Adrian Danzig keeps Molly Brennan swinging. Photo/Stan Barouh

By Monica Westin

The circus arts and physical theater company 500 Clown has been establishing itself as a preeminent performance troupe for the better part of the last decade. Especially known for the improvisational, exploratory nature of its productions, the group now finds itself at Steppenwolf for the second time presenting their fourth play, “500 Clown and the Elephant Deal.” Newcity spoke with Leslie Danzig, company member and director of the show, about the show’s features, Brechtian influence, and her vision for a new musical theater.

I’ve read that this show is based in part on Brecht’s “Man is Man.” How did you come upon this as a point of origin, and how has it evolved since then?

We actually realized while working on our last play that we’d stumbled into some Brechtian territory, from what we knew about Brecht and what he was up to in staging his plays, that we were already doing onstage. When we were thinking about material for the next show, we then asked ourselves about picking up an actual Brecht play. We settled on “Man is Man” for a few reasons. First, it’s centered around identity as fluid roles we play in our lives. As clowns, we’re always playing roles transparently, so that connection seemed really fruitful. In Brecht’s play identity becomes a game that goes too far, and the line between fiction and reality gets blurred; we see our own shows as a series of games with real consequences and the questions “are we playing? are we in the game or out?” constantly getting blurred. Read the rest of this entry »

By Monica Westin

Bridget Carpenter’s “Up,” opening next week at Steppenwolf, centers around a man whose greatest moment was decades earlier when he created a flying lawn chair propelled by weather balloons, and whose return to inventing in order to escape the demands of daily life impacts his family’s pragmatism and own dreams. Newcity spoke with Carpenter, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a writer and producer for “Friday Night Lights,”  the week before the play opened.

I couldn’t help but notice that your play is showing during the same time as Pixar’s animated film by the same name. I thought that was a major coincidence, although your play was actually first produced in 2002.

Under other conditions I might feel exasperated. In fact, I just saw the film, and it’s a wonderful, beautiful movie… so it’s more serendipitous synchronicity in this case. I actually thought it was amazing that the two stories aren’t at all the same story and don’t come from the same inspiration, but they’re both about dreams and wishes—and that I found surprising and didn’t bother me in the least. The singularity of the image of being released from the earth and gravity resonated with me. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A veritable buffet of intellectual treats for the the theater geek, with obvious influences from Pirandello to Stoppard and lots of fun plays on conventions of theater and the death of the author. Company member Jeff Dorchen’s play is incredibly smart, it’s absurdist and it’s got protagonist Saul Bellow stumbling into Neil Simon’s “Odd Couple,” a Machiavelli with a South Bronx accent, and the University of Chicago neo-con Allan Bloom being led around on a leash. At the very least, “Strauss at Midnight” is probably the boldest production you’ll see this year. The plot is impossible to parse in full but generally follows the logic of conspiracy theory, the plot of Dante’s Inferno (where Virgil is Virgil Tibbs, police detective from “In the Heat of the Night”), and the overall theme of paranoia and a total breakdown in systems of meaning-making. Because of the wonderfully strange free-associative arc of the show, each moment is drenched with theatrical potential and incredibly exciting for most of the production. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chic and deadly, where lavish style adds layers of significance to a sometimes hurried production. A beautifully garish garbage playground that comprises the set suggests the imminent decay of Oedipus’ kingdom, while costumes and props make subtle but smart reference to ancient Greek theater. To say that the show is somewhat superficial by nature isn’t a criticism; the Hypocrites seem to be suggesting the arbitrary and impossibly stark nature of identity and fate for Sophocles, as well as the literal wasteland that the play creates (so that Oedipus’ daughters who come to comfort him at the end of the play are portrayed by empty dresses). It’s both intellectually hip and a magnificent visual spectacle—scenes of Oedipus threatening a feather-crowned Theseus with a staple gun or Jocasta drinking bleach while singing a lounge song into a microphone inside an open port-a-potty do not fade for a very long time. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Have you heard the praise critics and audiences have been heaping upon the latest Curious Theatre Branch show, a revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker”?  Well, it’s fully deserved.  And now, only six performances remain to catch as fine a Pinter revival as you could hope to get, a confident and intelligent staging that nails Pinter’s complex musicality, but more importantly boasts three superb performances that demand to be seen. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Gudahl and Kate Fry/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Composer Joshua Schmidt scored a surprise hit with Next Theatre’s “The Adding Machine,” so much so that the show went on to have an off-Broadway New York run.  Meanwhile, Schmidt has continued creating sound designs and scoring music on demand for various venues and shows around town, as he has for years.  “A Minsiter’s Wife” is Schmidt’s second full-scale musical-theater piece, based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida.”  The idea to adapt Shaw’s triangular romance to music belongs to Writers’ Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam, who commissioned the work and was originally planning to write the adaptation as well as direct it, but wisely realized that was too daunting a task, and so Austin Pendleton was brought in along with Jan Tranen to write the lyrics.

The end result, in its world-premiere production at Writers’ Theatre, has much going for it, to be sure.  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After her husband’s assassination, Coretta Scott King continued to be a pillar of support for the civil-rights movement. In the Eclipse Theatre Company’s “A Song for Coretta,” five women gather at her funeral to draw strength from the civil-rights icon and to share their own stories.

Zora (Niccole Thurman) is a student journalist covering the proceedings. She interviews Helen (TayLar), a movement veteran; Mona Lisa (Kelly Owens), a Hurricane Katrina refugee; Keisha (Kristy Johnson), a pregnant high schooler; and Gwen (Ebony Wimbs), an Iraqi war vet heading back to the front. The five women look for inspiration in uninspiring times.

The ensemble is uniformly strong; the generational conflict between conservative Helen and combative Keisha is spot-on. While the script hits some clunkers (the writing and staging of two climactic stories are strained), it’s an affecting assessment of the success (and failure) of one community’s struggle. (Lisa Buscani)

“A Song for Coretta,” Eclipse Theatre Company, The Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 N. Lincoln,( 773)404-7336, through July 26.

RECOMMENDED

When Israeli actor Chaim Topol first played Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” in Tel Aviv back in the 1960s, he was a young man in his twenties, still on active duty for the Israeli Army.  Yet as the son of Polish-Russian Jewish parents who, like the fictional milkman Tevye and his family, had been forced out of Eastern Europe, Topol transformed the role from the purely comic interpretation originated by Zero Mostel on Broadway to something more poignant and truer to the musical’s original source material, the Yiddish short stories of Sholem Aleichem.  Despite his relative youth, Topol’s portrayal was so authentic and invigorating that he was chosen to open in the role on London’s West End, which led to director Norman Jewison choosing him to star in the 1971 film version, despite enormous studio pressure for Jewison to go with an older and more established bona fide movie star.

Some twenty years later when Topol had reached his early fifties, at long last the actual age of the character Tevye, he embarked on a national tour of “Fiddler”—including a memorable stop here at the Civic Opera House—that would later land on Broadway, and he would go on to reprise the role in London in 1995, his real-life daughter playing his daughter.  Now 73 years old, Topol began an international tour in January that is being billed as the “Topol Farewell Tour.”  Read the rest of this entry »

This two-person show, which follows a sketch-comedy format, is entertaining but ultimately far less interesting than actually reading the Craigslist website, which is itself already a wonderfully interactive, risk-taking performance. “Craigshow” is chock-a-block with obvious puns that illustrate what are essentially readings of Craigslist ads—for example, stuffing spam into each other’s mouths while reading off spam job descriptions, or using hardboiled eggs to illustrate an egg-donation sketch. Megan Maile Green and Shawn Bowers play off each other well, and they’re  adept in the genre, but as the show goes along, it becomes more and more obvious how little work they had to do to bring the Web site to life. Individual scenes often feel like they could have been imagined backstage twenty minutes before curtain, and it’s hard not to notice that most of the ads depicted come from the last month or so. While a fever pitch in getting through bits does sustain energy, the “Taboo” buzzer they hit to demarcate the separation between bits feels lazy and allows Green and Bowers to avoid creating a through-line for the show. Audience interaction is stilted when it happens: “What good thing happened to you today?” one actor asks audience members, to try to cheer up the author of a desperately lonely personal-ad writer. The show finally ends with an  autobiographical story about falling in love online with a CL con artist, which hits an  ambivalent note that’s far more intriguing than the rest of the show. (Monica Westin)

“Craigshow” plays Tuesdays at 8pm, at Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N. Milwaukee, (773)598-4549, through June  23. $10.

Photo: Jim Newberry

RECOMMENDED

Cheryl Trykv makes Amy Sedaris seem like a circus clown. Her tales of private eyes, girl Fridays, Palm Springs teen runaways and truck-stop lowlifes are peppered with observations about the world that would make anyone else want to cry, but in Cheryl’s hands they’re gems that just need a little spit shine. At heart she’s a storyteller, and her current performance, a monologue of her greatest hits from 1990 to today (many performed at Milly’s Orchid Show), weaves short stories with personal reflections. Whereas the personal asides are a strange blend of self-deprecation and self-affirmation, the stories, as short fiction, are a fit and imaginative revival of the American pulp genre. Cheryl celebrates the absurdity that passes for everyday life. Each sentence offers an unpredictable turn, but each word is precise. To see and hear her speak them onstage is icing. (Jason Foumberg)

Cheryl Trykv performs at Davenport’s, 1383 N. Milwaukee, June 16, 17, 23 and 24 at 8pm.