Welcome to Arroyo’s At
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—The
unexpected sensation created by “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” last
season catapulted Kristoffer Diaz into the front rank of young American
playwrights. Thus anticipation was understandably high for the opening of
Diaz’s “Welcome of Arroyo’s” at the American Theater Company. “Welcome to Arroyo’s” was Diaz’s first full-length play, so
it gets some dispensation as being an apprentice work. In any case, it’s not
very good. In fact, for most of the long evening, it’s pretty bad, with
unappealing characters thrashing their way through a cluster of indigestible
storylines. The play is located in a Latino bar on the lower East Side of
New York City. The set is the bar and a few tables, with two hip hop disc
jockeys presiding over turntables in one corner. The brash DJs greet audience
members with hugs and high fives, a sure indicator that there will be rocky
times ahead once the show begins. The proprietor of the bar is Alejandro Arroyo (Joe Minoso), a
young man of great optimism about his establishment considering it attracts no
customers. Alejandro has a younger sister, the bratty and foul mouthed Amalia
(Christina Nieves), who fancies herself a graffiti artist. The bar’s disc
jockeys (Gregory Qaiyum and Jackson Doran) play hip hop music, go through hip
hop routines, serve as a chorus for the action, and weave in and out of
character to talk directly with the audience. They are a cocky duo very pleased
with themselves. The two outsider characters are a police officer named Derek
Jeter, the same name as the baseball player (Edgar Miguel Sanchez), and a Puerto Rican young lady named Lelly
Santiago Sadieh Rifai). Jeter is in continual confrontation with Amalia over
the young woman’s painting on a public wall, strictly against the law. says
Officer Jeter. He is conciliatory toward Amalia and for his sympathy he gets
punched out repeatedly by the gal. Lelly Santiago comes to the bar as a researcher. She is on
the track of a woman who died six months previously who might be the mother of
Alejandro and Amalia. But more to the point the woman may be a Puerto Rican who
was the first female disc jockey in hip hop history back in 1979. It’s Lelly
contention that the woman’s place in the early history of hip hop elevates her
into one of the great cultural figures in modern history and a role model for
all young women. Along with the confusing and unpersuasive main storylines
there is a perplexing ongoing discussion of sushi that must have fallen into
Diaz’s script from another play. And the entire play is drenched in the f---
word in all its various manifestations. The playwright apparently finds the
relentless use of the word either funny or expressive. I found it gratuitous
and wearisome. A few stimulating topics can be discerned among all the sound
and fury of the production. Diaz is concerned with family, ethnic identity, and
the hold that the past has on the present, along with the cultural impact of
hip hop on urban culture. But any meaningful exploration of the themes is
overwhelmed by the unconvincing confrontations among uninteresting or annoying
characters, and all that profanity.
The acting level is adequate but not strong enough to lift
the troubled script to a satisfactory level of narrative or emotional interest.
The two disc jockeys are the best of the ensemble, though I found their
smugness grating. Jaime Castaneda is the director, Keith Pitts and David
Ferguson the scenic designers, Christine Pascual the costume designer, Charles
Cooper the lighting designer, and Rick Sims the sound designer. In a press release, American Theater Company artistic
director PJ Paparelli called the play “the future of American theater.” I don’t
think so. “Arroyo’s” is a misfire, but it doesn’t diminish the wonder of “The
Elegant Entrance of Chad Deity.” That
play demonstrates that Diaz has the theatrical imagination, verbal skills, and
social awareness to create great drama and great theater. “Arroyo’s” being his
first work, it’s understandable how the playwright has a special affection for
the show and may have been blinded to its defects. Now “Arroyo’s” has had its
hearing and Diaz can move on to his next work, which hopefully will be in the
glorious spirit of “Chad Deity.” “Welcome to Arroyo’s” runs through May 16 at the American
Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday
at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 to
$50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org. The show gets a rating of two stars. April 2010 Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
. ********************************************************************************** At
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—Lisa
Loomer’s 2007 play “Distracted” asks lots of questions about Attention Deficit
Disorder and provides no answers. Indeed, by the end of the play interested
spectators may feel more confused by Loomer’s drama than comforted and
informed. “Distracted” is receiving its local premiere in a resourceful
production at the American Theater Company. The central character is a
40-something mother trying to raise a difficult 9-year old boy named Jesse with
minimal help from her husband. Jesse is a handful—foul-mouthed, fidgety,
restless, disobedient —and that’s at home. He’s also disruptive in school, and
has no friends.
Distracted
The mother has Jesse tested and the diagnosis comes up as
ADD. Thus starts her long, painful odyssey to find treatment for Jesse that
will normalize the kid. She has to battle her husband, who thinks the boy is
just being a boy. Late in the play the husband discloses that he went through
the kind of struggling childhood Jesse is enduring. In other words, the father
probably had ADD back when the behavioral disorder wasn’t much recognized. The mother takes Jesse to variety of doctors, including
psychologists and psychiatrists. She enrolls him in clinics, gives him drugs
(including the controversial but widely used Ritalin), and suffers
contradictory advice from neighbors, the lad’s teacher, and her husband. The
mother is informed that Jesse’s disorder could come from heredity, diet, a
chemical imbalance, or just bad parenting. It’s a heartbreaking situation for the mother, placing
enormous stress on her relations with her son, her husband, her neighbors, and
her career. In her search for expert guidance, she runs into doctors who seem
as dysfunctional as Jesse. The play further muddies the waters by suggesting
that ADD could really be a product of our modern hyper society. The ACT stage
is enclosed by 16 TV sets all tuned to different television programs and motion
pictures. Adults in the play are constantly sidetracked by cell phone calls.
The implication is that we live in an age of sensory overload that encourage
ADD symptoms.
In the face of so much visual and aural stimulation, it’s no
wonder our attention spans are so short. So maybe Jesse’s condition is nothing
more than a reaction to all the electronic bombardments around him. And what
about the adults? One of the family’s neighbors is bipolar and one of the
doctors states he has ADD. In this environment, maybe Jesse isn’t so bad. But
he is uncontrollable at home and in school, so something absolutely must be
done. Yet consider the cost. Drugs may calm a child but also lessen his
creativity and render him passive. He will sleep badly and have little
appetite. Is the cure worse than the disease? The playwright injects plenty of basic information about ADD
for audience consideration, and the ATC adds more facts with a theater lobby
display. So Loomer is acknowledging that ADD is a verifiable condition, that it
afflicts millions of children (mostly boys) but also some adults, and dealing
with it can be one continuous frustration. The playwright does stack the deck a little by portraying
so-called experts in the ADD field as woolly minded at best and crackpots at
worst. She also includes a psychologically disturbed teenage babysitter who
masochistically cuts herself and eventually is institutionalized, perhaps for
life. But the girl’s plight is much different and more damaging than Jesse’s
ADD so her relevance in the story eluded me. The play is free flowing, with people talking directly to the
audience, sometimes breaking character. Performers help change the set between
scenes and morph from one individual to another in the same scene. Jesse
himself is kept offstage until the final minutes, represented only by his
shrill voice. The subject may be grim but Loomer lays on plenty of comedy. The
humor occasionally descends to the facetious, clashing with the seriousness of
the narrative. Donna Jay Fulks carries the production as the mother, an
intelligent, sympathetic woman who desperately wants to do right by her son but
can’t find straight answers. Fulks is on stage virtually the entire show and
gets full marks for creating a character whose grace under pressure is heroic. Kevin Rich is very fine as the father who resists labeling his
son as abnormal. By the end of the play we don’t know if the man wears
emotional blinders or is the straightest thinker in the story. The remainder of
the excellent ensemble consists of Hanna Dworkin and Dina Facklis as a pair of
well-meaning busy body neighbors, Noah Jerome Schwartz as Jesse, Sadieh Rifai
as the disturbed babysitter, and Minita Gandhi, Alan Wilder, and Audrey Morgan
as assorted experts who provide more heat than light. P. J. Paparelli directs the fluid staging. Mike Tutaj is
responsible for the video design. Janice Pytel for the costumes, Jesse Klug for
the lighting, Lindsay Jones for the sound, and Andre LaSalle for the set
design. “Distracted” runs through February 28 at the American Theater
Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8
p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40.
Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org. The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars. February 2010 Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
. *********************** Yeast Nation At
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—The
most unlikely idea for a musical in the past 10 years probably is “Urinetown,”
a show about a corporation that assumes control of the world’s bathrooms. It
became the unexpected hit of the year on Broadway in 2001. Maybe the second
most unlikely idea is “Yeast Nation,” a musical about a colony of one-celled
yeasts living at the bottom of the primordial sea in the year 3,000,458,000
B.C. “Yeast Nation” opened September 23 at the American Theater
Company. It took me about 10 minutes to recognize that the show was going to
work. It’s funny and clever with a terrific score by Greg Kotis and Mark
Hollmann and it’s being performed in a dream production directed by ATC
artistic director P. J. Paparelli. The show still has a few kinks to work out,
especially late in the second act, but as it stands this is tremendously
entertaining and creative. The first question is, How does the musical portray the
yeasts? Costume designer Paul Spadone outfits the large cast in black pants
suits covered by filmy green toga-like draperies that represent the yeast’s
membrane. Inside the drapery the yeasts carry a bulging food supply that makes
them look pregnant.
The next question is, What would single-cell yeasts talk
about? Kotis’s book establishes the yeast colony with a ruler called Jan the
Elder (every character is called Jan the something), who reigns with an iron
hand. The yeasts are facing a diminishing of their salt food supply so Jan the
Elder prohibits procreation (the yeasts have ostentatiously minimalist sex
lives). The narrative jump starts with Jan the Elder’s son Jan the
Second rebelling against his father’s tyrannical rule. The young man travels to
the forbidden surface of the ocean where he discovers eatable “gunk” that could
revolutionize the yeast existence. Then things really get political with Jan
the Wise and Jan the Sly plotting to overthrow Jan the Elder and kill Jan the
Second and his sweetheart Jan the Sweet. Leading the show’s chorus is Jan the
Unnamed, who looks like one of the witches in “Macbeth.” At the end, the yeasts
point toward a hopeful if murky future that eventually leads to life as we know
it today, represented by the audience at the ATC. The storyline is placed in the service of a superior rock
score, superbly sung by the entire ensemble. The staging is peppered with droll
bits of humor that sometimes gives the evening a look and sound of a mock
“Rent” crossed with Monty Python and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber at their
most whimsical. But that may not be fair to the originality of Kotis and
Hollmann, who can be humorous, facetious, wry, satirical, romantic, and even
dramatic. You really need to see and hear what they have accomplished to
appreciate the extent of their achievement. I mean, how many composer teams
could write first-rate songs with titles like “Stasis Is the Membrane” and
“You’re Not the Yeast You Used to Be.” The ATC has gathered together an uncommonly gifted cast, with
major names on the Chicagoland theater scene like Joseph Anthony Foronda (Jan
the Elder) and Barbara Robertson (Jan the Unnamed). The scene stealer is
paunchy, balding Jan the Wise, a crafty backstabber performed to a comic turn
by Phil Ridarelli. If “Yeast Nation” has a future elsewhere, Ridarelli needs to
be part of the package. The pint sized Sandie Rosa is a continuous pleasure as the
treacherous Jan the Sly. Rosa has one of
the show’s best singing voices and she’s a deft comedian and a toothsome
villain. Andrew Keitz (Jan the Second) and Melanie Brezill (Jan the Sweet) are
ingratiating young lovers.
Stephanie Kim makes a startling entrance halfway through the
show in a skintight red bodysuit as the New One, a creature from the gunk world
of the ocean surface come to Yeast Nation as the embodiment of the
possibilities of evolutionary life forms. Wendi Weber contributes some witty
comic bits as Jan the Famished while looking amazingly like Susan Sarandon. The
talented chorus consists of Robert Gerdisch, Bil Ingraham, Bethany Thomas, Briana
de Giulio, Govind Kumar, and Trista Smith. This is not a dancing show but it oozes high energy.
Choreographer Tommy Rapley has provided the ensemble with plenty of rhythmic
body movement and there is much dashing about and hurly burly that suggests the
cast will sleep well after each performance. The scenic design by Walt Spangler keeps the ATC stage
uncluttered but allows for a lot of vertical movement as the physical action
shifts from level to level as well as to movable ladders. Jesse Klug’s atmospheric
lighting is heavily into small colored lights. Lindsay Jones is the sound
designer and Mark Elliott directs the outstanding combo that provides the
accompaniment for the rocking score. Paaprelli has put the whole thing together
in a spontaneously looking flow that masks what must have been long and hard
rehearsing. How can “Yeast Nation” be improved? The last 20 minutes get a
little too frantic as Jan the Sly and her gang try to exterminate the good
guys. The character of Jan the Elder loses focus. Is he a patriot, a dictator,
or a confused old man? And at the end of the show the cautionary moral issues
come at the audience a bit too fast and furious. But these quibbles are easily fixed, and even if they aren’t,
“Yeast Nation” is still a hip, imaginative evening. It just goes to show that
anything is possible in the theater when skilled, risk-taking people put their
minds to it. “Yeast Nation” runs through October 18 at the American
Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday
at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and
$40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.actweb.org. Sept.2009 The show gets a rating of 4 stars. Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
********************* True West and Topdog/Underdog At
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—The
American Theater Company and the Congo Square Theatre Company, two of Chicago’s
more enterprising drama organizations, are collaborating on an ambitious project
they call American Classic Repertory. The project consists of two revivals, Sam
Shepard’s 1980 drama “True West” and Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2002 Pulitzer
prizewinning “topdog/underdog.” The joint venture brings together the ATC, a white company,
and Congo Square, an African American troupe, with the ATC staging “True West”
and Congo Square “topdog/underdog.” But in a daring twist, the two companies
will exchange casts halfway through the run, with the ATC players performing
the Parks play and the Congo Square actors taking on the Shepard play. Both
plays will be staged at the ATC theater. A lot connects the two dramas. Both are chamber plays,
essentially two-character works that focus on psychological conflicts between
brothers. Both plays are saturated with intensity and emotional and physical
violence and both are receiving brilliant productions. Each play has been seen
in Chicagoland before, but even audiences familiar with both pieces will want
to catch the current presentations. Both
dramas indeed are modern American classics and the acting is searing enough to
peel the paint off the theater walls. “True West” helped launch the Steppenwolf Theatre onto the
national scene back in 1982. The Steppenwolf transferred its production from
Chicago to New York City where Gary Sinise and John Malkovich blew away
audiences and critics with their volcanic performances. The Shepard play, set in southern California, explores the
relationship between brothers Austin and Lee. Austin is house sitting for his
mother, vacationing in Alaska, and working on a screenplay he hopes to peddle
to a Hollywood studio. Lee is an alcoholic drifter, a petty thief and a very
scary guy who seems ready to explode with rage at any moment. During the course of the 75-minute single act, there is a
role reversal, with Lee becoming a screenwriter and Austin turning to burglary
out of resentment because Lee stole his thunder with a Hollywood movie
executive. The play has its share of laughs, but the humor is disquieting and
serves mostly as an audience release
from the ongoing tension between the two brothers. Matthew Brumlow plays Austin and Stephen Louis Grush portrays
a frightening Lee. They are both
brilliant under P. J., Paparelli’s directing. Grush in particular moves up a
notch in the local acting pecking order with the chilling intensity of his
performance. In the Parks play, directed with scorching ferocity by
Derrick Sanders, Lincoln and Booth are black brothers. Both were abandoned by
their parents when they were adolescents. leaving the pair to raise themselves.
Booth is a big talking loser who scrapes by as a shoplifter. At the beginning
of the play, Lincoln is employed to impersonate Abraham Lincoln in an arcade.
His job is sitting in a chair while customers pay to shoot him. It’s a
grotesque concept made more grotesque by the brother wearing white face makeup
during his impersonation. 
The plot turns on three-card monte, a scam card game that
once provided Lincoln with a steady income. Then his partner got shot during a
street game and Lincoln retired to his Abraham Lincoln impersonation. Booth
wants to get his brother back on the street as a card hustler to earn some
major money. A three-card monte game between the brothers turns deadly at the
end of the play. Like “True West,” the play is drenched in tension, most of it
supplied by the volatile and increasingly desperate Booth, driven to the end of
his emotional tether by his girl friend’s rejection and his brother’s mocking
him during the three-card monte game. Anthony Irons (Lincoln) and Daniel Bryant
(Booth) are overwhelming in the accelerating fervor of their performances. “topdog/underdog” isn’t an overtly racial play but race
provides the subtext. It will be interesting to see what Brumlow and Grush, two
white actors, bring to the play from a different cultural vantage point. The
same holds for Bryant and Irons when they take on the roles of Austin and Lee
in “True West.” The flip-flop casting may turn out to be a gimmick or it may
bring fresh insights into a pair of tales about very complex psychological
fraternal relationships. By the end of the run, Congo Square may gain the most from
the collaboration by introducing its work to white north side audiences. But
audiences of all ethnic derivations will profit from productions of such
unrelenting commitment. “True West” and “topdog/underdog” are running in repertory
through March 8 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Tickets are $35 and $40. For performance
schedules call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org. Each
production gets a rating of four stars.
January
2009 Contact
Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. ********************** It’s a Wonderful World At
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—During
this decade “It’s a Wonderful World: The Radio Play” at the American Theater
Company has quietly carved out a niche for itself as one of the essential
entertainment events of the holiday season. This year’s production is more welcome than ever because the
original 1946 Frank Capra motion picture has disappeared from the television
scene where it once seemed to run around the clock.
Damon Kiely, the ATC artistic director from 2002 to 2007,
conceived of the show as a radio performance from the 1940’s, complete with
studio “Applause” and “On the Air” electric signs and a visible sound effects
man. An ensemble of seven actors takes on multiple roles to portray the story of
George Bailey and what he meant to the small town of Bedford Falls. The ATC staging is a fine slice of nostalgia, with Tom
Burch’s detailed radio studio set replicating the ambience of live radio drama
before it was swept aside by television. Michelle Julazadeh’s costumes capture
the 1940’s look and the story is periodically interrupted by commercials. In
previous seasons those commercials spotlighted the business around the ATC
theater on the North Side. This year the production is being sponsored by the
Emerald Nut Company so it gets all the commercial time. Most members of the audience have never experienced a radio
drama performance live and the ATC company makes the experience accessible by
starting off the show with a round of sing-along holiday songs. The cast also
solicits written messages from the spectators before the start of the show to
be read during the evening. It all sounds like a cutesy and agreeably frivolous 85
minutes or so of lightweight holiday amusement. What makes the show so special
is not just the concept, it’s the content. As familiar as it may be, the
narrative of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is one of the great fairy tales in modern
pop culture and the ATC adaptation superbly tells the story with all its
inspirational heartwarming sentimentality and drama, as irresistible as the
original movie. The ATC adaptation devotes a little over an hour to the actual
story, maybe half as much time as the movie, yet all the essential incidents
and characters are there. The audience easily adjusts to the idea of the radio play,
with the actors switching roles in the blinking of an eye as the sound effects
man creates the noises that ground the story its reality. In a matter of moments the spectators are engrossed
in the Capra story because the ATC delivers the storytelling straight, without
condescension. The staging may not have the high tech effects of “A Christmas
Carol” or the spectacle of “The Nutcracker,” but it casts its own spell through
the truthful acting and the potency of the plot.
There have been some changes in the cast this year. But
fortunately John Mohrlein returns as both the wistful angel Clarence sent down
to earth to rescue the despondent George Bailey and as the Scrooge-like meany
Mr. Potter, a terrific Lionel Barrymore performance that gets better every
year. ATC regular Stef Tovar plays George Bailey with enormous
commitment and passion. Tovar brings George so completely to life that the
rendition compels the audience to hang eagerly on every scene, even if they
know what’s coming. John Sterchi, another ATC regular, is first rate as
Clarence’s supervising angel and as the fumbling Uncle Billy, among others. The discovery of the night is Mary Winn Heider as George’s
loving wife. This is Heider’s debut performance with the ATC and the company
has found itself a true leading lady in looks and temperament and acting chops.
She has taken a potentially two-dimensional goody goody character and elevated
her into an intelligent and sympathetic human being. Heider is a keeper. The remainder of the impeccable ensemble consists of Casey
Campbell, Sadieh Rifai, and James Lusk as the announcer. Sean Okerberg handles
the studio special effects. I missed the name of the studio pianist and she
doesn’t seem to be credited in the playbill, but she was very good. Damon Kiely returns to the ATC to direct with a sure if
invisible hand. Everything looks like it happens spontaneously and naturally. A
most pleasurable evening. “It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play” runs through December
28 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are
Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m.
Tickets are $35 to $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org. The show gets a rating of four stars, December 2008 *********************** Celebrity Row At
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—Itamar
Moses is one of America’s
most stimulating young dramatists, but the plot of “Celebrity Row” wouldn’t get
a passing grade in a college beginning course in Playwriting 101. The work is
being given a brave production in a local premiere at the American Theater
Company. Moses
caught the eye of area playgoers a couple of seasons ago with his fascinating
“Bach in Leipzig” at the Writers’ Theatre. And the prospects for “Celebrity
Row” were intriguing. Guiding the production is David Cromer, the hottest
director on the area theater scene. The cast is blue chip, including Larry
Neumann, Jr., an actor incapable of given an uninteresting performance. The
play’s real-life premise certainly holds much promise. Four of the five main
characters are terrorists and arch criminals—Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and
Latin Kings gang leader Luis Felipe.
In
real life, these four public enemies were all confined for a time in the late
1990’s to a state-of-the-art maximum-security prison in Colorado. They lived in
solitary confinement for 23 hours of every day, totally cut off from any human
contact other than communication with their lawyers. The fifth character is
Maze Carroll, an idealistic young female lawyer with a small civil liberties
law firm working for more humane living conditions for incarcerated felons.
Placing these characters on the stage in a single volatile group sets the table
for some fierce political drama. The
first act takes place within the prison and meanders along to no particular
purpose beyond introducing the main personalities in the story plus some
supporting characters. No incendiary political drama in this act. At
the end of the first act, the four prisoners have somehow overpowered a guard, taken him
hostage (with his gun) along with the lawyer. The second act is devoted to the
four prisoners in control, dictating terms to the prison head and eventually
producing a homemade explosive device that will destroy the prison through its
air ducts. Early in the second act the audience
becomes aware of how lightly the laws of probability weigh on the playwright.
How could the prisoners capture a guard and his weapon in a facility that is a
textbook of maximum security? Plus, how could they have constructed the bombing
device when all four men were isolated for those 23 hours and under continuous
scrutiny the other daily hour set aside for exercise? Moses
is too good a playwright to come up with a complete dud. Much of the second act
stops being a play and turns into a high intensity debate, mostly between the
lawyer on one side and McVeigh and Yousef on the other. The debate is filled
with passion and righteous conviction. We get a glimpse into what twisted ideas
of patriotism drove McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. And
Yousef provides a chilling but perversely logical insight into what makes an
Islamic zealot a terrorist. We had previously gotten some glimpses into the
thought processes of Kaczynski and Felipe. Meanwhile, Maze pleads the case for
morality and the rule of law.
Before
the debates commence, the second act opens with a scene from the lawyer’s
family life, presumably intended to give the audience some back story on Maze’s
social liberalism. The scene has considerable humor, much of it emitting from
the lawyer’s right wing father and clueless mother, but the scene contributes
nothing to the narrative within the prison. At the end of the last act, the four men
meekly surrender to prison authorities even though they held the upper hand
and, in their desperate situation, had nothing to lose by standing fast with
their hostages. Then the play just stops. It
may be unfair to divulge so much of the plot but the events on stage are so
difficult to swallow that new viewers should be forewarned that a massive
commitment of audience faith will be required to buy into Moses’s storyline. On
the plus side, there are those speeches that allow the audience to examine the
minds of the terrorists and let them tell their side of the story, sometimes
with unnerving eloquence. Connoisseurs
of fine act will have much to relish in the production. The performances are
all super, especially Usman Ally as Yousef. Neumann, as always, is outstanding
as Kaczynski, explaining his terrorism through a gibberish of mathematical
ideas. Joe Minoso is fine as Felipe and Christopher McLinden is genuinely
horrifying as McVeigh when he angrily launches into his diatribe about the
evils of government in America that justified his destructive act in Oklahoma
City. The four actors also perform supporting roles that require them to exit
the stage for a quick costume change before reentering in a new persona. Ally,
for example, turns in excellent complementary character sketches as the prison
head and the lawyer’s mother. Kelli
Simpkins, a newcomer at the ATC, does a superb job as Maze, a role not written
with a lot of logic. Simpkins’s heated exchanges with Ally and McLinden in the
second act are the intellectual and emotional high spots of the play, almost
excessively hyper articulate. Andre
LaSalle designed the minimalist set. Alison Siple designed the costumes, Keith
Parham the sometimes dramatic lighting, and Andy Krumreich and Josh Schmidt the
evocative sound. “Celebrity
Row” runs through November 16 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron
Street. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8
p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $40. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org. The
show gets a rating of three stars. Oct.2008 Contact
Dan at zeffdaniel@aol.com. ************************ The People’s Temple at
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—The
Jonestown Massacre of 1978 is one of the most bizarre and tragic episodes of
the 20th century. More than 900 men, women, and children committed
suicide or were murdered in one horrific day in a remote area of the Latin
American country of Guyana. At the heart of the slaughter was a religious
leader named Jim Jones, who orchestrated the mass deaths and died himself in
the holocaust. A documentary drama called “The People’s Temple” attempts to
make some sense out of the Jonestown disaster. “The People’s Temple” doesn’t
answer all the questions about Jim Jones and his cult but it does provide a
riveting historical journey culminating in the 1978 mass suicides-murders and
their aftermath. And it’s receiving a stunning production at the American
Theater Company. Playwright Leigh Fondakowski, who also is the brilliantly
resourceful director, has pieced together the story of Jim Jones and his cult
from archives and interviews with the Jonestown survivors. A terrific 12-member
ensemble plays multiple roles in conveying the Jonestown saga in the words of
the people associated with the story, plus audio and video material preserved
from Jonestown. Jim Jones was a super charismatic leader who would have
thrived as one of those utopian socialist reformers who made their mark in 19th
century America. Initially Jones comes across as an inspired visionary, a man
who believed in racial integration during the 1950’s when race relations were
at a flashpoint in the United States. He was a champion of the poor and the
oppressed and his magnetic personality attracted thousands of followers. For a time in the early 1970’s Jones was one of the power
brokers of California politics, sought out by the movers and shakers on the
California political scene. But stories in the press started to emerge about
abuses within Jones’s People’s Temple. The paranoid Jones decided to shift his
church to Guyana, far from the prying and interference he saw on every side in
the USA. Jones’s followers carved out the town of Jonestown from the
jungles of Guyana. But late in 1978 a California congressman named Leo J. Ryan
led a delegation to Jonestown to investigate reports that all was not well in
the community. Ryan and his party were killed during his visit and shortly
afterward Jones decided that death was preferable to facing an invasion by the
outside world. On the surface, the Jonestown tragedy seems like a madman
leading his deluded followers to their destruction. But there were many
residents of Jonestown who swore by Jones to the end as a genius and a healer.
They insisted Jones and his church were misrepresented by a hostile media
dedicated to bringing him down. There is much evidence that Jones was something
of a con man but there is no question about the devotion of many of his
followers. Certainly Jones was remarkable. His views on racial
toleration were far ahead of his time and his reaching out to the poor and
disadvantaged seemed genuine. But apparently Jones was corrupted by his power.
He turned into an egomaniac-- ruthless, violent, and dictatorial. In the end he
led more than 900 people to their deaths because he rejected a world that would
not leave him alone to do his work as he saw it. “The People’s Temple” starts in the 1950’s. It follows the
life of Jones and his constituents to that fateful day in 1978 and then beyond
to examine the impact of the mass deaths on the Jonestown survivors and the
family members in the United States left to deal with the loss of their loved
ones in far off Guyana. The ATC production moves at a rapid pace, the performers
switching from character to character with only a brief name introduction.
There is rousing gospel singing, the People’s Temple being a very musical group.
We hear all viewpoints, from the skeptics in the press to the most dedicated
followers. It’s a fascinating mosaic of voices that describes the rise and fall
of the People’s Temple. The deaths of more than 900 people point to Jim Jones
as a monster, yet his social and racial goals, at least before the Guyana move,
seemed enlightened. And for every doubter there was a zealot. First among equals in the exemplary cast is Darrell Cox, who
plays Jones in all his complexity and also Jones’s son, a survivor trying to
deal with the calamity precipitated by his inspired and deranged father. The remainder of the ensemble portrays the multitude of
characters with credibility and enormous commitment. Cheryl Graeff, a rock at
the ATC for years, is outstanding, but it would be unfair to leave any of the
dozen off the honor roll. They are Patrick Andrews, Daniel Bryant, Tim Decker,
Kenn E. Head, Amy Matheny, John Mohrlein, Suzanne Petri, Tania Richard, Editha
Rosario, and Penelope Walker. Fondakowski has directed the production with a sureness and
fluency that makes the staging look inevitable, like the play could not be
presented any other way. Sarah Lambert’s scenic design is dominated by shelves
of boxes that contain props and files from the history of the People’s Temple.
Betsy Adams designed the lighting, Christine Pascual the costumes, Jake
Rodriquez the sound, and Bobby Richards the projections. There is an inevitable drop-off in emotional intensity
following the portrayal of the mass deaths in Jonestown. The play continues for
several more minutes to bring the story up to the present. Possibly the drama
could have ended with that horrific climax in Jonestown but I suppose the
account does require some sense of closure as the people left behind try to
adjust to the loss of so many loved ones in 1978. Those last scenes do not
diminish an engrossing and disturbing theatrical and dramatic experience. “The People’s Temple” runs through September 22 at the
American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Thursday and
Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are
$35 and $50. Call 773 409 4125 or visit www.atcweb.org. Sept. 2008 The show gets a rating of four stars. Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com . Speech and Debate at
the American Theater Company By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—“Speech
and Debate” is the first discovery of the 2008 season, a small show at the
American Theater Company that is humorous, fresh, and observant. The Stephen
Karam comedy has its flaws but the rewards are so great that its defects can be
dismissed as trivial. The storyline of “Speech and Debate” does not promise great
things. The three central characters are all high school misfits in Salem,
Oregon, suggesting that the audience is in for still another exploration of
teenaged angst. But the trio is so funny and so quirky that they carry the show
on a wave of laughter that is cannily leavened with insight and poignancy and a
little pain. Plus, Karam’s script does the impossible. It has something new to
say about being gay in America.
The three teens are Solomon, a geek who wants desperately to
be a hotshot newspaper reporter; Diwata, a self-involved girl burning with
resentment because she can’t get cast in the high school musical; and Howie,
who came out as gay at the age of 10 and surfs the internet on gay.com. The
modern American theater does not lack for high school characters who are losers
and in a strict sense, Solomon, Diwata, and Howie are losers—all living outside
the mainstream of life in their high school. And to add to the plot’s cliché
potential, Solomon may also be gay and Diwata became pregnant and flirts with
an abortion. From this soap opera raw material comes a play that allows
the high schoolers to speak and act like real teen-agers, though it would be
difficult to locate three real life high school students as funny as this
threesome. They are all immersed in the high tech appurtenances of the teenage
world—pod casts, blogging, text messaging, and chat rooms. That allows the
production to inject some comical videos and projections to buoy the comedy
even more. The plot loosely concerns the probability that the high
school drama teacher may be preying on male students. But that’s just the
trigger for a very loosely connected series of scenes among the three kids that
lead to assorted, and not very surprising, revelations at the end of the show.
Along the way we get some songs, very funny attempts at interpretive dance, and
way-out monologues. Just when the audience is relaxing amidst all the comedy on
stage, the characters start raising provocative and disturbing questions about
privacy, especially as it intersects with being gay. How much harm did the
drama teacher, who we never see, do in his pursuit of willing young men? The
town mayor is exposed as a man who encouraged gay relationships, but isn’t that
his own business, even if he proclaims himself a staunch conservative publicly?
The play doesn’t turn into a debate about the separation of
public and personal morality, but the questions are broached, and in a way that
forces the listeners to reexamine what may have seemed like a cut-and-dry
issue. “Speech and Debate” may stir up thoughts about attitudes
toward the gay life but it remains a hoot of a comedy. Karam is not only a
funny writer, he’s very hip. Diwata rewrites Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”
into a musical, with the young would-be witch Mary Warren as the heroine (to be
played, naturally, by Diwata). Her
adaptation includes lines like Mary’s “Try to hang me, see how strong my neck
is.” In one hilarious musical number, Mary Warren meets a gay teenage Abraham
Lincoln through the miracle of time travel and Diwata’s over the top
imagination. Karam deftly exposes the vulnerabilities that lurk beneath
the bravado of his three teens, as when Diwata yells at Solomon “You use
cover-up to hide your acne and think people can’t tell.” Or when Diwata rages at one of the boys, “You
read my blog? That’s my private journal.” These lines draw laughs from the
audience but they also underscore the loneliness of the characters. The American Theater
Company has located three young actors who look and sound like teenagers, and
more importantly they can all act. Patrick Andrews in particular is stunning as
Howie, angry and assertive and biting and wary.
Only a short distance behind are Jared McGuire as the nerdy Solomon and
Sadieh Rifai as the extravagantly conflicted Diwata. And the always reliable
Cheryl Graeff represents the adult world with as couple of delectable cameos as
a flustered high school teacher and a pompous newspaper feature writer. Theater artistic director P. J. Paparelli directs this hugely
tricky script with a savvy sense of the show’s absurd humor and underlying
dramatic tensions. This is a ramshackle script but Paparelli has managed to gather the random scenes into a cohesive whole. The show runs for 1
hour and 40 minutes without an intermission and could be cut at least 10
minutes, but doubtless many spectators would object to being denied 10
additional minutes of fun in the company of the offbeat teen threesome. Keith Pitts designed the flexible open stage sets. Charlie
Cooper designed the lighting, Lindsay Jones and Scotty Iseri the sound, Myron
Elliott Jr. the costumers, and Marty Higginbotham and Bobby Richards the
critical multimedia video and projections. Ed Kross choreographed the hilarious
interpretive dances. “Speech and Debate” runs through May 25 at the American
Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street.
Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8
p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 and $35. Call 773 929 1031. The show gets a rating of four stars. April 2008 For
more information contact: www.atcweb.org Contact
Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
*************************
Augusta
at the American Theater Company
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Richard Dresser’s play “Augusta” holds these truths to be self evident: Marriages may go sour. Men can be sleaze balls in manipulating vulnerable women. There is a class system in America and the class with the least money has the toughest time. The dramatist thereby displays a sharp eye for the obvious.
“Augusta” is being staged by the American Theater Company and the best news is the return of ATC company member Kate Buddeke back to Chicago after successful appearances on Broadway and elsewhere.
The playwright is clearly after thematic big game in his three-character 90-minute comedy drama. He wants to examine survival in the lower depths of American society, and take a few shots at corporate America while he is at is.
Molly (Buddeke) is a middle-aged woman working for a company that cleans houses. She’s the team leader of a two-member female team, her underling being a gullible young blue-collar girl named Claire (Gwendolyn Whiteside). The location is the coast of Maine.
In the opening scene an uncomfortable Claire meets her new boss, a middle management executive named Jimmy (Ed Kross) who is part smiling glad hander and part smarmy intimidator. Next we watch Molly and Claire as they clean the mansion of a rich and pathetically lonely woman named Mrs. Townsend, a character who never appears on stage but is a felt presence throughout the evening. Both Molly and Claire are scraping the bottom of the economic barrel. They have crummy jobs but their meager paychecks are all that stand between them and destitution.
The women are not only broke but they have miserable domestic lives. Molly cares for her husband, put in a wheelchair after a beating by her son, who is in jail for the assault. Claire’s husband is a womanizing layabout who has become a dead weight on Claire’s starry-eyed hope to improve her life.
Jimmy intrudes in the lives of his two lady employees, hitting on Claire and terrorizing both women with his bullying and paranoia over his job security. Jimmy is a caricature of the cliché-spouting company man, plus he’s an adulterer and an industrial strength neurotic.
The opening night audience laughed long and often at the stage action, which may or may not please the author, who thought he was writing a searing indictment of the socio-economic class system in this country. But the play works better if the spectators find it funny. As a profound statement about American society today, “Augusta” is ludicrously oversimplified and implausible. The three characters are cartoonish, especially Claire, a presumably street smart gal who professes amazement and outrage when Jimmy takes her to a company convention in the city of Augusta and then expects some bed time with her as compensation.
New ATC artistic director P. J. Paparelli brought in Chicago actress Nora Dunn to make her directing debut. Paparelli did Dunn no favorites in providing her with a superficial script that doesn’t begin to deliver on its promises. Dunn does get three very watchable performances out of Buddeke, Whiteside, and Kross. In the past, Kross had been one of Chicagoland theater’s best comic actors. In “Augusta” he gets to be funny in a malignant way and also displays some impressive acting chops as a character fighting his own demons as he makes the lives of his employees miserable.
Dresser writes the play in several scenes, from Jimmy’s office to a hotel bedroom to a cocktail lounge to the mansion the ladies clean for a living. Changing scenes involves stagehands rolling large props on and off stage during brief blackouts. Scenic designer Grant Sabina does his best to accelerate the scene changes quickly but they are often clunky and disruptive, in spite of Michael Groth’s functional properties. No problems with Jesse Klug’s lighting, Emily McConnell’s costumes, and Lindsay Jones’s sound design.
“Augusta” comes across as David Mamet lite—with its two women characters representing the American underclass and the lone male a blowhard and a phony. Dresser’s play has less profanity and more superficial laughs than typical Mamet, but he doesn’t touch Mamet’s skill at excavating the moral rot that corrodes the American dream. Still, it’s great to have Buddeke back on a local stage.
“Augusta” runs through March 2 at the American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron Street. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 and $35. Call 773 929 1031.
For more information contact: www.atcweb.org
The show gets a rating of 21/2 stars. Feb. 2008Contact us : zeffdaniel@yahoo.com