The Whale
At the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Question: Who wants to see a play about a 600-pound man? Answer: Any theatergoer who enjoys an offbeat but accessible drama flawlessly staged and performed. The play in question is “The Whale” by Samuel D. Hunter and the brilliant staging and acting come courtesy of the Victory Gardens Theater.
“The Whale” runs 1 hour and 50 minutes and flows in a series of short scenes that cover a time frame from a Monday morning through Friday morning. The play opens with the image of a mountainous man sitting on a couch in a disheveled apartment. The audience learns that the apartment is in a small town in northern Idaho and the man is named Charlie, who teaches online creative writing classes from a computer in his apartment.
The gay Charlie has been eating himself to death for 15 years following the traumatic death of his partner. Now Charlie is near the end of his life, suffering from congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, and near immobility because of his obesity. But Charlie hasn’t lost his sense of decency. He’s a good man burdened not only by his grotesque physical condition but by pressures inflicted on him by the few other people in his life, notably his angry and hostile 17-year old daughter Ellie. Charlie is a humble man, constantly apologizing for wrongs, however fanciful, he believes he has inflicted on people around him. Charlie wallows in guilt like he wallows in food.
The dye of
Charlie’s life is pretty well cast. But two other characters in the play are in
crisis. One is Ellie, a deliberately hateful and malicious teenager who has
alienated everyone around her. Charlie excuses her as simply a strong
personality. Her mother Mary calls her pure evil. The other character in emotional
turmoil is a visiting 19 year-old Mormon named Elder Thomas who is on a mission
to Idaho, He’s a true believer in the Mormon faith but in deep trouble with the
church for various displays of anti social behavior, like physically assaulting
his teammate on the mission and smoking pot. Charlie tries to reach out to both
youngsters, with ambiguous results. But his interaction with them provides much
of the play’s energy, intensity, and even humor.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
For “The Whale” to work, the audience must buy into Charlie as a human being, in spite of his mammoth size. Otherwise the play is a distasteful freak show. It’s impossible to overpraise Dale Calandra’s performance as Charlie. As an actor, he’s limited to his voice and facial expressions as performing tools, body language eliminated because of the superbly credible fat suit Calandra occupies with credible realism.
Using Hunter’s naturalistic but pungent dialogue, Calandra makes Charlie an individual the audience can accept as sympathetic, pathetic, intelligent, and maybe tragic. Charlie has given up on himself, but he constantly reaches out to others. He pleads for honesty from those around him, whether they are the anonymous underachieving students in his online class or his rebellious daughter. Charlie cannot save himself but he tries to save others, all through the discomfort and embarrassment that blight his waking hours. It’s the ultimate tribute to Calandra that the spectator so readily accepts Charlie as a human being and not an unpleasant spectacle.
Charlie is the passive eye of the emotional hurricane that swirls through the apartment with every entrance by Ellie, the Mormon young man, Charlie’s estranged wife, or his feisty but concerned caregiver. The scenes between Charlie and the bitter Ellie crackle with intensity. As Ellie, Leah Karpel is all hatefulness and cruelty, but she still suggests there is a salvageable young woman within, if only the walls of rancor can be breached.
Cheryl Graeff
creates a complex and lusty character out of Liz the caregiver. Liz is a lapsed
Mormon and the sister of Charlie’s dead lover. She is furious with Charlie for
not taking any medical steps to arrest his relentless march to the grave,
treating Charlie with a moving blend of exasperation and gruff affection. Will
Alan is a real find as the young and conflicted Mormon. The character teeters
on a psychological precipice, saved ironically by one of Ellie’s apparently
mean spirited practical jokes. Patricia Kane makes a brief but telling appearance
as Charlie’s wife, an aggrieved woman who resents Charlie saddling her with an
intractable problem daughter to raise as a single parent while Charlie
contributes money but no presence to the relationship.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Joanie Schultz’s directing is perfect in its unobtrusive insights into the wildly different characters. She respects the text for its humor and the heated dramatic scenes crackle. The action has a natural, inevitable cadence that’s even more impressive considering the improbable central character who controls the narrative.
Chelsea Warren’s set nicely captures the claustrophobic, debris-laden interior of the apartment. Heather Gilbert’s lighting is always atmospheric, with expressive inserts of expressive light and shadow, especially effective linking the scene changes. Thomas Dixon designed the sound and Janice Pytel the costumes, presumably including the terrific fat suit that encloses Calandra.
Chay Yew has leaned heavily on unconventional scripts during his young ascendency as Victory Gardens artistic director. It remains to be seen if he can win over audiences who were accustomed to more mainstream fare, at the same time enticing new patrons into his theater with the promise of cutting edge shows. Yew is taking a big chance with “The Whale,” in spite of its warm critical reception in New York City. But if there is any theatrical justice, this triumphant presentation will be the breakout event for Yew’s artistic reign. The production is a triumph and area audiences should respond accordingly, not out of obligation to the Victory Gardens but because this is a work that has earned hit status.
By the by, the
play’s title doesn’t simply refer to Charlie’s gigantic size. It symbolically
refers to the white whale in “Moby Dick” and the Biblical tale of Jonah and the
whale.
“The Whale” runs through May 5 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater. 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
Contact Dan: ZeffDaniel@Yahoo.com April 2013
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Disconnect
At the Victory Gardens Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “Disconnect” at the Victory Gardens Theater is a new play that tries to put a human face on those disembodied voices from India that provide customer service to Americans over the telephone from halfway around the world.
The Indian customer service representatives have been a source of frustration and jokes in contemporary American culture for years. Playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar takes us into the world of these anonymous voices, a world located in an office building in the Indian city of Chennai. There, a group of young Indians work the phones all night to pry money out of Americans who are maxed out on their credit cards and delinquent on their payments.
The play opens with a young executive (Arya Daire) giving the bad news to Avinash, a company supervisor (Kamal J. Hans). His group isn’t meeting its collection quota so he is being demoted from the desirable New York territory to lower status Illinois. The middle aged Avinash has a poor employee appraisal, stating he is out of step with the energy and commitment the company expects of its workers. Avinash protests, claiming he’s a victim of age discrimination, but it’s Illinois or unemployment, a dire fate in India where jobs are few and precious.
So Avinash descends to the fourth floor and the land of Illinois accounts, where his rah-rah by-the-book attitude goes down badly with his young team, namely Vidya (Minita Gandhi), Giri (Behzad Dabu), and especially the nonconforming Ross (Debargo Sanyal). Clashes erupt almost immediately between Avinash’s dedication to the company’s team culture and the free spirits under his supervision. That’s the setup for the remainder of this intermissionless 1 hour and 50 minute play.
Vida,
Ross, and Giri sit at a row at workstations, armed with computers and
telephones to cajole or intimidate the debtors to come across with at least
some payment. A certain amount of gamesmanship exists between the customer
service people and the “marks” with the big credit card deficits. The workers
fake American accents, claiming to be from Buffalo, New York, and similar
all-American locales to win the trust of the marks. The marks are full of excuses
and beg for compassion.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The first scenes are mood setters, portraying the methodology of the Indians with lots of overlapping dialogue as they work the phones to pry cash from the marks. Much of the dialogue is funny and some of it is unintelligible, but the audience gets the idea. Get the marks to cough up some cash, and if the methodology is devious or deceptive, so be it.
The intensity level escalates as Vidya and Ross develop emotional attachments to a couple of their long-term marks. They are drawn into the worlds of the American debtors, with their hard luck stories and pleas for more time, and their insistence that the check is in the mail. The rebellious and callous Ross gradually falls for the voice of an American named Sarah Johnson who owes $23,000 on her credit card bill. Ross’s relationship with Sarah turns into an obsession that ends disastrously for the entire team.
“Disconnect” has plenty of comedy as the callers wheedle and threaten their marks and banter with each other. The playwright also explores the mindset of the debtors at the other end of the phone line, people in desperate financial situations who still pad their credit balances with luxury goods and other nonessentials. “Disconnect” is partly a group portrait of undisciplined and self-indulgent Americans who spend without conscience or regard for the impossible financial hole they dig for themselves.
We get a peak into racism Indian style when the attractive Vidya is insulted by a remark that she’s a bit dark skinned. Apparently, the fairer the skin the better in India (the characters call Americans “whites”). The young Indians view the United States as their lifestyle role model. They dress like America youths, listen to American style rock music, and drink Cokes. They yearn to visit the USA and fantasize about the people and places in the New World. A visa to America is the Holy Grail.
Ross
takes over the final scenes of the play. His emotional involvement with Sarah has
escalated into a lawsuit for harassment against him and the company. Ross tries
to dig out of the spiraling calamity by impersonating Avinash with a long,
bravura monologue directed at Sarah. The play has switched from an exploration
of East versus West into melodrama.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
The explosive final scenes are great theater and an acting showcase for Sanyal. But the meat of the play focuses on the interaction between the Indian callers and the American marks and what that interaction says about contemporary consumer life in America and the urgent desire for upward mobility among the impatient and insecure younger generation in India. The potentials for satire and social probing in “Disconnect” are overwhelmed by the operatic final scenes.
The play gives the five Southeast Asian actors a terrific platform to display their skills. Sanyal pulls out all the stops in his final frantic attempt to salvage his job in the phone call to Sarah. As a display of acting chops we won’t see much better this season. Hans is outstanding as the older man trying to control a managerial situation that increasingly gets away from him. His dedication as a company man counts for little compared to failing to meet the impossible goals the company sets for him. His professional life is further undermined by the free spirits of the young callers under his command. This is a fine performance but everyone in the ensemble is excellent.
Director Ann Filmer keeps the verbal pot boiling throughout, abetted by the fluid set design by Grant Sabin, the costume design by Christine Pascual, the lighting design by Marc Vaughey, and Barry Bennett’s sound design and original music.
I liked “Disconnect” more while it was unfolding on the Victory Gardens stage than when I considered the show afterward. Much of my admiration while watching came from the turbulent final scenes that carry the spectator along on the sheer intensity of the performances. That intensity drains away a bit upon further reflection in the minutes following the final curtain. There is a fascinating cross-cultural story to be told, using the Indian customer service callers as a template for the shifting global cultural landscape we hear so much about. “Disconnect” may not entirely be that play but it still has its moments of insight and humor, and Debargo Sanyal’s performance is a keeper.
“Disconnect” runs through February 24 at the Victory Gardens Biography Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $50. Call 773 871 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of three stars. February 2013
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Equivocation
At the Victory Gardens Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “Equivocation” is Bill Cain’s stimulating, overlong play about William Shakespeare. Cain’s Shakespeare (spelled Shagspeare in the play) doesn’t radiate awe-inspiring genius. He’s a regular guy with a considerable talent for writing commercial plays for his acting company, but he faces a problem that may endanger his career, if not his life.
“Equivocation” is opening the Victory Gardens Theater subscription season. This is an entertaining play that deals with heavyweight issues in a literate, intelligent, and challenging manner. It’s also a very accessible play, with the characters talking in colloquial modern language. The play gets “Shakespearean” only when the characters act out scenes from “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”
The action takes place in 1605 when Robert Cecil delivers an
ultimatum to the Bard. Cecil is a cool, ruthless henchman for the new English
king, James I. Cecil orders Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder
Plot that will make the monarchy look good and unite the country. The Gunpowder
Plot was an alleged conspiracy by disaffected Catholics to blow up the Houses
of Parliament, killing the royal family and the court. The plot was betrayed
through an anonymous letter to the king (the plot is still commemorated today
as a national holiday called Guy Fawkes Day, named after one of the alleged conspirators).
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
Shakespeare refuses the king’s commission. He sees no dramatic value in the story and after preliminary investigation, decides it’s questionable that the plot ever existed. But one doesn’t say “No” to James I or Robert Cecil. So Shakespeare is impaled on the horns of a dilemma--write a play that is nothing more than an exercise in royal propaganda, or write a play that carries the ring of truth, with probable dire consequences for the author. It’s an agonizing choice between selling out for political and personal expediency, or being true to himself morally and artistically.
Cain’s script is filled with ideas that will churn the audience’s mind. The best parts of “Equivocation” trenchantly and eloquently explore the nature of truth. It turns out there are many “truths”—political, religious, artistic—depending on the eye of the beholder. The author injects plenty of humor into the high tension verbal exchanges so “Equivocation” never lapses into an academic debate.
The play takes place in Shakespeare’s playhouse and in a prison and torture chamber where the king’s men attempt to extract confessions from the possible conspirators, the chief one being a crafty and wise Jesuit named Henry Garnett. The play calls for five actors, plus an actress who plays Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith. Four of the actors play multiple roles, shifting the narrative from the playhouse to the larger political stage within the prison walls. Identities are changed in the blinking of an eye, yet the audience is never confused about who is who or what is transpiring.
The play’s title suggests the relativism of the issues Cain places on the table for his characters to wrestle with. The dictionary definition of equivocation is “the use of expressions with double meanings in order to mislead.” It’s also a Catholic doctrine allowing priests to lie during questioning when their lives are at stake. Shakespeare found the term dramatically useful, employing it in “Macbeth” (“I begin to doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth,” one of the meatiest lines in the entire Shakespearean canon).
At the Victory Gardens, Sean Grapey is a superb Shakespeare, not the literary deity he would become after his death but an audience-high man suddenly enmeshed in a very stressful situation. He also has to work among the feisty personalities and egos of his cohorts Richard Burbage (Bruce Young), Robert Armin (Matt Kahler), and Richard Sharpe (Arturo Soria), as well as report to the menacing Robert Cecil (Mark Montgomery). And there is Judith (Minita Gandhi), the only female in the show, a young woman who dislikes the theater, finds Shakespeare’s soliloquys silly, and likely resents her father’s dismissive attitude toward her while he grieves over the death of his son and her brother.
Cain deftly weaves together the complex threads of his narrative, notably the shifts between the intramural conflicts within the acting company and the Shakespeare’s interviews with the allegedly conspirators (they would be called terrorists today), along with the performance of scenes from “King Lear” and “Macbeth.” But Cain’s canny dramaturgy doesn’t fully disguise the fact that his play is too long, especially in the second act. Much of the act is consumed with the performance of scenes from “Macbeth” that are anti climactic after all the previous intellectual fireworks. About 20 minutes of blue penciling would tighten the script positively.
Photo credit: Michael Brosilow
The performances under Sean Graney’s directing serve the play handsomely Graney has carved out an estimable local reputation in Chicagoland theater for directing edgy, experimental plays. “Equivocation” is a comparatively traditional work but Graney orchestrates the multiple characters and themes with dexterity and clarity.
Among the supporting performances, Montgomery is perhaps first among equals for his Machiavellian, droll performance as Robert Cecil, a bad guy who steps out of the play’s chronology to inform the audience that as nasty as he may be, his descendants have played a central role in English political life to the present day. Young is stalwart as Richard Burbage and the Jesuit Henry Garnett, shrewd and dignified and witty and, as his life comes to an end, a little fearful. Gandhi hovers on the fringes of the story until she has her say near the end, when she gives her articulate take on her father and his theater. Soria moves convincingly from temperamental actor to sympathetic prisoner to the mincing James I. Kahler fills out the sextet as Robert Armin and number of minor roles.
William Boles has designed a flexible set that creates appropriate environments the play’s several locations. Janice Pytel designed the period costumes. Heather Gilbert designed the lighting and Kevin O’Donnell the sound.
“Equivocation” runs through October 14 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 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 3½ stars. Sept. 2012
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “Oedipus El Rey” at the Victory Gardens Theater is a powerful and riveting drama, which proves that a classic remains a classic, whether it’s set in ancient Greece or the modern prisons and barrios of California.
Oedipus
El Rey” is Luis Alfaro’s vision of Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” seen through the
prism of modern Latino life, specifically gang culture as it meldswith the traditions and values of the barrio in east Los
Angeles. Alfaro stays close to the basic narrative of the Sophocles tragedy,
with young Oedipus fulfilling a prophecy that he would kill his father, in this
case the gangland kingpin Laius (Alfaro retains all the Greek names of his
characters). After unknowingly killing his father, Oedipus unknowingly marries
his mother and Laius’s widow, Jocasta. At the end of the story the truth is
unveiled. Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus blinds himself with pins from Jocasta’s
jewelry and goes into exile.
Photo Credt: Michael Brosilow
In the Alfaro play, Oedipus is a strutting, arrogant young man who mocks the religious conventions of barrio life. After being paroled from prison, he moves in with Creon, wannabe replacement as crime king in the barrio. Oedipus meets Jocasta, Creon’s sister, and after some preliminary banter, they becoming steamy lovers, displayed in a long erotic scene the like of which audiences have never seen in any previous Victory Gardens production. The couple marries as their destiny is played out to its violent conclusion.
Alfaro absorbs some of the tropes of Greek tragedy, especially employing a chorus (call coro in the play) and frequent using short, staccato dialogue. Alfaro’s language is a peppery and poetic blend of English and Spanish, often eloquent and sometimes profane. Spectators unschooled in Spanish will miss a good bit of the dialogue when it shifts into the colloquialisms of the barrio and the prison. A two-page glossary of Spanish words and phrases is provided in the playbill but won’t be of much help to listeners as the patois of the barrio and the prison whiz past their ears. But the bilingual script doesn’t create any significant impediments to following the story, and the performers deliver the language with such passion and even humor that the Spanish-challenged patron shouldn’t miss much in meaning and context.
The play runs about 90 minutes with no intermission. The basic setting is the prison with its sliding chain-link steel panels reconfiguring the stage space. A blood red abstract projection at the rear of the stage is a reminder that we are watching a violent world. The six male performers mostly wear anonymous prison outfits, sometimes reverting to the civilian clothing of the barrio. As the only female in the play, Jocasta wears a loose fitting gown, easily removed for her extended nude scene with Oedipus. Director Chay Yew uses the entire theater, with actors moving up and down the aisles, occasionally unsettling the audience with their menacing stares.
Oedipus stands as a symbol of rebellion against the gods and their powers, with his bravado and hubris finally leading to his destruction. Alfaro preserves the ancient Greek conviction that one flaunts the gods at one’s peril. Once the deities have laid out a destiny, it’s irreversible and the individual struggles against his fate in vain, no matter how much pride and disbelief he flaunts.
Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow
Viewers familiar with the Sophocles original will find “Oedipus El Rey” fascinating as they follow how the playwright shapes the tragedy to the worldview of Latino life in prison and the barrio. Patrons will no knowledge of the original Greek drama will still have much to appreciate in the power of the story and the energy of the language. The narrative is a grabber 2,500 years after it was written and it doesn’t matter that the characters wear prison clothes instead of togas and live among enclosing steel security fences instead of stately Greek columns.
On a local level, “Oedipus El Rey” demonstrates the depth of Hispanic acting talent in the Chicago area. All seven members of the ensemble are local actors who have been active in Latino theater and occasionally appeared in mainstream Chicago plays, but they rarely get the kind of exposure they clearly deserve based on the superiority of the Victory Gardens production.
As Oedipus, Adam Poss is brilliant. He is on stage the entire play, speaking much of the dialogue as he carves out a figure of brash self-confidence. He’s ruthless in his ambition to take over as king of the barrio yet tender in his love affair with Jocasta. Poss triumphs in a role that demands stamina as well as command of raw and oversized emotions.
Charin Alvarez is splendid as Jocasta, a barrio-hardened woman who still yearns for love after enduring the abuses of the headstrong Laius. Her love scene with Poss is warm and unaffected, in spite of the nudity, and totally persuasive. As Laius, Madrid St. Angelo is the model of the bully preoccupied with preserving his power, outwardly proclaiming he isn’t afraid of any gods but still hedging his bets by ordering the newly born Oedipus killed. Arturo Soria is fine as Creon, as self centered and arrogant as Oedipus. Eddie Torres has some sensitive moments as the blind Tiresius, who knows the truth about Oedipus’s fate. Torres brings the blind old man alive as the only compassionate figure in the play. Jesse David Perez and Steve Casillas round out the ensemble as coros, but all the men in the cast form a pungent ensemble, replicating the rough brotherhood and omnipresent brutality of prison existence and the dangers of the gang infested barrio.
Kevin Dipenet designed the flexible and atmospheric set. Jesse Klug designed the lighting, Mikhail Fiksel the sound, and David Hyman the costumes. Ryan Bourque designed the fight choreography and movement, and there were plenty of both.
The program notes suggest there are parallels between the play and the street violence plaguing Chicago in real life. I didn’t find the play a cautionary tale with applications to modern society, but that doesn’t detract from “Oedipus El Rey” as a vibrant and moving drama by a major new voice in American theater and a showcase for Hispanic performers definitely deserving of wider recognition.
“Oedipus El Rey” runs through July 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 3000 or visit www.victorygardens.org.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. July 2012
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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
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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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