Tigers Be Still
At Theater Wit
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – At the beginning of “Tigers Be Still” at
Theater Wit, 24-year old Sherry takes a microphone and announces to the
audience, karaoke style, “This is the story of how I stopped being a total
disaster and got my life on track and did not let overwhelming feelings of
anxiousness and loneliness and uselessness just, like, totally eat my brain.” 
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
Well, maybe. But for most of this 1 hour and 40 minute one act play, Sherry’s feelings of anxiety, loneliness, and uselessness threaten to bring her down. The young woman is engulfed in problems that her determinedly perky and optimistic attitude may never surmount. Life has dealt Sherry a very bad hand.
Sherry lives in a house with an older sister named Grace who lives on the living room couch, wallowing in despair because she was jilted by her louse of a boyfriend. Grace subsists on Jim Beam bourbon and TV reruns of the movie “Top Gun.” Upstairs, their mother has withdrawn permanently into bed, suffering from an auto immune disease. The medication has caused mammoth weight gain, and the former high school prom queen refuses contact with any living person, including her daughters. She communicates only by telephone.
Sherry not only has to deal with a dysfunctional sister and mother, she is still traumatized by the departure of her father, who simply walked out on his family. Sherry’s social life is nil. At 24, she’s never had a boyfriend. And she’s never been employed, but that might change. Sherry now has a job, as an art therapist working for a middle school principal named Joseph, who, stretching the long arm of coincidence, dated Sherry’s mother during the woman’s prom queen days. The job comes with one millstone. Joseph insists that Sherry take on his 18-year old son Zach as a teaching assistant. Zach is a sullen teen-ager devastated by the loss of his mother who died in an auto accident. Joseph is thus faced with raising an uncooperative and belligerent son while he grieves over the loss of his wife.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
So those are the characters in Kim Rosenstock’s play—five people (we never see the mother) leading lives of not so quiet desperation. The play moves at a leisurely pace until the final scenes and requires patience from the audience lest they tire of being in the company of so many troubled and pathetic characters.
Fortunately Rosenstock writes with sympathy and humor. She creates clearly etched individuals, providing meaty roles for performers able to get under the skins of these downtrodden people. And by the end of the play, all the characters experience shifts in their lives that just might herald a brave new day, though each still has steep emotional and psychological hills to climb. A sequel to the play pegged two years later could find the characters liberated from their sorrows and hang-ups and enjoying livable lives. Or not.
The Theater Wit production looks and sounds just right. Mary Winn Heider carries the play as Sherry, fighting her defeated sister and mother on the home front, trying to build a relationship with the difficult Zach, and battling her own demons of vulnerability and insecurity. We root for Heider’s Sherry because the woman is trying so hard with so much relentless enthusiasm against such appalling odds. Heider is an attractive young lady, which works against the premise that Sherry never had a boyfriend. The actress in the off Broadway production had a physically gawky presence that added a kooky comic dimension to the character. But Heider’s Sherry is still credible and sympathetic in her desperation and that’s critical to the success of the production.
Matt Farabee is terrific as Zach, a downer of a character who can irritate spectators with his self centered glumness until his back story is revealed near the end of the play. Then he converts from an annoying and self involved teen-ager into a person struggling with internal burdens no 18 year old should be forced to carry.
Kasey Foster has a thankless role for much of the play, Grace being indolent and self pitying, though she stimulates much of the play’s comedy. But Foster meets the role head on, delivering the kind of quirky performance Laurie Metcalf would have provided 25 years ago at the Steppenwolf Theatre (Foster even looks a lot like Metcalf).
As Joseph, the only real adult in the play (excluding the non appearing mother), Guy Massey is funny and pathetic, which are the two poles that delineate the character. Massey beautifully performs a short scene in which Joseph tries to cancel his wife’s subscription to a yoga magazine, fending off the magazine representative’s relentless questioning about why the subscription should be cancelled. Joseph is in such denial that he won’t simply tell the rep his wife is dead. It’s the play’s saddest scene and all the stronger for its understatement.
Jeremy Wechsler directs the show with a command of both its humorous and semi-tragic elements. The comedy never gets too broad and the serious portions too mawkish. It’s a tough balancing act that the production manages with insight, humor, and even compassion.
Andrei Onegin designed the minimal set that consists primarily of a few pieces of furniture and a lot of mess, in cooperation with Emily Bennett’s properties design. Mike Durst designed the lighting, Christine Pascual the grungy costumes, and Christopher Kriz the sound, which leans effectively on selections of rock music.
The play’s title refers to a tiger that escaped from the town zoo and roams the community for the several weeks the play covers. It’s difficult to believe that a tiger could move about the town for such a long time without detection, but it does, which must mean the animal is a metaphor. Audiences can parse out the meaning of the escaped tiger at their pleasure. Doubtless it has something to do with the human condition but its impact on the play is minimal.
“Tigers Be Still” runs through June 3 at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $18 to $36. Call 773 975 8150 or visit www.TheaterWit.org.The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. May 2012
Contact Dan at zeffdanial@yahoo.com.
Like Dan on Facebook. Become a friend!!!
***********************************
The North Plan
At Theater Wit
By Dan Zeff
Chicago– “The North Plan” at Theater Wit is either a farce with dark political conspiracy overtones or a political conspiracy drama played heavily for farce. Playwright Jason Wells may intend to say serious things about the political state of the nation, but if the audience doesn’t take his play seriously, it’s his own fault. He’s made his show too funny to convince viewers they are witnessing any disturbing commentary about our current political scene.
“The North Plan” takes place in two
rooms of a police station in a tiny rural Missouri town. The time seems roughly
the present. In the first act, we meet a foul-mouthed trailer trash lady named
Tanya, confined to a cage in the police station waiting transfer to the county
facility on a charge of DUI. In the cage next to her is a Carlton, a hyper
personality who claims to be a mid-level bureaucrat in the State Department in
possession of an enemies list that can disrupt a group taking over the United
States government.
In bits and pieces, the audience learns that a force is taking over the government, arresting artists and journalists and similar resisters, setting up concentration camps, and instituting curfews and checkpoints. According to Carlton, they are following the North Plan, named for Oliver North (remember him?), hatched in the 1980’s. At least I think that’s the case. The point whizzed by me early in the show when I wasn’t sure what I needed to know to follow the erratic narrative.
In the second act, the action moves to the front office in the police station where a pair of sinister agents from Washington are on the scene to pry the enemies list from Carlton by any means necessary. There is a “Manchurian Candidate” menacing flavor about the agents and the forces they serve. They are a nasty pair, especially Agent Pitman. His colleague, Lee, is more of a stooge injected for comic effect. There are a few moments of torture in the second act and the play ends with half the cast shot dead, but the overall impression remains that “The North Plan” is a comedy which awkwardly incorporates elements of social commentary.
The playwright is most successful when
he follows the basic strictures of farce, especially mistaken identities and
highly unlikely confusions of purpose. There is only three entrances and exits
in Jack Magaw’s effective set, a very low ration for a farce, but they are used
nimbly to get characters on an off stage with split second timing in the true
farce tradition.
Director Kimberly Senior, who is on a roll this season, opts to play the action for laughs, and who can blame her? The playwright gives her little to work with in exploring the political possibilities of the story. We aren’t told how the country got into such a crisis or who the bad guys represent, though they are apparently right wing extremists. Carlton believes that if his enemies list can somehow be delivered to a Houston journalist with a comical name the country will be saved. How this will come to pass eluded me.
The six-member ensemble all show a nifty flair for comedy, led by the inimitable Kate Buddeke as Tanya, a lady who takes vulgarity to impressive heights. Buddeke starts the play with a virtual monologue, well laced with profanity, that establishes her character as one of life’s bottom feeders. She disappears from the action for a bit and then returns in triumph, guns blazing.
Kevin Stark is great as Carlton, a man who may (or may not) hold the key to saving the country with the enemies list embedded in his laptop computer. Carlton’s desperation manages to be funny and intense at the same time, not an easy acting feat. Tom Hickey is outstanding as Pitman, who is both scary and comical. Hickey’s Pitman is the kind of nasty, outwardly bland character who makes an audience nervous every minute he’s on stage. Brian King delivers a low-keyed comic performance as Pitman’s sidekick who doesn’t have a real place in the play.
Lucy Sandy plays Shonda, a young black administrative officer in the police station who initially stays uncommitted amidst the political turbulence brought in by Pitman and Lee but eventually opts for the good guys. Will Zahrn is the police chief, a crusty salt-of-the-earth character who doesn’t appreciate the big city boys from Washington D.C. running roughshod over his small domain.
“The North Plan” originated in 2010 as part of the Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Repertory of New Work. I don’t know if Wells revised his play significantly since 2010, but what he has now is a weird hybrid of belly laugh comedy and unsettling “Could it happen here?” political drama. Characters don’t die in a farce and we don’t laugh during plays that attempt serious political commentary. The opening night audience received the play as a comedy and that’s surely the way to go. Viewers can deal with the violence as best they can, happy to be entertained by the play’s offbeat visual and verbal humor.
In addition to Magaw’s set design, Scott Pillsbury designed the lighting, Elizabeth Flauto the costumes, and Rick Sims the sound. Chris Rickett choreographed the convincing fight sequences.
“The North Plan” runs through April 1 at Theater Wit, 1229 West
Belmont Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday
at 3 p.m. Tickets are $18 to $36. Call 773 975 8150 or visit www.TheaterWit.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. February 2012
Contact Dan at
www.zeffdaniel@yahoo.Com
Like Dan on Facebook. Become a Friend.
http://facebook.com/zeffdaniel
*********************************
This
At Theater Wit
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “This” explores the lives of several articulate and educated characters leading vaguely unhappy lives as they advance toward middle age. Nothing new there. The characters include an outwardly witty but inwardly bitter gay man. Definitely nothing new there. And the story turns on a sexual moment that sends shock waves through the characters. Absolutely nothing new there.
Melissa James Gibson doesn’t strive for originality in her play, relying on scintillating realistic dialogue, engaging characters, and brilliant theatrical/dramatic moments. The result is 95 superior minutes on the stage of the Theater Wit, thanks to the superb script and a to-die-for production.
The core character in “This” is Jane, a poet ad teacher who lost her husband to an illness a year before the play begins, leaving her with an adolescent daughter and a thick veneer of grief. Rotating around her are a married couple, Tom and Merrill, and their gay friend Alan. All four had met in college and remain close as they proceed into their late 30’s.
There is a fifth character, a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre who works in Doctors Without Borders. Jean-Pierre is brought into the story as a romantic fix-up for Jane to ease the sorrow of her widowhood. And like many good intensions, this act of friendship and sympathy turns counter-productive.
The marriage between Tom and Merrill is troubled, steeped in a lack of fulfillment aggravated by the recent birth of their first child, a baby who sleeps in 15-minute increments, frazzling the parents’ nerves and temper. Alan wants to remake a life he finds unsatisfactory. He’s willing to try almost anything, but his chief distinction, along with his tart sense of humor, is a genius for total recall. He can recreate any conversation carried on in his presence word-for-word. It’s a skill and a curse. His talent is a party trick and also skillfully insinuates itself into the development of the narrative.
Jane is trying to deal with single parenthood and her sense of loss at the death of her husband. Just as great a burden is the relentless sympathy inflicted on her by her friends. They have made her the poster woman for the perfect marriage destroyed by a death too soon and she is weary of living up to their glorification of her married life.
Jean-Pierre is an outsider in the story, a low-keyed and sexy man bemused by all the angst fulminating among the other characters. He also provides a welcome sense of perspective. Late in the play he learns of the one-night stand between Jane and Tom that threatens Tom’s marriage to Merrill. With true Gaelic worldliness, Jean-Pierre dismisses the infidelity as a minor occurrence. What is serious is what he sees as a Doctor Without Borders.
For all the incidents in the play, “This” is not plot-heavy. It’s people-heavy in the best sense. The characters are imperfect but likable, well spoken but not glib or pompous. They can also be very funny. Alan may seem the stereotype of the wisecracking gay man with inner demons, but he’s wonderfully fresh and entertaining, far beyond any sense of caricature. Credit Gibson for creating the character and Mitchell J. Fain for a stunning three-dimensional portrayal of a man trying to deal with a life he sees as shallow and inadequate.
In checking her entry in the playbill, I noted that I had seen Rebecca Spence in several shows in Chicago, and I’m sure she was very good in all of them. But her performance as Jane elevates her to a new plateau. Spence brings out the vulnerability, guilt, sensitivity, confusion, and heart of the woman in a impeccable performance. Spence may be a little young for Jane, but in the face of such superior acting that’s pure quibble.
John Byrnes and Lily Mojekwu play the troubled married couple with the same insight that marks the rest of the ensemble. Mojekwu might project her voice a little more in Merrill’s quieter moments, but overall she delivers a vivid portrait of a woman struggling with marriage and motherhood and watching her life gradually but inexorably slide downhill. Mojekwu’s character is black, but it’s a further tribute to Gibson’s subtlety that race is a nuance rather than an exploitive element in the story.
Steve Hadnagy is just right as the droll and urbane Frenchman. His best scene is conducted in impassioned French over a cell phone. I had no idea what he was saying but he was great.
Jeremy Wechsler deserves highest marks for assembling the flawless cast and then orchestrating a staging that seems inevitable and natural from first to last. Wechsler’s work on this production validates the truism that the best directing is directing that is invisible to the audience.
The visual production is as masterful as the performances. Roger Wykes’s flexible scenic plan shifts rapidly and smoothly among the narrative’s various indoor and outdoor settings with the movement of a few props and portable walls. Mike Durst’s lighting design, Samantha Jones’s costumes, and Christopher Kriz’s sound round out the first-rate physical production.
Theater Wit scored a coup by landing “This” for the play’s Chicago premiere. The show was a major success off Broadway two seasons ago and would have been an ornament on the schedule of any theater in metropolitan Chicago. It’s impossible to imagine any theater in the area, no matter how high its reputation, exceeding the triumph of this production.
“This” runs through March 27 at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $15 to $35. Call 773 975 8150 or visit www.TheaterWit.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yaoo.com. March 2011
Visit Dan on Facebook.
****************************
The Four of Us
At the Theatre Wit
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “The Four of Us” is a buddy play, a comedy drama about two friends over a 10-year period from 1997 to 2007. The playwright is Itamar Moses, one of the brighter lights on the current American theater scene, previously represented in Chicagoland in 2007 by his intriguing historical play “Bach in Leipzig” at the Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe.
Compared to the earlier play, “The Four of Us” is a slender piece, running 90 minutes without an intermission, focusing on the shifting relationship between two young men, a wannabe novelist named Benjamin and a wannabe playwright named David. The storyline moves back and forth in time over those 10 years in a series of short scenes. The tone is realistic, though toward the end of the play Moses throws the audience a curve that blurs the line between life and art and calls into question much of what we have previously seen and heard.
“The Four of Us” basically dramatizes the turbulent feelings of one struggling artist as he watches another artist make it big while he languishes, ignored and rejected. The play opens with the two young men dining at a restaurant. The pair are commemorating Benjamin’s success with his first novel. According to an agreement the two made years before, the first writer to score commercially gets treated to a lunch by the other. As the scene unfolds, the personalities David and Benjamin emerge. Davis is the more emotional, Benjamin cool and bemused. David is jealous of his friend’s success and he is put out by Benjamin’s laid-back attitude toward his new wealth and critical acclaim.
By the halfway point in the play, the
audience recognizes Benjamin as supercilious, pompous, and emotionally stunted
beneath his unflappable exterior. The man comes across as an annoying twit. No
wonder David gets irritated with him. Davis feels more deeply about things,
whether it is his career, his sex life, or his friendship with Benjamin. David
takes a voyeuristic interest in his friend’s sexual activities, hinting at a
repressed and envious personality lurking within the bland and diffident
exterior. Their personalities are so different that we may wonder how the
friendship could be sustained over such a long period, though the men are
geographically separated for much of the play’s time frame, allowing less
opportunity to get on each other’s nerves.
Moses dials up the emotional heat toward the end of the play when Benjamin confronts David at a preview performance of David’s play in New York City. Benjamin claims one of the characters in the play is based on him and he doesn’t like it. It’s in this scene that the audience learns of the surprise in the play’s structure. It would be unfair to disclose the dramaturgical switcheroo, but it forced me to reevaluate what I’d been watching, a distracting process while the play continues to unfold.
“The Four of Us” apparently has autobiographical elements, with Benjamin representing American novelist Jonathan Safron Foer, the author of the acclaimed first novel “Everything Is Illuminated.” David presumably is the stand-in for Itamar Moses himself. I wonder if they are still speaking to each other.
The chief merit of “The Four of Us” resides in the sharp dialogue. Moses also makes some interesting observations about the contrasting creative lives of a novelist, who works in isolation, and a playwright, who must collaborate with other artists.
After the opening scene, the best moment in the play comes when David blows up at the invisible audience during a question-and-answer session in Indiana where his new play is being staged. The play has been panned by local reviewers, bringing David to the boiling point as he insults everyone in sight, from the critics to the actors to the audience to the set designers. The tirade is a tour de force of frustration and resentment.
Many of the play’s weaknesses lie in scenes that meander. One scene turns on Benjamin acting out David’s recent sexual one night stand, using a large teddy bear as an erotic stand-in for the lady in question. The scene runs too long for its obvious point. Also, neither character is particularly likable, especially Benjamin, and that may keep both characters at emotional arm’s length for some spectators.
“The Four of Us” could be shorted by several minutes, culling out some of the chitchat, and I remain uncomfortable with the dramatic u-turn late in the play. Does the play really benefit from the twist, or is it a Tom Stoppard-ish gimmick that confuses instead of enhancing?
The production profits mightily from the spot-on performances by Collin Geraghty as Benjamin and Usman Ally as David. Geraghty is perfect as the aloof young man who explodes with hostility when he senses his friend is ridiculing him on the stage. Ally is equally good as David, wearing his feelings on his sleeve and never able to get a handle on his friend’s emotional disconnect in their relationship. Director Jeremy Wechsler does an insightful job of orchestrating the shifting tides of the friendship. Some scenes work better than others but under Wechsler’s unobtrusive but sensitive guidance, the play never turns static or talky.
Roger Wykes designed the sets, changed in full view of the audience with the sliding of a few panels and the brisk removal or addition of props by a pair of stagehands. Scott Pillsbury designed the lighting, Christine Pascual the costumes, and Joseph Fosco the sound.
“The Four of Us” runs through December 18 at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $30. Call 773 975 8150 or visit www.theaterwit.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. December 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
Visit him on Facebook.
**************************
Spin
At the Theater Wit
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Theater Wit has finally opened, adding three small but well equipped theaters to the Chicago storefront theater scene. After seven years of planning and 16 months of construction at a cost of $1.3 million, Theater Wit artistic director Jeremy Wechsler can point with pride to a project that will provide performing spaces for his own theater as well as the Shattered Globe Theatre, Stage Left Theatre, and Bohemian Theatre Ensemble.
The theater complex has been remodeled from the old Bailiwick Arts Centre and should be fully operational by this autumn. But the outlines of the project are clear now. There will be three 99-seat theaters, two with proscenium configurations and one flexible. The theaters will complete a mini theater district in the 1200 block of West Belmont Avenue, joining the Theatre Building next door with its multiple theater spaces.
The amenities at Theater Wit won’t be extravagant, but they are a massive upgrade over the previous facilities in terms of restrooms, lobby space, concessions, and box office convenience. The seats were obtained from an area high school but are comfortable and stylish looking. Compared to the typical storefront theater in Chicago, Theater Wit oozes luxury.
That’s the good news. The not so good news is that Theater Wit is opening the complex with the premiere of a play called “Spin.” It’s a family affair with Wechsler directing the work by his wife, dramatist Penny Penniston. “Spin” advertises itself as a comedy that takes satirical shots at advertising and consumer culture. But it’s really a ramshackle affair that lurches into so many different directions that it seems like the author dumped ideas for a half dozen plays into one script, with predictably indigestible results.
“Spin” has six characters. Brent (Coburn Goss) is an ace art director for an advertising agency who wants to get out of the rat race after he separates from his wife. Danielle (Alice Wedoff) is a street waif who Brent rescues from her abusive boy friend Aaron (Michael Kessler). Redge (Joe Foust) is the head of the ad agency, a cynic with a low opinion of human nature. Jack (Lance Baker) is a button-down executive with the agency who hovers on the fringes of the action to no discernible purpose. Ruby Jones (Austin Talley) is a black tennis star of Tiger Woods-like celebrityhood who becomes part of a beer campaign for the ad agency.
At times, “Spin” takes pot shots at the advertising business, surely the most over satirized institution in American society. Along the way, Brent falls in love with Danielle, discovers she is woefully under age (though Wedoff looks like a very healthy female in her 20’s), and goes to pieces. Danielle’s youth makes three of the play’s five male characters guilty of statutory rape. Aaron starts the play as a naïve anti-establishment terrorist of the Weathermen persuasion, leaves for a few scenes, and returns a changed and repentant young man. His main function in the play apparently is to introduce a bomb on stage that leads to a ridiculous black comedy climax.
Ruby Jones comes in late in the story to introduce a meditation on the power of celebrities in American life. When a brief video of Ruby surfaces on the internet showing the man fighting police seven years previously, we get commentary on the power of the internet and how to convert a public relations disaster into a positive through information manipulation.
There are continual and purposeless references to a small abstract sculpture in Brent’s possession as well as the death of Redge’s sister years ago that is a narrative tease and dead end. Periodically the characters address the audience directly, a distracting and confusing dramatic device that works in “The Glass Menagerie” and “Our Town” but not in “Spin.”
Somewhere in all this mish mash of storylines there may be a workable play. Penniston has written some sharp dialogue and a handful of dramatic scenes that hold the stage nicely. My guess is that her best chance to save her show would be to concentrate on the Ruby Jones bit. That’s where the real spin of the title comes in and it has immediacy with the real-life Tiger Woods soap opera that has flooded the media. The Jones narrative touches on racial attitudes, the cult of the sports hero in America, and image management that could work either as a tart comedy or as a drama. The rest of the stuff doesn’t coalesce into a coherent play.
The performances in “Spin” are fine, as one would expect from an ensemble that includes several A list actors in Chicagoland theater, notable Goss, Faust, and Baker. Wechsler directs unobtrusively. Jack Magaw has designed a functional and credible modern big city apartment set. Jessica Harpenau designed the lighting, Laura Brookshire Kollar the costumes, and Christopher Kriz the sound.
“Spin” runs through June 5 at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont Avenue. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 975 8150 or visit www.TheaterWit.org .
The show gets a rating of two stars. April 2101
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
**************************
Feydeau–si-deau
by Theater Wit
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO-Theater Wit is the latest local company to try its hand at
bringing a Feydeau show to life in English. The theater calls the show “Feydeau–si-deau,” one of several titles for the original, the best known being “Chemin
de Fer.”
Feydeau may have a hallowed place in the comic theater pantheon, but the man’s work doesn’t seem to travel well across the Atlantic Ocean. Over the years I’ve seen Feydeau productions, always in adaptations by English-speaking theater people, in Chicago and suburban theaters and in Canada. In spite of occasional felicitous humorous moments, the plays seemed laborious and silly, a great deal of sound and fury signifying very little in terms of laughter.
The reference books rank Georges Feydeau among the great comic playwrights in the history of western theater. In France, Feydeau is mentioned in the same breath with the immortal Moliere. Feydeau’s farces have been praised for their ingenuity and hilarity and he’s even been credited as a precursor of some of the edgiest experimental drama movements of the 1900’s.
The theme of a Feydeau farce is always sex, more particularly adulterous sex set among the complacent middle class and upper middle class Parisian society of the late 1800’s. “Feydeau si-deau” is comparatively late Feydeau, opening in 1904. It’s not a typical example of the author’s farce style. Generally, a Feydeau plot is so intricate and so complex that it defies description. The action in a Feydeau farce begins with a small misunderstanding. It then escalates into a frenzy of confusion and mistaken identities, with one character dashing in or out of a room, missing by a nanosecond a meeting with another character that would prove disastrous.
In many Feydeau farces the characters try to consummate their infidelities, but fail because of bad luck and their own incompetence. In “Feydeau –si-deau” the adulteries actually come off, which gives the narrative a faintly unsavory flavor. The plot itself is much less labyrinthine than usual. Essentially “Feydeau –si-deau” is a round robin of lecheries disrupting two marriages, with cheating husbands and wannabe cheaters circling lasciviously around two married women.
Feydeau enjoyed ridiculing his characters, often giving them bizarre physical or psychological quirks. In “Feydeau –si-deau,” a dustman barks like a dog under stress. A respected politician comes unglued like a would-be Inspector Clouseau in the presence of a woman he wants to seduce. A normally placid senior citizen turns randy when drunk, firing a pistol into the air. None of this has anything to do with the storyline but does allow for opportunities for lots of comic shtick.
It’s easier to perform Shakespeare than Feydeau. With Shakespeare, the language and characters are so rich that they can carry a less than perfect production. But a Feydeau play can’t fall back on brilliant language or scintillating characters. The language, at least in translation, is serviceable at best and the characters are mostly caricatures caught in the grip of a narrative spiraling more and more out of control. The sheer energy of the story has to sustain the evening. Give the audience a chance to sit back and ponder all the nonsense happening on the stage and the production is sunk.
Theater Wit gives “Feydeau –si-deau” a game try under Jeremy Wechsler’s high octane directing. But too much of the uproar on stage is noisy and foolish rather than hilarious. The characters are all dupes or sexual predators, which is fine if they are also funny. There are occasional moments of legitimate comedy but not enough to paper over the all too visible skeleton of the script. One character pelting melons at another character should be uproarious, but here it’s just inane.
Theater Wit has assembled a large cast of 14. The performances are uneven, but there is worthy work by Maggie Graham as the woman who is the lodestar of most of the libidinous men in the play. Kevin Theis is solid as Fedot, one of the predators. The funniest bit in the play is a running gag about the similar pronunciations of “Fedot” and “Feydeau.”
The always reliable Ronald Keaton stirs up a lot of dust as the drunk who fires a pistol with the decibel count of a 100-pound bomb. My personal favorite was Jennifer Grace in the very minor role of a lady’s maid who has a grand old time watching her betters land themselves in so many erotic difficulties. It would be interesting to watch the young actress in a more substantial comic role.
The physical production at the Theatre Building benefits from Laura Kollar’s turn-of-the-century costumes and the drawing room and bedroom sets by Hang Le and Courtney O’Neill. Jeremy Getz designed the lighting and Joseph Fosco the sound.
“Feydeau –si-deau” runs through April 20 at the Theatre
Building, 1225 West Belmont Avenue.
Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7:45 p.m. and Sunday at
2:45 p.m. Tickets are $24. Call 773 327 5252.
The show gets a rating of 2 ½ stars. March 2008
For more information contact: www.theatrebuildingchicago.org
Contact us: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com