Victory Gardens Biograph Theater - Chicago theater reviews

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 12^th 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 Find Dan on Facebook. ************************************************************************* 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 and read his review on Facebook. ************************************************************************************ 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. ***************************************************************************** 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 . **************************** 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.

Early in the show, shards of glass from the Snow Queen’s ice mirror (I think I got that right) pierce Kai’s eye and heart, changing him from a sweet young guy into an aggressive boor. At this point it looked like the audience is in for a heavy dose of allegory. Then Kai disappears from the story until well into the second act and it becomes Gerda’s show as she journeys to the northland to rescue Kai from the Snow Queen. Needless to say, it all ends happily, even though there is almost no dramatic tension anywhere in the show.

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 ************************* 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. *************************** 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 ********************** 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 ************************ 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 . *********************** 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 . ********************** 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 .

The show gets a rating of four stars. Oct. 2008

Contact Dan atzeffdaniel@yahoo.com

************************************* Relatively Close

at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater
By Dan Zeff

CHICAGO—For his 12th world premiere play at the Victory Gardens Theater, playwright James Sherman presents a collection of misfits and obnoxious characters who will either make audiences giggle with glee or grind their teeth in distaste.

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.

My admiration for the production did not overcome my exasperation with the play. It’s not that a workable comedy, ordrama, can’t be carved out of a group of family members at each other’s throats. Consider the success of “August: Osage County.” But “Relatively Speaking” is populated with people who seem to exist only to gouge each other emotionally and psychologically, if in a comical manner. The play will undoubtedly be a hit for Victory Gardens and several of the performance, especially Weber’s, should are entitled to awards consideration. It just wasn’t my cup of bile.

“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.

*******************

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

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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