Chesapeake

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

by Dan Zeff

Chicago – Plenty of negatives can be directed toward Lee Blessing’s “Chesapeake” at the Remy Bumppo Theatre. Is it a satire, a comedy, a fantasy, and does it even know, or care? Fortunately, these critical reservations are mostly disarmed by Greg Matthew Anderson’s brilliant performance as the show’s entire cast.

       Anderson plays a bisexual performance artist named Kerr. The performance consists of reciting the Song of Solomon from the Bible while being disrobed by the audience until he is naked on stage. Kerr’s nemesis is an arch conservative Southern senator named Thurm Pooley. Kerr is caught in a maelstrom of controversy over his performance piece because he’s received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pooley uses the controversial Kerr as a scapegoat to cut spending for the NEA and curry favor with conservative voters.

        The play’s title refers to a breed of retriever dog, one of which is an animal named Lucky who is Pooley’s pet. Kerr plots to kidnap Lucky in retaliation for the senator’s hostility but the kidnapping goes wrong and eventually Kerr is killed long with the dog and reincarnated as Lucky Two. This Lucky may look like a dog but he thinks and acts like a human being and dominates the baffled senator, who eventually yields to the pooch’s astonishing human powers.

                                  

        The best part of the play is the first act, a light but informative tour of performance art and its conflict with public officials who resent the performance people as purveyors of pornography. The longer second act is bogged down in Kerr’s transformation into Lucky 2, which may all be a dream. Blessing isn’t clear on this essential point.

      “Chesapeake” was first staged in 1999 when conflicts between cutting edge performance artists and Congress were big news, with the NEA caught in the middle. A big question of the day was, Should public money be used to sponsor art and how far can politicians and the government go to reject funding for art they consider offensive or too experimental? Blessing sides with the performance artists, no surprise there. The conservative politicians like Pooley (a stand-in for Jesse Helms, remember him?) are portrayed as narrow minded and cynical manipulators of this hot button issue for their own political gain. “Chesapeake” must have gone down very smoothly with liberals.

        The NEA funding for the arts may have roiled the cultural waters in the late 1900’s but one doesn’t read too much about it today. Performance theater that outraged many people back then scarcely would turn a hair in most urban audiences today, so the “Chesapeake” satire is dated. This play needed to be seen 10-12 years ago when its impact would have been maximized.

        What “Chesapeake” loses as a coherent play it gains as a stunning piece of acting by Anderson. One-actor shows have always filled me with admiration. A single performer has to carry the entire play, with no colleagues on stage for support, plus the amount of memorization has to be daunting. The performer not only must present the script alone, he/she has to make it a dramatic and theatrical experience and not just a recitation. And that’s where Anderson comes up big.

     Anderson is a youthful presence on stage and a terrifically ingratiating performer. The play is most successful when it makes the audience laugh and Anderson is a superb comic actor. His self-deprecating rendering of Kerr’s exploits in performance art in the first act had the chuckling spectators in the palm of his hand. Anderson morphs beautifully from character to character, mainly the Southern senator (who sounds like Dr. Phil), the senator’s calculating wife, and his nubile female assistant with bedroom eyes for the senator. Anderson is at his best impersonating Lucky, wonderfully capturing canine mannerisms mixed with human sensibilities. We buy into Anderson the dog as easily as we do Kerr the performance artist.

                                     

        The play is staged on a bare stage that features a slight raised wooden platform and a single chair and a glass of water, which provides a bit of unexpected comedy (set design by Timothy Mann). Jacqueline Firkins designed Anderson’s single casual costume. JR Lederle’s lighting is almost a character in the action, guiding the viewer from day or night and back again, sometimes with startling shifts in lighting intensity. The sound design by Rick Sims relies heavily on very loud barking.

Shawn Douglass directs the play and he must share credit with Anderson for bringing out the humor in the play. There is nothing either man can do about making the narrative’s improbabilities and uneasy shifts in direction.

        We have now been treated to two brilliant-one man shows this season, Timothy Kane in “An Iliad” at the Court Theatre and now Anderson. “An Iliad” is a vastly more superior play but both produced must-see evenings of acting. “An Iliad” has closed but Anderson is still on stage now to be appreciated and applauded.

    “Chesapeake” runs through April 29 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. with matinees on April 14 and 28. Tickets are $30 to $40. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 2½ star for the play and 4 stars for the performance.    April 2012

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Changes of Heart

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Pierre Marivaux wrote romantic comedies back in the early 1700’s. He was a major playwright in France but never made much of an impact on the American stage until an opera and theater director named Stephen Wadsworth started translating and adapting Marivaux’s plays into English in the 1990’s. Wadsworth’s successful versions made Marivaux a significant presence in American theater. He hasn’t been performed much on musical-dominated Broadway but regional theaters revive him regularly.

        The Remy BumppoTheatre is having a brave go at Wadsworth’s version of Marivaux’s romantic drama “Changes of Heart” (earlier known by the clunky title of “The Double Inconstancies”). It’s a long play (2 hours and 45 minute including two intermissions) and requires some patience from the audience. The first act sets in motion a story that seems thin and a bit silly. But the show builds over the next two acts, saying some stimulating things about love, fidelity, morality, and the vagaries of the human heart.

   The Prince (Steve Wojtas) of an unidentified kingdom is passionately in love with Silvia (Alana Arenas), a plainspoken village girl. Silvia has been taken to the Prince’s palace where the monarch hopes to woo her to be his bride. But Silvia loves a village lad named Harlequin (Nicolas Gamboa), disdaining the besotted Prince’s overtures of love. Indeed, she spends much of the first act verbally disdaining them. Why in the world does the Prince love her when she doesn’t love him back?

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Mourning Becomes Electra

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Timothy Douglas did not shrink from a challenge in his debut presentation as the new artistic director of the Remy Bumppo Theatre. Douglas selected Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra,” one of the longest dramas in America theater, much respected but seldom staged. The results will be gratifying to any Remy Bumppo fan concerned about the capabilities of the new head of the company.

        O’Neill adapted “Mourning Becomes Electra” from the Oresteia trilogy written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 458 B.C. O’Neill moved the tragedies from ancient Greece to New England America immediately after the Civil War. The three plays (in 13 acts) consumed more than five hours. Allowing for a dinner break after the first play, the project was a very full evening for playgoers in New York City back in 1931.

     Douglas uses the modern adaptation by Gordon Edelstein, which discards a dozen lesser characters and condenses the action to several minutes over three hours. Edelstein’s version focuses the story on the key characters and also makes the playing time manageable for a single evening.

     

     In published notes to the play, O’Neill stated that he wanted to re-create the “Greek sense of fate, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by.” His reinterpretation of the Aeschylus trilogy relies on a very contemporary dose of Freudian psychology in charting the downfall of the Mannon family. The characters talk a lot about love but what actually destroy them are hate, pitiless justice, and death.

The story opens as the Civil War is coming to its bloody conclusion. Christine Mannon and her daughter Lavinia await the return from the war of the family men folk—Ezra Mannon (Christine’s husband and Lavinia’s father), and Orin Mannon (Lavinia’s brother). 

While her husband was away fighting for the Union, Christine began an adulterous affair with Adam Brant, a sea captain. Brant is probably the son of Ezra Mannon’s brother, born to a servant woman, which earned Brant’s father ostracism from the family. So the building blocks for the upcoming tragedy are in place. Brant is bitter toward the Mannons. Christine hates her husband for his cold and callous personality and Lavinia hates her mother for betraying her father. Lavinia loves her father with a passion that exceeds her place as a dutiful daughter. And Christine has a similar passion for her son, who dotes on his mother.

With emotions at a flashpoint among the various Mannons, calamities are inevitable. By the end of the third play, Lavinia is the only main character still standing, the others dead either by murder or suicide. Lavinia faces a long life of isolation within the cursed family’s gloomy mansion, entombed by guilt.

 

There is a strong whiff of melodrama in the trilogy’s narrative and O’Neill was never one of the most eloquent writers in American drama, so some of the dialogue comes across as clunky and overheated. O’Neill is scarcely subtle in his renderings of the suppressed sexual passions that doom all the Mannons. Oedipus and Electra complexes control the fates of the characters with an obviousness that teeters on the edge of caricature. But the power of the story endures and finally triumphs.

The adaptation reduces the action to primarily two- and three- character scenes, played out in the minimalist setting of a bare stage with the spectators sitting on two sides facing each other. Visually the staging is dominated by a giant photo of Ezra Mannon at the rear of the stage, a presence that hovers over the tragic events well after his death at the end of the first act. There is little physical action in the play. The dialogue carries the story—bitter, angry, passionate, vengeful, despairing. Retribution is the order of the day and compassion is the first man down.

The ensemble features three members of the Remy Bumppo company—Annabel Armour as Christine, David Darlow as Ezra Mannon, and Nick Sandys as Adam Brant. Ezra dies in the first act and Adam and Christine in the second act. Darlow and Sandys are both excellent in their limited appearances but Armour carries the story until Christine’s demise. Armour’s Christine generates a sense of evil who would make Lady Macbeth shudder, yet, given the circumstances of her loveless marriage, her ardor for Brant, and the hatred radiating from her daughter, Christine comes across as almost sympathetic. Armour superbly portrays Christine as a character who, under better marital circumstances, would be a good woman and not a deceitful and murderous villain.

At first I thought that Kelsey Brennan was a little under qualified for the pivotal role of Lavinia, but either I adjust to her rather artless delivery or she grew into the character as the play proceeded. By the end of the show Brennan was bringing great force to her role, ending in a kind of resigned dignity.

Scott Stangland is a somewhat monochromatic Orin emotionally, but that’s a legitimate interpretation of a character hardened by the horrors of war who returns home to plunge into a cauldron of perverse emotions. When he needs to increase the dramatic heat, Stangland is well up to the mark. The cast is rounded out by Luke Daigle and Stephanie Chavara as a brother and sister who get romantically involved with Orin and Lavinia. They are the only decent figures in the story and their escape from the Mannon family likely saved their emotional and psychological lives. Veronda Carey rounds out the ensemble as the Mannons’s black servant woman who plays a kind of Greek chorus.

Tim Morrison designed the all purpose set. Samantha Jones designed the spot-on historical costumes. Stephen Sorenson designed the lighting and Victoria Deiorio the sound.

“Mourning Becomes Electra” runs through October 30 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances run Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sun day at 2:30 p.m. There are also several matinee performances. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.September 2011

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Edward Albee’s “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia” is a play about a love affair between a successful American architect and a goat. It’s not an allegory and it’s not a sordid melodrama and it’s not a farce. Albee has really written a play about a man in love with a goat, and it’s a masterpiece.

        “The Goat” is James Bohnen’s final presentation as artistic director of the Remy Bumppo Theatre and he departs in triumph. His production is funny, gripping, heartbreaking, and in its final moments, shocking. Most important, the production is convincing. The spectator, however reluctantly, is forced to buy into the premise that an intelligent man is having a love affair with a goat, with all the emotional upheavals that inevitably must follow.

        Martin and Stevie are an ideal married couple. Both are bright, articulate, liberal, and deeply in love with each other. Their only child, a 17-year old boy named Billy, is gay, but they can deal with that. The marriage explodes after Martin confides to his oldest friend, Ross, that he’s been having an affair with a goat, who Martin has named Sylvia. The repulsed Ross sends Stevie a letter informing her about the affair, and Stevie predictably explodes into a tsunami of revulsion, outrage, and shame.  Billy, already struggling with his sexual identity, is shattered by the revelation of his father’s barnyard romance, which brings to the surface his possibly incestuous feelings for Martin. Everyone’s emotions are at the boil until the final shattering moment that leaves the characters either destroyed or open to possible reconciliation, depending upon the viewer’s capacity for optimism.

        

        “The Goat” is a call for tolerance for those people who live outside the box of society’s moral rules. Martin doesn’t apologize for his “relationship” with Sylvia. He finds fulfillment in his love for the animal, a case he makes with considerable eloquence. His love for the goat doesn’t diminish his love for Stevie but his plea for understanding earns him nothing but abuse that verges on hysterical loathing.

        “The Goat” runs about 100 minutes without an intermission. Its three scenes all take place in the upscale living room occupied by Martin and Stevie and their son. This clearly is not a story of trailer trash perversion on the order of “Tobacco Road.”

     Spectators who find Albee’s premise difficult to stomach will search for symbolic meanings in the play to defuse the shock and maybe the embarrassment of the narrative. They will look in vain. The playwright does throw out a teaser in twice dropping the phrase “large Alice” that some people will seize on as a reference to Albee’s “Tiny Alice,” perhaps his most symbol-drenched and obscure drama. But “The Goat” is what it is, and the audience has to deal with it.

        In one sense, “The Goat” is a broadside in the ongoing battle for sexual freedom. But it’s broader theme remains that call for understanding, if not outright acceptance, of people who march to a different drummer, even if that march tramples on the moral sensibilities of society. Extra marital affairs are recognized, even accepted, as part of the modern domestic scene. Homosexuality and same sex marriages are looked upon with sympathy, at least by a significant percentage of the population. But in the eyes of Stevie, Billy, and Ross (who represents the moral disapproval of society at large) Martin goes too far, and his unapologetic request for understanding just aggravates his transgression. And so, at the end he and Sylvia both play a terrible price.

        The verbal and physical confrontation between Martin and Stevie, after she receives Ross’s letter, is volcanic in its intensity. Yet on balance “The Goat” is also a very funny play, demonstrating that Albee can write comedy at a high level, punctuated with one-liners and zingers worthy of Neil Simon in peak form. “The Goat” is singular in modern American drama for its blend of wit, near tragedy, and the urgency of the moral questions it forces upon the audience.

        The Remy Bumppo cast is exemplary, with Annabel Armour giving perhaps the performance of her illustrious career as Stevie, beside herself with fury and anguish at her husband’s infidelity, compounded by his refusal to recognize it as an infidelity at all. Stevie finds herself in an impossible position that Armour renders with multi dimensional credibility. The mental images of Martin with the goat are too much for woman, detonating shrieks of misery and anger that stun the spectators.    

Nick Sandys is terrific in the difficult role of Martin. Sandys must convey Martin’s bizarre point of view with passion and seriousness. A failure to make Martin’s case plausible would turn the character repellant and hugely diminish the play. Sandys brings it off, an acting feat of striking sensitivity.

        Will Allen is fine as the distraught Billy and Michael Joseph Mitchell is excellent as the audience-high stand-in for society’s values. His Ross is self righteous and judgmental and a meddler and he doubtless speaks for a lot of people in the audience.

        James Bohnen’s directing nails the play’s complexities dead center, shifting drawing room comedy to psychological violence with unforced realism. Tim Morrison’s elegant set provides a proper backdrop for this unlikely tale of out-of-bounds love. Frances Maggio designed the costumes and Heather Gilbert the atmospheric lighting. Victoria Delorio designed the sound and composed the original music.

        “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?” runs through May 8 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $45. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.  April 2011

                   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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The Importance of Being Earnest

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

 

Chicago – Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is the greatest comedy of manners in the English-speaking theater and a really good revival of the play is one of the joys of theater-going.

The Remy Bumppo Theatre Company gives the play a stylish staging that makes good on Wilde’s almost nonstop cascade of wit and epigrams. The production takes some time to build its comic momentum but by the end of the evening the audience should be awash in pleasure.

“Earnest” is a love story of sorts, ultimately three love stories. But the comedy is really about well-born characters straining mightily to be clever, glib, and witty. The great Lady Bracknell summarizes the society of the time with the pronouncement “We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces.” It’s an ironic line, like so many in the play, because for Lady Bracknell, surfaces are everything. Indeed, superficiality seems to be the goal of almost everyone in the play, down to the   droll butler.

                                                                                   

The narrative centers on the efforts of two young men-about-town, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, to woo a pair of pretty young things named Gwendolyn Fairfax and Cecily Cardew.  Presiding with dour disapproval over the romances is the imperious Lady Bracknell.

The play is drenched in coincidences and mistaken identities that repeal all laws of probability. At the end of the final act, six of the characters are appropriately paired off. How long lasting those marriages will be is a matter of speculation, but sufficient unto the day is the comedy thereof, and “Earnest” in the Remy Bumppo staging provides amusement aplenty.

        The first act mostly is devoted to setting the play’s unlikely storyline in motion. Greg Matthew Anderson strains a bit as the relentlessly facetious Algernon, but Paul Hurley is just right as the more three dimensional Jack Worthing.  This is Hurley’s first appearance with Remy Bumppo and the actor is a keeper.

        There seems to be a modern tradition building of having a male actor play Lady Bracknell. I saw William Hutt and Brian Bedford play the role at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with glorious results. Bedford is leading the Stratford production to Broadway this season. David Darlow takes on the role of the imperial lady at Remy Bumppo. The unconventional casting is not a stunt. Hutt, Bedford, and Darlow were simply the best performers for the role. The audience instinctively giggles a bit at the first appearance of a male Lady Bracknell, but almost immediately the credibility of the acting takes over. This isn’t a drag impersonation, just fine gender-blind comic acting.

        Linda Gillum and Kelsey Brennan (another newcomer) are splendid as the female halves of the romantic equation completed by Anderson and Hurley. Gillum strikes the perfect note as Gwendolyn, the lofty London sophisticate. At first I was a bit distracted by her stilted walk, but her affected movement is explained by Lady Bracknell’s comment in the final act that the female chin be being worn very high this season. Gwendolyn, a slave to fashion like the others in the play, is simply holding her chin up in the approved style of the day

     If Gillum’s Gwendolyn represents the urbanity and cynicism of the town, Brennan’s Cecily stands for the comparatively unspoiled innocence of the country. The second act’s highlight is the manner in which the two young women circle each other, veering between hostility and friendship as they assess how much each has to fear as a rival for the affection of the young man they both erroneously believe is named Ernest.    

        In supporting roles, Annabel Armour is a delectable Miss Prism, Cecily’s tutor and the woman who unknowingly holds the key to the narrative. Ted Hoerl is fine as the country parson with a bashful yen for Miss Prism. William Watt contributes a droll cameo as Algernon’s butler in the first act, including some quick thinking improvisation between him and Anderson after the bell rope came off the wall on opening night. The unexpected collapse of the rope was so funny the cast should consider keeping it in the show.

        The physical production nicely replicates the upper class world of the 1890’s. Melissa Torchia designed the modish late Victorian costumes, Richard and Jacqueline Penrod the minimal but effective settings, J.R. Lederle the lighting, and Jason Knox the sound. Shawn Douglass directs with a keen ear for the glories of this language-driven comic masterpiece.

   “The Importance of Being Earnest” is something special in the repertoire of high comedy. The play satirizes the affectations of a certain segment of English society in the late nineteenth century  as well as dramatic conventions of the time and Wilde himself. But all that that matters little to modern audiences. What does matter is the incandescent repartee that flows from every character on stage. The Remy Bumppo ensemble speaks Wilde’s glittering, civilized dialogue with assurance and, there’s that inevitable word again, style. Once the production gets up to speed, the viewing experience is delicious.

    “The Importance of Being Earnest” runs through January 9 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $55. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.  November 2010

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Night and Day

By the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago –  “Night and Day” is not your typical Tom Stoppard play. It doesn’t try for the narrative pyrotechnics and visual whiz-bang of dramas like “Jumpers,” “Arcadia,” and “Travesties.” By Stoppard standards, “Night and Day” goes for the straight realistic approach, though the dialogue still snaps off the epigrams and sophisticated wit that make this English dramatist such a one-of-a-kind writer.

        “Night and Day,” which premiered in 1978, is being revived by the Remy Bumppo Theatre, a troupe that thrives on this kind of language-driven modern theater. The dialogue may crackle, but the play unfortunately shows its age. Most playwrights would be proud to create a literate script like “Night and Day,” but in the Stoppard canon this is a second tier work.

        The play is set in the fictional African country of Kambawe, one of those post-colonial new African nations that have developed such a violent internal history. All the action takes place in the home of Geoffrey Carson, a British mine owner.

There are several storylines active in the play, but “Night and Day” is mostly about journalists and journalism. The newspapermen in the play are all after the story of a rebellion against Kambawe military dictator Colonel Mageeba.  The play takes us into “Front Page” territory, with a foreign spin. Two correspondents and a photographer are all after the story, risking their lives to get the copy back to London.

The key characters are Australian journalist Dick Wagner and British photographer George Guthrie (both veterans of the foreign correspondent wars) and idealistic young British reporter Jacob Milne. Serving as a kind of skeptical Greek chorus is Carson’s wife, Ruth, an intelligent and sharp-tongued woman who has one-night stands behind her husband’s back because she is bored an a little desperate.

There are many back-and-forth arguments exploring the importance of the press in society, not ignoring the media’s lapses into sensationalism and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Ruth has little use for the everyday press—“I am with you on freedom of the press—it’s the newspapers I can’t stand.” Wagner and Milne go round and round, Wagner the battle-scarred cynic and Milne the young go-getter. For all his cynicism, Wagner is a pro-labor and anti-management militant who is outraged that Milne broke newsroom solidarity by filing stories while his small English provincial newspaper was enmeshed in a labor dust-up.

The repartee goes back and forth, a lot of it funny and some of it intense. Telling points are made on all sides, like how much are newspapers a necessary public service and how much a rather tawdry business? If the journalists are as clever in their writing as they are in their speech, they should all be prizewinners.

The competitive newspaper world of 1978 scarcely resembles the dire condition of the media today. The background may be the world of the British press but the main situation then and now applies to America. Wagner writes for a British paper called the Globe that publishes only on Sunday. That’s a dinosaur concept today, when the Internet and bloggers bring the news to the public in nanoseconds rather than days. There is something almost endearing about the reporters in “Night and Day” relying on an old-fashioned telex machine to get their stories out.

The setting may be antique, but the issues Stoppard dissects about the necessity of an independent press still have some resonance. Still, we live in a different time. Newspapers are withering away and television news is in trouble. The discussions about the press in “Night and Day” are studded with eternal verities, but for me the subject took on a quaint quality, like the spectators was stepping into a time machine.

There are some problems in the stagecraft. Ruth often speaks directly to the audience, which violates the realism of the play. And it’s sometimes difficult to tell when Ruth is speaking to the viewers (out of the hearing of the other characters) and when she is just muttering to herself. That’s Stoppard’s fault. Linda Gillum is the model of eloquent skepticism about the media while dealing with her personal demons that express themselves in interludes of promiscuity. Ruth’s domestic tribulations aren’t integrated very well into the rest of the play, nor is the cameo appearance of Colonel Mageeba toward the end, though Ernest Perry, Jr., is excellent as the volatile Idi Amin-style dictator.

Greg Matthew Anderson’s Jacob Milne verbally battles Shawn Douglass’s Dick Wagner about the press, both in its intramural labor conflicts and in its mandate to deliver the story to the public, even at great personal danger. The narrative stops while they engage in their heated exchanges, but the writing is urbane and evenhanded and well worth hearing. David Darlow can’t do much with the curiously colorless role of Geoffrey Carson, the industrialist trying to navigate the treacherous political shoals in Kambawe. James Krag takes over the part October 20.

James Bohnen directs with his usual attention to the verbal pleasures of the script. Tim Morrison has designed an effective country house interior, enhanced by J. R., Ederle’s lighting. Samantha Jones designed the period costumes and Jason Knox the sound.

“Night and Day” runs through October 31 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

The show gets a rating of three stars.   Sept. 2010

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Les Liaisons Dangereuses

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—“Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is one of the most cynical novels ever written and Christopher Hampton has adapted the book into an equally cynical play. The Remy Bumppo Theatre is presenting a stylish and well-acted revival of the play, but it requires a larger helping of the cynicism that makes the novel and drama so engrossing, and disturbing.

        A Frenchman named Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote the novel in 1782 in the form of letters exchanged among the principals of the story. About 200 years later Hampton converted the novel into a play that was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

        The story explores the corruption of innocence by Valmont and his former mistress Madame de Merteuil, two aristocrats in France during the 1780’s. The pair occupy their time violating the virtue of vulnerable and unsuspecting people in their social circle. The couple subtly and skillfully manipulates trusting and unsuspecting men and women, with sexual seduction as the main weapon. They ruin lives because it amuses them.

       Valmont and Merteuil plan their campaigns like generals on the battlefield. The greater the challenge the greater their elation when they finally destroy their victims. It’s chilling stuff, and also fascinating, like watching a pair of Iagos systematically wreak havoc, for sport.

       In “Liaisons,” Valmont and Merteuil wreck the lives of a virtuous married woman named Madame Tourvel and an unworldly 15-year old girl named Cecile Volanges. There is collateral damage among other characters but those two ladies are the ones hunted, and brought down. The older woman dies of a broken heart and the teen-ager will likely spend the rest of her life in a convent.

        Valmont is the chief agent of destruction. He’s highborn and good-looking, a man of the world to his fingertips. It’s fascinating to watch him lay siege to the virtue of the pious Madame Tourvel and seduce young, and willing, Cecile at the same time. He operates like Richard III winning the Lady Anne over the coffin of the lady’s murdered husband. It’s pure evil but it works.

        The original novel was totally without humor or sentimentality. There is much sophistication and urbanity in the play, populated almost entirely by members of the educated French aristocracy. There is also some black humor, but the Remy Bumppo production comes across as a romantic comedy until the story darkens toward the end. The opening night audience laughed often at the machinations of Valmont and Merteiul and how they reeled in the suckers. But this is a “Liaison” largely defanged of its crucial decadence and nastiness.

       Nick Sandys is one of Chicagoland’s best leading men and a natural choice for Valmont, with his suave manner and good looks. But Sandys’s Valmont is too likable. An audience who doesn’t despise the character is missing out on the chief emotional kick of the play. Rebecca Spence is more successful at conveying the duplicity beneath the warm façade of Merteiul but Valmont is the heart of the narrative and Sandys takes us more into the world of “The Philadelphia Story” than the immorality of French aristocrats just a few years before the hand heavy of the French Revolution takes its revenge on their class.

        The acting is solid among the supporting players, notably Linda Gillum as the fatally gullible Madame de Tourvel and Drew Shirley as Valmont’s droll valet and partner in crime. Margaret Katch is good as the 15-year old, ripe for her introduction to the wonderful world of sex by a master. Janice O’Neill is good as Cecile’s mother, a woman who allows Merteiul to guide her and loses her daughter as a result. The remainder of the capable cast consists of Paul Hurley, Annabel Armour, and Sienna Harris.

        David Darlow’s directing properly locates the play’s droll side, but where is the evil? Emily Waecker’s costumes capture the elaborate Baroque look of late eighteenth century France. This is a rich looking production, abetted by the scenic design of Alan Donahue and the property design of Nick Heggestad. Michael Rourke designed the lighting and Jason Knox the sound. Sandys stages one of the more convincing, and dangerous looking, sword fights I’ve ever seen on a stage.

        Audiences exposed to “Liaisons” for the first time likely will come out of the theater well satisfied by all the ingenious plotting among a  wealthy society with too much time on its hands. But an amusing and entertaining evening could have been enhanced by a healthy dose of venom.

        “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” runs through May 2 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50.  Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.    March 2010

                        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—The mini Athol Fugard festival that’s now known as Fugard Chicago 2010 got off to a rousing start with the TimeLine Theatre production of “’Master Harold’…and the Boys’” last month. The play explores the insidious psychological evils of the official South African government policy of racial segregation from 1948 to 1991.

        Now comes the second entry in the festival, “The Island” at the Remy Bumppo Theatre. The play is actually a collaboration between the white Fugard and black South African actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who comprised the original cast of this two- hander when it opened in 1973.

        “The Island” is a grimly realistic frontal attack on apartheid, with none of the understatement of “Master Harold.”

The two characters are John and Winston. They are cellmates serving long sentences in a maximum security prison for African political prisoners on Robben Island in the Atlantic Ocean about seven miles off the coast of Cape Town.

        The play’s first 15 minutes are a wordless rendering of the two men miming the backbreaking, and pointless, labor of loading and unloading sand from wheelbarrows on the island shore. The men are finally released for the day into their cells where they collapse, exhausted and injured. The dialogue begins, mostly concerning the two-actor performance of Sophocles’s Greek tragedy “Antigone” that John plans for an upcoming prison concert. Winston generates some humor with his reluctance to participate in a play he doesn’t understand and would require his portraying a woman, injuring his macho pride.

         The story takes an unexpected turn when John receives the news that his sentence has been reduced on appeal and he will receive his freedom in three months. After momentarily sharing John’s joy in his news, Winston bitterly expresses his jealousy that John will soon be a free man while Winston likely will languish in prison until his death. Finally, the two men act out their stirring version of “Antigone,” a subversive play that celebrates the bravery of the individual against the tyranny of the state.

        The shifts in narrative direction turn “The Island” into a sequence of mini plays, each with its own dramatic tone. The moods various vary from resignation to anger to despair to jubilation to cautious hope to fierce courage. There are moments of comedy and an indelible passage in which John fakes a telephone call, using a tin can, to his home, hearing the latest news from his friends and family as Winston listens and fires his own questions, caught up in the fantasy of the situation. It’s a heartbreaking glimpse of the deprivation endured by men stripped to the emotional bone by an unjust political system.

        “The Island” is a play about the triumph of the human spirit, and more. It’s a very human story about two men bonding to survive their intolerable existence in prison. John’s pending freedom threatens to break that bond, but it endures, like the characters.

        LaShawn Banks (John) and Kamal Angelo Bolden (Winston) don’t so much impersonate their characters as inhabit them. Bolden made a big splash as the title character in the much applauded “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” at the Victory Gardens Theatre last year and his performance in “The Island” cements his standing as a premiere actor in town irrespective of race. His slow, stubborn, finally passionate Winston is the perfect foil for the more outwardly intelligent and articulate John. They make a remarkable pair under James Bohnen’s spot-on directing.

        The action is played out on a bare square platform that represents the barren prison cell, with only two mats and thin blankets and a water bucket for props. The Tim Morrison set, complemented by Rachel Laritz’s costumes, JR Lederle’s lighting, and Victoria DeIorio’s sound, establish the claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison setting.

        The Fugard Festival concludes in the spring with the Court Theatre revival of “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead,” another two-character play from the Fugard-Kani-Ntshona collaboration that has often been presented as a companion piece to the “Island.” By the time the Court production closes, local audiences should have a new understanding and appreciation of the dramatic skill and political bravery of Athol Fugard. Our exposure to some stunning acting adds to the Festival’s sense of occasion.

        “The Island” runs through March 7 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumpo.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.   January 2010

               Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Heroes

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

 CHICAGO—“Heroes” is a comedy apparently written to give three actors the opportunity to deliver star performances for audiences sure to lap up the antics of three endearing old codgers for about 80 uninterrupted minutes.

        The play was written in 2003 by French dramatist Gerald Sibleyras and translated in 2005 by the eminent British playwright Tom Stoppard, who vigorously stated that the English version is a translation from the French and not an adaptation. So spectators seeing his name in the program need not look for any imaginative blend of philosophical themes and dazzling theatricality in the Stoppard manner.

        What Stoppard’s translation does provide is the master’s flair for wit and delicious language flourishes. Indeed, ‘Heroes” is so thin as drama that one suspects Stoppard’s verbal infusions make the play better in English than it was in French.

        The premise of “Heroes” is almost ostentatiously simple. The time is autumn 1959. The place is the terrace of a French military nursing/retirement home. Gustave, Henri, and Philippe are French veterans of World War I. Henri has been in the home for 25 years, Philippe for 10 years, and Gustave for six months. There is a fourth character, a life size stone statue of a dog that Philippe insists is alive, or at least moves, which becomes a comical running gag.

        The three men have bonded because of their living situation but they have distinctly separate personalities. Gustave has a veneer of sophistication and is the cynic of the trio. Henri is the most mild mannered, taking harmless pleasure observing the young girls at a nearby girls school. Philippe is the most anguished, periodically fainting from the effects of shrapnel in his head. The man is afflicted by paranoid anxieties over the sinister machinations of Sister Madeleine, the off-stage nun in charge, and his fearsome in-laws.

        The men spend their time chatting, teasing, and exchanging insults, none of them cruel. Periodically they make plans to escape from the home, possibly to Vietnam but more likely to a row of poplar trees in the distance. But the audience knows the men won’t ever put their plans into effect. Essentially, they are just waiting to die.

        “Heroes” has the flavor of “Waiting for Godot” lite, in that the characters are waiting vainly for something meaningful to happen in their lives. They make plans that will never be realized and at the end of the play they are no better or worse off than they were at the beginning. Life is tedious, but there you are.

   Comparisons with Samuel Beckett may be excessively lofty for the Sibleyras play and there is no suggestion during the performance that the author has anything more in mind than giving three accomplished actors the comic wherewithal to show the spectators a good time. Nothing wrong with that. More ambitious plays have delivered less entertainment than “Heroes.”

        The three scene stealers in the Remy Bumppo production are Mike Nussbaum (Henri), David Darlow (Gustave), and Roderick Peeples (Philippe). It’s always a joy to see Nussbaum on a local stage, and at age 85 he still has the capacity to deftly handle a subtly demanding role like Henri with understated humor and some poignancy. Darlow and Peeples are both outstanding, though a little young for their roles, especially in comparison on stage with the patriarchal Nussbaum. But they all work beautifully together, extracting all the play’s comedy as well as its more rueful emotions.

        The production fits handsomely within Tim Morrison’s realistic evocation of the terrace that is the play’s sole locale. Samantha C. Jones designed the period costumes, Richard Norwood the lighting, and Jason Knox the sound.

        The French title of the play can be translated as “The Wind in the Poplars,” but Stoppard changed the name because he feared English audiences might confuse it with Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s story “The Wind in the Willows.” His choice of “Heroes” is perplexing because the play doesn’t suggest that any of the characters was a hero in World War I and certainly they are not heroic in their present circumstances. But the issue of the play’s title is an insignificant blemish on a short but pleasurable evening of fine acting and considerable humor.

   “Heroes” runs through November 29 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $45. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.      October 2009

               Contact Dan atzeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

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Old Times

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

 CHICAGO—“Old Times” at the Remy Bumppo Theatre should satisfy Harold Pinter idolaters. Audiences in a literal frame of mind need not apply. A certain amount of ambiguity adds spice to a play, but a play that is all ambiguity will breed frustration and insecurity in viewers not locked into the Pinterian world view.

        “Old Times” was one of Pinter’s later critical successes, dating back to 1971. It’s a three-character work that only runs about 80 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission. Much of the stage time is consumed by those portentous Pinterian pauses and several additional minutes are spent by two of the characters singing snatches of old pop songs to no recognizable purpose. The actual talk alternates between mini monologues and those clipped exchanges of everyday language that seem so commonplace on the surface but obviously signify hidden depths of meaning.

       The action, for want of a better term, takes place in a converted English farmhouse on an autumn night in 1970. In the opening moment, Deeley and his wife Kate sit in their living room, with another woman standing motionless at the rear of the stage with her back to the other two. After a few minutes of banal dialogue between  husband and wife, the lighting suddenly brightens and the second woman joins the other two with easy familiarity.

        The third character is Anna, Kate’s best (and only) friend 20 years ago when both were youthful and poor in London. Anna now lives in Sicily in apparently luxury with her Italian husband. She’s returned to England to visit her old friend.

    The threesome engages in a roundelay of recollections of those days 20 years ago. Deeley met Kate in a movie house showing the classic “Odd Man Out” that led to their marriage. Deeley also met Anna in a London pub, or so he says. At first Anna says she doesn’t recollect any such meeting but eventually discusses it in detail. By the time the play draws to a conclusion, the audience must deal with a number of questions. Did Kate and Anna have a lesbian affair? Did Deely sleep with Anna? Has Anna returned to reclaim Kate, or to rekindle her relationship with Deeley?

        A play like “Old Times” tends to give an audience an inferiority complex. Surely there is some coherent significance to all this understatement, subtlety, and nuance. And if the viewers can’t figure it out, the fault lies with them and not the play. It takes viewers with a fierce faith in their own intelligence to state that the problem lies, not with their own discernment but with a drama that is mostly shadow and very little substance.

        The atmosphere of mystery, or pseudo mystery, is reinforced by the attitudes of the two women. Anna spends most of the play wearing an inscrutable smile that implies she knows much more than the audience. At the same time Kate sits on a couch staring blankly into the middle distance like her body is in the farmhouse but her mind and spirit are elsewhere, perhaps in that unfathomable past the three characters can’t seem to agree on.

        While Anna and Kate do their ethereal thing, Deeley grows increasingly agitated and eventually breaks down in sobs, a collapse that defies explanation based on what we have seen on the stage.

        The main problem with “Old Times” is that the characters are so insubstantial that we really don’t connect with them or their multiple conceptions of what happened 20 years ago. The play lacks that sense of menace that makes Pinter at his best so riveting. There is no real conflict, no indefinable feeling of sinister currents just below the calm surface of things. By the end of the play, the audience reaction may be summarizes in those two terrible critical words, “Who cares?”

       The Remy Bumppo revival plays the Pinter card for all its worth. Under James Bohlen’s directing, the cast delivers the Pinterian silences to the max. Jenny McKnight has that blank gaze down perfectly, as does Linda Gillum with Anna’s Mona Lisa smile. All the outward emotion in the play resides with Nick Sandys’s Deeley, who shouts and snarls and weeps while the two women look on casually.

        The physical production consists of Tim Morrison’s simple modern interior, Rachel Laritz’s costumes, JR Lederle’s ostentatiously dramatic lighting (called for in Pinter’s stage directions), and Victoria DeIorio’s suitably spooky mood-setting sound and original music.

        “Old Times” runs through May 31 at the Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $45. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.       April 2009

             Contact Dan at  zeffdaniel@yahoo.com    

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The Marriage of Figaro

Presented by the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—Today “The Marriage of Figaro” is known worldwide as an iconic comic opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But for a few years in the late 1700’s the original play by Pierre Beaumarchais was one of the hottest items on the French stage. Indeed, the French king banned the play for a time because he considered its satirical jabs at the French aristocracy seditious.

        The Beaumarchais comedy is rarely staged today, with the Mozart adaptation firmly in control of the field. Nothing in the Remy Bumppo Theatre revival of the play suggests that the situation should be otherwise. Based on what’s presented on the Remy Bumppo stage, King Louis XVI must have been thin skinned indeed to take umbrage at this inane bit of low comedy.

    It’s possible that there is more to the Beaumarchais play than the Remy Bumppo production. The translation and adaptation by Ranjit Bolt trims away a lot of the original script. What remains is almost two hours of foolery about mistaken identities and failed seductions in the household of the Count Almaviva, with his valet Figaro at the center.

        The action has been moved from the late 1700’s to 1952, for no discernable reason. The plot lurches forward at the beginning with the pending marriage of Figaro to Suzanne, the maid to the Countess Almaviva. But the philandering Count has his eye on Suzanne, sex-wise. At the same time, young Cherubin, the countess’s godson, has a passion for the sexpot daughter of the Count’s gardener. And the Count is hostile to Cherubin for reasons that elude me.

        Multiple disguises go awry before the storyline staggers to a modestly happy ending. Figaro and Suzanne and Cherubin and his simpering bimbo are paired off successfully and the Count promising fidelity to the skeptical Countess.

        Director Jonathan Berry sees the play primarily as a farce, with slamming doors and characters dithering about in a frenzy to avoid detection by other equally distracted characters. People on stage talk to the audience amidst much mugging and smiting of foreheads in anger or frustration. Occasionally there is a burst of indignation against the over privileged aristocracy and the abuse of the working class, which got the play into trouble originally. But these flurries of satire and outrage are lost amid the relentless comic shtick and physical mayhem of the production.

        The ensemble includes several A List actors on the Chicagoland theater scene, notably Nick Sandys as Figaro, Mary Beth Fisher as the Countess, and Joe Dempsey as the Count. The adaptation allows Figaro almost no opportunity to display his wiles as a crafty servant playing his masters like a violin. Figaro is caught up in the low comedy uproar as much as any other character and a fine opportunity is thus lost to enjoy a resourceful theatrical figure who has been compared to Falstaff.

       Fisher does what she can with a role that demands she be an outraged wife and a simpering lovesick woman at the same time. Dempsey plays the Count in a constant state of agitation that pleads with the audience for laughs.

        Let the record show that numerous people in the opening night audience chuckled and giggled frequently throughout the evening. Whether they laughed because they thought the production was funny or laughed out of sympathy for the comic desperation on the stage I cannot say. As the saying goes, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.

        The set was designed by Marcus Stephens, the costumes by Alison Siple, the lighting by Heather Gilbert, and the sound by Joshua Horvath. Caroline Fourmy choreographed some diverting dance bits to accompany the changing of props between scenes.

        “The Marriage of Figaro” runs through January 4 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $55. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 21/2 stars.      November 2008

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.  

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The Voysey Inheritance

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—Business ethics, or the lack of them, isn’t a topic that just made the headlines this month. The subject has been a favorite of social-minded playwrights for generations, with George Bernard Shaw as the most famous practitioner of the morality and immorality of the business life in he English-speaking theater.    

Shaw’s contemporary Harley Granville-Barker also examined the slippery slopes of business ethics, notably in his 1905 drama “The Voysey Inheritance,” now being revived by the Remy Bumppo Theatre. The current production is David Mamet’s adaptation, which shrinks the performance time considerably, not necessarily to the benefit of the play.

      After the senior Voysey suddenly dies, Edward assumes the leadership in the firm and calls his large group of brothers and sisters together to inform them of their father’s machinations. He insists the proper course is restitution to the defrauded clients and public exposure of the malfeasances. The family naturally recoils at the prospect of public disgrace, and the loss of their income.

 Voysey is the name of a high respected firm in London that handles investments. Young Edward Voysey, a partner in the family firm, finds to his horror that his esteemed father has been using client money for speculation, a practice he in turn inherited from his father. Edward discovers that many of the client accounts have been looted to a zero balance. The elder Voysey has eluded detection for years by paying out dividends and interest when due.

 Edward agrees to carry on as the head of the firm, trying to restore as much of the looted funds as possible to the various accounts. Matters come to a head when a friend of the family, and one of the major clients, tells Edward he intends to withdraw his account, feeling that Edward isn’t quite up to the mark in comparison with his father. The client is horrified by Edward’s disclosure of his father’s perfidy and eventually come up with a plan to gradually restore some of the lost fortune.

Edward indignantly considers the client’s plan a scheme to get his money returned on the financial backs of the smaller investors. The client is infuriated by Edward’s rejection and at the end of the play Edward faces years of prison for his father’s financial misdeeds.

Edward seems to have a martyr complex brought on by his idealism. Nobody gains by public exposure of the fraud scheme, but keeping quiet while working to restore the embezzled money means the family good name is maintained and the unlucky clients will see at least some return of their investments.

Granville-Barker’s original five-act version may have explored the play’s morally ambiguous issues at greater depth. The David Mamet version is a shorthand version of the story, and the issues they raise. I didn’t understand why Edward got so indignant over the client’s plan for restitution. After all, the man just wanted his money back. And I didn’t understand why Edward faced years in prison. Surely with the aid of a good lawyer he could demonstrate that the crimes lay entirely with his father and Edward’s motives were pure and practical in working to return a portion of the missing money.

The intricate details of the investment fraud and restoration eluded me a bit but that’s really not what the play is about. The author really wanted to examine the complex impact of money and reputation on individuals. But the Remy Bumppo staging is more effective in its portrayal of character types, starting with the elder Voysey, a cultivated and droll man (flawlessly presented by David Darlow) who doesn’t see what all the fuss is about when Edward confronts him with the realities of the firm’s fiscal improprieties.

Edward Voysey (strongly played by Raymond Fox) comes across as something of a prig. The man is ready to cut off his nose to spite his face when he could have taken a more pragmatic, if morally suspect, path that would have saved everyone a lot of grief and at least on the surface, hurt nobody.

        The Voysey siblings are an entertaining lot, led by the blustery Major Booth Voysey (played at a delightful roar by Dan Kenney). Hugh Voysey (a sensitive and passionate Tom Bateman) is an artist revolted by the family fraud, ready to give up all his money and separate from his wife. The other siblings are all very well played by Janice O’Neal, Mark Hines, and Sharina Martin. Patricia Donegan plays the mother, a shrewd woman who can claim deafness when it suits her not to hear unpleasant things.

The outsiders in the play include Roderick Peeples in a beautifully multi-dimensional performance as the client. Hines returns to play a local cleric who is in complete sympathy with the client’s plan for restitution. Peter Davis is excellent as the firm clerk, a basically decent man who accepted an annual bribe from the elder Voysey to keep his mouth shut and is affronted by Edward’s refusal to maintain the payoff.

Special mention goes to Rebecca Spence in a portrayal that can only be called radiant. Spence plays Edward’s fiancé with such sympathy and intelligence that the performance sends the spectator riffling through the playbill to learn more about this luminous and attractive young actress.

James Bohnen has directed this talky play with his usual understated skill. Andrea Bechert designed the handsome and detailed Edwardian parlor. Rachel Laritz designed the authentic early twentieth century costumes, Richard Norwood the lighting, and Lindsay Jones the sound.

“The Voysey Inheritance” can be described as Shavian in its examination of ethical dilemmas that aren’t as cut and dried as they seem. But on the evidence of this adaptation, Shaw did it better, in spite of the spot-on acting and staging.

“The Voysey Inheritance” runs through November 2 at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.  Tickets begin at $40. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

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

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

 

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On the Verge

at the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—Eric Overmyer’s “On the Verge” is based on the literary gimmick of placing a group of characters from another time in our own time period. We are thus supposed to be entertained by their befuddled reactions to familiar things we take for granted.

      The play’s second act does provide some amusement, but the first act is long and tiresome. Possibly the current production doesn’t serve the play well, but I recall seeing “On the Verge” several years ago staged by another company and I was equally bored.

        The play begins in 1888. Three intrepid females set out to travel through Terra Incognita (Unknown Land) in search of high adventure. The women travel alone and with only the equipment they can carry in heir backpacks. We watch them mime their way through treacherous rivers and scale dangerous mountains. Along the way they express themselves in irritating chirpy bits of smug dialogue broken up by short monologues directed at the audience.

        As the ladies move from challenge to challenge, they come upon perplexing words and objects, like an eggbeater, “Red Chinese,” cream cheese, and an “I like Ike” button. Along the way they encounter strange characters, mostly male and all played by a single actor. The characters in the first act include a shy abominable snowman and a bridge troll who speaks like a rapper and dresses like a wannabe actor under the spell of Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.”

        In he second act the women stumble into the year 1955, or at least the pop culture aspects of the year—its slang, advertising jingles and products, and most important, the new music called rock and roll. The incursion into 1955 will be most amusing to those audience members who can smile at the retro mention of Mister Coffee, Bebe Rebozo, Burma Shave, and Madame Nu.

     Overmyer treats the 1950’s with considerable affection. If he intended any satire of the period, he understated it to the point of invisibility. The three women embrace 1955 with unalloyed optimism. Two of them eagerly fall in with surfing and rock and roll. They may have started in 1888 but they have found their true home in the Eisenhower feel-good years. The third woman elects to push on to the future’s future, sadly separating from her two companions.

        We’ve seen this kind of time travel device many times, from “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to “Back to the Future.” It can be fun and even instructive to see how silly our society appears through the eyes of outsiders. But the second act’s nostalgic chuckles cannot overcome the tedium of the first act and its smug and coy dialogue.

        Part of the problem may reside in the Remy Bumppo casting. The three female explorers are all played by actresses who look to be in their early 20’s—Susan Shunk, Rachel Sondag, and Liza Fernandez. They are supposed to play feisty spinsters, but they look too youthful to be credible as intrepid lady adventurers in Victorian days. On the other hand, had they been older, they wouldn’t have fit the second act transformation into a young surfer and a rock and roll zealot.

        The best thing about the production is Gregory Anderson, who plays the assorted odd characters in both acts, including a boyish gas station attendant, the operator of a jive nigh club who marries one of the women, and most notably, as the suave Mister Coffee in his white suit, a figure who may also be God.

        The scenic design by Tim Morrison mostly keeps the stage open, relying on props that indicate locales from scene to scene. Judith Lundberg’s costumes are perfect in first portraying the three women in their 19^th century full skirts, and then dressing up two of the women in the “Happy Days” garb of the 1950’s. Gina Patterson’s lighting and Lindsay Jones’s sound and original music are inventive and dramatic.

        James Bohnen’s direction does what it can with the script but the first act remains dead in the water.

        The news is much more promising for the 2008-9 season. Remy Bumppo will present David Mamet’s adaptation of Harley Granville-Barker’s 1905 drama “The Voysey Inheritance (September 18 to November 2),  Pierre Beaumarchais’s late 18^th century comedy “The Marriage of Figaro” adapted by Ranjit Bolt (November 13 to January 4), and Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” (April 23 to June 7).

        “On the Verge” runs through June 1 at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 871 3000.

        The show gets a rating of 2 ½ stars.    May 2008

For more information, visit www.remybumppo.org.   

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Bronte

at the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

        CHICAGO—For more than 100 years the three Bronte sisters have been at the heart of one of the great industries in English literature. Every year graduate students, professors, and just curious tourists make the pilgrimage to Haworth Parsonage in the Yorkshire moors to pay homage to the women who produced two of the great romantic novels in Western literature and elevated themselves to a degree of literary celebrityhood in the English-speaking world matched only by William Shakespeare and James Joyce.

        British playwright Polly Teale is one of the latest writers to plunge into the Bronte mythology. Teale has written a trilogy of plays based on the sisters, the final work, simply called “Bronte,” now receiving its local premiere in a luminous production by the Remy Bumppo Theatre.

        Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Bronte lived in isolation in rural England. Patrick Bronte, their father, was a poor Irishman who became the parish clergyman in the small, isolated town of Haworth in West Yorkshire. There the sisters lived their father and their brother Branwell. Their mother died while the sisters were children, leaving an emotional void in their lives as they grew up shy, poor, and lonely.

                                 

     The sisters were physically plain women suffocated by the cultural oppression that early Victorian patriarchal society inflicted on their women. Females were rarely educated in the early 1800’s in England, though the sisters were exposed to above average learning in the harsh atmosphere of several boarding schools. Patrick Bronte did allow his daughters to read freely among literary classics, this at a time when women were not even allowed to enter a local library. The reading probably triggered the lively imaginations of the three sisters, leading to Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre.” Poor Anne has existed for generations as the odd woman out in the family, though her writings are starting to receive more positive upgrading by critics.

        Teale’s play begins with three actresses in modern clothing changing to the wardrobe of the early 1800’s as they introduce the three sisters and their narrow world weighed down by poverty, infant mortality, and drudgery. The actresses, costumed in the dresses of the day, then assume Yorkshire accents and take us through the humdrum daily lives of the sisters as well as their fervent inner lives.

        As children the sisters played with their brother, who led the girls in swashbuckling adventures on the high seas concocted in their kitchen. Gradually the personalities of the sisters clarify. Emily wrote to escape the prison of her daily existence. She fiercely protected her inner life while the more outgoing Charlotte sought fame in the outside world beyond the Bronte home. Charlotte becomes a darker character, possibly destroying a novel by Emily after her sister’s death and heavily editing Emily’s poetry for posthumous publication.

        There isn’t much physical action in “Bronte” but plenty of emotional highs and lows as the sisters endlessly bicker in their loneliness, discuss the meaning of life, and generally try to deal with the tedium of the endless days at Haworth while they harnessed their writing as an outlet for their frustrations. Their first publications were published under male pseudonyms, the British literary world being unwilling to recognize that mere females could write novels with the emotional wallop of “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre,” novels often challenged for obscenity

        Teale injects scenes from the two major novels into the otherwise realistic action of her play. Thus, we get an actress playing Bertha Rochester, the mad wife from “Jane Eyre,” and Cathy, the tragic heroine of “Wuthering Heights, with cameo appearances by Rochester himself and Healthcliff, Cathy’s lover.

        Teale’s play reflects enormous research in laying out the everyday lives of the sisters and the social climate that imprisoned them. The playwright’s educated guesses about what transpired among the sisters and what went on in their heads has the ring of authenticity. At 2 ½ hours, the play runs a little long for such a talky piece, but most of the talk is highly charged with feeling and sometimes eloquence (and occasional humor).

       Audiences unfamiliar with the intimacies of Bronte family life will be struck by the central place occupied by Branwell, the hope of the family, a charismatic young man eventually destroyed by the expectations heaped upon him by his less privileged sisters. None of the sisters lived beyond their 30's while the dissolute and disappointed Branwell died at 31. Only the father survived, outliving all his offspring to the age of 81.

        The Remy Bumppo production is ornamented by superb performances from the three young actresses playing the sisters—Carrie A. Coon as the intense and withdrawn Emily, Susan Shunk as the more outgoing and cagey Charlotte, and Rachel Sondag as the patient Anne. All three draw the spectators into the world of the Bronte sisters with absolute authenticity. Their dowdy costumes can’t quite conceal the fact that the three actresses are all attractive young women, but otherwise the viewer has no difficulty accepting them as incarnations of the Bronte sisters.

  

        Gregory Anderson delivers an extraordinary performance as Branwell, a young man cursed with carrying the burden of his family’s hopes, his failures spiraling downward to alcoholism, drug addiction, and psychological defeat. Patrick Clear contributes a set of striking performances as the various men in the lives of the sisters, beginning with their authoritarian father and ending with the comical curate who improbably becomes Charlotte’s husband.

        Linda Gillum plays the fictional Bertha Rochester and Cathy, weaving in and out of the action like a ghost and spending much of her stage time writhing on the floor in either spiritual agony or erotic arousal. I doubt that Gillum has ever played stranger roles in her years with Remy Bumppo.

        James Bohnen directs the language-heavy play with insight and intelligence, the hallmarks of a Remy Bumppo production. Tim Morrison designed the effectively atmospheric setting of the parsonage interior. Judith Lundberg designed the costumes, Rich Norwood the lighting, and Lindsay Jones the sound as well as composing the original music. And a nod to dialect coach Eve Breneman, who guided the ensemble to render the Yorkshire dialects with reasonable accuracy without sacrificing intelligibility.

  “Bronte” runs through May 4 at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 871 3000.

          The show gets a rating of 4 stars     March 2008

            For more information contact:   www.remybumppo.org

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