A Soldier’s Play
At the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “A Soldier’s Play” opened off Broadway in 1981 and immediately became one of the most important American dramas of its day. Charles Fuller won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for the play, which turned out to be his only significant work for the theater. The show also gave an early career boost to a couple of young African American actors named Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington.
The Raven Theatre is reviving the play on the theater’s East Stage.
“A Soldier’s Play” is about race in America as the issue stood in the middle of the twentieth century. The year is 1944, the place a U.S. Army post in Louisiana, specifically a training camp for black recruits during World War II. On the surface, the play is a murder mystery. Someone shot and killed a hard-nosed black sergeant named Waters and Captain Davenport, a black officer, has been brought in from the outside to investigate the murder. Was Waters killed by local white racists (the Ku Klux Klan flourishes in a nearby town)? Or was Waters the victim of payback for his brutal treatment of his recruits? Or maybe Waters was just shot during a brawl.
Photos by Dean LaPrairie
The opening moments of the play portray Waters’s death, though the shooter isn’t seen. The story then bounces back and forth between the present time and flashbacks that reveal to Davenport, and the audience, the complex relationships between Waters and the recruits as well as Waters’s own conflicted personality. The sergeant is obsessed with advancing the status of blacks in white America. He loathes blacks who bring down the race with their accommodating ways. As Water’s explains to one easygoing recruit, “The black race can’t afford you no more.…(white people) needed someone to mistreat—call a name, they paraded you, reminded them of the old days—cornbread bakin’, greens and ham cookin’, Daddy out pickin’ cotton, Grandmammy sit on the front porch smokin’ a pipe. Not no more.”
But Waters hangs on the horns of his own racial dilemma. He wants to elevate the perception that whites hold of blacks, but he finally recognizes that he is actually modeling his own conduct on seeking approval from the white world and allowing white society to define him as a black man. His final words before he is shot are “They still hate you!”
The play portrays the depth of the racial divide in American society during the World War II years, using the army camp as a microcosm of white hostility to blacks who don’t remain in their place. The white officer who commands the black recruits tells Davenport his investigation is futile. No white man would ever be convicted of killing a black man. Indeed, Davenport can only question a pair of white officers with the commander, representing the white world, in attendance.
Eventually, Waters’s killer is revealed, and the disclosure isn’t a huge surprise. Conflicts among the black men in the unit made the tragic outcome inevitable.
The Raven revival gives Fuller’s rich and demanding script a brave try, but the production suffers from under casting in key roles. The most persuasive acting comes from several of the young actors who played the recruits. But the featured performances need to be stronger and more assured (the opening night performance was a little ragged, but the line fluffs may only have been the glitches of one slightly off night).
Photos by Dean LaPrairie
The physical production is excellent, starting with Andrei Onegin’s set, an arrangement of ramps and platforms that fluidly allows the action to shift among numerous locations in and around the army base. JoAnn Montemurro designed the period costumes, Diane Fairchild the lighting, and Marie C. Quinn the sound. Leif Olsen composed the original music. Michael Menendian directs.
It would be rewarding to see “A Soldier’s Play” presented at the Court Theatre, where so many plays on African American themes have been memorably staged. The Court has access to a deep pool of terrific black actors who could meet the challenges of this superb work. Still, enough of the play’s strengths shine through the Raven revival to make the production worth seeing as a major document in modern American theater.
“A Soldier’s Story” runs through March 30 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $36. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of 2½ stars. February 2013
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The Big Knife
At the Raven Theatre
by Dan Zeff
Chicago – Ah, Hollywood, a dream factory for the masses but behind the scenes a cesspool of moral corruption. Or so says Clifford 0dets, the bright young hope of the American theater in the 1930’s who left Broadway for California to write screenplays during in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
0dets vents his fear and loathing of the movie industry in his 1949 drama “The Big Knife,” now being revived at the Raven Theatre. It’s not the first attack on Hollywood morality and not the best, but it has all the ingredients of this genre. There is the central figure who is repelled by the backbiting and deceit and betrayal built into the industry’s culture, yet he sells out to its temptations, with tragic results. There is the ruthless studio head and the assorted hangers on—the agents and lawyers and publicists who are complicit in all this nastiness. And there are their women—some decent but most opportunistic career builders and camp followers who use their bodies as coin of the realm. Plus everyone drinks a lot.
“The Big Knife” centers on a superstar actor named Charlie Castle (Jason Huysman), with idealist leanings, who wants to get out of the movie trade because he feels his motion picture success, with its artistic compromises, has made him a lesser man than when he started. His studio wants him to sign a multi-million dollar 14-year contract, but Charlie resists, egged on by his wife Marion. The studio holds a trump card over Charlie’s head. The can ruin his life by revealing that he killed a child in a hit-and-run accident, a crime that a studio publicist went to jail for.
Photos by Dean LaPrairie
A would-be starlet named Dixie Evans was in the car at the time of the accident and she’s threatening to implicate the studio and Charlie in the accident’s cover-up. The studio executives consider murdering her to save the bad publicity and Charlie’s career. Overwhelmed by the crisis, his sense of personal failure, and the on again-off again stress of his marriage, Charlie commits suicide.
“The Big Knife” does tell a rousing story, especially toward the end when the possibility of cold-blooded murder rears its ugly head. But the play has problems. Charlie isn’t a very sympathetic character and his speechifying about regaining his artistic integrity sounds hollow coming from an alcoholic and an adulterer. Huysman does what he can with the role, but as a poster boy for rebelling against the iniquities of Hollywood, Charlie doesn’t cut a very credible figure.
The play’s significant action takes place off stage, and the audience has to be satisfied with a lot of on-stage talk, much of it overheated and pseudo philosophical. The suicide ending is melodramatic and comes across more of a cop-out than a heroic final gesture of protest.
On the positive side, the play does offer several entertaining character studies, starting with the ruthless studio head Marcus Hoff (Chuck Spencer). Hoff superficially presents himself as an uncomplicated and friendly guy, and he even weeps on cue, but underneath Hoff is a despot who takes no prisoners. Castle’s agent (Ron Quade) is honorable and folksy, but the publicist (Mike Boone) is a craven yes man, and Hoff’s henchman (Greg Caldwell) is a glad hander with the sensibility of an executioner. The one nice guy in all this is a writer (Ian Novak) who manages to separate himself from the moral bankruptcy around him.
The play’s women are a variable lot. Patty Benedict (JoAnne Montemurro) is a vicious gossip columnist of the Hedda Hopper/Luella Parsons ilk. Marion Castle (Liz Fletcher) is Charlie’s advocate but mainly a colorless figure. Not so the two bimbos in the story. The publicist’s sexpot young wife (Jen Short) has her eye on the main chance, which doesn’t include her nerdy husband. The most striking performance in the production comes from Jennifer Dymit as Dixie Evans. Dymit takes over the stage as the starlet who finally rises up against the executives who have manipulated her, failing to recognize she’s in way over her head in doing combat with these sophisticated vultures. Dymit isn’t on the stage very long but she has a commanding presence and absolute believability in a role that isn’t much more than a plot contrivance.
The action takes place in the living room of Charlie’s plush home, a fine detailed design by Ray Toler. JoAnn Montemurro designed the 1940’s wardrobe. Kurt Ottinger designed the lighting and Melissa Schlesinger the sound.
Photos by Dean LaPrairie
As an expose of the evils of Hollywood, “The Big Knife” doesn’t cut very deep. The movie “The Bad and the Beautiful,” released in 1952, is much more effective in exploring Hollywood’s dark side. Still, there is enough crackling dialogue and sour humor to remind us of Odets, the important playwright of the 1930’s. Possibly he wrote the play out of some feeling of self loathing, expiating a sin of selling out his talent to the gods of mammon and success in La La Land. Maybe Odets should have stayed in New York City, away from the siren call of big money and the easy life out West.
“The Big Knife” runs through November 11 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $36. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of three stars. Sept. 2012
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The Price
At the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – “The Price” demonstrates Arthur Miller at the top of his game, writing intense, eloquent, densely textured dramas about families under stress.
“The Price” is being present in a solid revival at the Raven Theatre. The production was marred a bit on opening night by some glitches in the line reading, but the staging is strong enough to grip the viewer in the play’s engrossing web of domestic misunderstanding, recrimination, guilt, failed dreams, and the search for success in a materialist culture.
The
play’s action takes place in a New York City attic cluttered with
furniture. The building is being torn down and policeman Victor Franz is
meeting a dealer to sell off the contents of the apartment that have been
gathering dust for 16 years since the death of Victor’s father. Victor has been
a policeman for 28 years and is consid retirement. He is joined by Esther, his
wife, a bitter woman exasperated by what she sees is her husband’s lack of
ambition throughout their marriage. 
The dealer arrives, an 89-year old Russian Jew named Gregory Solomon, one of Miller’s few successful comic characters, a wily old man oozing folk wisdom. At the end of the first act, Victor’s brother Walter arrives. The brothers had not seen each other during those 16 years and their reunion sets the stage for the emotional fireworks that dominate the second act.
Victor has carried a grudge against Walter for most of his adult life. After their father lost his money during the Great Depression, Victor stayed with the shattered old man, giving up a promising career in science to become a policeman, a career he hated. Meanwhile, while Victor was tending to the father, Walter went out on his own and became a world famous, and wealthy, surgeon. Victor sees himself as the victim of Walter’s selfishness, sacrificing himself to the father Walter callously abandoned to make his way in life, earning the money and recognition Victor believed could have been his if he wasn’t chained to his father.
The two brothers go back and forth, their acrimony fed from the sidelines by Esther Franz while Solomon tries to inject notes of moderation. On the surface, Walter looks like the bad guy, but as layer after layer of revelation peels away, the conflict between the two brothers takes on a more ambiguous flavor. Did Victor heroically devote himself to his failing father or did the old man really manipulate his son into a caregiver? Did Victor deep inside himself recognize the old man for the schemer he was and subconsciously elect to assume the mantle of a martyr? Did Walter abandon his family responsibilities or did he escape from a loveless home before he was swallowed up like Victor?
The title of the play initially refers to the price the dealer was going to pay for the family furniture, but it really refers to the price we pay for making choices that end up mistakes, and the price we pay for accepting comforting illusions that may justify our failures and our blighted lives.
“The Price” is more concentrated than related Miller dramas like “Death of a Salesman” and “All My Sons.” It takes place in real time in a single setting, often with only two characters on the stage. But the writing is continuously engrossing as Victor and Walter lob recriminations and excuses back and forth, each trying to justify himself in the eyes of the other and occupy the moral high ground. There is no winner and at the end of the evening the brothers are at least as estranged as they were at the outset. Much emotional blood has been spilled, but it’s an open question whether either man has benefited from exposure to all the revelations, charges, and counter charges.
Chuck Spencer dominates the production as Victor, partly because the actor is on stage virtually the entire play, partly because Victor is the play’s most complex and sympathetic character, and partly because Spencer gives the evening’s most commanding performance. JoAnn Montemurro provides one of her finest Raven performances as the wife eaten up with resentment and frustration. Every Walter I’ve seen has been an aggressive, domineering type but Jon Steinhagen plays the man mainly simmering with regret, almost pleading for reconciliation with his brother until he reaches an emotional line he won’t cross. Steinhagen’s interpretation cedes the spotlight to Spencer’s more dynamic Victor but it’s a valid interpretation. Leonard Kraft tries to evoke Gregory Solomon’s sly, endearing qualities, but his timing was sometimes off on opening night and his accent doesn’t quite convince.
Michael Menendian’s directing is unobtrusive and allows the power of Miller’s dialogue to flood the stage, especially when Victor and Walter stand virtually nose to nose, arguing the rightness of their positions as they rake over old grievances. Scenic designer Amanda Rozmiarek must have ransacked every second hand store in Chicago to assemble the wonderful jumble of furniture that fills the Raven stage. Montemurro designed the costumes, Richard Norwood the lighting, and Danielle Stack the sound.
“The Price” runs through April 14 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre,com.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. March 2012
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Bus Stop
At the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – William Inge was a hot American playwright during the 1950’s, but in the turbulent 1960’s and beyond his realistic studies of small town Midwestern life became unfashionable. Lately, Inge has reappeared on the radar of important American playwrights, with theaters and audiences again finding pleasure in his sturdy dramaturgy and incisive, often compassionate, character studies.
“Bus Stop” comedy-drama is probably the least significant of Inge’s 1950’s hits, but it still provides much pleasure. And its virtues glow in the gem of a revival now at the Raven Theatre.
“Bus Stop” adopts the common dramatic device of gathering a cluster of disparate characters in a single setting and watching them interact. The setting could be a stalled elevator, a jury room, a life raft, an airplane, or in the case of “Bus Stop” a diner in a small Kansas town. The diner is operated by a streetwise middle-aged lady named Grace, assisted by a bright but naïve high school girl named Elma. A winter blizzard strands a small busload of passengers in the diner for several hours in the dead of night. By the end of the play the life of each passenger been changed.
The stranded passengers teeter on the brink of cliché but they all grab the audience’s attention because they are amusing, sympathetic, and occasionally dramatic. There is the alcoholic and depraved middle-aged professor named Gerald Lyman, a rawboned and bumptious young cowboy named Bo Decker, his older friend and mentor Virgil Blessing, and a 19-year old nightclub singer who calls herself Cherie—uneducated and a little amoral but still endearing. The characters are rounded out by Carl, the bus driver who has a sexual thing going with Grace, and Will Masters, the town sheriff.
The action is powered by two plot lines. Bo Decker, roaring with bravado, demands that Cherie marry him while Cherie is put off by the young man’s domineering manner. At the same time, Lyman, a pathetic predator of teen-age girls, tries to seduce Elma with his courtly and worldly manner.
All the action takes place in the diner interior over a few hours and the resolution of the two storylines is predictable. But the play is still loaded with warmth and humor provided by its assortment of sympathetic characters (even, ultimately, Gerald Lyman). Everyone on stage is audience high. There are no outsized villains or heroes, just men and women who entertain us with their hopes and yearnings and problems.
“Bus Stop” could be a plod in an inferior production but the Raven has cast all eight roles with pinpoint accuracy. Each member of the ensemble crawls inside the skin of his or her character. Michael Stegall’s Bo Decker really looks 21 and his maturation from blowhard to vulnerable wooer is totally credible. Jon Steinhagen works wonders with Lyman, a tricky role that could descend into melodrama or bathos. Steinhagen shows the man’s painful blend of self-knowledge and self-loathing, seasoned with droll humor.
The performance of the night comes from Jen Short as Cherie. This is the role played by Marilyn Monroe in the motion picture adaptation, and the girl is conventionally played as a winsome and brassy blonde. Short is an attractive brunette who doesn’t push the floozy element. Her Cherie has been around the block since she was 14, a product of a dreary redneck upbringing. She’s taken plenty of hard knocks but still projects a charming innocence. It’s a deft and understated performance that refuses to cater to the role’s flashy temptations.
The locals are all performed to a turn. Sophia Menendian is a charming Elma, vulnerable in her innocence but still a sharp lass whose intelligence and optimism should take her far in her adult life. Kristen Williams extracts a surprising amount of personality from the normally minor figure of Grace. Her savvy and lusty portrayal fleshes out a normally inconsequential figure in the story. Mark Pracht likewise creates a vivid three-dimensional figure out of the laconic Virgil. The ensemble is rounded out by fine performances by Dean La Prairie as Carl and Antoine Pierre Whitfield as the sheriff.
JoAnn Montemurro’s insightful directing brings in the show at less than two hours, including a single intermission between the second and third acts. Her pace is perfect, with an impeccable balance between comedy and the play’s serious moments. Ray Toler designed the flawlessly realistic and detailed diner interior. Joelle Beranek’s costume designs preserve the 1950’s ambience of the story. Melissa Schlesinger designed the sound and Diane D. Fairchild the lighting.
“Bus Stop” runs through December 11 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of four stars. October 2011
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The Odd Couple
At the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” may be the funniest comedy in American drama. The only serious competition might come from “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” but nobody does that show anymore.
As most people know from the hit movie and TV adaptations, “The Odd Couple” is about two men who have become icons in American pop culture—compulsive neat freak Felix Unger and his friend and nemesis, the uber-slob Oscar Madison. They become roommates from hell, granting audiences three acts of unconditional hilarity.
“The Odd Couple” will be funny in all but the most inept productions. It’s a special joy when the acting is razor sharp, with Simon’s wisecracks and visual jokes bouncing around the stage at warp speed.
The revival at the Raven Theatre starts slowly. The opening scene poker game, which should crackle with one liners and comic insults, stimulated chuckles instead of belly laughs. The actors look their roles but the scene doesn’t scintillate.
The production takes off with the entrance of the neurotic clean-aholic Felix, melting under the emotional distress of his suddenly broken marriage. The play then becomes a two-hander between Felix and Oscar and the comedy temperature rises nicely.
The star of the production is Jon Steinhagen, a chubby Felix, not quite as assertive as Tony Randall in the TV series, but funny enough, and more important, a credible human being instead of a cartoon. We feel Felix’s pain as we laugh at him and his compulsive cleaning mania. The very tricky scene in which he is thrust together with the ditsy Pigeon sisters from an upstairs apartment, reducing them to tears, was the best staging I’ve ever seen of this potentially silly interlude.
As Oscar, Eric Roach is excellent in the early scenes, a believable portrait of a happy go lucky single man on the outside who still aches for the domestic tranquility denied him since his divorce. Roach is a good actor and when his Oscar finally breaks under Felix’s multiple annoying habits and he tells his roommate “Stay out of my way,” the play suddenly takes a serious turn. Here is a man driven to desperation and maybe violence. The action returns to comedy, but it’s a moment that puts a human face on a story the audience had been conditioned to take very lightly.
Unfortunately, as Felix eats away at Oscar’s nerve ends, Roach tends to go over the top in his hair pulling and ranting. The emoting may gather a few easy laughs from the audience but it cheapens Oscar, a man capable of blowing his cool, but not in such a farcically frantic manner.
Liz Fletcher and Brigitte Ditmars are admirable as the Pigeon sisters, Oscar’s hope and expectation for a little male-female rest and recreation. The poker buddies are played by Greg Caldwell, Larry Carani, Greg Kolack, and Anthony Tournis.
The Raven production eliminates the intermission between the second and third acts, bringing the show in at a tight two hours. Michael Menendian’s directing sustains the necessary brisk pace.
Ray Toler designed the credible apartment interior, allowing for plenty of room to dash in and out of swinging doors and around the furniture. JoAnn Montemurro designed the costumes, Katherine Chavez the sound, and Amy Lee the lighting.
Newcomers to “The Odd Couple” may have a better time than veterans of the play. The lady sitting next to me on opening night was convulsed with laughter throughout the evening. This obviously was her first exposure to the play and she was having a ball. In any case, though I’ve seen funnier poker scenes, Steinhagen’s Felix Unger is worth the price of admission.
“The Odd Couple” runs through July 18 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $25 and $30. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of three stars. May 2010
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Death of a Salesman
At the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The Raven Theatre revival of “Death of a Salesman” is a reminder of just how good a play this is. And the production has enough creative touches to freshen the viewer’s exposure to the Arthur Miller classic, no matter how familiar it might seem.
Willy Loman has become an iconic figure in American culture since the drama opened 60 years ago. Audiences and academics can argue whether Loman is a flawed hero seduced by false dreams of success or whether he’s a pathetic villain. But the man does grab the spectator’s mind and emotions. And that’s the core value of the Raven production.
Chuck Spencer plays Loman. Spencer, a Raven Theatre ensemble member, is younger than the conventional rendering of the salesman, but the viewer easily adjusts to his comparative youth. Spencer is a continuously kinetic Loman. His moods swing higher and lower than any Willy in my experience. Today, Loman might be diagnosed as bi polar, with a touch of dementia. Whatever his psychological condition, Loman seethes energy, whether in his anxiety and anger or in his irrational exuberance and optimism.
Spencer’s portrayal is also exceptionally physical. His battles with his sons Happy and especially Biff are both scary and heartbreaking in their violence. Spencer’s arguments with the other characters ooze intensity. Willy’s optimism may be built on sand, but you have to love a guy who can feel that good about something, even if the next moment he plunges into despair or antagonism
The play’s most painful scene comes when Willy visits his boss, asking for a home office reassignment to get him off the road. It’s an agony to watch Willy increasingly humiliated by the insufferable young man in a beautifully played scene by Spencer and Anthony Tournis (who resembles a youthful Mayor Daley).
Under Michael Menedian’s insightful directing the drama’s theatrical shifts in time and space come off without a hitch. The production gets off to a stirring start when Willy trudges down the theater aisle muttering to himself and walks up to his garage, which dominates the stage. Without missing a beat, he swings open both ends of the garage exterior to reveal the inside of his Brooklyn apartment. It’s a startling creative moment that immediately establishes that the play is in inventive artistic hands.
The Raven ensemble consists of 11 performers, three doubling in minor roles. Everyone is at least satisfactory and some much more than that. Jason Huysman is outstanding as Biff, the older son with a life ruined by a steady diet of his father’s pipe dreams about success and being “well liked.” Huysman’s confession of his own inadequacy to meet his father’s expectations is superbly delivered. Greg Caldwell is excellent as Happy, the younger son who also is victimized into a shallow womanizer by Willy’s false gospel of the American dream.
JoAnn Montemurro is credible in the difficult role of Linda, Willy’s wife. How can any woman stand by her man so steadfastly in the face of his weaknesses and volatile temperament? Linda may be naïve (she apparently doesn’t know of Willy’s on-the-road adulteries) but the heart must have its reasons and Montemurro brings Linda sympathetically alive without turning mushy.
Ron Quade is the strongest Charlie I have ever seen, an impressive figure even if he is mostly filtered through Willy’s imagination. Jerry Bloom is fine as Ben, the next door neighbor who remains Willy’s friend and benefactor even in the face of Willy’s insults and irascibility. The cast is rounded out by Kevin Hope, Susie Griffith, Devon Candura, and Alexis Atwill.
The play’s epilogue at Willy’s gravesite still seems an unnecessary add-on marred by purple patches of dialogue out of kilter with what we have seen and heard previously. But it’s a small price to pay for all the richness of the first two acts.
Hats off to the production’s designers, starting with Andrei Onegin for his garage/apartment interior set. Joelle Beranek outfits the cast in a wardrobe of authentic looking clothing of the late 1940’s and earlier. Mike Tutaj created the sound and video design, Leif Olsen’s composed the original music, and Amy Lee designed the lighting.
The revival is free of any ethnic leaning. Willy and his family are often portrayed as Jewish but the Raven staging is WASP-like if anything, representing Willy as an all-American Everyman. The spectator can decide if Loman was just a well-meaning casualty of a bogus idea of success or if he is a man who wrecked the lives of his sons and damaged his own life with corrupt and occasionally illegal values. The man is endlessly fascinating and he’s embedded in one of the most entertaining and thought provoking works in modern drama. It’s great to have him and his supporting characters back in all their complexity and humanity.
“Death of a Salesman” runs through December 5 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickers are $25 and $30. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of four stars. October 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Hedda Gabler
At the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The title character in Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” is the greatest female role in modern drama. Depending on the actress and director, the woman has been portrayed as a pathological monster at one extreme or as a victim of a repressive society on the other. “Hedda Gabler” remains sturdy and stageworthy after more than 100 years, but it’s still all about how the production interprets Hedda.
Hedda’s first appearance in the play comes several minutes into the opening act and our first look tells us much about the kind of Hedda we will see the rest of the play. At the Raven Theatre excellent revival, Mackenzie Kyle is cast as a young and attractive Hedda. I’ve seen Heddas who were near middle age and severe in countenance, dressed in dark colors. So we can expect a youthful, livelier Hedda, and that’s what we get.
The play takes place in what is now Oslo, Norway. Ibsen wrote the play in 1890 and it reflects a conservative and male dominated society. Hedda was the daughter of the famous General Gabler. As we first meet her, she has returned from a six-month honeymoon with her husband, George Tesman, a naïve and slightly stuffy but well-meaning academic. It’s significant that the play is called “Hedda Gabler” and not “Hedda Tesman.” The title establishes that the woman is very much in the line of her military father rather than a marital appendage of her new husband.
Kyle’s Hedda is petty, malicious, cowardly, fearful of scandal, and most of all, bored. She is pregnant and revolted by her condition, and probably by sex in general. The play explores how Hedda destroys Eilert Lovborg, a genius writer given to dissipation. She ruins Lovborg partly out of an evil nature and partly to demonstrate to herself that she can control another person’s destiny.
Unfortunately for Hedda, her destruction of Lovborg puts her in the power of Judge Brack, a friend of the family and a wily middle-aged bachelor who isn’t a bad person but a man of the world happily willing to press an advantage that falls into his lap. For Hedda, being dominated, especially with its sexual ramifications, is insupportable and leads to her famous off stage suicide at the end of the play.
The Raven production under Michael Menendian’s savvy directing uses a modern adaptation by the contemporary American playwright Jon Robin Baitz. The adaptation remains faithful to the spirit and narrative but smooths out some of Ibsen’s clunky (at least in translation) language and makes the dialogue more idiomatic to the modern ear.
Kyle is a tall young actress with curly blonde hair. Her interpretation of Hedda is consistent and persuasive. The audience may recoil at Hedda’s seemingly wanton evil but beneath the malice we can glimpse the frustrated, fearful woman who recognizes her own cowardice and her jealousy of people around her with the courage to take their own lives in hand.
The Raven production is favored with exceptional supporting performances by Ian Novak as George Tesman and Jon Steinhagen as Judge Brack. Novak gives us a Tesman who is a pleasant, unworldly man, not very clear sighted about his wife but not the silly ass caricature so many actors make of the character. And Steinhagen’s smooth Judge Brack isn’t the predatory villain in some revivals. His Brack is a man who keeps his eye on the main chance. The judge sees no reason why he and Hedda can’t work out a companionable sexual situation and he is genuinely shocked at Hedda’s violent death at the end of the play.
Ian Paul Custer is a little low keyed as Lovborg, admittedly a difficult role. Wild eyed geniuses aren’t easy to portray on the stage and Custer’s less manic approach has its own legitimacy, even at the risk of losing some dramatic heat. Symphony Sanders is good as Thea Elvsted, an uncomplicated woman who rehabilitates Lovborg, at least temporarily, much to Hedda’s envy and resentment. JoAnn Montemurro is fine as Tesman’s sympathetic and giving aunt. Claudia Garrison completes the ensemble as the Tesman maid.
The Raven physical production is a little unsteady. Andrei Onegin’s detailed set suggests late Victorian Norway, the critical background which establishes the oppressive social climate that weighs Hedda down. But the characters wear clothing all over the chronological map, from what looks like 1930’s and 1940‘s styles to the present day. And the portrait of General Gabler, which should look down ominously on the action, is reduced to a small picture on a back wall that contributes nothing to the atmosphere of the play. More successful are Christine Ferriter’s lighting, Katherine Chavez’s sound design, and Leif Olson’s original music.
But visual quibbles aside, this is a fine rendition of one of the great plays of modern times. The production chooses not to create an agenda for Hedda, whether as a feminist victim or as a psychological case study. Kyle’s Hedda may not be a daring interpretation, but it works superbly within its own parameters.
“Hedda Gabler” runs through June 27 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 338 2177 or visit www.raventheatre.com.
The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars. May 2009
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Laughter on the 23rd Floor
at the Raven Theatre
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—In “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” Neil Simon wrote a fictionalized account of his apprentice years as a comedy writer on the legendary Sid Caesar variety program called “Your Show of Shows.”
During the early 1950’s, Caesar employed a stable of writers whose names read like a roll call of American comedy in the late 20th century—Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Simon himself. “Laughter” takes audiences behind the scenes as the writers, a manic and furiously funny group, go through the agonies of creating a weekly 90-minute TV show for their boss, a comedy genius named Max Prince who was also a pill-popping neurotic in a constant state of paranoia.
The Raven Theatre is reviving Simon’s 1993 comedy in a superbly cast and adroitly directed production that provides a snapshot of an era in American show business. Simon’s dialogue delivers one zinger after another, but the glory of “Laughter” is humor that emerges naturally from its characters rather than as a string of stand-up comedy wisecracks.
The setting is a room on the 23rd floor of a building on 57th street in New York City. There the writers gather to trade insults and concoct the comedy sketches that will please their boss.
“Laughter” doesn’t have much plot. If there is a narrative thread, it’s Prince’s offstage battle with network executives over the content of his program. “The Show of Shows” was a hip, intellectual revue that typically would spoof Marlon Brando’s appearance as Mark Antony in the movie Version of “Julius Caesar.” It was an East Coast Jewish brand of comedy that made the network uneasy because TV was emerging from its infancy and spreading into America’s heartland where, in network eyes, tastes ran more to bowling on television and inane sitcoms than to Max Prince’s idiosyncratic brand of high brow humor.
Along with the tensions between Prince and the network, the specter of McCarthyism hung over the national scene. Joseph McCarthy was calling a patriot like General George Marshall a communist. Anyone with a hint of left wing background was in danger of the dreaded blacklist.
But “Laughter” isn’t primarily a history lesson. It offers a collection of gifted and volatile writers bouncing off each other like protons, everyone trying to please the self-dramatizing and wired Max Prince.
The play is narrated by Lucas Brickman, the young writer who represents Simon himself. The writing staff consists of six men and a woman, all indulging in love-hate relationships with each other in the pressure cooker atmosphere of that claustrophobic room.
The Raven production nails each character, starting with Eric Roach as a Max Prince living on his nerve ends, existing on medication and booze as he battles his demons at the network and within himself. It’s an over-the-top performance appropriate to an over-the-top personality
The characters are all clearly and comically delineated, from the self-conscious hypochondria of the Woody Allen character (furiously played by Jeremy Glickstein) to Carol, the lone female trying to stay afloat in that profane macho world. Mackenzie Kyle does a superb job of holding her own with the outsized individuals who surround her. And Noah Simon provides a bull’s-eye performance as the insecure Mel Brooks character.
The rest of the ensemble playing the writers—Greg Caldwell, Greg Hardin, Dean LePrairie, and Dan Granata (as the Simon stand-in)—all work beautifully together as a group and in their individual comic moments. Even the staff secretary, a comedy writer wannabe named Helen (Elizabeth Lesinski), gets a funny turn in the second act as the ditsy woman tries to come up with a set of comic names in competition with the pro writers, and totally blanks out.
Director Michael Menendian does a fine job of ensuring that the writers remain human as well as funny. There is a danger of allowing the acting to descend into a disorderly Marx Bothers farce, but Menendian keeps the characters and the action on the rails, resisting all temptations to allow the play to generate into shtick.
Ray Toler designed the credible realistic set. JoAnn Montemurro’s costumes capture the look of the early 1950’s. Stephanie Farina designed the sound and Christine Ferriter the lighting.
A comedy by America’s funniest playwright about a collection of funny people should be a funny play. And “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is a very funny play.
“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” runs through June 28 at the Raven Theatre, 6157 North Clark Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 338 2177.
The show gets a rating of four stars. May 2008
For more information, visit www.raventheatre.com
Contact Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com