At the Victory Gardens Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – The new play at the Victory Gardens Theater runs 90 minutes and after the first 45 minutes on opening night I was ready to give up on the show. It appeared that the playwright had composed a comedy dealing with genocide, a concept both unworkable and offensive. Then the script shifts gears and the play ends on a peak of attention-grabbing intensity. Overall the drama doesn’t hold together, but at least the actors get to show serious dramatic chops and the narrative does engage in some provocative issues.
The full title of the play is “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.” The playwright is Jackie Sibblies Drury and her work comes out of the Victory Gardens IGNITION Festival of new plays.
“We Are Proud to Present…” begins with six amateur actors lined up in front of the audience. The ensemble is evenly divided between three black and three white performers, identified only by their color. Their leader (Tracey N. Bonner) addresses the audience directly as she fumbles through a stack of note cards. This goes on for several minutes as we are informed that the performers will be exploring the little known genocide that took place in the early 1900’s in what is now Namibia in western Africa, when German colonial forces wiped out 80 per cent of the native Herero tribe.
The opening lecture aimed at the audience
is relentlessly facetious, finally concluding with the six actors moving back
stage to attempt a historical rendering of the circumstances surrounding the
Herero massacre. The actors choose to recount the atmosphere surrounding the
genocide by reading letters back home from lonesome German soldiers, letters
that don’t even hint at the enormity of the slaughter they are inflicting on
the Herero tribe.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
About halfway through the show the performers get racial in their approach to the black/white aspects of the genocide. A cultural divide opens between white and black actors, who separate over interpretations of racial authenticity and identity in delving into the Herero tragedy. The white actors seem more comfortable viewing the genocide from a white viewpoint. At least one black actor demands the story inject more of the African perspective.
In the final minutes the emotional temperature really heats up. The scene transfers from Africa to the United States. The two white male actors (Jake Cohen and Bernard Balbot) become Southern redneck racists persecuting one of the black actors (Travis Turner). The action gets explosively tense, with a noose actually around the neck of the bound and humiliated black actor who ultimately flees the stage just before the play ends. The curtain call got a predictable standing ovation from the audience, still in the grip of the white-hot racial confrontations that had just passed before them.
But the emotional high of the play rapidly drains away, replaced by the uncomfortable feeling that “We Are Proud to Present…” doesn’t make any narrative sense. The six amateur actors are supposedly performing without a script, yet they fall into a carefully worked out mini play that occupies the final minutes of the evening. The two white actors morph into the racist rednecks without any indication of why they are suddenly Southerners instead of their previous impersonations of German soldiers stationed in Africa. The ensemble goes into a group rap number for no dramatic reason. The stimulating and disturbing core of the play, conflicting black and white viewpoints on racial history, gets lost in all the overheated narrative twists and turns.
The viewer can cut the play some slack in recognition of the committed performances, led by Turner as the black actor who is most inflamed by the injustice he sees in the white attitude toward the Herero genocide. There is also good work by Kamal Angelo Bolden as a second black man and Leah Karpel as the lone white female. The viewer may be frustrated and confused by the inconsistent narrative but the actors seemed to know what’s happening on stage and what is expected of them.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
I suspect that “We Are Proud to Present…” is still in a state of playwriting flux. The show needs to go back into the workshop to refine its strengths, the contrary approaches to race and history by the well meaning but conflicted black and white performers. The attempts at aw shucks comedy in the opening minutes does get some giggles from the audience but trivializes the enormity of the genocide theme to come. The idea of actors gradually merging into the roles they perform is not new in the theater but it’s valid and worth building on. But there needs to be some bridge that connects the German forces and the Herero victims in Namibia during the early 1900’s with the hateful redneck racists on American soil. If such a bridge does exist in the current production, it eluded me.
Director Eric Ting hasn’t been able to make Drury’s script coherent but he has definitely guided some all-out performances from his young cast. Brian Sydney Bembridge designed the set, Jesse Klug the lighting, Sarah Picket the sound, and Christine Pascual the grungy costumes. Mike Tutaj designed the projections that keep the audience informed about the play’s chronology.
Whatever its dramatic weaknesses, “We Are Proud to Present…” does spotlight a little known horrific episode in modern history. The Herero tribe finally as a champion to recount their near extermination more than a century ago. A spotlight is focused, however erratically, on how black and white attitudes clash over how to validly present this tragedy, and by extension other tragedies rooted in racial conflict. But there is much work to be done before the play meets the challenges it honorably tries to confront.
“We Are Proud to Present…” runs through April 29 at the Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 30090 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. April 2012
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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At the Victory Gardens Theater
by Dan Zeff
Chicago – “Ameriville” surveys the current American social landscape and finds this country in dire straits. There are problems everywhere—racism, class conflict, the plight of the homeless and troops returning from far off wars, the lack of health insurance, the exploitation of illegal immigrants, hate crimes, poverty, bigotry, and intolerance.
It’s a bleak picture that “Ameriville” portrays, so why is the show so exhilarating? The answer resides in the multiple talents and spirit of its four member ensemble, now performing with inexhaustible energy on the stage and in the aisles at the Victory Gardens Theater.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The performers call themselves Universes and their show has been developed with and directed by Chay Yew, the Victory Gardens new artistic director. The quartet consists of Gamal Abdel Chasten, William Ruiz, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp, and Steven Sapp. They draw on a panorama of musical traditions—salsa, blues, rap, rhythm and blues, gospel, and what sounds like field chants from slave days. When they aren’t singing, they are talking, and always in constant motion, not so much dancing as in choreographed movement. They go at it for 90 uninterrupted minutes, delivering a complex and intricate production so persuasive that all the action looks and sounds natural and inevitable.
“Ameriville” begins with a collage of scenes from New Orleans during and after the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe of 2005. The early scenes explore the devastation of the hurricane and the problems of recovery—problems complicated by government incompetence and insensitivity and the indifference of the rest of the country. The show then flows into social problems that blanket the entire country. The stories are told from the viewpoint of the underclass—the homeless veteran, the immigrant Latina woman working two exhausting jobs to keep her family going, the black man scuffling for food money on street corners. The show is a rich group portrait, mostly of people left behind in the quest for the American dream. There is a con artist, a barber, a drunken tourist, and a street vendor.
“Ameriville” clearly sides with the victims of social injustice and inaction. It’s nothing we haven’t been exposed to before, but Universes grabs us with its highly theatrical flair for storytelling. Typical is a rap poem that speeds through all the different kinds of hate, including fat people who hate thin people because thin people look better, and thin people who hate fat people because fat people can eat whatever they want to.
There is plenty of humor in “Ameriville” along with the drama and pathos. In one comic bit, two performers circle around each other, each man trying to prove his racial bona fides by demonstrating he is blacker than the other. The mood shifts flow cohesively, and coherently, facilitated by a flexible staging that includes only four wooden chairs and two wooden tables arranged in various combinations from scene to scene. The performers pound out percussive rhythms with their hands and feet, break out into a cappella song, and launch brief monologues. It’s all nonstop but never out of control. The segways to the next scene are flawless in their precision, doubtless the result of uncounted hours of rehearsal.
The production is enhanced by Brian Freeland’s video designs projected on the rear wall of the stage, videos that mix abstract images with realistic scenes to provide a visual complement to the live action. But in spite of all the nonstop activity, the show never seems overly busy or confusing. The subject matter may be earthy, but “Ameriville” is a deceptively sophisticated theatrical and dramatic experience.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
By the end of the show the performers have adopted a hopeful “We shall overcome” attitude. Sure, they say, we face daunting problems but we can survive and even triumph because we carry the collective American spirit within us. It sounds preachy but the message does pack an emotional wallop and the opening night audience responded with an enthusiastic standing ovation at the end.
“Ameriville” needs to be seen by kids in school who will respond to the show’s vibrant hip hop flavor, especially those young people who have little or no exposure to live theater. The “Ameriville” call to action likely will connect more viscerally with the youths who have experienced depravation than middle class adult liberal viewers who form the bulk of the playgoing public.
Universes is a true ensemble and all four performers have star moments during the evening. But first among equals are Mildred Ruiz-Sapp with her belting singing voice and Gamal Chasten, the funniest of the four. Millicent Johnnie is the choreographer. Brian Sidney Bembridge designed the rustic all purpose set, Russell Champa the dramatic lighting, and Benjamin Marcum the sound.
Even viewers immune to the “Ameriville” messages should be stirred by the exuberant theatricality of the evening. And who knows, maybe even jaded viewers who shrug off issues of social injustice will be stimulated to rethink their attitudes. That’s obviously the hope, and even the expectation, of Universes. Good luck to them in their worthy fight.
“Ameriville” runs through February 26 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. February 2012
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In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play
At the Victory Gardens Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – For people expecting a giggly prurient evening at “In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play,” prepare for a disappointment. There isn’t a snigger in the play or any exposed female flesh. Audiences will have to make do with a delightful and insightful and informative comedy featuring a stage full of captivating performances.
“In the Next Room” is another collaboration between Sarah Ruhl and the Victory Gardens Theater. Ruhl sets her play in the 1880’s in a spa town near New York City. The specific location is the home/office of Dr. Givings. The man is a doctor and a man of science, as he tirelessly reminds the other characters. His practice concentrates on treating women or hysteria, that catch-all pre-20th century ailment with symptoms that include mood swings, sensitivity to light, and headaches. What the women really suffer from is sexual repression.
The doctor treats his patients by bringing them to orgasm with an electronic contraption that electronically applies stimulation to the woman’s pelvic region. Occasionally, the doctor or his female assistant substitute manual stimulation, punctiliously washing their hands afterward.
This may sound like pornography by any definition, but the doctor uses his treatment as pure therapy. Eroticism never enters the equation. This premise may appear laughable to modern audiences (and the Victory Gardens audience laughed plenty on opening night). But such treatments are a matter of historical record, especially after the introduction of electricity in the late 1800’s. Dr. Givings use an electric-power stimulator that would have been impossible before Thomas Edison harnessed electricity for widespread use. Indeed, there are many invocations to Edison by characters during the play.
The doctor’s treatments elicit moans and cries from his patients, but the man never connects their response to anything sexual. Their gasps of pleasure are simply the end product of a successful therapy session. And therein lies the real meat of “In the Next Room,” a male society’s imprisonment of women in emotional and psychological bondage. One outward symbol of female subjugation resides in the women’s fashions of the day, massive amounts of clothing that bind and constrict the female form with corsets and petticoats and multitudinous buttons.
The victims of male domination in the play are the doctor’s wife, Catherine, and Sabrina Daldry, the only female patient we see. Both women are locked into emotionally disconnected marriages, presumably a norm of the day. The husbands condescend to their wives when they interact with them at all. Issues of a woman’s needs would be greeted by the men with blank incomprehension.
The society of the late 1800’s did not approve of intimacy between the sexes. A veneer of polite discourse replaced honest communication. The doctor turns his back in embarrassment as his wife partially disrobes. We hear about a man who reacted with horror on his honeymoon when he saw body hair on his naked wife. Inhibitions are everywhere but it’s the women, kept in the more profound ignorance, who suffer the most.
Catherine and Sabrina eventually explore the sexual benefits of the doctor’s therapy on their own, experimenting in some wonder with the vibrator, delightful and fearful at the sensations that carry them into unexplored territory.
Catherine is the core character. She feels a failure as a mother because she can’t satisfactorily breast-feed her new baby, so the husband hires an African American woman as a wet nurse, a woman who recently lost her own baby to cholera. Add loneliness and unsatisfied sexual longings to Catherine’s sense of inadequacy and you have a woman nearing the end of her emotional tether. And her husband remains unapproachable, spending his evenings at his club while his wife languishes in isolation.
The emotional pot heats up in the second act with the appearance of a young painter named Leo Irving. He comes to the doctor with his own case of hysteria brought on by being jilted by his Italian fiancé. The painter, with his passion and free spirit, stirs Catherine even more and she pleads to run off with him to Paris.
The doctor treats his patient, and eventually his wife, with a clinical detachment that would be beyond belief today in any situation outside an X rated movie. The doctor’s failure to understand the erotic moans surging from his patient during the vibrator treatment speaks volumes for the man’s society-conditioned insensitivity as a medical man, never mind as just a man.
The Victory Gardens production is a marvel, beginning with Sandy Shinner’s directing. Shinner’s skill at balancing the play’s humor with its dramatic moments, especially in the second act, is a model of understated intelligence. Action that could lapse into absurdity or bad taste is credible and realistic and often hugely funny without losing the play’s serious center. Of course, it helps that the ensemble features the inimitable Kate Fry in one of her most fetching and charming performances at Catherine. Fry takes Catherine on a personal voyage of self-discovery and rebellion that is fascinating to watch.
Polly Noonan is a joy as Sabrina Daldry, a bundle of ills and complexes until Dr. Givings’s life enhancing vibrator cures her condition. Tamberla Perry adds a stately, thoughtful performance as the black wet nurse who could teach both Catherine and Sabrina much about marriage and a healthy sex life between husband and wife.
As Dr. Givings, Mark Montgomery is perhaps excessively cold and distant toward his yearning wife. Even accepting that his conduct reflects the prevailing marital attitudes of the day on the man’s side, Montgomery’s character is callous and unsympathetic and makes the happy ending at the end of the play difficult to swallow. Montgomery could lighten up on the doctor a bit. Givings obviously is clueless about his wife’s mental state but he needn’t be quite so remote.
Lawrence Grimm is fine as Sabrina’s husband, a man cut from the same domineering cloth as the doctor. Joel Gross energizes the play in the second act as the exuberant artist. Patricia Kane makes a strong and sympathetic presence as the doctor’s assistant. Her deeply buried sexual longings briefly surface in perhaps the play’s most affecting moment.
The physical production is superior. Jack Magaw’s design effectively compartmentalizes the set into the parlor and the surgical room. Jacqueline Firkins must have done hours of research to create the wonderfully evocative costumes, especially the female gowns that come off layer by layer as the ladies disrobe down to their underwear. Joseph Appelt designed the lighting and Andre Pluess the sound (which was disabled for the second act at no cost to the effectiveness of the performance).
“In the Next Room…” perhaps takes a little too long to wind up its narrative, but the evening remains a joy. What American playwright other than Sarah Ruhl could take such a high risk premise and convert it into a triumph?
“In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play” runs through October 9 at the Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 300 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars Sept. 2011.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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The Gospel According to James
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “The Gospel According to James” is a powerful drama based on an actual event, the lynching of two young black men in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. But the play is really about the impermanence of memory and memory as a self-serving device to ease personal guilt and avoid personal responsibility. “Gospel” is also the best-acted play I’ve seen at the Victory Gardens since it moved into its Biograph Theater facility in 2006.
Playwright Charles Smith uses the 1930 lynchings as a launching pad for his narrative, but the play concentrates on the contrasting recollections of that horrific event as filtered through the memories of its two survivors more than 50 years later—James Cameron, who was almost hung along with the two others, and Marie, the white woman who was at the center of the event as a young woman named Betty.
The play opens with a confrontation between Cameron and Marie during the early 1980’s in Marion, after the funeral of Marie’s father. Marie is fiercely hostile to Cameron, accusing him of lying about the circumstances surrounding the lynchings. Cameron insists his version is the true one and the rest of the play dramatizes alternate scenarios portraying events that led to the violence. James wants to establish a black holocaust-style museum to honor the memory of Shipp and Smith and other lynching victims. Marie just wants to put the tragedy behind her.
The early
minutes of the play are slow going. The audience is unfamiliar with the
narrative material and doesn’t know what to listen for amid the bickering
between Marie and Cameron. The drama takes off with the portrayal of the first
of several versions of what happened back in 1930. For much of the evening we
are in “Rashomon” territory, with truth in the eye of the beholder. Only at the
end do we observe the real events of 1930 and they are much different from what
we’ve seen previously, as credible as those accounts seemed as they unfolded. 
Some facts are not in dispute. Marion was a hotbed of racism back in 1930, with a strong Ku Klux Klan presence. The shadow of the Great Depression was starting to encroach on the community, creating a sense of foreboding about the future. The ground was thus fertile for a spontaneous outburst of racial violence when the young black men were accused of killing a white factory worker named Claude Deeter and raping his girl friend.
Thomas Shipp, Abe Smith, and James Cameron were arrested for the attack and a huge crowd of white men, women, and children gathered at the jail, eventually broke in, and dragged the three boys out. Shipp and Smith died gruesomely but Cameron was saved by a white man, who turned out to be Marie’s father. Cameron eventually served several years in prison as an accessory to the killing and alleged rape and eventually became a civil rights leader in Indiana, dying in 2006 at the age of 92.
As Cameron and Marie watch silently in the background, the various interpretations of the 1930 events are acted out, with younger versions of the two elderly characters at the heat of the stories. Marie takes the stage as the youthful Betty, restless in her dead end small town life and attracted to the sexually charismatic Abe Smith, even though she is committed to the bullying Claude Deeter. Cameron appears as the naïve 16-year old Apples.
At the end of the play, the truth of those events in Marion finally is revealed. Self-knowledge descends on both Marie and James, though Marie remains shaken when forced to confront the truth buried so long within her.
The strength of the play resides in the several playlets that render the conflicting accounts of the circumstances leading up to the lynchings. They are all gripping in their tension and all entirely persuasive. The accurate version ties up the narrative fragments, especially for spectators who were paying close attention to the previous differing memories and their clues to the truth.
Under Chuck Smith’s incisive directing, the actors bring the narrative to life with mesmerizing intensity. Andre De Shields is the nominal star and gives a star performance as James Cameron, but this is a true ensemble triumph for Victory Gardens. Linda Kimbrough, though a bit young looking for the part, is superb as Marie, fighting personal demons as she deals with the trauma of 1930. Wardell Julius Clark (Tommy) and Tyler Jacob Rollinson (Abe) are terrific as the doomed young black men. Anthony Peeples brings some welcome comic relief to Apples, the portrait of Cameron as a young innocent.
Christopher Jon Martin and Diane Kondrat are brilliant as Betty/Marie’s parents, living out a troubled marriage in a troubled time with a fractious daughter. Zach Kenney is fine as the repugnant Claude Deeter and Kelsey Brennan delivers a superior complex performance as Betty. This young lady can really act.
Linda Buchanan’s set shifts seamlessly between 1930 and the early 1980’s, reinforcing the show as a memory drama played out in the shadows of the mind. Rachel Healy designed the period costumes, Kathy Perkins the dramatic lighting, and Ray Nardelli the sound.
“The Gospel According to James” runs through June 12 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. May 2011
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Tree
At the Victory Gardens Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago—“Tree” is a small play, running for only 90 minutes without an intermission, employing just four characters in a single set. Yet it touches a lot of thematic bases with a high emotional content—like race, gender, and family.
Julie Hebert’s play doesn’t try to knock the socks off the audience, but it is affecting and entertaining, assisted immeasurably by a beautifully staged production at the Victory Gardens Theatre.
The play starts with a white Louisiana college professor named Didi Marcantel knocking on the door of a home in a black neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Didi’s knock is answered by Leo, a divorced man who works as a chef in a Southside restaurant. After some initial verbal sparring, Didi informs Leo that she is his half sister, with a common white father, recently deceased. Leo is the product of a black mother and Didi’s mother is white.
Didi learned about Leo through the discovery of letters she found after her father’s death. Now she wants to connect with relations who had been unknown her to before her father’s passing. Leo, on the other hand, resists. He’s suspicious of Didi’s motives, sensing that she has come to Chicago to relieve feelings of guilt and remorse. Leo doesn’t want Didi in his life but she digs in. For her piece of mind, she needs to know more about Leo’s side of the family.
What follows is a many layered portrayal
of family relationships that go back decades, starting with Leo’s mother,
Jessalyn, a mentally disturbed old woman who lives with him and is given to
operatic outbursts of poetic language interspersed with patches of the rawest
profanity. About midway through the play the fourth character appears, Leo’s
college-age daughter JJ, an outgoing young woman caught up in the unexpected
family drama that has been unfolding since Didi’s first knock on that door. If
Leo resists this investigation into the family past, JJ is hungry to know more.
“Tree” deals with personal roots, along with the inevitable racial overtones (the gender bits come mostly as comic relief because Leo insists that Didi is a lesbian, which she denies, though under Leo’s questioning she admits she’s nursed thoughts of switching over). The playwright doesn’t reach for cosmic truths that the slender nature of her play couldn’t support. “Tree” is essentially about Didi trying to reconstruct elements of her past and dragging Leo along with her. There is conflict and confrontation, but nothing melodramatic. The main characters act like most people trying to deal with unexpected and emotionally inflammatory personal issues.
Jessalyn is the heart of the play. In her disordered mind she holds the answers to what happened decades ago in her love affair with a young white boy that led to Leo’s birth. Celeste Williams gives a bravura performance of great intensity as the old woman, alternating between wild flights of fancy and lucid moments that leach out fragments of the truth about her early life.
By the end of the play more letters have been
discovered and Didi and Leo piece together the history of their shared
parentage. How the knowledge will impact on their future lives is left
unresolved at the final blackout. Leo is still a black man and Didi is still a
white woman, with all the cultural and racial baggage that implies. Yet there
is a feeling of mutual acceptance that ends the play on a reassuring note.
Williams has the showcase role, but Elaine Rivkin as Didi and Aaron Todd Douglas as Leo are first rate. Douglas captures Leo’s wariness and confusion about the potential domestic hornet’s nest this strange white woman stirs in his personal life. Rivkin, in turn, gives credibility to Didi’s urge to find the missing pieces to her ancestry and inject some closure to a life now in a state of some turbulence and vulnerability.
Leslie Ann Sheppard brings some welcome vitality into the story as soon as she makes her first appearance halfway into the action. Sheppard’s JJ is more levelheaded than her father in facing the bombshell that Didi throws into her domestic life. As Sheppard plays her, JJ deserves more stage time for her freshness and humor.
The performances flow beautifully under Andrea J. Diamond’s sure-footed directing. Jacqueline and Richard Penrod have designed a complex multi level set that renders the Southside home, inside and out, with striking detail. Judith Lundberg designed the costumes, notably JJ’s hip and gaudy outfit. Charles Cooper designed the lighting and Misha Fiksel the sound.
“Tree” runs through May 1 at The Victory Gardens Theatre, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m., with several performances Tuesday through Thursday. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. April 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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The Boys Room
At the Victory Gardens Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Adult men and women moving back with their elderly parents. That’s a hot button topic in the new millennium, attracting the attention of stand-up comedians and sociologists alike.
Joel Drake Johnson seizes on the issue in his new play “The Boys Room,” a work that is variously comic and somber, and ultimately absorbing and stimulating in its world premiere in a stellar production at the Victory Gardens Theatre.
The play
has four characters. There’s a senior citizen named Susan trying to live an
independent life spiced with a little romance with a Hispanic neighbor. But her
life is roiled by her two sons, Ron and Tim. Both move in with their mother,
who is not pleased at their invasion of her space.
As the play begins, Tim is already installed in the bedroom he shared with his older brother when they were children. Tim is divorced, unemployed, and drives his mother to distraction with his annoying personal habits, notably crying himself to sleep each night. In the opening scene, Ron appears. He’s a successful dentist who wants to move in with Mom after leaving his wife, just diagnosed with breast cancer.
Tim refuses to share the bedroom, his refuge from the world. Ron demands entry, and hard words and some blows ensue before a grudging accommodation settles in. The uneasy domestic arrangement is upset about halfway through the play with the appearance of Ron’s teenage daughter Roann, coming as an emissary from her mother to discover Ron’s short range and long range intentions toward his family.
Up to Roann’s entrance, I watched the antics of the two brothers with much irritation. Both men came across as selfish, weak, whiney, and, in Ron’s case, cowardly. Who needed to spend an evening in the theater in the company of such losers?
The play heats up in the later portion
of the 90-minute one-acter. There is a furious confrontation between Ron and
his daughter, with Roann spitting out her scorn for Ron’s craven abandonment of
his wife when the woman requires his support the most. The scene is capped by
Ron’s meltdown admission that he has been a worthless individual his entire
adult life. Is Ron’s confessional sincere or is he using his self-flagellation
as an insidious weapon to disarm outside criticism?
The play ends on a tentative note of reconciliation between Ron and Roann. But given Ron’s lack of moral backbone, the reconciliation may be tenuous indeed. No upbeat possibilities attach themselves to Tim. The playwright is more interested in Ron and he relegates Tim to the ash heap of an ineffectual middle-aged man who uses his family home as a security blanket to protect him from a world he finds inhospitable.
Susan has our sympathy. In a long monologue at the end of the play, she recounts how she walked out on her two young sons the night her husband suddenly died. But she returned later that night, responding to the pleas of the boys. She dutifully raised them as a single parent and her reward is accommodating a couple of adult moochers who decide they can’t cope with their sorry lives outside the sanctuary of their childhood home.
Roann is the character most to be pitied. A spunky girl, she’s forced to deal with a probably dying mother and a morally worthless father. She explodes in anger and despair, finally gaining comfort from her grandmother, who apparently is destined to get no peace in her last years from her dysfunctional family.
In an interview, Johnson notes that there are many parents who don’t necessarily love their children. They tolerate them and take responsibility for their upbringing, but ponder whether their lives might have been happier and more fulfilling without the burden of children. Those are hard thoughts, but as Susan looks at the self-indulgence and weakness of her grown sons, she may have her regrets about returning that night her husband died. And considering how Tim and Ron turned out, who can blame her?
“The Boys Room” profits from four blue chip performances by three generations of actors. Mary Ann Thebus is the matriarch of the family, feisty and droll with a compassion she visits on Roann that she denies to her sons, who don’t deserve it. Thebus gives a luminous performance, though in her quieter and more intense moments she needs to project more. The audience is hanging on her every word and wants to hear everything.
Joe Dempsey (Ron) and Steve Key (Tim) are all too effective as the pleading sons who wear down their mother’s resistance to their shallow behavior. They are frequently funny, which doesn’t mitigate the fact that they are both self-serving and unsympathetic, using their neediness as a battering ram against their mother basic decency. Allison Torem, a young actress of enormous presence and range, is fierce and desperate as Roann, a youngster with far too much on her emotional plate, thanks to a pathetic father.
Sandy Shinner unobtrusively orchestrates the action nicely from early comedy to the dramatic explosions later on. Jeffrey Bauer designed the bi-level interior set. Carol J. Blanchard designed the costumes, Todd Hensley the lighting, and Andre Pluess the sound.
“The Boys Room” runs through February 20
at the Victory Gardens Theatre, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances
are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday
at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call
773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org. Februrary 2011
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.
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At Home at the Zoo
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Edward Albee’s 1959 one act play “The Zoo Story” is a classic of modern drama, but the playwright decided that the short play needed a prequel to fill in some background on one of the two characters. An introductory one-acter was commissioned in 2003, first performed in 2004 as “Homelife”, and combined with “The Zoo Story” as a two-act play in 2007.
Albee originally titled the longer work “Peter and Jerry,” the names of the two protagonists in “The Zoo Story.” But the playwright thought the title was too close to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream brand so he renamed it “At Home at the Zoo.” That’s the show now on view at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre.
“The Zoo Story” portrays the spontaneous meeting and eventual violent confrontation between a mild-mannered middle-aged book editor named Peter and a drifter named Jerry. Peter is reading on a bench in a secluded part of Central Park in New York City when Jerry enters. Jerry strikes up a conversation with Peter, the highlight being Jerry’s long monologue about his conflict with his harridan landlady and her vile dog. The play ends with a stunning act of violence provoked by Jerry.
“The Zoo Story” has stimulated a cottage industry of interpretation. The drama has been placed within the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd, though the dialogue and action are plausibly realistic. Scholars and critics have seen religious, symbolic, and social meanings in the play. With or without those meanings, the play is fascinating—funny in spots and harrowing in its rising tensions leading to the stunning conclusion.
The success of “The Zoo Story” as a self-contained work suggests that the story didn’t require any additional explication. “Homelife” has its interesting moments and can stand as a significant addition to the Albee canon of short plays. But it didn’t enhance my understanding or enjoyment of “The Zoo Story.”
“Homelife” portrays Peter in the time leading up to his departure for that park bench and his fateful encounter with Jerry. The action takes place in the upscale Manhattan apartment Peter shares with his wife, Ann. After several minutes of meandering dialogue, the atmosphere heats up with Ann’s statement that she’s discontented with her marriage. It’s too safe, notably in their sex life. Ann claims she loves Peter, but she yearns for a bit of passion, even rage and hate, to spice up their marriage.
Peter then launches into a monologue describing his one venture into the “animal,” a violent sexual experience with a coed during a fraternity party when he was in college. That experience may or may not connect in the audience’s mind with the violent explosion still to come in “The Zoo Story.” The play ends with Peter leaving the apartment to walk to the park for some reading on his favorite bench.
“Homelife” is a portrait of a marriage suffering a midlife crisis. Ann and Peter are no longer on the same emotional page. His inner fire burns low and even. Ann would welcome an occasional conflagration but that’s not in Peter’s even-tempered personality. The play leaves the impression that Ann has had her say about her unfulfilled needs, but the marriage will go on as before and she will have to make do. Of course, unknown to her, Peter will undergo a life-changing experience in the park.
After seeing “At Home at the Zoo,” I wanted to know more about Jerry, a fascinating and disturbing character who is more than just a psychological loose canon. Peter is a pretty tepid figure. Jerry grabs our attention. Ideally then, Albee could write a first act about Jerry, then insert “The Zoo Story,” and write a new third act exploring how Peter deals with the explosive conflict with Jerry in the park. “Homelife” does no harm, but it doesn’t force us into reassessing “The Zoo Story,” which remains a stand-alone masterpiece.
At Victory Gardens, Tom Amandes plays Peter, Annabel Armour is Ann, and Marc Grapey is Jerry. Amandes plays the laconic (and sometimes inaudible) Peter with effective understatement. In both plays Peter mostly reacts, frequently silently, to the verbal barrages launched by Ann and Jerry. It’s not an easy role, but Amandes extracts plenty of nuance from the character. Armour is excellent, as usual, this time as the wife trying to stoke some erotic fire in her husband.
But the evening belongs to Grapey, partly because Jerry is the most riveting person in “At Home at the Zoo” and partly because he’s so convincing in the role. He makes the audience a little uneasy as soon as he enters the stage, but he’s also oddly good company, especially as he narrates his horror story of his miseries with the landlady and her dog.
Like Peter, the audience tolerates Jerry because he’s entertaining to listen to, until we gradually recognize that bad things are happening as Jerry starts to go off the psychological rails. The audience is with Peter as he attempts to extricate himself from an individual who apparently means him harm, for no reason other than Jerry perhaps resents Peter’s complacent upper middle class life style. Grapey’s performance builds beautifully from comedy to tension to tragedy.
Both plays benefit from Dennis Zacek’s unobtrusive but insightful directing. Mary Griswold designed the tow minimal sets, a living room arrangement of furniture in the first place and two park benches in the second. Judith Lundberg designed the costumes, Rita Pietraszek the lighting, and Andre Pluess the sound.
“At Home at the Zoo” is a must-see for allowing audiences to reacquaint themselves with “The Zoo Story,” an iconic work in American drama. “Homelife” is an agreeable add-on but it’s the battle to the death between Jerry and Peter that will send the viewers out of the theater both unnerved and exhilarated.
“At Home at the Zoo” runs through October 31 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 300 or visit www.victorygardens.org .
The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars. October 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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A Guide for the Perplexed
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Five high quality performers occupy the stage of the Victory Gardens Theater heroically attempting to bring Joel Drake Johnson’s new play “A Guide for the Perplexed” some kind of dramatic credibility.
No luck. The play rolls along, funny when it should be serious and implausible when it should be believable. The story has no narrative arc and the ending leaves the spectators muttering “Huh?” under their breath.
“Perplexed” is still another entry in the Dysfunctional Family genre. The family on display here consists of middle-aged Phillip and Sheila, their teenage son Andrew, and Sheila’s brother Doug. The three males, who suck in nearly all of the play’s oxygen, are each lumbered with crushing emotional and psychological burdens.
Phillip is in a tailspin after losing his job. Doug has just been released from five years in prison and comes to live with Sheila and Phillip, at Sheila’s insistence over Phillip’s resentment. Doug is unstable, occasionally eloquent, leading a rudderless life. Andrew is a genius, but he’s also gay and the torments from his schoolmates have driven him into rebellion against his parents amid thoughts of suicide. In that area he is joined by Doug, who tried to kill himself several times in prison.
The two women are afterthoughts in the play. We only see Sheila a few times in phone conversations with her husband (she’s on a business trip to New York City). Sheila sees her home life disintegrating but she’s helpless to reverse the disorder, though from the few glimpses we get of her, she seems to be the most rational and together person in the family. In the second act a woman named Betty appears. She’s been Doug’s pen pal while he was in prison, has fallen in love with him at long distance, and now shows up laden with gifts to continue the relationship in person. Her visit mostly allows Doug to behave erratically and belt out the Rolling Stones song “Satisfaction.”
Director Sandy Shinner may have recognized that as searing drama “Perplexed” is hopeless, so she plays most of the action for laughs, and not very subtle laughs at that. There is a farcical scene showing Doug and Phillip making up a couch for Doug’s bed. Another comical bit has Phillip trying to knot a tie on Doug. There is the “Satisfaction” rendition and some running gags with Phillip’s tank of delicate tropical fish.
Actually, nearly the entire first act is an extended attempt at sitcom between the volatile Doug and the prissy, insecure fussbudget Phillip. The only character who grabs the audience is Andrew. The audience has to sympathize with a lad being persecuted at school for his homosexuality and caught in the crosshairs of his parents’ floundering marriage. Andrew does daily battle with the ineffectual stay-at-home Phillip, who has lost control of his son, his marriage, and his self-esteem. We ache for Andrew, flaunting a false bravado that can’t conceal his desperation. Nobody else in the play seems able help him, so the poor guy suffers.
The play’s title comes from a classic work of Jewish theology composed in the late 12th century by Moses Maimonides. Andrew, who is studying Hebrew in school, tries to explain the tenets of the book to Doug, who isn’t impressed. And that’s the last we hear of the Maimonides masterpiece. Its relevance to the storyline is elusive to the point of invisibility.
If the play is to work at all, it must connect Doug and Andrew, the two outsiders. The dramatist makes some attempts to bring the two together, but Doug, with his shambles of a life, isn’t the person to solve, or even ease, the boy’s agony.
The production trumpets the return of Kevin Anderson to Chicago. Anderson is a splendid actor and he endows Doug with a fascinating complexity. Doug went to prison for assault, yet he writes poetry. His life is a failure but he possesses impressive insight and self-knowledge. A fine play could be built around this actor and this character, but “Perplexed” isn’t that play.
That wondrous actor Francis Guinan creates a superior Felix Unger-type comic character in Phillip. Almost every line and gesture gets a chuckle or a laugh from the audience, though I suspect that the playwright sees Phillip has a pathetic, poignant, almost tragic figure. Maybe not. Guinan delivers a textbook performance of comic nuance, but are we suppose to laugh or wince at the man’s misery? The opening night audience chose to laugh, possibly because to take the character seriously would be absurd.
No quibbles about Bubba Weiler’s performance as Andrew. Weiler gives a terrific portrayal of a teenager teetering at the brink of total despair. Like Doug, his character belongs in a play of his own, minus the easy laughs that diminish the lad’s agony.
Meg Thalken plays Sheila, a character so underdeveloped that she could have been written out of the play to save the cost of an actor. The author needs to bring Sheila more meaningfully into the play. Her normalcy and warmth could hold the key to saving Doug and Andrew as well as her marriage, but not in a handful of cameo appearances talking into a telephone. Cynthia Baker does what she can with the strange scene of pen pal Betty meeting with Doug. I felt more sympathy for the emotionally needy Baker character than anyone else in the story aside from Andrew. Baker demonstrates how a large performance can emerge from a small role.
The physical production is impressive, with Jeffrey Bauer’s set making effective use of the Victory Gardens turntable stage to present detailed interior and outdoor locations. Carol Blanchard designed the costumes, Todd Hensley the lighting, and Andrew Pluess the sound.
“A Guide for the Perplexed” runs through August 15 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Additional performance are August 4 and 11 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $50. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of 21/2 stars. July 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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Jacob and Jack
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO — “Jacob and Jack” is James Sherman’s latest comedy for the Victory Gardens Theater. Sherman has been a brand name for Victory Gardens for years and “Jacob and Jack” carries many of the footprints of previous, and popular, Sherman plays. The setting is Chicago, the key characters are Jewish, and the tone is light.
In his program note, Sherman indicates he wants to celebrate
Yiddish theater in America, a vibrant form of ethnic entertainment in the early
1900’s that died out during the Depression. That may have been Sherman’s
intent, but what he delivers is a conventional farce, with the dithering
characters and slamming doors that form the bedrock of the style.
Farces have always been about sex, and in “Jacob and Jack,” two lecherous middle-aged men try to seduce vulnerable young women. But instead of being naughty in the French farce style, the seduction attempts are faintly unpleasant. It’s all supposed to be played for humor, with a touch of poignancy, but there is a whiff of Dirty Old Man about the story I found off-putting.
The gimmick in “Jacob and Jack” is the shifts in time between 1935 and the present. The location throughout the 90-minute play is three connecting dressing rooms in a downtown Chicago theater. The show opens with Jack Shore (Craig Spidle) preparing to give a stage reading paying tribute to his grandfather, Yiddish actor Jacob Shemerinsky. Shore applies a wig and makeup in his dressing room to physically represent Shemerinsky, setting up the time shift in which Spidle goes back and forth in time as both Jack and Jacob.
The time shift involves the other performers. Janet Ulrich Brooks takes on the roles of both the wife of Jacob and the wife of Jack, each woman angrily enduring her husband’s incurable flirting. Laura Scheinbaum portrays the young women who are attracted to the fame and blarney of the two actors. Daniel Cantor is Jack’s agent and the theater’s stage manager back in 1935. Roslyn Alexander plays Jack’s mother and the mother of the young woman of 1935. Andrew Keltz plays a modern assistant stage manager and an aspiring young actor in the earlier storyline.
As the time shifts flash back and forth, abetted by some quick off stage costume changes, the viewers may sense they are watching a minor Alan Ayckbourn play. Ayckbourn is famous for his intricate plot structures and clever use of stage space, both evident in “Jacob and Jack.” But Ayckbourn has serious comments to make beneath the surface laughter of his plays, comments about middle-class characters leading lives of quiet desperation. Sherman apparently is after giggles.
Jacob and Jack each have their professional tribulations. Jacob is a florid actor of considerable ego who must face the fact that Yiddish theater has lost its audience and his glory days on the stage are over. He can travel to the despised Hollywood and try to emulate Paul Muni, who became a movie star after honorable service on the Yiddish stage. Or he can work in a shoe store. Jack Shore isn’t even a star actor. His success resides in being a spokesman for a carpet company on television for 12 years. When he learns his stage reading will be presented before an audience of 1,000 live people instead of a dozen of his mother’s senior citizen friends, Shore panics.
During the final five minutes of the play, Sherman tries to
inject some touchy-feely substance into the evening’s froth by recounting the
unhappy final years of Jacob’s life and Jack’s sudden conversion from a TV
pitchman into a person serious about acting. It’s a nice try but it has an
add-on feeling. The play still rises or falls as a farce.
The opening night audience laughed a lot and applauded enthusiastically at the curtain call. The spectators may have been saluting the cast, and rightly so. But the play itself deserves less commendation. There isn’t enough narrative heft in the plot and I couldn’t work around the relentless campaigns by both Jacob and Jack to worm their way into the young women’s affections.
Craig Spidle plays both Jacob and Jack and he delivers a pair of strong impersonations, but he doesn’t come across as Jewish, a fault beyond Spidle’s control but still a fault, especially in the portrayal of Jacob. There is no equivocation about the performances by Brooks and Cantor in either of their incarnations. Both are terrific. Alexander is lumbered by characters who are either silly or stereotypes. Keltz is outstanding, especially as the breezy aspiring actor of 1935.
I watched Laura Scheinbaum act when she was a child and it’s been a pleasure to see her gracefully mature into a fine young adult actress. She is funny, charming, and emotionally affecting in both her roles, salvaging some comic dignity from the encounters with the older men that could have turned really disagreeable.
Director Dennis Zacek keeps the pace properly propulsive. Mary Griswold designed the superb set of three grungy theater dressing rooms that are essential characters in the play. Carol Blanchard designed the costumes and wigs, Jesse Klug the lighting, and Scott Miller the sound.
“Jacob and Jack” runs through June 20 at the Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars May 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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The Lost Boys of Sudan
At the Victory Gardens Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—There is a strong play in the story of a group of Sudanese youngsters brought to the United States from their war-torn African country. It is a story of survival, bravery, and harrowing danger in Africa and disorienting culture clash in the United States. Unfortunately, “The Lost Boys of Sudan” is not that play, at least not yet.
Lonnie Carter’s “The Lost Boys of Sudan” at the Victory Gardens Theater takes as its subject the travails of three teen-agers from Sudan’s Dinka tribe as they survive a vicious civil war in their country and are unexpected plucked from a refugee camp to be transported to a new life in Fargo, North Dakota, of all places.
Carter employs a rich variety of storytelling modes—dance, African percussion, choral recitation, chants, and mime. But the narrative lacks focus and above all, a sense of drama. While there can be humor in the story of the Sudanese teens, there should also be some tension.
As the play now stands (and apparently it’s been in a state of revision since 2007), the narrative meanders badly, adopting an almost frivolous tone for a serious topic. The play’s language veers without reason from realistic prose to doggerel verse and even passages from Shakespeare.
The second act in Fargo loses its way in a morass of facetiousness. Yes, it’s humorous to see American life through the eyes of three young foreigners whose background does not prepare them open a can or a box to feed themselves. But there has to be more to their culture shock than sitcom jokes.
After a confusing opening few minutes narrated by an actress impersonating a cow, the audience meets the central characters, two boys named T-Mac Sam (Samuel G. Roberson, Jr.) and A. J. Josh (Namir Smallwood), and K-Gar Ollie (Leslie Ann Sheppard). K-Gar is a female who impersonates a boy to save herself from rape and probable death in the Sudan.
The first act does convey some of the terrors of the Sudanese civil war, with all sides flouting the term “Liberation” in their title. The battling factions may mouth platitudes about freedom and justice but the prize in the war is oil and the country’s other valuable minerals.
Somehow the three teens escape to the refugee camp, leaving their village destroyed and their families doubtlessly wiped out. They survived through luck and determination under enormous physical and mental stress. A bit of their bravery and resourcefulness leaks through in Carter’s play but not enough. Then comes the second act in Fargo that doesn’t examine the teens’ new situation with either clarity or insight. Halfway through the final act one character indulges in a rap-like monologue that stops the story dead. The monologue may have had its bits of hip humor, but its value to the narrative is nil.
Along with the three teen-agers, the cast of characters includes a panorama of characters in both Africa and North Dakota, all portrayed by five performers deftly taking multiple roles—Adeoye, Kenn E. Head, Ann Joseph, Nambi E. Kelley, and LaTricia Kamiko Sealy. The entire cast has the talent and versatility to o deliver a stirring recounting of a little known story that is certainly worth the telling.
The production profits from colorful and creative projections designed by James Dardenne. Elizabeth Flauto’s costumes are authentically African and authentically contemporary American. I cannot challenge the authenticity of the African dialect coached by Sheila Landahl, but it certainly was thick enough. Jim Corti gets plenty of movement from his ensemble but he can’t do much about the wandering narrative.
On opening night performance, a group of real Lost Boys from Sudan were in at the performance (for some reason they weren’t recognized from the stage). They all must have engrossing tales to tell about their experiences dodging death in African and trying to adjust to the culture, and weather, in the United States. Putting those young men on the Victory Gardens stage to relate their life stories might be a riveting experience for an audience. The current vehicle doesn’t get the job done.
“The Lost Boys of Sudan” runs through April 25 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org
The show gets a rating of 2 ½ stars. March 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Blue Door
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO--Tanya Barfield’s “Blue Door” at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater explores an individual’s search cultural and racial identity, a relevant and familiar theme in modern drama. Unfortunately, her play doesn’t advance the discussion much.
Barfield’s two-hander focuses on a black middle-aged mathematics professor named Lewis who is going through a bad patch in his life. His white wife of 25 years has just requested a divorce. His department chairman has put him on sabbatical leave after Lewis got into a racial confrontation with a black student in class. Now Lewis can’t sleep, and in his insomnia he confronts his alter ego, ancestral ghosts, and his black militant brother, all forcing him to take a hard and unflattering look at his life.
One actor plays Lewis in “Blue Door” and the other takes on multiple roles, mostly of Lewis’s ancestors. The second actor, representing three generations of Lewis’s family, recounts harrowing tales of abuse in the deep South, when the white Southerners persecuted Lewis’s forefathers before and after the Civil War.
The shades of Lewis’s great grandfather, grandfather, and father combine with the militant brother to force Lewis to ask himself the painful question, Have I sold out my blackness to gain acceptance in the white world? His white university colleagues are patronizing and insensitive. Lewis himself doesn’t give a very good account of himself, especially in the harsh interchanges with his scornful brother.
The playwright leads the audience to conclude that Lewis indeed has sacrificed the best part of himself to curry favor with a condescending and hostile white society. But in the play’s final moment, a presumably enlightened Lewis joins his brother in what sounds like an African chant, indicating I guess that Lewis has finally found his true self in his African heritage.
The venerable Chicagoland actor Bruce A. Young plays Lewis as confused, vulnerable, and anguished. Lindsay Smiling plays the other characters, and his performance provides most of the show’s dramatic intensity with his accounts of the appalling cruelty the white South inflicted on Lewis’s forebearers. As storytelling, Smiling’s accounts of white brutality have a strong dramatic impact, but they stand apart from Lewis’s dilemma.
There must be more to Lewis than we see. After all, the man rose to a prestigious academic position by his own bootstraps. He won, at least for a number of years, the love of a white woman during a period in the later twentieth century when interracial marriages endured under great social pressure.
Lewis’s best line comes in response to his wife’s request for a divorce after Lewis refuses to attend the Million Man March on Washington, D.C., in 1995. “You want a divorce because I don’t want to march on Washington, not as any form of protest but just to announce to the world that I’m black?” That’s the kind of sharp and sensible response the wife deserved but it’s about the only instance in the play that shows Lewis has the intelligence and mettle to take care of himself. The rest of the time he primarily reacts defensively to the slings and arrows flung at him by the figures his sleep-deprived imagination evokes.
“Blue Door” runs 90 minutes with no intermission. I grew increasingly impatient with the play as it proceeded. I didn’t think Barfield gave Lewis a fair shake. He is a straw man set up as the representation of a black man who somehow loses his way, racial identity-wise. Lewis is coming apart, mostly because that’s the way the playwright writes it. I was also distracted by the characters occasionally addressing the audience directly. The shifts between realism and talking to the audience from the stage disrupted the flow of the drama.
The play is performed in Lewis’ study (designed by Keith Pitts), though the action stretches from 1851 to 1995. Charlie Cooper’s lighting and Liviu Pasare’s projections give the production some visual variety under Andrea J. Dymond’s directing. Judith Lundberg designed the costumes, Andre Pluess the sound, and the playwright composed the original music.
Barfield’s play has its heart in the right place and the accounts of white brutality toward Southern blacks are a vivid reminder of a terrible time in American history. But overall the play just didn’t work for me.
The play’s title refers to a folk practice of painting a door blue as protection against evil spirits. Its symbolic application to Lewis and his emotional and psychological problems eluded me.
“Blue Door” runs through February 28 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of 2½ stars. February 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
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The Snow Queen
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—“The Snow Queen” opened in 2006 at the Victory Gardens Theater, obviously intending to establish itself as a winter holiday tradition in Chicagoland theater. I thought it was one of the more tedious presentations of the year, and my negative memories of that production led me to skip the repeat stagings in 2007 and 2008.
But word was out that “The Snow Queen” had been tweaked since 2006 under the stewardship of director/choreographer Jim Corti, so I decided to give the 2009 version a shot. The show unquestionably is better, but it still hasn’t gotten over the hump of its chief defect, dramatic inertia.
“The Snow Queen” is loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale as originally adapted by director Frank Galati, composer Michael Barrow Smith, and puppeteer Blair Thomas. The show is really a concert with the slimmest narrative thread about a youthful Danish couple named Kai (Andrew Keltz) and Gerda (Leslie Ann Sheppard). The Snow Queen seduces young Kai and takes him up to the frigid northland. Gerda then sets out on a journey to bring the lad back to the warmth of their little town.
The only other major character is the Storyteller, played by Chicagoland theater veteran Cheryl Lynn Bruce. The ensemble is completed by three dancer/puppeteers: Jackson Evans, Genevieve Garcia, and Nicole Pellegrino. The threesome, dressed like elves, sing, dance, and manipulate Blair Thomas’s puppets.
The show is performed almost entirely in songs composed by Smith, who has a great facility for clever lyrics and an eclectic taste in popular music that moves comfortable from lite rock to folk to country. Smith appears on stage throughout the performance, accompanied by five enormously skilled singer/musicians who occasionally step into the show as passing characters.
The Snow Queen, portrayed as an impressive all-white giant puppet, has no personality. She doesn’t come across as a villain and it’s difficult to understand why Kai left his happy home and Gerda’s friendship for the dubious attractions of the queen’s ice palace. If there is a sexual subtext there, it eluded me. In any case, the character of the Snow Queen needs to be beefed up as a first step toward strengthening the plot.
The virtues of “The Snow Queen” reside in Smith’s score, the exceptionally talented musician/singers, and a radiant performance of enormous charm and vocal distinction by Leslie Ann Sheppard. The young lady has been active in area theater in recent seasons but this should be her breakout performance.
Blair Thomas is one of the leading puppeteers in America but the show insufficiently utilizes his imagination and technical skills. More Thomas puppeteering would be high on the list of necessary enhancements for the production. So would some semblance of a coherent narrative. The music, especially in the second act, tries to carry the show, and in comic numbers like “Robber Girl,” it does. You’ve got to like any song that injects Gabby Hayes and Ma and Pa Kettle into the lyrics. The singing contributions by the small orchestra are exemplary, especially by Barbara Barrow, Sue Demel, and Bob Goins, not that Cathy Norden and Robert Arendt don’t pull their weight.
The physical production is a fine visual blend of Jeff Bauer’s set design, Tatjana Radisic’s costumes, and Jenna Sjunneson McDonald’s lighting, all complemented by Joe Cerqua’s sound design. Corti moves the performance smoothly and his jaunty dances are fun to watch.
“The Snow Queen” is marketed as a family show and certainly there is some appeal for children, with the hero and heroine being adolescents. But a two-hour show with almost no action or dialogue will make considerable demands on a youngster’s attention span, especially in an evening performance. More Blair Thomas puppets would certainly up the entertainment value for young viewers.
“The Snow Queen” may be more at home at the Old Town School of Folk Music” than in a legitimate theater. Yet the opening night reception was enthusiastic, so “The Snow Queen” clearly has its passionate advocates. It just needs more to happen on stage.
“The Snow Queen” runs through December 27 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performance schedules vary, with numerous matinee presentations. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. December 2009
Contact Dan atzeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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Elaborate Entrance of
Chad Deity
At the Victory Gardens Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” celebrates the culture of professional wrestling in America and satirizes our stereotyping of ethnic groups we fear or distrust, mostly Middle Easterners and Asians. It also announces the appearance of a dramatist named Kristoffer Diaz, who has written a play that moves to the head of the class as the most entertaining and imaginative new stage piece of the season.
“Chad Deity” is receiving its world premiere at the Victory Gardens, in association with Teatro Vista, as the second of two works that emerged from the theater’s Ignition Festival, devoted to playwrights of color under the age of 40. Michael Golamco’s “Year Zero” opened at the new Studio Theater a couple of weeks ago to well earned critical praise. That play validated the Ignition Festival as a worthy enterprise. “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” could elevate the festival further into an event of huge significance for local and perhaps national theater.
“Chad Deity” starts out as an instructional monologue on professional wrestling in the United States narrated by a wrestler named Macedonio Guerra. He’s a Latino from the Bronx who takes the role of the bad guy in the little morality plays fought between good and evil in professional wrestling matches.
We soon meet Chad Deity, an African American wrestler who makes that elaborate entrance into the play by dashing through the theater aisles scattering fake dollar bills into the crowd as gaudy lights follow him to the stage. Macedonio and Chad work for a cynical and manipulative white man named Everett K. Olson. He runs The Wrestling, one of the operations that feeds the public craving for the orchestrated violence of professional wrestling.
After a time Vigneshwar Paduar (VP) makes his appearance, an Indian-American from Brooklyn who plays street basketball but soon enters the world of pro wrestling, reborn as the Fundamentalist, a an anti-American Muslim. He teams with Macedonio, who takes on the public persona of an equally anti-American Mexican named Che Chavez Castro. The idea is to present the two as America-hating villains who battle the all-American Chad Deity.
The play is primarily a series of monologues, with a few dialogue interchanges among the characters. The playwright has a keen ear for hip hop language and he loads his script with funny but too-true politically incorrect zingers about how native Americans view, and scorn, ethnic outsiders.
The end of the play runs too long and takes on too much philosophical baggage, trying to establish professional wrestling as a metaphor for all that is good in the American way of life. But even a thematically murky final few minutes can’t diminish “Chad Deity” as a theatrically invigorating show that converted the opening night spectators from a theater audience into a roaring, cheering crowd at a wrestlemania extravaganza.
The performers spontaneously interact with the patrons, giving the production an improv feel that only enhances the exhilarating “what next” feel of the evening. There are some actually wrestling body slams in the ring that dominates Brian Sidney Bembridge’s gaudy set. Pro wrestling may be scripted to a foregone conclusion, but it still requires participants with considerable athletic skills, as well as acting talents to establish their personalities before the eager crowds. The audience is free to take or leave the play’s heavy philosophizing but they have to be impressed by the ballet-like ability of the wrestlers to persuasively simulate violence without mangling their bodies.
The production is one of those occasions where the audience leaves the theater convinced the play could never be successfully staged any other way. Thanks to director Edward Torres and his spot-on ensemble, “Chad Deity” floods the Victory Gardens interior with an energy and a dramatic intensity that seems inevitable, drawing the audience into its garish world with absolute credibility.
Which brings us to Desmin Borges as Macedonio. Borges has some decent credits in Chicago theater in both mainstream and Latino theater, but even the closest followers of his career must be astounded by the brilliance of his performance in this show. As Macedonio, Borges has more than half of the play’s lines, mostly demanding monologues that mingle humor with anger, dejection, desperation, and the character’s pride in professional wrestling as a sports entertainment to be respected and appreciated as an art form. When he isn’t talking, Borges displays a hilarious range of facial expressions ranging from startled double takes to perplexity to weary “what can I do now?” resignation. It’s a performance of remarkable vitality, variety, and stamina.
Kamal Angelo Bolden plays Chad Deity as a man who knows his craft as a pro wrestler and how to exploit the expectations of a crowd hungering for a charismatic hero in the ring. Usman Ally, in a real breakout performance, plays VP, a complex character who refuses to play by the rules of the game. VP has taken his share of abuse in Brooklyn for his Asian origins and he won’t be the villain in a literally black and white cartoon wrestling drama about the good guys (read Americans) confronting the bad guys (read foreign heritage with dark skin).
James Krag is fine as Olson, the wrestling promoter whose only principles reside in the box office. Christian Litke provides some convincing and colorful cameos as wrestlers who serve as cannon fodder for the main eventers.
Christine Pascual has designed a colorful wardrobe of wrestling costumes. Jesse Klug is responsible for the wild lighting and Mikhail Fiksel the thumping hip hop sound. The physical production is also enlivened by John Boesche’s projections.
“Chad Deity” is a terrifically sensory experience but there is a thoughtful storyline embedded in the visceral visual and sound spectacle. Even conceding that open night audiences are notoriously favorable to a play, the reaction of the first night crowd at Victory Gardens reached an emotional pitch rarely seen in a theater. We eagerly await what Kristoffer Diaz has for us next.
“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diaz” runs through November 1 at the Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $37 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars. Oct. 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Blackbird
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—“Blackbird” at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre is a love story, a perverse, even grotesque love story, but still a love story.
David Harrower’s play has earned international praise for its complex take on a most disagreeable topic, pedophilia. In this case, a 40-year-old man had sexual relations with a 12-year old girl. That was 15 years ago. Now the girl, age 27, confronts the man, now middle aged, for reasons she may not be able to understand herself.
“Blackbird” runs a taut 70 minutes without an intermission, covering in real time the reunion between Ray and Una as they both try to reconstruct what happened 15 years ago, and why. It’s the Rashomon-type shifting of perspective that gives the play its fascination. The narrative is rooted in pedophilia, but it’s really about the elusive nature of memory and time.
The action is confined, literally, to the canteen of an office building. After 15 years, Una has tracked Ray to a business in the building where Ray (who changed his name to Peter following his release from prison) has some undefined middle management job. Una’s life has been starkly shaped by the childhood sexual encounter. She’s become promiscuous and seems rootless and edgy. Ray wants to put the incident behind him and create a new life. He doesn’t want to face Una after all the elapsed years and he doesn’t know why she is there.
The early dialogue consists of staccato overlapping exchanges. But gradually the characters return to those days 15 years ago when Ray and Una met and became lovers. The play peaks with extended monologues. Ray describes how he first met Una at her family’s outdoor barbecue and implies that she seduced him as much as he enticed her. Una recounts in a long speech their final tryst at a hotel and how Ray abandoned her, leaving her alone and terrified in a strange neighborhood. Ray counters that he didn’t desert her but when he returned to the hotel after going out for cigarettes and a drink she was gone.
We also learn that Una refused to testify against Ray and even denied any illicit contact between them, but the authorities forcibly extracted DNA evidence from her that confirmed the sexual relations. So Ray went to prison for three hellish years.
Ray insists the affair with Una was a one-time encounter. He claims he’s read books on pedophilia and says he doesn’t fit the profile. The affair with Una was a single mistake.
So what’s the real story? Has so much time passed that the characters are locked into revisionist memories that block out any objective truth? Did the young Una, as Ray claims, know more about love 15 years ago than Ray, then a shy, insecure loner? Ray doesn’t go so far as to justify the affair, but he does try to explain it.
What are Una’s motives for visiting Ray after accidentally spotting his picture in a magazine? Does she want revenge, closure, or to rekindle the romance? Late in the play, Una comes on to Ray, who rejects her, prompting the most cutting line in the script “Am I too old?”
Near the end of the drama, an unbilled third character makes an unexpected cameo appearance that shocks the audience and churns any judgments about Ray in the audience’s mind. In the final moment, Una stands alone and desolate on the stage, feeling what—a new sense of betrayal, a second agonizing loss of her lover? The audience doesn’t know for sure and probably neither does Una.
In the Victory Gardens production directed by Dennis Zacek, the play belongs to Una as performed by Mattie Hawkinson. William Peterson is her foil, a low-keyed Ray who spends the 70 minutes mostly listening intently or reacting to Una in fear, anger, guilt, and occasionally a little compassion.
Hawkinson speaks with a little girl inflection that implies the 12 year old dominates the adult. Clearly she has not freed herself from the psychological trauma of the affair. In that sense, Ray’s actions 15 years ago were unforgivable. He has robbed a female of her youth. “I lost everything. I lost more than you ever did. I lost because I never had had time to begin.” That’s a pretty damning indictment.
Peterson’s Ray makes a case for at least understanding a man who perpetrated a cruel wrong 15 years ago under an ungovernable urge. The man has paid his dues to society, at least in the legal sense, and tried to restart his life in a new town with a new name (Una stayed in her town and became the butt of gossip and innuendo, losing her friends and the respect of her family). Then comes that startling cameo appearance and the audience is forced to reevaluate everything they’ve just heard.
The production profits from Dean Taucher’s spot-on realistic set and Jesse Klug’s atmospheric lighting. Christine Pascaul designed the costumes and Andre Pluess the sound.
I suspect that other productions of “Blackbird” have achieved a greater level of intensity. The Victory Gardens version is totally involving but a more aggressive Ray would have heated the stage to a higher emotional temperature. This is still riveting watching, taking a distasteful premise and opening it up to all kinds of reverberations, in just 70 gripping minutes,
Note: “Blackbird” should not be confused with Adam Rapp’s “Blackbird,” given a triumphant production at the Profiles Theatre five years ago. That also was a super intense two-character play about a bizarre romance.
“Blackbird” runs through August 9 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $58. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. July 2009
Contact Dan atzeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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Love Person
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Watching “Love Person” at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater is like attending foreign film with particularly wordy subtitles. But instead of translating from a single foreign language into English, “Love Person” communicates through sign language, e mail, and occasionally, Sanskrit.
“Love Person,” by Aditi Brennan Kapil, is a four-character play that deals with three relationships. The play opens with a visiting professor of Sanskrit named Ram reading a Sanskrit poem in some kind of upscale bar, presumably in Boston. His listeners include three women—Vic, her sister Free, and Maggie. Free is deaf and Maggie’s lesbian and hearing partner. Vic is a boozing, foul-mouth, twice divorced flake who instantly falls in love with the self-effacing Ram.
Vic pursues Ram with considerable erotic intensity. Free accidentally intercepts an e mail from Ram directed to her sister and begins a less heated relationship with Ram through e mailing, except that Ram thinks it’s Vic doing the electronic communicating. Ram becomes intoxicated with Free’s sophisticated e mailing, believing it’s Vic doing the writing. Eventually the unintended deception comes out with predictable hostility from Vic toward her sister. At the same time Maggie and Free are having issues, largely I gather because Free believes Maggie is leaving her behind for Maggie’s hearing friends.
Much of Kapil’s dialogue is conveyed through ASL (American Sign Language), with the signing translated into words through projections above the stage. The e mail exchanges between Ram and Free are communicated to the audience through similar projections. Even when two hearing characters talk to each other, their dialogue is projected, presumably to accommodate deaf patrons in the audience.
The projections are presented with considerable dexterity, with the dialogue color coded to help the audience identify which character is talking. But there are problems, perhaps unavoidable. The audience too often is reading the play rather than watching it. Occasionally the projections move too quickly to allow for easy following. It’s like a three-ring circus where something is going on in each ring, all demanding attention at the same time. I found myself struggling to read the projections while attempting to enjoy the very fine acting going on below the words. It got frustrating.
For viewers able to adjust to the production’s projection technology, there is much to admire in the play. ASL is a gesture language at least as expressive and nuanced as verbal language, often conveyed with an almost dance-like grace. Liz Tannebaum, who plays the deaf Free, is deaf herself and a remarkable actress. At times I gave up on the projection translations and just watched Tannebaum perform with her hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language. It’s a fascinating performance, not just as a novelty character but as a three-dimensional young woman churning with emotions.
The author has stated that “Love Person” examines the impact of language—English, foreign (Sanskrit), electronic (e mail), and sign (ASL)—in its many facets in human communication. The play injects several Sanskrit poems into the storyline that are supposed to explore the journeys of the various characters. But those ancient Indian poems are too remote from modern sensibilities and seem grafted on to the story rather than fully integrated.
The relationship between Free and Maggie works the best in the play, portraying how hearing and non-hearing women, both independent in spirit, can bond together and work through difficulties not faced by hearing partners. Arlene Malinowski holds up her end of the partnership with feeling and intelligence, not an easy feat with Liz Tannebaum’s scene stealing performance right next to her.
I couldn’t buy into the love affair between the manic Vic and the diffident Ram. Vic is desperate for a love partner to anchor her loose canon life. Ram can’t match her intensity but thinks he finds an emotional link to her through the e mails sent by Free. Ram may be falling in love with the wrong woman but he ends up with Vic, and good luck to them. I give their marriage six months. That’s no slam against the often comic free wheeling performance by Cheryl Graef or Rajesh Bose’s low-keyed acting as Ram.
Sandy Shinner is the resourceful director of the technically complex production. The show benefits from Jeff Bauer’s modern multi level set, Carol Blanchard’s costumes, Christopher Ash’s lighting, and the sound design by Andre Pluess and Michael Griggs. Mike Tutaj, who seems to have cornered the local theater market on projections, handles the demanding job for “Love Person” as well as possible, some too speedy translations notwithstanding.
The skillful dramatic display of ASL had the opening night audience totally engaged. You could have heard a pin drop as the spectators intently followed the projections as well as the ASL gestures. I have some problems with the narrative’s credibility and the projections did distract too often, but “Love Person” still is worth seeing as a special adventure in playgoing, and Liz Tannebaum is a performer not to be missed.
“Love Person” runs through June 14 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. May 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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Class Dismissed
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Jeffrey Sweet’s “Class Dismissed” explores the lives of a group of characters, mostly young, trying to muddle their way through the turbulent 1960’s in the United States. The characters aren’t particularly noteworthy and their problems aren’t very daunting, but they provide audiences at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater with more than two hours of intelligent, articulate, often humorous entertainment.
Sweet’s characters are a diverse lot. Roy is a rich college student who hides his family wealth so his peers will accept him as a person and not a fountain of small loans. His buddy Pete is a semi hippie in a relationship with Meg, a firm minded young woman who eventually drops Pete for Roy. Wendy is a former waitress who attaches herself to the group after they all move to an old house in Vermont owned by Roy’s wealthy father. The fifth member of the group is an ex college professor named Jackson who serves as a kind of patriarch for the young folks as he works on an economic history of America that he will never complete.
The second act moves the story into the 1980’s. The core group of characters is joined by Lisa, a teenager with lots of questions about her past and plenty of resistance to her parents. Her mother is Meg and her father is Pete but she lives with Meg and Roy after they marry. Several other characters filter in and out of the play, adding color and comedy to the narrative.
During the 1960’s portion of the play the young people are aroused to action by the political ferment of the decade but they mostly stay on the fringes, except for an abortive attempt at political disobedience that laughably fails. Mostly they sit around and talk and make plans and ponder their future and shuffle their relationships.
There isn’t much action in “Class Dismissed,” no villains and only misunderstandings and modest conflicts rather than white-hot confrontations. The play survives on Sweet’s vibrant dialogue that avoids dealing with the 1960’s primarily as a historical record of political and social upheaval. Audience members of a certain age will nod ruefully at the dilemmas faced by the young people on stage, difficulties that appeared so important at the time but seem so slight in retrospect.
The characters, while not hyper literate, are well spoken. Sweet avoids caricature and cliché when dealing with the 1960’s. His characters are naïve and idealistic but they are also bright and they care for each other through the decades when the youths of the 1960’s become adults, facing adult problems, sometimes with the mindset of their student days.
The play adopts a kind of “Our Town” approach. Characters chat with the spectators directly, filling in blanks in the play’s chronology and schmoozing about their history. The device could have been coy and cutesy, but it’s easily accepted by the viewer, thanks to partly to Dennis Zacek’s assured, understated directing.
The ensemble serves the play beautifully. Jennifer Avery is superb as Meg, very much her own woman as a child of the 1960’s who morphs into a wealthy matron in the 1980’s. Aaron Roman Weiner, an actor new to me, is outstanding as Roy and his edgy, emotional conversations with his wealthy father are highlights of the evening. The father is played with wisdom and self knowledge by Tim Grimm, who doubles, equally impressively, as the college professor. Steve Key is a splendid Pete, halting and uncertain in the 1960’s who grows into a firm adult in the 1980’s, thanks partly to his relationship with Wendy, played with a deft blend of self possession and insecurity by Ann Joseph.
Jessica London-Shields does most of her work in the second act as Lisa, the restless teenager who avoids the twin pitfalls of being annoying or precocious. She’s just an independent girl often at odds with the adults around her, a personality most people in the audience will recognize either as a mirror of their younger selves or their own offspring. Marc Grapey rounds out the cast in multiple roles, ranging from a corporate lawyer to an aging flower child, all played with droll humor.
Mary Griswold has designed a set that nicely captures the atmosphere of the play’s locale in rural Vermont. Her semi abstract setting is enhanced by John Culbert’s mood setting lighting. Tatjana Radisic designed the costumes and Joe Cerqua the sound.
“Class Dismissed” is a nostalgia trip, and more. It places a collection of sympathetic characters on stage and invites the audience to enjoy their interaction, their setbacks, their small triumphs, and how they change, often reluctantly, with the passing of time. They are agreeable people to be around, burnished by the playwright’s spot-on dialogue. One gets the feeling that Jeffrey Sweet likes his characters and that feeling communicates itself happily to the audience.
“Class Dismissed” runs through April 26 at the Victory Gardens Biography Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Ticket are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. March 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
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Living Green
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—In Lorraine Hansberry’s classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” the blue collar Younger family escapes from the demoralizing poverty of Chicago’s African American inner city to a white neighborhood. In “Living Green,” Gloria Bond Clunie investigates the flip side of that story, with the upwardly mobile black Freeman family contemplating moving from the security of a white neighborhood back into the inner city.
Clunie’s play, receiving its world premiere at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, attempts to explore some stimulating and potentially controversial themes. In their search for comfort and safety, have the Freeman’s sacrificed too much of their black identity? Having made it economically in the white world, are the Freemans obligated to give back some of their success to the poor neighborhood where they were raised, and nurtured? But how much of a price should the Freemans, or other successful black families be expected to pay in terms of yielding the security of their present lives for the poor schools and dangers of gang violence and drugs in the old ‘hood?
The Freemans consist of Frank and Angela and their teenage children Carol and Dempsey. The year is 1995, almost 50 years after the setting of “A Raisin in the Sun.” It’s a significant year for black America, the year of the Million Man March to Washington, D.C., that vast gathering of black males, “A holy day of atonement, reconciliation and responsibility.
In spite of Angela’s misgivings, Frank and his son attend the march, each returning with a considerably raised consciousness. Frank wants to sell the family house and move back to Chicago’s South Side to reconnect with their roots and participate in the renewal of the previously blighted area.
Angela resists giving up their hard won middle class life in white America to follow some questionable racial quest. Mostly she fears for the safety of her children. She asks her husband if she is obligated to claim “every gun toting freak misfit” just because they are black.
The playwright introduces a couple of outside characters to stir up the arguments. One is Shondra, a quiet and hard working 16-year old girl from the ghetto now living with the janitor at the school Carol Freeman attends. The janitor asks the Freemans to take in the girl for a time while the janitor’s wife convalesces from an illness. There are no difficulties with the girl but then her bumptious streetwise brother bursts onto the scene with his aura of gang crime. The brother’s appearance leads to violence that reinforces Angela’s fears about moving into the heartland of black Chicago.
Clunie readily admits to being inspired by “A Raisin in the Sun,” even starting her play with a scene similar to the first scene in the Hansberry play. And Clunie adopts Hansberry’s symbol of a small potted plant that represents the Younger dream of owning a home with a garden.
Unfortunately, “Living Green” doesn’t approach the earlier play’s gallery of vivid characters, its domestic and racial tensions, its bracing humor, and its eloquent writing. Much of the play motors along in sitcom style, a knockoff of the Bill Cosby TV series. Shondra and her brother are add-on characters to inject some urgency into the debate about moving, the brother standing for the threats to family security the Freemans would face in their new life.
Perhaps a black audience will find disturbing immediacy in Clunie’s play, especially in the conflict over how much ethnic identity and pride are yielded to middle class life as defined by the white world. To me, Angela’s concern for the safety of her children in a black neighborhood was more persuasive than Frank’s musings about losing some of his black identity and his desire to regain that identity by resettling on the Southside to contribute to community development, gang bangers being a risk worth taking. But that’s a white reaction. Members of the black community may think otherwise.
Clunie’s writing is realistic and often humorous. She writes a few scenes of dramatic intensity, all involving Angela, who has the play’s best dialogue. Ann Joseph is very fine as the wife, her opposition to her husband’s moving plans understandable and passionately expressed. Aurelia Clunie (presumably a relative of the playwright) does a fine job as the daughter, comfortable in her current middle class existence, intrigued by a move back to the family roots, and fearful of what dangers that move would bring.
Kenn E. Head does well as Frank Freeman, swept up in the black identity issue that was stirred to fever pitch by the Million Man March. Cedric Young nicely plays the janitor, an ostentatiously wholesome presence in the play.
Mary Griswold designed the expansive and detailed interior of the Freeman house. Judith Lundberg designed the costumes, Mary Badger the lighting, and Mikhail Fiksel the sound (which relied heavily on moody distorted renditions of Duke Ellington songs). Andrea J. Dymond directs.
“Living Green” certainly has its heart in the right place. It’s not “A Raisin in the Sun. But then again, a play can be pretty good and not be as good as that masterpiece.
“Living Green” runs through March 1 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. February 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .
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Eurydice
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” bathes the audience in an emotional and theatrical spectrum that ranges from whimsy and comedy and fantasy to an exploration the sense of loss that comes with the inevitability of death. That’s a lot of bases to touch in a mere 80 minutes of performance time but Ruhl brings it off with the invaluable assistance of the magical staging at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater.
We have not lacked for Ruhl plays locally in recent seasons. There have been productions of “The Clean House,” “Passion Play,” and “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” none of which I cared for. But “Eurydice” works both as glowing drama and as imaginative theater.
“Eurydice” is the playwright’s spin on the famous Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the myth Orpheus is a fabulous musician. He marries Eurydice but she dies and descends into the Underworld. The grief-stricken Orpheus follows her and the Lord of the Underworld permits her to return to the upper world with Orpheus, provided that he does not look back at her until they are free of the Underworld. But Orpheus does look back and loses Eurydice forever.
The Ruhl version takes place in contemporary times. Orpheus is a musician but Eurydice prefers books, a cause of some friction between the two. At their wedding, Eurydice encounters a mysterious man, called a Nasty Interesting Man in the playbill, who lures her away from the wedding party to his apartment with the promise of a letter written to her by her dead father. The young woman accompanies the man, but tumbles to her death on a giant staircase leading up to the man’s apartment.
Entering the Underworld, Eurydice encounters her deceased father, but doesn’t recognize him, having passed through Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Later, Orpheus manages to enter the Underworld to rescue his wife but, as in the myth, he looks back as they depart and she must go back.
This account makes the narrative seem more linear than it is on the Victory Gardens stage. The story takes on the quality of a fairy tale, with unexpected shifts in dramatic tone. There is much poignancy in the reunion of Eurydice with her father, the play being inspired in part of the death of Ruhl’s own father. We never learn who the Nasty Interesting Man is, though the same actor also plays the Lord of the Underworld. But if there is a connection between the two characters it is elusive. More likely the Nasty Interesting Man is Ruhl’s dramatic device to get Eurydice dead and into the Underworld.
In the Underworld there is commentary by a trio of cranky and elderly senior citizens collectively called the Stones (Big Stone, Loud Stone, and Little Stone). They sit at the side of the stage like three elders out of a Norman Rockwell painting of the 1940’s, offering their grumpy observations.
The play has echoes of “Our Town” in its use of people from the grave speaking reverently about the small precious things in life. “Eurydice” is loaded with droll and comic pleasures but there is also pain, like when Eurydice faces the dilemma of leaving her beloved father behind to return to the upper world with her equally beloved husband.
Co-directors Jessica Thebus and Sandy Shinner have bonded with their designers to create an exceptional visual production, possibly the first to fully utilize the high tech capabilities of the new Victory Gardens Biograph facility. Eurydice arrives in the Underworld in an elevator with rain pouring down on her. Her father creates a room for her in the Underworld out of string and helium-filled balloons, an entrancing silent scene. The Lord of the Underworld makes his entrance riding an adult-sized tricycle.
The final moment of the play is a haunting tableau of Eurydice and her father reclining in a bathtub, its water washing away their memory as Orpheus makes another entrance in the Underworld in that rain drenched elevator.
Spectators need to set aside any insistence on realism to enjoy this play. Ruhl allows her imagination to float from scene to scene and the viewer needs to follow that imagination without demanding answers to loose ends in the storytelling and characterizations. Those who permit the playwright to lead them will enjoy a marvelously airy, and emotional, ride.
Lee Stark plays Eurydice as a wide-eyed innocent. It’s a delicious performance, and a demanding one, the character being on stage the entire play. Stark is cute but never cutesy, a compliment that equally applies to the play. Joe D. Lauck endows her father with enormous warmth and sympathy. The role of Orpheus is a bit underwritten and we have to accept the chemistry between the young musician and the more literal minded Eurydice, but Abelson has the looks and stage presence to carry off the role.
Beau O’Reilly nearly steals all his scenes as the flamboyant and slightly sinister Nasty Interesting Man and the Lord of the Underworld. The three Stones are well played by three old pros of the Chicago theater, William J. Norris, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, and Caitlin Hart.
It is impossible to overpraise the contributions by the design team—Daniel Ostling (sets), Judith Lundberg (costumes), JR Lederle (lighting), and Andre Pluess (the magnificently atmospheric music and sound). They collectively put together a physical production that is enchanting to see and hear.
“Eurydice” runs through November 9 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $48. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org .
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Relatively Close
By Dan Zeff
I fall into the teeth-grinding sector, but on opening night I was certainly in the minority. Most of the customers found the backbiting and self-serving antics of Sherman's men and women a hoot.
The name of Sherman’s play is “Relatively Close.” The show is a page out of Sherman’s familiar dysfunctional family bag. As usual, the setting is local (the Union Pier resort area of Michigan) and the characters are mostly Jewish. The dialogue is loaded with Chicago references and peppered with typical Shermanesque one-liners. Until the last third of the play, there isn’t much plot, just a lot of insult-laden encounters among three sisters and their three spouses.
For added garnish, a teen-aged son is include in he menagerie, a lad who goes into a sullen funk when he realizes that he has to spend a week in a summer home without cable TV and a computer, and the location is so remote he can’t even use his cell phone.
The three sisters are Jan, Beth, and Marlene. Jan is a greedy, bossy, and abrasive, the most unpleasant figure in the play, though the competition is close. Beth is pregnant and working on her fifth marriage. Marlene is so shy that she can communicate with strangers only by speaking through a ventriloquist’s dummy, a brassy blonde with a personality of her own.
The husbands consist of Yousef, Ron, and Arthur. Yousef belongs to Jan, and an odder marital couple could scarcely be imagined. Yousef is rich, cheap, and Persian. Beth’s husband Arthur is an African American academic and exceedingly pretentious. Ron is tied to Marlene. He’s a hyper man who dresses up like a character in “Mary Poppins” to attend a sing-along version of the film at the local movie theater. Dylan is Beth’s teenage son, the lad who can’t cope with the absence of modern electronics.
Everyone in the play is Jewish except for the Persian and the black man. The unusual ethnic mix allows Sherman to indulge in some funny politically incorrect humor. There are other droll comic moments, as when Marlene describes a convention of shy people in New York City.
The storyline superficially deals with a conflict among the sisters,
with their husbands as interested parties, about what do to do with the family summerhouse in Union Pier now that their parents are dead. Jan wants to sell and take a nice commission as the real estate broker. Beth is on the fence but opposes Jan on general principles. Marlene wants to keep the house for sentimental reasons. Toward the end of the play, Sherman tosses in a plot twist of ostentatious improbability that leads to an unlikely but sort of happy ending.
Say what you will about the quality of the play, the Victory Gardens production is terrific. All seven actors nail their unsympathetic or oddball characters. Penny Slusher is marvelously detestable as Jan and Usman Ally is superb as her unctuous Persian husband. Laura T. Fisher is such a warm and sympathetic actress that she endows the promiscuous Beth with a humanity that sometimes seems out of place within this menagerie of caricatures. As her husband, Dexter Zollicoffer is just right as the smarmy academic.
The most entertaining couple in the play consists of Daniel Cantor as Ron and Wendi Weber as Marlene. Cantor is great as a man who seems to exist in a perpetual state of exasperation--that is, when he isn’t putting the moves on Beth. The performance of the night belongs to Wendi Weber, who takes the ludicrous figure of Marlene and makes her funny, poignant, and just kooky enough to be endearing. David Gonzales rounds out the ensemble as Dylan, who either seems a little old to be Beth’s son or maybe Beth seems a little young to be his mother. In this improbable zoo of a family, it’s ultimately a point of little matter.
Director Dennis Zacek keeps the action at a boil as the characters slash away at each other for personal gain, sibling rivalry, or just to be disagreeable. John C. Stark has designed a splendid two-level set that finally utilizes the new Victory Gardens stage to its full potential. Julie Mack designed the lighting, Christine Pascual the costumes, and Andre Pluess the sound.
“Relatively Close” runs through July 13 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $45. Call 773 871 3000.
The show gets a rating of three stars. June 2008
For more information, visit www.VictoryGardens.org.
Contact Dan Zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Four Places
at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Maybe it’s the law of averages. If area theaters present enough plays about dysfunctional families, one is likely to turn up a gem. And so it is with “Four Places," the humorous, searching, ultimately heartbreaking new play at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater.
“Four
Places” (the title is the only weak element in the Joel Drake Johnson
play) is 90 uninterrupted minutes of painfully honest and human writing
about such familiar themes as parent-child relationships, the hidden
depths of marriage, and the challenges and miseries of growing old.
The play begins in an automobile, where the middle-aged brother and sister Warren and Ellen are picking up Peggy, their elderly mother, for their weekly lunch at a local restaurant. At first, the play looks like a sitcom centered on a dotty, feisty, and endearing old lady doing verbal battle with her two adult children. And nobody plays a dotty, feisty, endearing old woman better than veteran Chicagoland actress Mary Ann Thebus.
The opening night audience had a fine time for the first portion of the play, laughing indulgently at the antics of the mother and the fumbling efforts of her two offspring to get a handle on her behavior. But gradually the mood darkens and the intensity ratchets up. Warren and Ellen are concerned that their mother may be physically abusing their father, a semi invalid kept quiet by liquor fed to him continuously by his wife.
The father/husband never appears on the stage but he remains a strong presence. There is the revelation that he’s been in love with another woman for most of his marriage, a marriage that has turned into a love/hate combat between Peggy and her husband. The mother sees her marriage as a private concern between herself and her spouse. Warren and Ellen feel they need to step in to protect their father from possibly murderous actions from their mother.
The play turns into an “eye of the beholder” narrative. The mother insists that she knows best how to deal with their father and resents what she feels is a frontal attack by her children. Matters are complicated by baggage each child carries. Warren is still wounded from a bitter divorce and in a downward psychological spiral complicated by problems in his teaching career. Ellen lost her husband to an illness and is spiritually adrift. Both are stretched to the emotional limit by their own personal problems compounded by the dangers they see in their mother’s conduct toward their father.
The playwright tells this complex story with spot-on realistic dialogue that subtly peels layer after layer from the interplay between brother and sister and children and parent. There isn’t a false verbal note struck anywhere in the language and the final moments offer no facile resolution to the anxieties and emotional tugs of war laid out for the audience.
The play’s title refers to the four locations that form the backdrop for the story—the automobile and three different spots in the restaurant. There is a fourth character in the story, a restaurant waitress with a relentlessly breezy manner who periodically intrudes on the tense conflicts among the other three characters, putting in her two cents worth without a clue about the deep psychological waters that threaten to engulf her customers.
Mary Ann Thebus is stunning as Peggy. She starts out as a maddening old woman who would drive any offspring to despair and frustration. But as the play progresses and she senses that her children are about to intrude into her marriage, Peggy reveals a hard core of self-knowledge that makes her the most firmly rooted figure in the narrative. If the audience chuckles at her flakey mannerisms early in the play, their heart goes out to her later as the old woman realizes with a rising sense of panic that her life is being uprooted by children who cannot recognize that they are recklessly muddling into a situation she’s spent most of her life trying to control.
Thebus is the centerpiece of the ensemble, but she receives exceptional support from Peter Burns as the son coming apart from stresses in his own life. Burns superbly evokes the image of a man coming unglued by demands on him that he doesn’t have the inner resources to handle. Meg Thalken as Ellen is wonderfully effective, especially in her silences as she tries to hold herself together amid the emotional turbulence swirling around her.
Jennifer Avery is excellent as Barb, the waitress who injects herself as a member of the family with her patronizing proprietary attitude toward Peggy and consequent wary, near hostile, view of Ellen and especially Warren.
Sandy Shinner directs with unerring insight and sensitivity. The production effectively makes use of the theater turntable to rotate among the various settings of the action. Jack Magaw’s set features blowups of old photos in the background that imply younger and happier days for the disintegrating family. Carol J. Blanchard designed the costumes, Avraham Mor the lighting, and Andre Pluess the sound.
In the theater lobby before the start of the play I ran into Dennis Zacek, the artistic director of Victory Gardens. I asked him if expectations were high for the show tonight. He replied that the show was a sensational piece of writing. It sounded like puffery at the time, but he was correct. Johnson has written a sensational script, the best new work to play at a Victory Gardens theater in recent memory.
“Four Places” runs through May 4 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $45. Call 773 871 3000.
The show gets a rating of four stars. April 2008
For more information contact: www.victorygardens.org
Contact us: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
********************************
A Big Blue Nail
at Victory Gardens Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—“A Big Blue Nail” is having its world premiere at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre. After the run concludes, playwright Carlyle Brown should take his script into a workshop, cut away all the dramatic frou frou of the first act, and hone the play down to its essence, a stirring clash between two complex characters. Brown has plenty to work with now, especially in the second act. But much rethinking is required before this highly promising work is ready for prime time.
“A Big Blue Nail” is a memory play that recounts Robert Peary’s struggle to become the first explorer to reach the North Pole and its aftermath. Peary today is generally gets credit as the first man to reach the pole, but his achievement remains a matter of uncertainty. Did he actually locate the pole? Was his rival Frederick Cook really the first explorer to stand on the pole? And most important, did Peary, out of ego and a thirst for power and acclaim, unfairly exclude his African American assistant Matthew Henson from his rightful place as no worse than a co-discoverer of the North Pole?
It’s Peary’s conflict with Henson that forms the core of Brown’s play. The action starts in 1919, 10 years after Peary allegedly reached the North Pole. The explorer is tormented by nightmares as he sleeps fitfully on his estate in New England. He sends a letter to Henson, asking the man to visit him. Henson is bitter and frustrated at Peary’s refusal to acknowledge his integral role in the successful assault on the North Pole. While Peary gathered wealth and honors, Henson worked anonymously as a clerk-messenger in Brooklyn.
When Henson and Peary share the stage, “A Big Blue Nail” is absorbing and dramatic. Unfortunately, much of the first act is spent in mystical and dreamlike visitations from an initially naked young woman called the Future and a chorus of Eskimos (now called Inuit in these politically correct times). The Future and the chorus spout purple patches of verbiage that take the play into Peary’s fevered imagination, contributing very little to the script’s narrative or psychological development.
Finally, in the second act we get the expected showdown between the aggrieved Henson and the defensive Peary. We see Henson as a proud man who wants validation for his North Pole achievement to give some meaning to a life otherwise undercut by racism. The two men slash at each other verbally, Henson expressing his resentment and sense of betrayal and Peary stating his side, laying blame for Henson ‘s lack of recognition on his race. The public and the scientific community simply would not have accepted a black man as a great explorer. Peary did everything he could for Henson, but the anti-black tone of the times couldn’t be breached, or so Peary claims.
Along the way a portrait emerges of Peary as a man obsessed with the search for the North Pole as the accomplishment that would give his life meaning. He was an opportunist, at times irrational, power hungry, and a manipulator, insecure with a moral blind spot, the perfect celebrity for our publicity-driven day. If Peary was a hero, he was an enormous flawed hero, not nearly as good a man as Henson, at least in Brown’s dual portrait.
The Victory Gardens production casts two of Chicagoland’s finest actors in the key roles, Larry Neumann, Jr., as Peary and Anthony Fleming III as Henson. Neumann is on stage virtually the entire evening and seems to deliver at least half the play’s lines. His Peary begins the evening as a fussy little man tormented by bad dreams of murky origin. His Peary doesn’t gain stature until the second act in his face-offs with Henson, both in the Arctic and in his bedroom in New England. Then the full psychological complexity of the explorer emerges, his pettiness, his pride, his physical courage, his yearning for acceptance, his isolation, and his desperate reaching out to Henson for friendship and some kind of absolution for past injustices.
Fleming’s Henson is a less complicated, but no less driven man who simply wants his due from posterity. Fleming’s imposing bulk and booming voice play off dramatically against Neumann’s slender physique and nasal intonation. By the end of the play, nothing has been settled between the two, though history has recognized Henson, even though the man died in obscurity at the age of 88 in 1955, 35 years after Peary’s death. Today both men are buried side by side in Arlington National Cemetery.
The supporting cast does what it can. Bethanny Alexander is stuck with impossibly flowery lines as the Future. The estimable Laura T. Fisher is very strong in her few stage moments as Peary’s wife. The show could use a larger contribution from this articulate and sympathetic character. A 13-year old lad named Scott Baity, Jr., stalwartly plays Tupi, a supernatural figure in Peary’s nightmares.
The four-man ensemble of Esteban Andres Cruz, Joseph Anthony Foronda, Narciso Lobo, and Remigio Ortiz plays the chorus, who impersonate sled dogs and Eskimos, occasionally to some dramatic effect. In their best scene, Eskimos demand from Peary an exact description of this North Pole that the white man seeks so obsessively? Is it a big blue nail in the ice and snow? Peary concedes ironically that this fiercely pursued prize is nothing more than a mathematical abstraction.
Loy Arcenas directs the production and also designs the set, which abstractly replicates the bleak frigid wilderness of the Arctic. Meghan Raham designed the costumes and Jesse Klug the lighting. Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen are responsible for the original music and sound design.
I left the theater speculating how much more effective the play might be as a 90-minute one-acter, with three characters--Peary, his wife, and Henson—literally and figuratively exploring this fascinating and ambiguous true story.
“The Big Blue Nail” runs through March 2 at the Victory Gardens Theatre, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $45. Call 773 871 3000.
For more information contact: www.victorygardens.org
The show gets a rating of three stars.
Feb. 2008
Contact us : zeffdaniel@yahoo.com