3: Remy Bumppo

May 30, 2013: Creditors, by August Strindberg

While I’ve never actually seen or worked on a production of it, Miss Julie figured prominently in my undergraduate theatre education. I recall getting into a heated debate with my directing professor over an issue of feminism that rose out of a scene study from that play. Anyway, my fellow Swede has always had a prominent place in my theatre education so I took the opportunity to see a new adaptation of Creditors as Remy Bumppo.

I left feeling my usual awe for Strindberg’s mastery, but the production itself was meh. The actor with the fewest credits was by far the best, and two more actors gave strong performances but lacked any direction. I seem to be missing the strong hand of a confident director in all the shows I’m seeing lately. Another beautiful set, tho. There are a number of up-and-coming young scenic designers in this town right now.

2: Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company

May 23, 2013:
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

When this show first ran at Mary-Arrchie’s home theatre in March, tickets were so hot you couldn’t get your hands on one. A former colleague of mine who runs a major LORT theatre on the east coast called me to ask if I’d seen it as he was looking for a show to program into his smaller space. So when we learned that they were going to revive the show in May at Theatre Wit, we figured we’d get a chance to see this amazing production without having to wait in standby lines by buying our tickets well in advance. We saw the show tonight and WTF?! We couldn’t believe it was the same play that everyone has been raving about. For serious. Did we walk into the wrong Glass Menagerie?

Admittedly, it was a preview, possibly the first one. Admittedly, there was an understudy on for Laura that night. Admittedly, the lighting designer only had 35 lighting instruments to work with and I’m sure it was a shoe string budget. But it was a depressingly common, below-average store-front theatre production.

The scenic design was beautiful. Let me call that out first. And that’s…about it. The projection design was superflous, distracting, and two decades too early for the time period of the play (silent films had been almost entirely replaced by talkies by 1937). The costume design was anachronistic in all the wrong ways (Laura was wearing a dress with spagetti straps), the lighting design was one step below passable (actors speaking in the dark = not acceptable), and the cuing, dear god, the cuing. Musical underscoring (though beautiful, original composition) was too loud, seemingly randomly placed, and missed obvious things like there was no music when a character asks “where is that music coming from?” The stage manager missed a series of cues, and while I will allow that it might have been the first preview and possibly the first time that they ran the show in this space, these were disruptive cue jumps, not just nuances of timing. Many of the cuing problems could/should/would have been noticed and fixed by a director if it weren’t for the fact that the director was playing Tom, so he wasn’t in a position to see anything. The acting lacked any direction at all, in fact, which is to say the actors were emoting their little hearts out but it was all one-note. The whole play was so heavy and tragic that all of the beautiful fragile comedy of the script was completely obliterated. We were the only ones in the theatre laughing, and that was because we were recalling the humor from the version of the play we did at Marin 2 years ago.

And I’m a stickler for rules. You can set up any premise you want for a play — the moon is made of green cheese, people only speak in gibberish, ghosts can cross through imaginary walls but live people must use the door — and I’m totally on board as long as you stick to the rules of the world you created*. This show failed to do that. The victrola was made of a pile of junk (a clothes wringer, a wooden crate, a record), but the typewriter was real. Sometimes actors spoke face-front to the audience, sometimes they interacted physically with one another. Tom lurked in corners and watched his memories for the first act, but in the second act he walked off stage and inexplicably stayed away for half the act. In a play where the whole conceit (and excuse me, Chris Jones, but this is not a revolutionary new take on Glass Menagerie) is that the story is being retold as a figment of Tom’s memory, many years after the events occured, you kinda need the presence of the narrator to illustrate that point. Oh and I’m sorry, but you can’t give an actor a 3″ light up plexiglass cube and then and ask them to mask it with their hands so the audience, sitting 10 feet away, can’t tell that it’s not a glass unicorn.

In short, so many of our colleagues and friends and critics raved about this play that we still can’t figure out if we saw the wrong show. Me, I would like those 2.5 hours of my life back.

PS – Theatre Wit, $8 is too much to charge for a beer at intermission.

*Ahem, please say nothing about my inconsistent use of traditional capitalization and punctuation on this blog. I don’t make anyone pay to read it.

1: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre

March 14, 2013:
Othello: the Remix — a hip-hop adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello
Written, directed and music by GQ and JQ

I know it’s sort of ridiculous that I’d never actually seen a show at Chicago Shakes, but it was true. I blame my intense aversion to Navy Pier. Plus, none of their mainstage work particularly interests me. However their second stage programming almost always sounds interesting, and expensive parking and and an aversion to tourists are not good enough excuses for all the great shows I’ve probably missed out on. Glad that we saw this one.

the view of Navy Pier from the 6th floor lounge