Theater Reviews
If ever there was an argument for government-sponsored
Geriatric Care, this is it. The clan depicted in Samuel
Beckett's Endgame consists of a blind and wheelchair-bound
patriarch, his amputee parents, and the former's foster son,
whose responsibility it is to minister to the whole sorry
lot. The physical logistics of this situation would be
grotesque enough&emdash;did I mention that they live in what
appears to be an abandoned basement, with the sire and dame
housed in twin garbage cans?&emdash;but even more disturbing
is the psychological dynamic engendered by this
proximity.
At no time has the question of duty to the elderly and
enfeebled aroused more debate than today, with
life-prolonging medical technology making for a burgeoning
population of Golden Agers. But playgoers who might be
rendered uneasy by Beckett's gerontophobia and director
Nicholas Rudall's contemporary spin thereon will find it
easy to ignore these subtexts in a production that appears
to have been vacuumed, disinfected and otherwise purged of
its icky imagery. For example, ancient Nagg munches on a
rock-hard dog biscuit with no indication of weakened jaws or
decalcified teeth. The family's shabby and filthy garments
are worn by the actors as if freshly laundered. And when
Hamm announces that he is urinating in his chair, he might
as well be commenting on the weather for all the onstage
reaction provoked by his behavior.
The American Theater Company has assembled an all-star
cast for its season opener. In the role of the self-absorbed
Hamm, Michael Nussbaum blusters against the dying of the
light with ironic humor and impeccable timing, closely
flanked by David Darlow as the weary Clov (done up in Peking
Opera redface&emdash;to symbolize his character's superior
vitality or simply exaggerate his facial expressions?). But
Deanna Dunagan and ATC member John Möhrlein, playing a
likewise clown-faced Nell and Nagg, come off as too lively
to be convincing as living fossils languishing in twilight
memories. (Individual speaking tempo and body language are
particularly important when players' ages do not necessarily
correspond to those of their personae.)
But watching seasoned troupers do their stuff is always a
pleasure. Though attributable more to technical expertise
than artistic inspiration. ATC's staging of this modern
classic supplies sufficient panache to send audiences home
satisfied by their safely-sanitized stroll through Beckett's
existential nightmare.
THE INVENTION OF LOVE
Playwright: Tom Stoppard
At: Court Theatre
Tickets: $28-$38
Phone: (773) 753-4472
Runs through: Oct. 15
by Gregg Shapiro
In 1998, Court Theatre scored with their acclaimed
production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar
Wilde and in 1999 they had a hit with Tom Stoppard's The
Real Thing. With The Invention of Love, the first play of
their 2000/2001 season, they come up with a winning
combination of the two.
Written by Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love is an
inventive love story about the unrequited love between
British poet A.E. Housman and fellow Oxford classmate Moses
Jackson. Upon meeting Charon (Maury Cooper), the river
Styx's boatman, an elder Housman (played brilliantly by
Paxton Whitehead) says, "I'm dead then, good," immediately
setting the tone for the play, which is a mix of intelligent
humor and painful introspection.
Critical and gossipy, Housman's life was "marked by long
silences," but as soon as he realizes that he is not dead,
only dreaming, he opens up about his life and the man he
loved. While on the river, he crosses paths with his younger
self (played by Guy Adkins), Moses Jackson (Martin Yurek),
and another classmate and friend, Pollard (Bruch Reed),
permitting him to openly express the love he felt for
Jackson by saying that he "would have died for Jackson but
he never had the chance."
There are many places in which The Invention of Love is
truly innovative. The conversations between the young and
old Housman, for one, are a highlight of the production,
giving the actors a chance to revel in the material. The
more reserved Housman and the flamboyant Wilde were, for a
brief time, at Oxford at the same time, and in a scene
towards the end of the play, the older Housman meets with
Wilde.
The verbose Stoppard packs his two and a half hour play
with more than what the average audience is prepared to take
in, including a debate about the aesthetics of the period,
scholarship, the Oscar Wilde controversy, and what it meant
to be a man in love with another man at that time. Still,
Stoppard does for Housman's lovelife, in The Invention Of
Love, what he did for Shakespeare's in Shakespeare In Love.
He makes it theatrical, thereby suspending it in the realm
of the imagination, which doesn't make it any less touching
or heartbreaking. This Midwestern premiere is a beacon of
hope at the beginning of a very full fall theater
season.
RUM & COKE
Playwright: Carmen Pelaez
At: Pegasus Players/O'Rourke Center For The Performing
Arts
Tickets: $15 - $25
Phone: 773-878-9761
Runs through: Oct. 22
by Gregg Shapiro
Carmen Pelaez's autobiographical one-person piece, Rum
& Coke, is a good reminder of what makes the artform of
the single-voice, multiple-character performance so
enjoyable. The American-born daughter of Cuban exiles,
Pelaez's very personal show details her odyssey of
self-discovery which began with a journey to Cuba.
On a simply set stage (a couple of chairs and a small
table, a coat rack), with a screen in the background onto
which various images (including photographs of Cuba and
Miami, the artwork of Pelaez's aunt) were projected, Pelaez
makes her entrance smoking a cigar to the strains of Albita.
She talks about her aunt Amelia Pelaez, "one of Cuba's first
modernists," and her decision to see Cuba for herself, armed
with a couple of bags of chocolate ("spiritual Tylenol") to
bring to Cuba.
With a few simple articles of clothing or devices
(headband, strand of pearls, bandana) Pelaez transforms into
the people who were essential to her journey. In Miami,
before Cuba, we meet Juana (whose distinguishing artifact is
a headband), who like "ruffles and spandex" and men. Pelaez
becomes her grandmother by donning a pair of cat-eye
glasses. Her grandmother, who came from Cuba "wearing a
linen dress" and has been accused of being a "nostalgic
aristocrat," is opposed to Carmen's trip to Cuba, having
spent virtually all of her time in Miami protesting what has
become of her homeland. While in Miami, Carmen consults a
santera, in a blue scarf, who encourages Carmen to follow
her dream of going to Cuba. Of these three characters, Juana
and the santera were the most fully realized.
In Cuba, Carmen stays with her pearl-necklace-wearing
aunt (who Pelaez says looked like a meringue), who opens up
to Carmen, feeding her "family stories and a meal." After
learning about her family, Carmen ventures out into Havana,
"the city that never was and will always be," where her most
eye-opening experiences occur. She meets a prostitute
wearing a red-fringed shawl skirt, who equates her work with
the ballet. The prostitute tells Carmen her own tragic story
of being trapped in Cuba.
Carmen's education continues at the Tropicana night club,
beginning with rum. As someone who "has never been a rum
girl," Carmen has a change of heart. As she put it, "the rum
was syrup, and I was a waffle." In addition to being dazzled
by what was happening on the stage at the Tropicana, she is
equally overwhelmed by a conversation she has with a former
Tropicana show girl, now working as a bathroom attendant at
the nightclub.
Pelaez is riveting, and although a few of the
characterizations were not as strong as some of the others,
her voice rang true throughout the theater. Perhaps the fact
that she was so close to the material, obstructed her
performance, and another actress less involved in the events
of the story might have done a better job. In any event, one
still leaves the theater, drunk on Pelaez's experiences. It
was a pleasure to watch the self-described "walking Cuban
identity crisis" regained her identity.
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THE TWO
GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Navy Pier, 800 East Grand Ave.
Phone: (312) 595-5600
Tickets: $35-$45
Runs through: Nov. 11
by Andrew Patner
Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson have been lauded
extensively&emdash;and appropriately&emdash;for their
accomplishment in building the new Chicago Shakespeare
Theater, a magnificent home for classic drama and comedy in
the heart of the city's populist concrete boardwalk, Navy
Pier. Their first season on the Pier showed some of the
understandable costs that all of the energy required to
build this space exacted from the need to present an
artistic product that could match these impeccable new
surroundings. The launch of the second Navy Pier season with
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, complete with an astonishing
subscriber base of 21,000, allows for some assesment of
where this company has come in its many years and where it
still might go.
As always with CST (as under its earlier name of
Shakespeare Repertory at the Gold Coast's Ruth Page
Auditorium), clear language and presentation remain
hallmarks&emdash;never mean feats. But as so often in its
earlier seasons, too, this production of Two Gentlemen
reveals a refusal to engage with deeper meanings in the
works presented. Guest director Penny Metropulos, of the
acclaimed Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival has assembled
a cast of CST regulars and supplemented them with an
intelligent design team from her Pacific Northwest base. But
despite intriguing program notes from Metropulos and an
outside academic on the role of adolescence and of same-sex
friendships in this work, perhaps the earliest of
Shakespeare's comedies, provocation comes only from the
commentaries of the play's supporting characters and never
from its prinicipal players or the director's handling of
them.
As the Duke of Milan, CST veteran Larry Yando reminds us
of the vanities of the rich and powerful, even those rich
and powerful who are wise, in an hilarious scene where he
forces a guest to participate in his morning exercise
routine. The performances of Scott Parkinson and Eddie
Jemison as the clowns, Speed and Launce are priceless.
Parkinson, long-established (he's only 30, but, yes, he's
long-established) as a serious actor of the first-rank, is
transformed here to a bubblegum-chewing Brooklyn wiseacre on
roller skates with all the timing and deapdan skills of an
ace vaudevillian. Jemison must contend with a dog (blame
Shakespeare's script here), but on opening night, he showed
with some on-the-money vamping that an expert fool and his
wit are not easily parted by a mere disobedient canine.
The leads are pleasant, Brain Vaughn and Kate Fry as the
wronged Valentine and Julia most especially, but they need
to move us, and Proteus and his ungentlemanly behavior needs
to chill us. The presence of Roderick Peeples, Brad
Armacost, and Oksana Fedunyszyn in smaller roles is luxury
casting of the most delicious sort.
In the end, along with the clowns, the production belongs
to Gaines's longtime music director Alaric (Rokko) Jans
whose delightful live score&emdash;performed onstage by his
own ragtime trio&emdash;offers the kind of needling
re-examination of the script that the directors and
producers at CST themselves need to give us more often.
SYNCOPATION
Playwright: Allan Knee
At: Apple Tree Theatre, Highland Park
Tickets: $28-$32
Phone: 847-432-4335
Runs through: Oct. 22
by Jonathan Abarbanel
The aging pixie Ross Lehman, who possesses the natural
grace of Danny Kaye, and Ann Noble Massey, she of the
expressively wide eyes, make the most of Syncopation, an
unusual theatrical romance by Allan Knee, and a great
showcase for two intense actors.
Syncopation is set to the rhythms of tangos, waltzes and
ragtime two-steps in 1911 New York, and uses ballroom
dancing as a metaphor and narrative device, along with a
quasi-epistilary style in which the two characters address
the audience as if reading diary entries, beginning with the
date. These atypical devices, combined with complex
characters, lift Syncopation above the standard tale it
might otherwise be, of a quixotic and unlikely couple.
Henry Ribalow, a 42-year-old immigrant meat packer, has a
passion for dancing, and places newspaper ads to attract
potential partners to the sixth-floor studio he's rented,
suggesting that they will "dance for royalty" one day. Anna
Bianchi, a 22-year-old garment worker, answers the ad in
what may be her first-ever independent choice. In the course
of many months, these two prickly individuals affect each
other for good and bad, until they accept the fact that
love, combined with dancing, conquers all.
The tale of Henry and Anna is funny, poignant and
bittersweet. Henry is thin-skinned and frequently callous.
Repressing his yearnings and fearing rejection, he declares
that two people can be passionate dance partners without any
personal passion. Personal passion, however, is the
naïve Anna's dream, as she opens herself to new
experiences, including friendships with "odd women with
short hair and strong opinions."
As the tale progresses, the period-perfect dance steps
(by Marla Lampert) and the relationship become more and more
complex. Setting his tale in a time frame of nearly two
years, Knee does not short-change either the dance metaphor
(dance is both freedom and commitment) or depth of
character. Syncopations is not a play of easy solutions, and
therein lies its strength.
Mark E. Lococo has directed with style and pace,
recognizing that the play needs a degree of leisure, yet
never letting it drag. He understands the intensity of Henry
and Anna, conveyed in the unflagging focus of Lehman and
Massey. The period details of costumes (Rebecca Powell) and
the Italinate arched windows of the set (Tim Morrison)
perfectly evoke time and place, as does Jeffrey
Lundun‚s original music, matched to the Tin Pan Alley
sounds of dance bands and Victorolas in those pre-radio
days.
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