Creditors

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Even veteran playgoers have only rare opportunities to see a play by August Strindberg, and if they do see a Strindberg play, it probably won’t be “The Creditors.” The play is about one of Strindberg’s favorite themes, the battle between the sexes, the best known being “Miss Julie.” That’s the play of choice for most theaters who want to dip their artistic toes into a Strindbergian maelstrom of overheated psychological conflict

     The Remy Bumppo Theatre is reviving “The Creditors” (simply called “Creditors in David Grieg’s version). The three-character work runs about 85 minutes with no intermission and the dramatic temperature is near the boiling point for most of the time.

     The action is located in the lounge of a seaside hotel, presumably in Sweden, during the late 1800’s. For the first 40 minutes, we watch a middle-aged man named Gustav talking with a young and crippled artist named Adolph. The two had met recently and the play starts during the middle of a conversation in which Gustav systematically undermines Adolph’s marriage to an older woman named Tekla. Gustav gets into the head of the naïve, vulnerable, and gullible young artist, subtly mocking his art but primarily attacking his marriage, like Iago relentlessly roiling the peace of mind of a credulous Othello.

         Gustav asserts that he’s Adolph’s friend and all his vicious implications are offered with the younger man’s interests in mind. But Gustav has an agenda, revealed late in the play, which is easily identified by any attentive spectator within the first few minutes of the opening scene.

         By the time Tekla appears almost halfway through the play, the conversation between the two men has ambiguously painted her as self indulgent, vain, aggressive, and mischievous. We see that both men love her passionately and distrust her with at least as much passion.

         Just before Tekla makes her entrance, Gustav departs and the next extended scene descends into a verbal battle between the jealous, emotionally shaken young husband, and the woman who quickly recognizes that someone has filled her husband’s mind with disturbing thoughts about her love and fidelity. Gustav then sends Adolph to the next room to overhear an interview Gustav arranges with Tekla that presumably will show the husband his wife’s true colors. The plot twist is finally revealed that reshapes the triangle and the play ends with a death.

          

                                                                                                           Photo Credit:  Johnny Knight

         “Creditors” is a realistic play in its language and setting, but the intensity of the verbal exchanges far exceeds the parameters of normal discourse, even when the subject is as intimate and volatile as married life. The characters deliver extended monologues unlike anything that a person would speak in the heat of a moment in real life. The talk is drenched in Freudian illusions and philosophical and psychological speculation. Tekla, Gustav, and Adolph may look like typical middle class people of the period, but they express themselves with a complexity that likely was never heard in a Swedish seaside hotel or any other location in the Western world. They assault each other in a gripping sequence of mini debates but one senses that it’s the playwright’s voice coming from each character rather than the characters speaking for themselves.

         All three roles obviously make considerable demands on the actors. Probably the toughest assignment is Tekla. The character remains offstage for the first 40 minutes of the play while the two men dissect her personality, her motives, and her attitudes toward love and marriage. The audience’s curiosity about the woman is high by the time she enters and the actress has to hit the stage running. Linda Gillum plays Tekla as cool, predatory, intensely sensual, and confidant until her passions get the best of her as the story winds down. Her relationship with the younger Adolph seems a mismatch, but love does have its unpredictable ways.

                  

                                                                                        Photo Credit:  Johnny Knight

         Mark Montgomery, who has established himself as one of the top actors in the area, perfectly captures the malice disguised as friendship that allows Gustav to destroy Adolph’s confidence in his art and more importantly, the faith he has in his dominating, fickle wife. Gabriel Ruiz is at a disadvantage in playing Adolph, a man easily manipulated by both Gustav and Tekla, but his character gets in a few good licks against the overpowering personalities of the older and wilier figures. Sandy Shinner directs with a steady hand, orchestrating the play’s many emotional peaks, and occasional humorous moments, with unobtrusive insight.

         Jeffrey Bauer’s lounge design is outwardly naturalistic, but its sterility, reinforced by Charles Cooper’s bright and even lighting, turns the setting into a kind of chilly laboratory. Although the set is supposed to be a public lounge, it also is the site for Tekla’s heavy petting with Adolph, the kind of romantic action that belongs in the bedroom instead of a common room in a hotel. Jeremy Floyd’s costumes capture the late nineteenth century time frame (Strindberg wrote the play in 1888). Christopher Kriz is the sound designer and Julie Allen is responsible for the numerous authentic looking props.

                         

                                                                                                 Photo Credit:  Johnny Knight

         “Creditors” probably says more about Strindberg than about his characters. The playwright obviously had ambivalent ideas about the sexes though he tended to yield the upper hand to the women in his dramas, who are typically strong, crafty, relentless, and unyielding. Tekla is a prime example of the Strindbergian woman but she has her sympathetic side. She excuses any abrasive conduct by claiming that it’s who she is. Gustav has his villainous qualities but he’s been driven to extremes by abuses endured in the past and one has to admire his opportunistic skill as a revenger. Adolph is basically in over his head, a decent young man who unfortunate loves a wife he can’t handle. They all form a complicated trio who we may not want to know in real life, but they certainly make stimulating company for a brief interlude on the stage. And the tentacles of this short-ish drama extend deep into modern American theater, as anyone who has seen “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” will verify.

         “Creditors” runs through June 2 at the upstairs studio of the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m., plus selected Thursday and Saturday matinees. Tickets are $27.50 to $42.50. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

      The show gets a rating of three stars.

Contact Dan: ZeffDaniel@Yahoo.com                April 2013

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You Never Can Tell

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – George Bernard Shaw may be the preeminent philosopher-playwright in modern drama but the man could write a delightful romantic comedy when he set his mind to it.  His “You Never Can Tell” ranks high among the romantic charmers of the past 150 years and local audiences will have the pleasure of its company through the holidays in a delectable revival by the Remy Bumppo theater.

    Shaw wrote “You Never Can Tell” in the mid 1890’s, partly in admiration of the comedies of manners written by Oscar Wilde during that decade. “You Never Can Tell” isn’t quite as brilliant in its high comedy as “The Importance of Being Earnest,” but what other play in the English language is? Let it suffice that “You Never Can Tell” is extremely funny, its humor enriched by the usual wry Shavian commentary on English society, the class system, the importance of money, a wife’s inequality to her husband in English marital life, feminism, and similar social concerns of his day.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Photo by Johnny Knight

     The play takes place at an English seaside resort. The opening minutes lumber a bit as the author sets his plot in motion. By the end of the first act all the narrative pieces are in place and it’s a joyous ride to the last act blackout.

  Mrs. Clandon is a successful author of self-improvement books. She has returned to England from the Portuguese island of Madeira where she had fled her bad-tempered husband Fergus Crampton 18 years previously, taking her three children with her. The offspring consist of the twins Philip and Dolly and their older sister Gloria. The twins are a breezy pair while Gloria, following her mother’s lead, is a no nonsense “New woman,” oozing independence and eager to do battle for women’s rights.

   The plot is triggered by Dolly’s visit to an impoverished young dentist named Valentine to have a tooth extracted. Stretching the long arm of coincidence to its breaking point, Valentine’s landlord just happens to be the irascible Crampton who in short order comes face to face with his wife and three offspring. There are verbal showdowns between Crampton and his wife as well as his three children while Valentine instantly falls in love with Gloria. But the young woman has no use for romance, living behind a wall of self-reliance until she realizes, initially to her shame, that she has fallen in love with the dentist. It all ends happily, though Valentine is left pondering whether he is cursed by getting what he wished for, marriage to a strong-willed woman likely to overmatch his larky personality.

         The multiple happy endings are foreordained. The fun comes in listening to the articulate main characters eloquently state their various cases. Shaw’s language glitters with intelligence and droll satire. Shaw’s mouthpiece is William, a waiter at the resort who demonstrates his superiority to the higher-class characters virtually every time he opens his mouth.

  

                                         Photo by Johnny Knight.

         The Remy Bumppo production benefits from some spot on casting, especially in the more senior performers. Doug Hendel has proper amount of bluster as Crampton, a man who feels his family abandoned him 18 years ago and now demands his rights as a father when they unexpectedly turn up. Hendel converts a cartoon bully into a man entitled to some sympathy from the audience. Elaine Rivkin is just right as Mrs. Clandon, a woman of unshakable social beliefs and a strong commitment to humanitarian goals and little use for the sentimentalities of romance. But Rivkin never allows her character’s doctrinaire attitudes to obscure her human qualities as a caring mother of three demanding children. Peter A. Davis is terrific as the family lawyer Finch McComas, a conservative humorless man continually flustered by the gleefully outspoken opinions of the young people around him. Rob Glidden appears in the last act as a lawyer called upon to serve as a conciliator between Crampton and Mrs. Clandon, taking over the action with a string of iconoclastic Shavian spins on marriage and the family. Dale Benson, a Chicagoland theater treasure, is a delight as the waiter who pacifies all the brushfires of frayed feelings.

         The younger characters tend to be upstaged by their elders. Eliza Stoughton’s Gloria isn’t much of a presence until late in the play when she is amazed and horrified to discover she is capable of falling in love. From that moment to the end of the play, Stoughton’s Gloria is a dominating figure. Greg Matthews Anderson is a lighthearted Valentine, with an airy manner that contrasts mightily with Gloria’s more severe personality. He is probably correct in pondering with some concern about what he is letting himself in for in marrying such a take-charge female. Alex Weisman and C. Jaye Miller play the young twins, saying all kinds of rude and awkward things in the comfortable knowledge that their embarrassing behavior is really harmless and even endearing. Miller is a petite charmer who should receive first-call consideration for any ingénue roles upcoming on the local theater scene.

     Director Shawn Douglass has expressed an affection for “You Never Can Tell” for years. Douglass believes the play has been shamefully ignored and he’s correct. His production should help set the record straight. Douglass is in sympathy with the play’s comic vibes, setting a brisk pace through the four acts and drawing high-energy performances from the ensemble to mask the fact that the play is all talk and no action.

The physical production is one of the best in Remy Bumppo’s history. Costume designer Emily Waecker supervises a sumptuous wardrobe of late Victorian clothing for each character, led by a stunning evening gown Gloria wears with distinction in the final act. Set designer Timothy Mann smoothly transfers the action among four different locations, with the assistance of properties designer Julie Eberhardt.  Lee Fiskness is the lighting designer and Nick Gajary designed the sound plan.

         “You Never Can Tell” runs through January 6 at the Greenhouse Theatre Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $42.50 to $52.50. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

         The show gets a rating of 3½  stars.    November 2012

                  Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Chesapeake

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

by Dan Zeff

Chicago – Plenty of negatives can be directed toward Lee Blessing’s “Chesapeake” at the Remy Bumppo Theatre. Is it a satire, a comedy, a fantasy, and does it even know, or care? Fortunately, these critical reservations are mostly disarmed by Greg Matthew Anderson’s brilliant performance as the show’s entire cast.

       Anderson plays a bisexual performance artist named Kerr. The performance consists of reciting the Song of Solomon from the Bible while being disrobed by the audience until he is naked on stage. Kerr’s nemesis is an arch conservative Southern senator named Thurm Pooley. Kerr is caught in a maelstrom of controversy over his performance piece because he’s received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pooley uses the controversial Kerr as a scapegoat to cut spending for the NEA and curry favor with conservative voters.

        The play’s title refers to a breed of retriever dog, one of which is an animal named Lucky who is Pooley’s pet. Kerr plots to kidnap Lucky in retaliation for the senator’s hostility but the kidnapping goes wrong and eventually Kerr is killed long with the dog and reincarnated as Lucky Two. This Lucky may look like a dog but he thinks and acts like a human being and dominates the baffled senator, who eventually yields to the pooch’s astonishing human powers.

       

        The best part of the play is the first act, a light but informative tour of performance art and its conflict with public officials who resent the performance people as purveyors of pornography. The longer second act is bogged down in Kerr’s transformation into Lucky 2, which may all be a dream. Blessing isn’t clear on this essential point.

      “Chesapeake” was first staged in 1999 when conflicts between cutting edge performance artists and Congress were big news, with the NEA caught in the middle. A big question of the day was, Should public money be used to sponsor art and how far can politicians and the government go to reject funding for art they consider offensive or too experimental? Blessing sides with the performance artists, no surprise there. The conservative politicians like Pooley (a stand-in for Jesse Helms, remember him?) are portrayed as narrow minded and cynical manipulators of this hot button issue for their own political gain. “Chesapeake” must have gone down very smoothly with liberals.

        The NEA funding for the arts may have roiled the cultural waters in the late 1900’s but one doesn’t read too much about it today. Performance theater that outraged many people back then scarcely would turn a hair in most urban audiences today, so the “Chesapeake” satire is dated. This play needed to be seen 10-12 years ago when its impact would have been maximized.

        What “Chesapeake” loses as a coherent play it gains as a stunning piece of acting by Anderson. One-actor shows have always filled me with admiration. A single performer has to carry the entire play, with no colleagues on stage for support, plus the amount of memorization has to be daunting. The performer not only must present the script alone, he/she has to make it a dramatic and theatrical experience and not just a recitation. And that’s where Anderson comes up big.

     Anderson is a youthful presence on stage and a terrifically ingratiating performer. The play is most successful when it makes the audience laugh and Anderson is a superb comic actor. His self-deprecating rendering of Kerr’s exploits in performance art in the first act had the chuckling spectators in the palm of his hand. Anderson morphs beautifully from character to character, mainly the Southern senator (who sounds like Dr. Phil), the senator’s calculating wife, and his nubile female assistant with bedroom eyes for the senator. Anderson is at his best impersonating Lucky, wonderfully capturing canine mannerisms mixed with human sensibilities. We buy into Anderson the dog as easily as we do Kerr the performance artist.

             

        The play is staged on a bare stage that features a slight raised wooden platform and a single chair and a glass of water, which provides a bit of unexpected comedy (set design by Timothy Mann). Jacqueline Firkins designed Anderson’s single casual costume. JR Lederle’s lighting is almost a character in the action, guiding the viewer from day or night and back again, sometimes with startling shifts in lighting intensity. The sound design by Rick Sims relies heavily on very loud barking.

Shawn Douglass directs the play and he must share credit with Anderson for bringing out the humor in the play. There is nothing either man can do about making the narrative’s improbabilities and uneasy shifts in direction.

        We have now been treated to two brilliant-one man shows this season, Timothy Kane in “An Iliad” at the Court Theatre and now Anderson. “An Iliad” is a vastly more superior play but both produced must-see evenings of acting. “An Iliad” has closed but Anderson is still on stage now to be appreciated and applauded.

    “Chesapeake” runs through April 29 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. with matinees on April 14 and 28. Tickets are $30 to $40. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 2½ star for the play and 4 stars for the performance.    April 2012

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Changes of Heart

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Pierre Marivaux wrote romantic comedies back in the early 1700’s. He was a major playwright in France but never made much of an impact on the American stage until an opera and theater director named Stephen Wadsworth started translating and adapting Marivaux’s plays into English in the 1990’s. Wadsworth’s successful versions made Marivaux a significant presence in American theater. He hasn’t been performed much on musical-dominated Broadway but regional theaters revive him regularly.

        The Remy BumppoTheatre is having a brave go at Wadsworth’s version of Marivaux’s romantic drama “Changes of Heart” (earlier known by the clunky title of “The Double Inconstancies”). It’s a long play (2 hours and 45 minute including two intermissions) and requires some patience from the audience. The first act sets in motion a story that seems thin and a bit silly. But the show builds over the next two acts, saying some stimulating things about love, fidelity, morality, and the vagaries of the human heart.

   The Prince (Steve Wojtas) of an unidentified kingdom is passionately in love with Silvia (Alana Arenas), a plainspoken village girl. Silvia has been taken to the Prince’s palace where the monarch hopes to woo her to be his bride. But Silvia loves a village lad named Harlequin (Nicolas Gamboa), disdaining the besotted Prince’s overtures of love. Indeed, she spends much of the first act verbally disdaining them. Why in the world does the Prince love her when she doesn’t love him back?

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Mourning Becomes Electra

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Timothy Douglas did not shrink from a challenge in his debut presentation as the new artistic director of the Remy Bumppo Theatre. Douglas selected Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra,” one of the longest dramas in America theater, much respected but seldom staged. The results will be gratifying to any Remy Bumppo fan concerned about the capabilities of the new head of the company.

        O’Neill adapted “Mourning Becomes Electra” from the Oresteia trilogy written by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 458 B.C. O’Neill moved the tragedies from ancient Greece to New England America immediately after the Civil War. The three plays (in 13 acts) consumed more than five hours. Allowing for a dinner break after the first play, the project was a very full evening for playgoers in New York City back in 1931.

     Douglas uses the modern adaptation by Gordon Edelstein, which discards a dozen lesser characters and condenses the action to several minutes over three hours. Edelstein’s version focuses the story on the key characters and also makes the playing time manageable for a single evening.

     

     In published notes to the play, O’Neill stated that he wanted to re-create the “Greek sense of fate, which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by.” His reinterpretation of the Aeschylus trilogy relies on a very contemporary dose of Freudian psychology in charting the downfall of the Mannon family. The characters talk a lot about love but what actually destroy them are hate, pitiless justice, and death.

The story opens as the Civil War is coming to its bloody conclusion. Christine Mannon and her daughter Lavinia await the return from the war of the family men folk—Ezra Mannon (Christine’s husband and Lavinia’s father), and Orin Mannon (Lavinia’s brother). 

While her husband was away fighting for the Union, Christine began an adulterous affair with Adam Brant, a sea captain. Brant is probably the son of Ezra Mannon’s brother, born to a servant woman, which earned Brant’s father ostracism from the family. So the building blocks for the upcoming tragedy are in place. Brant is bitter toward the Mannons. Christine hates her husband for his cold and callous personality and Lavinia hates her mother for betraying her father. Lavinia loves her father with a passion that exceeds her place as a dutiful daughter. And Christine has a similar passion for her son, who dotes on his mother.

With emotions at a flashpoint among the various Mannons, calamities are inevitable. By the end of the third play, Lavinia is the only main character still standing, the others dead either by murder or suicide. Lavinia faces a long life of isolation within the cursed family’s gloomy mansion, entombed by guilt.

 

There is a strong whiff of melodrama in the trilogy’s narrative and O’Neill was never one of the most eloquent writers in American drama, so some of the dialogue comes across as clunky and overheated. O’Neill is scarcely subtle in his renderings of the suppressed sexual passions that doom all the Mannons. Oedipus and Electra complexes control the fates of the characters with an obviousness that teeters on the edge of caricature. But the power of the story endures and finally triumphs.

The adaptation reduces the action to primarily two- and three- character scenes, played out in the minimalist setting of a bare stage with the spectators sitting on two sides facing each other. Visually the staging is dominated by a giant photo of Ezra Mannon at the rear of the stage, a presence that hovers over the tragic events well after his death at the end of the first act. There is little physical action in the play. The dialogue carries the story—bitter, angry, passionate, vengeful, despairing. Retribution is the order of the day and compassion is the first man down.

The ensemble features three members of the Remy Bumppo company—Annabel Armour as Christine, David Darlow as Ezra Mannon, and Nick Sandys as Adam Brant. Ezra dies in the first act and Adam and Christine in the second act. Darlow and Sandys are both excellent in their limited appearances but Armour carries the story until Christine’s demise. Armour’s Christine generates a sense of evil who would make Lady Macbeth shudder, yet, given the circumstances of her loveless marriage, her ardor for Brant, and the hatred radiating from her daughter, Christine comes across as almost sympathetic. Armour superbly portrays Christine as a character who, under better marital circumstances, would be a good woman and not a deceitful and murderous villain.

At first I thought that Kelsey Brennan was a little under qualified for the pivotal role of Lavinia, but either I adjust to her rather artless delivery or she grew into the character as the play proceeded. By the end of the show Brennan was bringing great force to her role, ending in a kind of resigned dignity.

Scott Stangland is a somewhat monochromatic Orin emotionally, but that’s a legitimate interpretation of a character hardened by the horrors of war who returns home to plunge into a cauldron of perverse emotions. When he needs to increase the dramatic heat, Stangland is well up to the mark. The cast is rounded out by Luke Daigle and Stephanie Chavara as a brother and sister who get romantically involved with Orin and Lavinia. They are the only decent figures in the story and their escape from the Mannon family likely saved their emotional and psychological lives. Veronda Carey rounds out the ensemble as the Mannons’s black servant woman who plays a kind of Greek chorus.

Tim Morrison designed the all purpose set. Samantha Jones designed the spot-on historical costumes. Stephen Sorenson designed the lighting and Victoria Deiorio the sound.

“Mourning Becomes Electra” runs through October 30 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances run Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sun day at 2:30 p.m. There are also several matinee performances. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.September 2011

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Edward Albee’s “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia” is a play about a love affair between a successful American architect and a goat. It’s not an allegory and it’s not a sordid melodrama and it’s not a farce. Albee has really written a play about a man in love with a goat, and it’s a masterpiece.

        “The Goat” is James Bohnen’s final presentation as artistic director of the Remy Bumppo Theatre and he departs in triumph. His production is funny, gripping, heartbreaking, and in its final moments, shocking. Most important, the production is convincing. The spectator, however reluctantly, is forced to buy into the premise that an intelligent man is having a love affair with a goat, with all the emotional upheavals that inevitably must follow.

        Martin and Stevie are an ideal married couple. Both are bright, articulate, liberal, and deeply in love with each other. Their only child, a 17-year old boy named Billy, is gay, but they can deal with that. The marriage explodes after Martin confides to his oldest friend, Ross, that he’s been having an affair with a goat, who Martin has named Sylvia. The repulsed Ross sends Stevie a letter informing her about the affair, and Stevie predictably explodes into a tsunami of revulsion, outrage, and shame.  Billy, already struggling with his sexual identity, is shattered by the revelation of his father’s barnyard romance, which brings to the surface his possibly incestuous feelings for Martin. Everyone’s emotions are at the boil until the final shattering moment that leaves the characters either destroyed or open to possible reconciliation, depending upon the viewer’s capacity for optimism.

        

        “The Goat” is a call for tolerance for those people who live outside the box of society’s moral rules. Martin doesn’t apologize for his “relationship” with Sylvia. He finds fulfillment in his love for the animal, a case he makes with considerable eloquence. His love for the goat doesn’t diminish his love for Stevie but his plea for understanding earns him nothing but abuse that verges on hysterical loathing.

        “The Goat” runs about 100 minutes without an intermission. Its three scenes all take place in the upscale living room occupied by Martin and Stevie and their son. This clearly is not a story of trailer trash perversion on the order of “Tobacco Road.”

     Spectators who find Albee’s premise difficult to stomach will search for symbolic meanings in the play to defuse the shock and maybe the embarrassment of the narrative. They will look in vain. The playwright does throw out a teaser in twice dropping the phrase “large Alice” that some people will seize on as a reference to Albee’s “Tiny Alice,” perhaps his most symbol-drenched and obscure drama. But “The Goat” is what it is, and the audience has to deal with it.

        In one sense, “The Goat” is a broadside in the ongoing battle for sexual freedom. But it’s broader theme remains that call for understanding, if not outright acceptance, of people who march to a different drummer, even if that march tramples on the moral sensibilities of society. Extra marital affairs are recognized, even accepted, as part of the modern domestic scene. Homosexuality and same sex marriages are looked upon with sympathy, at least by a significant percentage of the population. But in the eyes of Stevie, Billy, and Ross (who represents the moral disapproval of society at large) Martin goes too far, and his unapologetic request for understanding just aggravates his transgression. And so, at the end he and Sylvia both play a terrible price.

        The verbal and physical confrontation between Martin and Stevie, after she receives Ross’s letter, is volcanic in its intensity. Yet on balance “The Goat” is also a very funny play, demonstrating that Albee can write comedy at a high level, punctuated with one-liners and zingers worthy of Neil Simon in peak form. “The Goat” is singular in modern American drama for its blend of wit, near tragedy, and the urgency of the moral questions it forces upon the audience.

        The Remy Bumppo cast is exemplary, with Annabel Armour giving perhaps the performance of her illustrious career as Stevie, beside herself with fury and anguish at her husband’s infidelity, compounded by his refusal to recognize it as an infidelity at all. Stevie finds herself in an impossible position that Armour renders with multi dimensional credibility. The mental images of Martin with the goat are too much for woman, detonating shrieks of misery and anger that stun the spectators.    

Nick Sandys is terrific in the difficult role of Martin. Sandys must convey Martin’s bizarre point of view with passion and seriousness. A failure to make Martin’s case plausible would turn the character repellant and hugely diminish the play. Sandys brings it off, an acting feat of striking sensitivity.

        Will Allen is fine as the distraught Billy and Michael Joseph Mitchell is excellent as the audience-high stand-in for society’s values. His Ross is self righteous and judgmental and a meddler and he doubtless speaks for a lot of people in the audience.

        James Bohnen’s directing nails the play’s complexities dead center, shifting drawing room comedy to psychological violence with unforced realism. Tim Morrison’s elegant set provides a proper backdrop for this unlikely tale of out-of-bounds love. Frances Maggio designed the costumes and Heather Gilbert the atmospheric lighting. Victoria Delorio designed the sound and composed the original music.

        “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?” runs through May 8 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $45. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.  April 2011

                   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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The Importance of Being Earnest

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

 

Chicago – Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is the greatest comedy of manners in the English-speaking theater and a really good revival of the play is one of the joys of theater-going.

The Remy Bumppo Theatre Company gives the play a stylish staging that makes good on Wilde’s almost nonstop cascade of wit and epigrams. The production takes some time to build its comic momentum but by the end of the evening the audience should be awash in pleasure.

“Earnest” is a love story of sorts, ultimately three love stories. But the comedy is really about well-born characters straining mightily to be clever, glib, and witty. The great Lady Bracknell summarizes the society of the time with the pronouncement “We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces.” It’s an ironic line, like so many in the play, because for Lady Bracknell, surfaces are everything. Indeed, superficiality seems to be the goal of almost everyone in the play, down to the   droll butler.

                                                                                   

The narrative centers on the efforts of two young men-about-town, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, to woo a pair of pretty young things named Gwendolyn Fairfax and Cecily Cardew.  Presiding with dour disapproval over the romances is the imperious Lady Bracknell.

The play is drenched in coincidences and mistaken identities that repeal all laws of probability. At the end of the final act, six of the characters are appropriately paired off. How long lasting those marriages will be is a matter of speculation, but sufficient unto the day is the comedy thereof, and “Earnest” in the Remy Bumppo staging provides amusement aplenty.

        The first act mostly is devoted to setting the play’s unlikely storyline in motion. Greg Matthew Anderson strains a bit as the relentlessly facetious Algernon, but Paul Hurley is just right as the more three dimensional Jack Worthing.  This is Hurley’s first appearance with Remy Bumppo and the actor is a keeper.

        There seems to be a modern tradition building of having a male actor play Lady Bracknell. I saw William Hutt and Brian Bedford play the role at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with glorious results. Bedford is leading the Stratford production to Broadway this season. David Darlow takes on the role of the imperial lady at Remy Bumppo. The unconventional casting is not a stunt. Hutt, Bedford, and Darlow were simply the best performers for the role. The audience instinctively giggles a bit at the first appearance of a male Lady Bracknell, but almost immediately the credibility of the acting takes over. This isn’t a drag impersonation, just fine gender-blind comic acting.

        Linda Gillum and Kelsey Brennan (another newcomer) are splendid as the female halves of the romantic equation completed by Anderson and Hurley. Gillum strikes the perfect note as Gwendolyn, the lofty London sophisticate. At first I was a bit distracted by her stilted walk, but her affected movement is explained by Lady Bracknell’s comment in the final act that the female chin be being worn very high this season. Gwendolyn, a slave to fashion like the others in the play, is simply holding her chin up in the approved style of the day

     If Gillum’s Gwendolyn represents the urbanity and cynicism of the town, Brennan’s Cecily stands for the comparatively unspoiled innocence of the country. The second act’s highlight is the manner in which the two young women circle each other, veering between hostility and friendship as they assess how much each has to fear as a rival for the affection of the young man they both erroneously believe is named Ernest.    

        In supporting roles, Annabel Armour is a delectable Miss Prism, Cecily’s tutor and the woman who unknowingly holds the key to the narrative. Ted Hoerl is fine as the country parson with a bashful yen for Miss Prism. William Watt contributes a droll cameo as Algernon’s butler in the first act, including some quick thinking improvisation between him and Anderson after the bell rope came off the wall on opening night. The unexpected collapse of the rope was so funny the cast should consider keeping it in the show.

        The physical production nicely replicates the upper class world of the 1890’s. Melissa Torchia designed the modish late Victorian costumes, Richard and Jacqueline Penrod the minimal but effective settings, J.R. Lederle the lighting, and Jason Knox the sound. Shawn Douglass directs with a keen ear for the glories of this language-driven comic masterpiece.

   “The Importance of Being Earnest” is something special in the repertoire of high comedy. The play satirizes the affectations of a certain segment of English society in the late nineteenth century  as well as dramatic conventions of the time and Wilde himself. But all that that matters little to modern audiences. What does matter is the incandescent repartee that flows from every character on stage. The Remy Bumppo ensemble speaks Wilde’s glittering, civilized dialogue with assurance and, there’s that inevitable word again, style. Once the production gets up to speed, the viewing experience is delicious.

    “The Importance of Being Earnest” runs through January 9 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $55. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.  November 2010

                   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Night and Day

By the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago –  “Night and Day” is not your typical Tom Stoppard play. It doesn’t try for the narrative pyrotechnics and visual whiz-bang of dramas like “Jumpers,” “Arcadia,” and “Travesties.” By Stoppard standards, “Night and Day” goes for the straight realistic approach, though the dialogue still snaps off the epigrams and sophisticated wit that make this English dramatist such a one-of-a-kind writer.

        “Night and Day,” which premiered in 1978, is being revived by the Remy Bumppo Theatre, a troupe that thrives on this kind of language-driven modern theater. The dialogue may crackle, but the play unfortunately shows its age. Most playwrights would be proud to create a literate script like “Night and Day,” but in the Stoppard canon this is a second tier work.

        The play is set in the fictional African country of Kambawe, one of those post-colonial new African nations that have developed such a violent internal history. All the action takes place in the home of Geoffrey Carson, a British mine owner.

There are several storylines active in the play, but “Night and Day” is mostly about journalists and journalism. The newspapermen in the play are all after the story of a rebellion against Kambawe military dictator Colonel Mageeba.  The play takes us into “Front Page” territory, with a foreign spin. Two correspondents and a photographer are all after the story, risking their lives to get the copy back to London.

The key characters are Australian journalist Dick Wagner and British photographer George Guthrie (both veterans of the foreign correspondent wars) and idealistic young British reporter Jacob Milne. Serving as a kind of skeptical Greek chorus is Carson’s wife, Ruth, an intelligent and sharp-tongued woman who has one-night stands behind her husband’s back because she is bored an a little desperate.

There are many back-and-forth arguments exploring the importance of the press in society, not ignoring the media’s lapses into sensationalism and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Ruth has little use for the everyday press—“I am with you on freedom of the press—it’s the newspapers I can’t stand.” Wagner and Milne go round and round, Wagner the battle-scarred cynic and Milne the young go-getter. For all his cynicism, Wagner is a pro-labor and anti-management militant who is outraged that Milne broke newsroom solidarity by filing stories while his small English provincial newspaper was enmeshed in a labor dust-up.

The repartee goes back and forth, a lot of it funny and some of it intense. Telling points are made on all sides, like how much are newspapers a necessary public service and how much a rather tawdry business? If the journalists are as clever in their writing as they are in their speech, they should all be prizewinners.

The competitive newspaper world of 1978 scarcely resembles the dire condition of the media today. The background may be the world of the British press but the main situation then and now applies to America. Wagner writes for a British paper called the Globe that publishes only on Sunday. That’s a dinosaur concept today, when the Internet and bloggers bring the news to the public in nanoseconds rather than days. There is something almost endearing about the reporters in “Night and Day” relying on an old-fashioned telex machine to get their stories out.

The setting may be antique, but the issues Stoppard dissects about the necessity of an independent press still have some resonance. Still, we live in a different time. Newspapers are withering away and television news is in trouble. The discussions about the press in “Night and Day” are studded with eternal verities, but for me the subject took on a quaint quality, like the spectators was stepping into a time machine.

There are some problems in the stagecraft. Ruth often speaks directly to the audience, which violates the realism of the play. And it’s sometimes difficult to tell when Ruth is speaking to the viewers (out of the hearing of the other characters) and when she is just muttering to herself. That’s Stoppard’s fault. Linda Gillum is the model of eloquent skepticism about the media while dealing with her personal demons that express themselves in interludes of promiscuity. Ruth’s domestic tribulations aren’t integrated very well into the rest of the play, nor is the cameo appearance of Colonel Mageeba toward the end, though Ernest Perry, Jr., is excellent as the volatile Idi Amin-style dictator.

Greg Matthew Anderson’s Jacob Milne verbally battles Shawn Douglass’s Dick Wagner about the press, both in its intramural labor conflicts and in its mandate to deliver the story to the public, even at great personal danger. The narrative stops while they engage in their heated exchanges, but the writing is urbane and evenhanded and well worth hearing. David Darlow can’t do much with the curiously colorless role of Geoffrey Carson, the industrialist trying to navigate the treacherous political shoals in Kambawe. James Krag takes over the part October 20.

James Bohnen directs with his usual attention to the verbal pleasures of the script. Tim Morrison has designed an effective country house interior, enhanced by J. R., Ederle’s lighting. Samantha Jones designed the period costumes and Jason Knox the sound.

“Night and Day” runs through October 31 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

The show gets a rating of three stars.   Sept. 2010

            Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Les Liaisons Dangereuses

At the Remy Bumppo Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—“Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is one of the most cynical novels ever written and Christopher Hampton has adapted the book into an equally cynical play. The Remy Bumppo Theatre is presenting a stylish and well-acted revival of the play, but it requires a larger helping of the cynicism that makes the novel and drama so engrossing, and disturbing.

        A Frenchman named Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote the novel in 1782 in the form of letters exchanged among the principals of the story. About 200 years later Hampton converted the novel into a play that was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

        The story explores the corruption of innocence by Valmont and his former mistress Madame de Merteuil, two aristocrats in France during the 1780’s. The pair occupy their time violating the virtue of vulnerable and unsuspecting people in their social circle. The couple subtly and skillfully manipulates trusting and unsuspecting men and women, with sexual seduction as the main weapon. They ruin lives because it amuses them.

       Valmont and Merteuil plan their campaigns like generals on the battlefield. The greater the challenge the greater their elation when they finally destroy their victims. It’s chilling stuff, and also fascinating, like watching a pair of Iagos systematically wreak havoc, for sport.

       In “Liaisons,” Valmont and Merteuil wreck the lives of a virtuous married woman named Madame Tourvel and an unworldly 15-year old girl named Cecile Volanges. There is collateral damage among other characters but those two ladies are the ones hunted, and brought down. The older woman dies of a broken heart and the teen-ager will likely spend the rest of her life in a convent.

        Valmont is the chief agent of destruction. He’s highborn and good-looking, a man of the world to his fingertips. It’s fascinating to watch him lay siege to the virtue of the pious Madame Tourvel and seduce young, and willing, Cecile at the same time. He operates like Richard III winning the Lady Anne over the coffin of the lady’s murdered husband. It’s pure evil but it works.

        The original novel was totally without humor or sentimentality. There is much sophistication and urbanity in the play, populated almost entirely by members of the educated French aristocracy. There is also some black humor, but the Remy Bumppo production comes across as a romantic comedy until the story darkens toward the end. The opening night audience laughed often at the machinations of Valmont and Merteiul and how they reeled in the suckers. But this is a “Liaison” largely defanged of its crucial decadence and nastiness.

       Nick Sandys is one of Chicagoland’s best leading men and a natural choice for Valmont, with his suave manner and good looks. But Sandys’s Valmont is too likable. An audience who doesn’t despise the character is missing out on the chief emotional kick of the play. Rebecca Spence is more successful at conveying the duplicity beneath the warm façade of Merteiul but Valmont is the heart of the narrative and Sandys takes us more into the world of “The Philadelphia Story” than the immorality of French aristocrats just a few years before the hand heavy of the French Revolution takes its revenge on their class.

        The acting is solid among the supporting players, notably Linda Gillum as the fatally gullible Madame de Tourvel and Drew Shirley as Valmont’s droll valet and partner in crime. Margaret Katch is good as the 15-year old, ripe for her introduction to the wonderful world of sex by a master. Janice O’Neill is good as Cecile’s mother, a woman who allows Merteiul to guide her and loses her daughter as a result. The remainder of the capable cast consists of Paul Hurley, Annabel Armour, and Sienna Harris.

        David Darlow’s directing properly locates the play’s droll side, but where is the evil? Emily Waecker’s costumes capture the elaborate Baroque look of late eighteenth century France. This is a rich looking production, abetted by the scenic design of Alan Donahue and the property design of Nick Heggestad. Michael Rourke designed the lighting and Jason Knox the sound. Sandys stages one of the more convincing, and dangerous looking, sword fights I’ve ever seen on a stage.

        Audiences exposed to “Liaisons” for the first time likely will come out of the theater well satisfied by all the ingenious plotting among a  wealthy society with too much time on its hands. But an amusing and entertaining evening could have been enhanced by a healthy dose of venom.

        “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” runs through May 2 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50.  Call 773 404 7336 or visit www.remybumppo.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.    March 2010

                        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
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