deserves credit for the smooth transition between conventional English (when the officials talk among themselves) and a heavily accented Slavic brogue when they address Murphy and his friend.

 “The U.N. Inspector” runs through October 12 at the Next Theatre in the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $23 to $38. Call 847 475 1875 or visit www.NextTheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of three stars.    Sept. 2008

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

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9 Parts of Desire

by the Next Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Evanston—“9 Parts of Desire” intends to bring the Iraqi war down to a human level, away from the political posturing and sound bytes and numbing statistics. The play shows audiences the cost of the conflict among the non-combatant civilians who endure the unending violence and tension of the war, that is, if they are fortunate enough to survive it.

        The show opened in Edinburgh in 2003 and transferred to London the next year. It opened in New York City in 2004 and has since played throughout the country, often performed by another actress. The Next Theatre captured the show for Chicagoland audiences with Raffo starring. The production is installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art for a too short run.

        Raffo impersonates nine women, almost all of them Iraqi. Through them we hear chilling accounts of the toll the war has taken on Iraqi civilians and also the horrific regime of Saddam Hussein. Even the most vociferous opponents of the war will have to concede that the American invasion did rid Iraq, and the world, of a true monster in Hussein and his family.

        The 85-minute show is set within a detailed set of scaffolding and ruins that visually set the tone for the destruction inflicted on Iraq over the course of the war. Raffo changes characters with a sudden switch in a cloak and altered body language, often accompanied by a blackout and occasionally a thunderclap of sound that will make some spectators jump out of their seats.

        The nine women whose voices we hear are a varied lot, beginning with the Mulaya, a professional mourner and continuing with individualized characters like Layla, a painter who collaborated with the Hussein regime by painting nudes and portraits of Saddam and became their sexual plaything.  Several of the women reappear during the play. There is surprisingly little outrage in their accounts of the brutality and death that have been their daily companion for so many years, much of it inflicted by American guns and bombs. They are not desensitized to their suffering and the suffering of those around them, but they accept the devastation as the way of their world.

        Spectators expecting firebrand political polemics from the play, especially Bush bashing, will be disappointed. Hooda, an academic living in exile, expresses her divided attitude about the American invasion. “This war is against all my beliefs, and yet I wanted it.” The agony of living under the insane tyranny of the Hussein regime goes a long way toward justifying the conflict, and yet….

        Raffo’s versatility is an obvious positive in the play.  She can shift characters in a split second, but we are still conscious that it is Raffo on stage, displaying her gallery of women with their mix of bravery and endurance. The play is no facile exercise in the triumph of the human spirit. These women face hardship and danger and heartbreak every day of their lives, a condition unimaginable to the audiences watching the play in this country.  They are survivors, not heroines.

        But audiences will be exposed, at least for a few minutes, to the realities of a conflict that adds to its human cost almost hourly. After watching “9 Parts of Desire,” very few spectators will be able to watch those impersonal TV shots of the war without recognizing the pain and loss of average people caught in a crossfire of mayhem they did not start and cannot control.

        The play’s title is a quotation from Ali ibn Abu Taleb, the founder of the Shiite sect of Islam: “God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”

        Director Joanna Settle is responsible for shaping Raffo’s material into its fluid sequence of mini dramas. Antje Ellermann designed the set, Kasia Walicka Maimone the costumes, Obadiah Eaves the sound (adapted for this production by Andre Pluess), and Peter West the lighting (adapted for this production by Keith Parham).

        “9 Parts of Desire” runs through May 18 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue. Performance schedules vary. Tickets are $23 to $38. Call 847 475 1875.

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The American Dream Songbook

  at the Next Theatre

 By Dan Zeff

EVANSTON—“The American Dream Songbook” explores the American Dream in words and music and finds this elusive holy grail drenched in disillusion, alienation, and false values. That would make for a pretty glum evening if the songs and performances weren’t so entertaining.

      The show is still another innovative concept from that house of innovation, the Next Theatre.

      Next artistic director Jason Loewith started with the revival of Leonard Bernstein’s 1950’s one-act opera “Trouble in Tahiti.” But that piece only runs 45 minutes, so to flesh out the production, Loewith commissioned five songs from young contemporary American composers to create a second act commentary on the thorny topic of the American Dream, circa 2008.

      Bernstein wrote “Trouble in Tahiti” in the early 1950’s and it had a brief run on Broadway in 1955. The opera is very much a 1950’s period piece, when the postwar American suburbs were the lodestar of the white American middle class and also the symbol of shallow comforts and empty materialism. But the work is more a portrait of a marriage gone bad than a sociology term paper about the barren goals of American life at mid century. 

       Sam is ambitious and self-centered. Dinah feels emotionally abandoned by her aloof and unromantic husband. Bernstein tells their glum story almost entirely in song through seven scenes. The show is basically a two-hander between Sam and Dinah with a trio of singers providing choral commentary and sometimes taking on minor characters. But the show is a slender work, with the exception of one very funny scene in which Dinah imagines herself romantically involved in one of those South Seas movie love stories (hence the title of the opera).

     The husband and wife are well sung by James Rank and Karen Doerr, though their voices don’t match well. Rank has a musical comedy voice and Doerr is operatic and in their duets Doerr’s vocal power tends to dominate. “Trouble in Tahiti” ends up being essentially a one-note tale of a couple emotionally adrift who can’t seem to find a way back to connect with each other. The husband isn’t a particularly sympathetic figure and their unhappiness isn’t very involving for the audience.

      “Trouble in Tahiti” is really a table setter for the more intriguing second half of the production, when those five young composers take their whack at the American Dream from today’s perspective.

                    

      The first piece, by Chicago composer Kevin O’Donnell, is a continuation of the troubled relationship in the first act--a new couple and a new decade but the same old emotional disconnect. The music takes a chipper turn with “Betty, the Clam Girl” by the successful musical theater composer Michael John LaChiusa. This number is a lampoon about a homely girl who finds glamour through an arduous physical makeover. The piece satirizes the American lust for outward physical beauty, an easy target but a fun one in LaChiusa’s musical imagination.

      The centerpiece of the second act is Michael Mahler’s “The Rise and Fall of Britney Spears.” The number is an elaborate send-up of the American fascination with celebrityhood, with Spears both manipulated and manipulating in creating the image of the ultimate youth-driven celebrity (Justin Timberlake is also a participant). The number could have been tasteless or obvious, but Mahler’s clever lyrics tell a story that is both hilarious and cautionary.     

                                                

 Michael Friedman’s “Things We Wanted: Two Murder Ballads” shows how the imagination of children is exploited by American legends told to youngsters. Josh Schmidt ends the act with “This Little American Dream,” which starts out as the only optimistic bit of the evening and ends humorously and ironically taking the same sour view of the American Dream that dominated the rest of the production.

     The three-performer chorus of “Trouble in Tahiti” takes center stage with Rank and Doerr in the second act. They are Jason Bayle, Brandon Dahlquist, and Bernadette Garza, all quality singers and actors with Garza particularly notable.

     Loewith directs the entire presentation, with Tommy Rapley, who seems to be everything these days in Chicagoland musical theater, handling the choreography. Collette Pollard’s all-purpose set features giant mirrors at the rear of the stage. Jason Fassl designed the lighting, Janice Pytel the costumes, and Jeff Dublinske the sound. Jeremy Ramey is the musical director of the very fine six-piece orchestra that ends the evening with a jaunty Dixieland march down the aisle.

     “The American Dream Songbook” runs through March 22 at the Next Theatre, 927 Noyes Street. Performances are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $45. Call 847 475 1875.

          For more information contact:  www.nexttheatre.org

                       The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.                   Feb. 2008

                                 Contact us : zeffdaniel@yahoo.com