Lone Prince

Prague Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Guy Roberts’ love affair with Shakespeare began many years ago. “When I was 15,” shares Roberts, “I thought I was going to be a painter and follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. Then I watched Laurence Olivier’s ‘Hamlet’ and was blown away. Hamlet had great clothes, a great sword fight, and he got to kiss two beautiful women. What more could you want?” On February 6, Roberts debuts his one-man Hamlet at Gorilla Tango Theatre. “I wanted to premiere this show in Chicago,” explains Roberts, “because I kept hearing that Chicago was the place to be.” Roberts tackles eighteen characters in his ninety-minute Hamlet adaptation that includes only the scenes the prince is privy to. ”Since it is a very long play with many different subplots you kind of forget what Hamlet knows,” says Roberts. “Seeing and hearing only what Hamlet does, you understand in a much clearer, sharper way the reasons behind the choices he makes.”

Stay Gold

Beginning February 3 at The Building Stage, Walkabout Theater Company and Collaboraction present “Goldbrick,” the story of an immigrant in Chicago told through the music and lyrics of Jon Langford (pictured). “I am really impressed by the quality of the acting,” Langford says of the production. “Tawny [Newsome] and Larry [Yando] do an incredible job. It was nice to hear other people singing my songs. It was like hearing songs for the first time. It renewed my interest in those songs and made them seem new and different even though I know them well.” Loren Crawford, co-creator and writer of the production, hopes to supplement an ongoing discussion circling around America’s perpetually tumultuous relationship with immigrants. “I was watching the inauguration and I was dumbstruck by just how relevant our project is to the times we are experiencing,” she says. “I am humbled and inspired by the realization that our voices are part of a growing chorus that sees and embraces a different future for America, one that includes us all.” 

For each of their shows, about a week before previews, Victory Gardens Biograph Theater hosts an open rehearsal. Tonight, audiences get a sneak peek at Gloria Bond Clunie’s “Living Green,” a story of an upwardly mobile African-American family living on the North Shore but contemplating a move back to the West Side.

For this open rehearsal, the cast runs through the first scene of the second act. The scene, set in a living room, perfectly accommodates a discussion and seems to encourage more candid conversation among the director, playwright, actors and audience.

While discussing her collaboration with the dramaturge, for example, experienced playwright Clunie makes one particularly real confession. “I thought they were saying Drama Turd! I thought they were!”

One most affected audience member, shocked by the idea of a move back to the dangerous West Side, repeatedly questions the writer, director and cast. “Do you know what the West Side is?” she implores incredulously.

All acknowledge that the play asks tough questions and presents no easy answers. “This play is interesting and exciting,” says director Andrea J. Dymon, “because what we do not see onstage is upwardly mobile black folks and what we do not talk about in the black community is who we become—and if we want to be who we become—when we leave black communities.”

“I am not brave enough to be these people, I wish I were,” shares Clunie. “Sometimes plays give you the chance to be braver, to stretch more.” (Meaghan Strickland)

Quick, how many lesbian dramas can you name off the top of your head?  And no, ”The L Word” doesn’t count. That’s a tough one, isn’t it?  After all, if you asked me to do the same with gay drama—as in male homosexual drama—I wouldn’t have to think hard at all.  There are the classics (“The Boys in the Band,” “As Is”), the epic (“Angels in America”), polemic (“The Normal Heart”), Chekhovian (“My Night with Reg”), tragic (“Torch Song Trilogy”), wistful (“The Dying Gaul”), coming-of-age (“Beautiful Thing”) and even puerile (“Party”).  And that’s just a start.  But lesbian stage dramas?  There’s Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour,” but that’s more about the corrosive effects of gossip than it is about lesbianism.  How about David Mamet’s “Boston Marriage,” probably more enjoyable for its dialogue (it is, after all, written by Mamet) than for any great insights into the lesbian experience.

Perhaps this paucity of “lesbian drama” is the reason attention, plaudits and awards were hurled at playwright Diana Son’s “Stop, Kiss” when it first premiered Off-Broadway in the late 1990s, and now being revived by The Gift Theatre as their 2009 season opener.  At its bare bones it’s about two people who unexpectedly fall in love with one another.  Their love is a nascent yet strong love, and one that ultimately sees them through an unexpectedly violent tragedy.  No more, no less.  And although these characters happen to be women, there’s little in the script that explores or justifies how and why these two women—fresh from long-term heterosexual relationships—fall in love.  Quite surprisingly, given that the author is female, I’m apt to think that the play’s believability rests upon an audience’s patriarchal prejudices or chauvinistic fantasies:  since women can easily fall in love with one another emotionally, it must follow that they could take up cunnilingus just as easily.  In fact, the play says so little about the psychology of female-female or lesbian unions that I think you could almost recast the parts heterosexually and have the same play, just make them first cousins or something to equal all the surface “edge” found in this play’s Sapphic situations.  To be fair, I think Son is more interested in exploring the nooks and crannies of how people come together, and certainly it is impossible to deny her shrewd eye for life’s little moments.  Indeed, the play lives in its minutiae, whether it’s the mundane questions we ask potential lovers when courting them, or the pleasure-delaying restraint we savor before that first inevitable kiss.  But these moments, beautifully observed by director Michael Patrick Thornton and his fine ensemble, can only go so far.  And if the play’s dozen or more scenes, some no longer than a few lines, weren’t scattered about flashing forwards and backwards in non-chronological order—a shopworn structural device even ten years ago—I think more people would realize just how average this piece and its writing truly is—almost devoid of subtext and intelligence.  (I wasn’t surprised, by the way, to read in the program that Son is a writer for ”Law and Order,” which helps explain the play’s structure, more appropriate for celluloid or television than for The Gift’s storefront playing area with limited light and depth capabilities to handle the cinematic cutaways).

The production’s only saving grace is its performances, and since this is The Gift, a group of actors who could wring pathos from a greeting card, they imbue the piece with a lot more than is actually there.  Anna Carini and Amy Speckien are superb in the lead roles and Paul D’Addario and James D. Farruggio do more with their one-dimensional supporting characters that could be expected of anyone. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

 At The Gift Theatre, 4802 N. Milwaukee, (773)283-7071. Thu–Fri 7:30/Sat 2:30 pm & 7:30pm. $20-$25.  Through March 14.

By William Scott

For quite some time if you have wanted legit opera in Chicago you have had two choices. Lyric Opera of Chicago and Chicago Opera Theater are the big boys in town and they hold quite the monopoly.  Though both companies produce acclaimed work, if you are looking for something contemporary, options dry up.  Oh sure, you will see the occasional Benjamin Britten or John Adams opera by one company or the other, but  both primarily present in traditional formats.  Enter Eric Reda and Chicago Opera Vanguard.

“I am excited to present a whole new experience for Chicago lovers of music, theater and opera,” explains artistic director Reda. COV’s mission is to create a Midwest home for engaging opera  and music theater with contemporary resonance.  Reda’s philosophies are simple:  be open to anything, start with good text and deliver a musical experience that resonates with an audience.  To be sure, he understands that the quality of the music experience will largely be the stick by which the company is measured.

“My collaborators and I talk a lot about what is it that we can do to make opera more viable,” Reda says.  He goes on, “Why does it have to be a museum piece? It’s time to start revitalizing this form.  Funding is going down for it and it’s like looking at a pretty picture that looks really great in a gallery but it has no immediate impact.”

The company got its feet off the ground with several minor productions and concerts, most notably, the recent evening of art songs  (most of them newly commissioned) called “The Chicago AIDS Quilt Songbook” at the Court Theatre.  The concert went to support Seasons of Concern, the Chicago theater community’s fundraising effort to fight against AIDS.  Now the young company embarks on an important milestone for any organization, its first full season.

Season zero for COV will bring two productions.  In May they will produce “GREEK,” a modern Oedipus myth set in a Britain afflicted by “a plague of racism, violence and mass unemployment” written by Mark-Anthony Turnage and Jonathan Moore.  The show promises plenty of bad language and a sixteen-piece orchestra.  But first, this week COV will open with a piece that has been making the rounds to major producing institutions nationwide, Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Orpheus and Euridice.”

Gordon’s song cycle is written for a soprano voice (Euridice), a clarinet (Orpheus) and a piano.  Rebecca Prescott and Patrick Rehker will perform the title roles respectively. Two dancers, Logan Vaughn and Matthew Prescott, will accompany the piece, embodying the emotional journey of the title lovers.

Although based on an ancient myth, if the piece feels intensely personal that is because it is. Gordon wrote the piece as a tribute to his lover, who died of AIDS in 1996.   The libretto poured out of him one night during a particularly rough period in his partner’s sickness.  The writer knew this was something large and special.

“I didn’t quite realize what I was doing. It was born out of my need to tell my own story at the time,” Gordon recounts. ”Pretty soon I realized I had not only written about the birth of love but I had written about the birth of art through suffering.  It was so intense.”

Reda is counting on that innate intensity to create a loud and visible start for COV.  Gordon’s work is largely accepted by more traditional opera goers—in fact the writer did a residency at the Lyric—but he works within a new school of composers who are struggling to keep the operatic form living in the often rigid confines of the established industry.

COV will need the support  of non-traditional opera goers.  An alternative warehouse venue like the AV-Aerie may help.  Costumes by local design celebrity and “Project Runway” contestant Steven Rosengard may also go a long way to reaching out.  But Reda also sees the economic climate as a possible advantage.

“Part of what we have been saying all along is in making new work accessible, it is important to also make them economically accessible,” Reda says.  Good seats to the bigger houses can cost upward of $100.  COV memberships are $50 for both shows.

“I feel like right now in economically tough times people are still starved for cultural entertainment. I feel we are a viable alternative,” Reda says. “Why not make a home where you can be one of a hundred people in a hall listening to really great music theater.”

“Orpheus and Euridice” plays the AV-Aerie, 2000 W. Fulton, January 29-February 9, chicagovanguard.org

RECOMMENDED

Inez Cuesta doesn’t have time to attend milongas (social tango dances) while on tour, but she does enjoy seeing how other cultures have embraced Argentine Tango over the years. “All the world wants to know more about tango,” she says. “We are well-received in Europe, in America. Japan is crazy about it.”

This weekend, Tango Fire will visit Chicago—a city with its own sizable cadre of crazed tangueros y tangueras—for the first time, slicing up the stage of the Harris with hyper-precise, lightning-fast footwork executed in four-inch heels. The show is in two acts: a milonga scene in which the five couples, vocalist Javier Dominguez and accompanying quartet Quatrotango share the stage; and a modern section, where suits are traded in for tight black tees, gowns make up for in sequins what they lose in yardage, and flashy, decidedly un-tango-like lifts, splits and death-drops punctuate much open-mouthed ribcage-and-thigh-stroking. This latter half, the blown-out caricature of an understated, versatile sensuality inherent in the dance, is the aesthetic many tango stage shows emphasize—and it’s understandable to an extent, as the tremendous nuance of the traditional salon style—in which feet remain on the floor pretty much the whole time—is near impossible to project to a house of 1500-plus. (This may also be why the best promotion for tango instructors is a virtuoso salon performance; the contained, simmering physicality of the traditional dance tends to inspire participation over spectatorship.) Ms. Cuesta, who joined the company with her partner Mauricio Celis in 2005, appreciates the spectrum of the Tango Fire production.

“In this performance, we show all styles,” she says. “It’s important that people are introduced to all of tango. There are many ways to demonstrate our culture, our music. This show is very complete. We love this life, this music.” When I ask what style she prefers, she answers as a true tanguera, drawn to Argentine tango at the age of 16, before any other dance form: “the traditional. It is more difficult; we are drawing on the stage with our feet. It’s very clean.” (Sharon Hoyer)

At the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 East Randolph, (312)334-7777. Saturday, Jan 24, 3pm and 8pm. $45-$85.

RECOMMENDED
“Medicine is food, and food is medicine” declares the kitchen matriarch Po Momma at one point in Northlight’s world premiere of Kenneth Lin’s “Po Boy Tango,” and so too, is this tightly constructed production a true-to-the-recipe dose of healthy brain-food.

“Po Boy Tango” tells the unconventional story of a friendship between a Taiwanese immigrant now living on Long Island, Richie Po, and Gloria B, the African-American hospice worker who also happens to be the second-best cook he has ever known. The first, his deceased mother, was a celebrity chef in Taiwan, and her presence is conveyed through “video” interludes that punctuate the play. Richie convinces Gloria to cook his mother’s famous banquet for his daughter’s upcoming wedding; in return, he’ll partner with her in a lifelong dream of opening a Southern soul food café. Accordingly, the stovetop provides the backdrop for an engaging journey into the nuances of food, heritage and uneasy racial relations. Anyone who’s spent time cooking with friends and family know what a stew can be made out of the interactions between the participants.

Brian Sidney Bembridge’s versatile and contemporary set transforms kitchen to kitchen to kitchen, augmenting the topnotch acting by Ken Narasaki (Richie Po), Jeanne Sakata (Po Momma) and Jacqueline Williams (Gloria B), and efficient direction from Chay Yew that injects the story with enough energy to prevent its potentially inert story line from spoiling.

My principal reservation about the production was the use of pantomimed food rather than the real or simulated thing. The play’s description makes it sound like a sensual feast on the order of the movies “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” and “Big Night”; instead it was like watching children play tea party—not only disappointing but distracting, at least for the first ten minutes or so minutes till I got used to it.  (Brian Hieggelke)

“Po Boy Tango” plays at Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie, (847)673-6300 or northlight.org, through February 15.

RECOMMENDED

Two prisoners of an unnamed totalitarian dictatorship, tortured daily for reasons they know not, ruminate on philosophical questions that result from their state of helplessness and ignorance. The dialogue, well-timed if not overly memorable, is at its best when it nimbly darts between the easy irony and dark humor that results when the men, one empirical and one sentimental in outlook, try to figure out the world around them and fail wildly. At worst, and more often, the speech is somewhat stilted and its rhetoric forced; the greatest irony in a show about problems of meaning-making is that it succumbs to the temptation of trying to sound clever. There’s also a problem in knowing how to take their clichéd situation; one of the prisoners, in attempting to understand the layout of the prison, points out that the world has a few basic structures that have proven themselves over time to work, and this logic is clearly borne out in the structure of the play, which can’t quite seem to decide if it’s playing with conventions of the genre or merely stuck in it—is the torture chamber of a prison in an unnamed totalitarian dictatorship a metaphor for life itself (“We come here involuntarily, we’re smashed daily, and our only escape is death”) or is it a literal setting, seemingly indicated by the grotesque appearance of a torturer delivering a detailed, beyond-gory monologue about the methodology of a murder? That said, “The Unseen” makes important if not original inquiries into what we can know and beautifully explores the kinds of religious and other anti-intellectual impulses that take the place of failed reason and empiricism, and it’s at moments very moving. Technically the show is sound, if not striking, with smart use of lighting that makes audience both prisoners and panopticon; but in the end, the ideas turn out to be far more interesting than the dialogue, characters and production as a whole. (Monica Westin)

At A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N Wells, (312)943-8722. Through March 1.

A lot of time was put into Sad Hat Productions inaugural production of writer/director Roell Schmidt’s “The Rotogravure.”  The three-plus hours the audience has to sit through it is proof of that.  They call it a cine play, a live performance and recorded video mashup that tells the story of a budding young love that could not feel less vital.  The black-and-white video narrates the story of a guy and girl as fantastical interpretations of the mundane proceedings are enacted live in vivid color.  I will say the costumes, by Alycia Barohn and Jennifer Tillery, are beautiful and there are some really clever theatrical devices used for transition.  However, most of the cleverness is dampened by the overuse of spectacle moments and the seconds between transitions stretch on and on.  Soon, very soon, it just gets obnoxious.  The production didn’t damage me so bad that I’m not interested in seeing another of Sad Hat’s cine plays.  But here’s some friendly advice:  Do it in a smaller space. The Athenaeum mainstage ate your show up, and take the air out of it please. (William Scott)

At The Athenaeum, 2936 North Southport, (312)902-1500. Through January 31.

RECOMMENDED

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, the Pennsylvanian duo that stars in the highly successful and infectiously bizarre “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, bring their mostly indescribable routine on the road. In three seasons of the show, the tandem has crafted a niche out of outlandishly kitschy costumes, irrepressibly goofy satire and a blitz of short sketches with virtually no ties to logic (other than they were clearly conceived after downing five Red Bulls). To get an idea of the extent of Tim and Eric’s unadulterated randomness one has to watch the show for themselves, if just to see if they can stomach an entire episode of Jeff Goldblum starring in the Jeff GoldBlueMan group, a pseudo-infomercial for the “Innernette” (the entire Internet packed into one CD-ROM!), and John C. Reilly as “Dr. Steve Brule,” a humiliated, possibly mentality-challenged news reporter. Yes, that really is an actual episode, and no, that doesn’t include the dance party. (Andy Seifert)

Tim and Eric Perform January 24 at 7:30pm at The Vic Theatre, 3145 North Sheffield, (773)472-0449.

RECOMMENDED

One of Zanies Comedy Club’s most reliable MCs as well as one of the most underrated comedians on the national stand-up scene, Chicago’s own Hannibal Buress brings a style of comedy that refuses to rely on gimmicks: no props, no in-your-face attitude, no outward quirkiness, no farting into the microphone. Buress’ shtick: jokes, drawing equally from observational and non sequitur varieties and narrating in a lethargic fashion that somehow exponentially increases the jokes’ effectiveness. “People always think I’m high, all the time. I stopped smoking weed like a year ago,” he says. “’Are you high? You look high.’ Naw I’m not high, I’m just way cooler than you.” And it’s true—despite looking a little nerdier than the average comic, Buress’ general laidback demeanor says, “I am awesome.” Watch for him in an upcoming dorky African-American stand-up documentary, “The Awkward Kings of Comedy.” (Andy Seifert)

January 23-25 at Lakeshore Theater, 3175 N. Broadway, (773)472-3492. $15.