Great Small Works' "Marcovaldo Planets"

By Monica Westin

It’s a big weekend for Seth Bockley. In addition to his highly-anticipated performance promenade “The Twins Would Like to Say” with Dog & Pony opening at Steppenwolf Garage on Sunday, Bockley has curated the impressive lineup of artists at Links Hall’s Toy Theater Festival this weekend.

Bockley champions toy theater for its populist roots in nineteenth-century paper theater, which could be made in anyone’s living room as a precursor to television. The form has morphed from living-room entertainment to a cheap, DIY way of making performance that Bockley loves because it’s “not rarefied art.” We spoke to Bockley about this form he wants to be reclaimed as an everyday act.

Toy theater seems to be an exciting and increasingly popular form lately—I’m thinking of companies like Great Small Works, who I know are going to be part of this show. Why do you think there is such a strong interest in toy theater today? When did you personally become interested in the medium?

I became interested in toy theater, and puppetry more generally, through work with Redmoon back in 2004 during my mentorship with Frank Maugeri, now the artistic director there. I originally was more interested in writing and had no intention, really, of getting involved with puppetry, but through seeing what Frank was able to do with the medium, I became extremely excited and interested in this form of storytelling. So oddly, I had become involved as a writer for puppet theater, which was a strange thing to be, and our collaboration allowed me to see the potential of this form. I see it as a form that can both be in dialogue with and in competition with cinema—working with puppetry is closer to the work of a filmmaker rather than a theater director. One of the many cool things it allows is a way of performing animation—performing film really—by other means. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Unfortunately, there was only one performance of Chris Sullivan’s creepy, gorgeous, hilarious, and profoundly one-off show at Rhinofest this year. However, “Mark the Encounter” has been in development for years (it shows), and so it’s possible there will be another incarnation in Chicago, though its creator plans to take it on the road before that happens. If and when it does, it’s an important one to see—rarely do we get a chance to see a performance piece that has been as meticulously worked as Sullivan’s, nor one that incorporates truly arresting—and at times brilliant—writing, perfectly disturbing comedy and a sense of the absurd delivered with droll understatement.

This is all to say that “Mark the Encounter” is very smart and at most times seemingly the work of a deranged consciousness. The show follows a dream logic, beginning with a doctor convincing a woman to donate her newly vegetable husband’s heart to a creepy marionette named Fred. Fred appears again as the fantasy of the dead man’s alleged brother Nosmo, whose insanely funny, and very very sad inner life turns out to be the expressionist hinge around which the short scenes rotate. Nosmo has a Peruvian mountain man living where his heart used to be (dysphemistically called a homunculus). His fantastically depraved and hilarious fantasies of seducing his brother’s widow run up against deeply unhealthy psychotherapy sessions that easily outstrip the subject’s usual treatment. Other scenes, intertwined and undermining one another, including an undertaker with the hustle of a used-car salesman and a series of horrific funeral elegies delivered with professional deadpan, somehow do more than stay afloat. This show embodies the niche between performance art and theater that Chicago desperately needs filled, and it does so in a damn smart, damn funny way. (Monica Westin)

Rhinofest.com

By Monica Westin

Links Hall’s new director, Roell Schmidt, is as diverse as the programming at Links; a playwright, producer and successful head of development and marketing at Lookingglass Theatre and the Chicago Chamber Musicians. We spoke with Schmidt, who started at Links in July, to get a sense of her plans.

Given your background in development, it seems that one of your focuses is going to be bringing in audiences?

That’s absolutely one of my most important missions. Performers don’t perform for themselves. I feel strongly that one of my major efforts has to be to ensure that the audience attendance is first at the scene, the way it was for Poonie’s this fall. We’ve been able to hit capacity a few times, and that’s our continued goal…. One method I found effective at other places has been the mighty power of the creative college student. There’s a great granting program that allows us to hire undergraduates to come and work on staff, and they’re tapping into all of their social-networking knowledge and creativity, thinking about who would be the right groups or individuals to know about an event, and how to get them that information. Read the rest of this entry »

John Sanders, Kate Fry and Rob Lindley/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

When the Noël Coward revue “Oh, Coward!” opened in late 1972, Coward himself was still around but his detached and wry style had fallen way out of fashion. British actor/director/playwright Roderick Cook thought that the time was right to remind us all of what an original voice Coward had been, and the result was a hit show that even Coward himself came to check out in early 1973 in what turned out to be his last public appearance (he died in March of that year).

Cook’s idea was astonishingly simple: two male performers—one was originally Cook himself—and one female performer, all in evening clothes and sipping champagne, singing Coward songs and acting out scenes from his best-known plays. It was a passport to another era, and nearly four decades later, it feels as fresh as ever, at least in the hands of Writers’ Theatre. Entering the performance space in the back of a suburban bookstore, you are offered a glass of champagne as you head into an intimate theater transformed into an elegant, art deco nightclub of the 1930s. Music director Doug Peck greets you in tails as he is playing Coward songs on a grand piano and you find your way to small tables encircling the space in inviting, cabaret style. Read the rest of this entry »

Wayne Wilson, Jerry Kernion, Daniel Passer/Photo: Kristie Kahns

RECOMMENDED

Traditional Cirque du Soleil fans—and they are legion—are likely to find this latest comedy-packed, vaudeville-style entry in the franchise a perplexing, even tedious experience in that it has little in common with past offerings. “Daniel, help me down from here,” says clown Wayne Wilson, caught on a rising microphone. “I can’t,” says Daniel Passer, “I’m not in the union.” So much for the Chicago topical humor (the show is dress-rehearsing here for a New York opening).

Still, the take-off on American “talent” shows is hysterical, though it is likely to be unappealing to those who actually like such shows. “Is there anyone with any talent here?” says emcee Schmelky (Jerry Kernion), and seat numbers of “volunteers” are read aloud to audition on stage. All are clowns, of course, although out of makeup and just initially “normal” enough that they could pass for actual audience members. Before long, we get a ventriloquist whose dummy is deaf (the ventriloquist silently moves his hands endlessly, imitating sign language), a streaker/contortionist as a “modern dancer” (Patrick de Valette) and “the oldest mime in the world” (Gordon White) who comes on stage with a walker and takes his time to pantomime a large glass box that takes him long stretches of time to make his way across to its four corners.  Cruel humor, to be sure, but funny nonetheless.

As for actual circus acts within the show, these are few and far between, and consist mostly of juggling and a couple of gymnasts, albeit all excellent, as you would expect. What we get instead are elaborate dance routines, colorful costumes and an overdose of skits with no overall theme to any of this other than apparently being scaled-down Cirque du Soleil stuff reconfigured for theater venues.  (Dennis Polkow)

“Cirque du Soleil Banana Shpeel” runs through January 3 at the Chicago Theatre, $23-$98.

Ricky Jay/Photo: Jesse Dylan

RECOMMENDED

Ricky Jay opened “A Rogue’s Gallery” by reciting a poem that his friend Shel Silverstein wrote for him, in which Jay defends himself against a gun-wielding sore loser with only his playing cards. By the end of the evening, the idea of Jay fighting crime with cards seemed not only entirely possible, but paled in comparison to some of his other feats. Through random and sometimes haphazard processes, Jay selected audience members to join him on stage for various mesmerizing sleight-of-hand effects (he doesn’t call them tricks) in which he somehow managed to inscribe a book to someone before knowing her name, made cards seemingly teleport from one place to another, and blindly charted the course of a knight across a chess board without ever landing in the same space twice, while reciting Shakespeare and spontaneously calculating square roots. He also shared clips from some of the many films he’s been in and consulted on, and generally made people laugh tears with his remarkable stagecraft and wit. It sounds strange, and it was; but the kind of strange that causes every part of you all the way down to the cellular level to wonder how? Read the rest of this entry »

By Damien James

Ricky Jay is a master of deception, and chances are good that you’ve seen his work even if you have no idea who he is. With his company Deceptive Practices (motto: “Arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis”), Jay has consulted and served as technical advisor for stage and screen alike, working on such films as “Forrest Gump” (he designed the wheelchair that made Gary Sinese look legless), David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” (he also acted in the latter two films), among others. Beyond that, Jay may be the world’s foremost sleight-of-hand artist, its greatest historian of magic and the art of the con, and the preeminent archivist and academic of human oddities, as explored in his quarterly, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies. He can also, by the way, throw a playing card so hard and fast as to pierce the rind of a watermelon, “that most prodigious of all household fruits,” as he refers to it.

For five nights at the beginning of December, Jay holds court in the Mamet-directed one-man show “A Rogue’s Gallery,” billed as a more personal and improvisational performance, at the Royal George. Jay was good enough to share some of his time after a long day on the set of the TV show “Flash Forward,” whose cast he recently joined. He plays, in his words, “a menacing character.” I’ve heard stories of how gruff and elusive Jay can be and what subjects he famously avoids; so, expecting gruff, I asked how he was doing. “Honestly, I’m thoroughly and completely exhausted, meaning that I will be like putty in your hands.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ryan Robinson

RECOMMENDED

There are two things that come to my mind when someone says “mime.”  The first is Marcel Marceau, who is probably the person that most Americans think of despite the fact that very few of us ever had the chance to see the late (reportedly great) French mime artist during his lifetime. And then I think of “Tootsie,” that delicious 1982 comedy in which a dejected Dustin Hoffman, strolling through Central Park, pauses to observe a mime balancing on a curb and then cruelly tips him over, a gesture that probably represents most people’s attitude towards mime artists.

But after experiencing the one-man mime show, “Magical Exploding Boy” presented under the auspices of Chicago Physical Theater, I will now think of Dean Evans. With nothing more than a bare stage, chair and a few props, this professional actor, mime artist and clown, who has worked extensively with the Neo-Futurists and (quite impressively) studied with Marceau himself, holds your rapt attention—no exaggeration here—for fifty-five minutes straight, and ultimately delivers one of the most unique, enjoyable and physically accomplished entertainments to be seen in Chicago right now. Read the rest of this entry »

John Pierson, Luke Holladay, Vanessa S. Valliere/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

There are those who find the Neo-Futurists scary any time of the year, so the thought of the avant-garde ensemble actually setting out to be scary for the Halloween season sounded intriguing, to say the least.  As you wait for your Edgar Allan Poe-themed tour to begin, you notice, ever so subtlely, the presence of a beautiful-but-hushed-and-pale young woman sitting in a corner copiously planting herself in dirt, an upside-down take on Poe’s fear of premature burial. Old photographs surround her, some which she buries along with her, and at least one audience member has her program spirited away and buried along with the photos. A personable and playful but mysterious guide clad in a black robe and hood with a half glow-in-the-dark facemask greets our group in silence and throws a glowing red bouncing ball to see who will go first.  Entering a long, scary hallway full of Andy Warhol-like portraits of well-known dead people, we make our way to a room based on Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” where a game audience member is given a palette of real paints and a brush and invited to paint a slowly deteriorating model on a video screen. Our aesthetic host, meanwhile, judges the quality of each, crumbling up ones that the rest of us decide do not represent honest artistic efforts.  A room devoted to “The Tell-Tale Heart” has audience members reading free riffs on the tale from a deck of cards (two of us had to chime in with punctuated “thump-thump” sound effects) but to careful and heartfelt direction from our silent guide. Read the rest of this entry »

Sultry striptease and karaoke are what this unique burlesque show is about tonight at the U.S. Beer Company. The audience cheers as the hosts and dancers appear on stage one-by-one, ready to shed their costumes.

But there’s more to burlesque, or the “classic striptease,” than what many think. American burlesque in the early twentieth century combined satire and social commentary with performance and of course, striptease. However, solo performer and producer for Flesh Tones Burlesque, Cathy “Maiden Sacrifice” Russell, says as it’s become more popular, it’s become difficult to find that style anymore.

“As it’s gotten bigger, people who don’t have quite the education yet as to the history and what it’s typically been about, why it’s important in our dance history and what that meant socially,” Russell says. “It’s really gone back to basics. It’s gotten a little conservative.” Read the rest of this entry »