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 »

Northwestern University’s Theatre and Interpretation Center is currently presenting three productions of its brand new “Masters-in-the-Making” series, which features the work of three third-year MFA student directors. The works include David Greig’s “The American Pilot,” “The Who’s Tommy” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel. “The idea is to celebrate the kind of capstone experience of these three young directors,” Artistic Director Henry Godinez says. “We’re putting them together in the same quarter, almost as sort of a festival.” Godinez says the idea of putting the productions together—instead of scattered around the year, as they were in the past—helps them earn attention. “My feeling was that [the productions] would get lost in the midst of the rest of the season,” Godinez says. “I felt like this would be exciting and it would be advantageous to make an event out of it. Of the productions, Godinez says, “All three [directors] have chosen projects that are personal to them. They have a comment to make about the way they view the world in which they live.” The “Masters-in-the-Making” series runs through March 14. (Tom Lynch)

David Cross and Bob Odenkirk

By Andy Seifert

Chicago may be an improv town, but Chicago also likes a little one-on-one action every once in a while, as in the audience versus the entertainer, one guy or gal throwing out his or her material in the hopes that it will produce a moments worth of euphoria in a crowd of onlookers and they can reap all the glory. That’s stand-up comedy for you, and it’s the format that will dominate the “Just for Laughs” Festival, which makes its American debut after twenty-seven years in Canada.

Legitimate Hollywood stars, alt-comedy favorites, Comedy Central stand-bys, Chicago theater troupes, and fresh-looking up-and-comers (yet to be chewed up and spit out by the industry) will converge in the Second City between June 17-21, meaning a ton of talent and a number of borderline personality disorders will be on full display. Spanning twelve venues throughout the city and including a fluid, diverse lineup of about forty shows, the Just for Laughs festival should appeal to a wide range of audiences and, like any festival, has its share of both immensely exciting shows and left-field head-scratchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Blessed Child

By Monica Westin

The second annual Alcyone Festival opens this week, dedicated to celebrating female playwrights and combating their lack of representation on American stages. Newcity spoke with Tony Adams, the artistic director of Halcyon Theater and curator of the festival.

Tell me about the concept for this year’s festival. Is there a through-line or common theme? How will the plays work together?

We’re focused on bringing women writers to light, specifically playing with outdated notions about the plays women write. The idea of the festival has been to undermine the idea that women write small domestic dramas, and we tried to get as far away from that idea as possible. Last year’s festival was inspired by the playwright Lillian Hellman, and we played with the idea of “1000 years up to Lillian Hellman,” producing plays of early female playwrights from that entire span of time. This year’s show will focus on themes as far from domestic drama as possible: terrorism and the cult of martyrdom in different variations. (They take place in locations from Palestine to Bosnia to a non-specific milieu reminiscent of Denmark.) Read the rest of this entry »

"The Day of Knowledge" was first produced as part of Leap Fest 4/Photo: Ryan Ward Thompson

By Monica Westin

Leap Fest, one of the strongest new-play festivals in town for five years running, goes into its sixth incarnation this month. The festival is unique in subject matter, focusing on sociopolitical and overly political plays, which other companies might shy away from, and three Leap Fest plays have gone on to win Jeff Awards, so the odds of seeing one of next year’s Jeff Award-winners is uncannily high. I spoke with Drew Martin, the interim co-artistic director (along with David Alan Moore), about what to expect at Leap Fest 6.

Leap Fest is known as a powerhouse new-play festival, and the Jeff Award record certainly attests to its strength. How do you choose the plays, and what’s exciting to you about the process?

I attribute the Jeff odds to the selection process. The plays we choose are whittled down from hundreds, and we read them over and over and argued about them. We’ve done plays in the past from all over the country and internationally. This year, four of the five playwrights are from Chicago, which isn’t intentional because we don’t target any particular demographic and it does vary from year to year. Read the rest of this entry »

By Valerie Jean Johnson

It was 1920 when Eugene O’Neill was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize for “Beyond the Horizon,” forecasting his place in theater history as one of America’s most important playwrights. Nearly a hundred years later, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre honors and examines the legacy of the “father of American drama” with “A GLOBAL EXPLORATION: Eugene O’Neill in the 21st Century,” a three-month festival (curated by Artistic Director Robert Falls) showcasing productions by some of today’s most innovative and exciting theater companies. At the top of the lineup is the New York City-based Wooster Group, itself a legend of the contemporary American stage, presenting their groundbreaking interpretation of “The Emperor Jones.”

For over three decades, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, the company has been constructing its powerfully unique multimedia performances, including radical reworkings of plays by some of the most lauded playwrights of the historical and contemporary canon: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill. Their highly stylized productions have earned critical acclaim and drawn passionate controversy, perhaps none more so than “Jones,” the rarely produced, controversial, expressionistic tale of Brutus Jones, the tyrannical emperor of an island in the West Indies, on the run from natives in revolt, haunted by the ghosts of both his criminal past and the scars of America’s nefarious racial history. The nucleus of the Group’s explosive production, which premiered in 1993, is Kate Valk, a white woman who takes the stage with her face caked in thick black makeup, assuming the title role. It is a performance that has been praised by critics as “riveting, haunting and altogether astonishing,” a “tour de force” that has challenged racial and gender stereotypes while dazzling, disturbing and defying expectations of audiences around the globe.

Valk’s relationship with O’Neill’s play goes back to her childhood: “I certainly grew up with [it]…Paul Robeson [the stage and screen legend who played Jones in the 1924 revival] was one of my idols and I had seen the film…I had even, as a young girl, seen a ballet version of ‘The Emperor Jones’ so I certainly knew about it, although I hadn’t ever read the actual play.” It wasn’t until much later that Valk encountered the play on the page, when LeCompte presented the idea of producing the play to the Group. “When I first started working with the company they were doing ‘Port Judith,’ and Spalding’s [Gray] party piece was kind of a mad dance… he and Liz had taken and edited a section from ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night,’ so O’Neill was around…we read [‘Jones’], and she [LeCompte] thought that I could play it.”

The Wooster Group’s process draws from a variety of sources—music, film, traditional global theater practices, pop culture—and for this production, the company found a great deal of inspiration in the presentational style of Japanese Noh theater. “We began working with the text from O’Neill and the movement that we loved from the Asian theater forms—not that we studied it at all, it was more a kind of very modern, fast synthesis of all those materials, but it came very intuitively. And it’s all there on the page, like music… It’s written phonetically.”

And on a first reading, O’Neill’s writing style is nearly as startling in its appearance on the page as the story itself—the diction and language immediately and disturbingly evoke the ghosts of American minstrelsy characters. Confronted with the apparition of a prison guard he killed before fleeing to the island, Jones cries out to the dark walls of the surrounding forest “I kills you, you white debil, if it’s de last thing I evah does! Ghost or debil, I kill you agin!” Valk’s Brutus Jones is presented with such magnetic and unrelenting precision that each performance, she admits, is extremely exhausting, and preparing for each remount of the show is a challenge to both mind and body for this seasoned and accomplished actress. “I don’t quite have the same energy I had when I was 35,” Valk says with a chuckle, “but maybe there’s something else I look for. I would say what I lose in youthful robustness I maybe make up for just by experience of all the other kind of performance I’ve done with Liz and the group since then. [The performance] takes a lot of energy and I was a little worried about that until… Scott [Shepard] and Ari [Fliakos], the people that I play with on stage, and I just watched the tape. I’m really looking forward to doing it again.”

Those recordings of past performances are invaluable tools for the Group when remounting works from their thirty-plus year history. “We just watched the tape of the last time we performed it, in Philadelphia a little over a year ago. It’s scored out, and it doesn’t change radically in terms of structure. The singing of the song, of the text, my style, is still very much the same.” But this tour of “Jones” will be the company’s last, says Valk, explaining simply that “there are certain roles you play at certain times of your life.”

But Valk seems more than pleased at the prospect of launching the first of the final performances here in Chicago, a fitting culmination of the fifteen-year journey of “Jones.” “It’s an honor to be part of the O’Neill festival—are you kidding? To have the work seen in that context, I’m thrilled. To be considered part of the modern canon of O’Neill’s work, I’m deeply honored.”

At Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, (312)443.3800, January 7-11

Adam Webster, founding artistic director of the side project theater, returns to his original mission of making the intimate space of his theater a second home to area artists in what he calls an “open door policy” for artists to direct/write/act without creating a traditional ensemble. His ambitious year-long one-act festival in eight parts, “Cut to the Quick” debuts this weekend, with the overall theme of thwarted love, and the way we communicate (or fail to), which will allow Webster to accommodate a huge number of artists he admires as well as trying his hand at crafting disparate pieces into a coherent evening of theater. I spoke with him the weekend before the show opens to hear a little more about this selection and self-described curatorial process.

For a short-play festival, yours seem to be more intent than usual on grouping plays so that each evening creates a single journey, and the different evenings speak to each other. Can you tell me more about that process?

Yeah, curating is a helpful way for me to view what my role has been—it’s all about visualizing different varieties of blending between plays. Most of the shows I’ve chosen also don’t have definitive endings, so the audience has to make conclusions themselves.

Do the shows then somewhat dissolve together?

Hopefully there will be an arc to each evening, at least as I see it in my head, and in rehearsals it’s seemed to work that way. We have several different approaches to a certain theme—for example, the latter half of the ten-minute plays evening has five shows in it that have something to do with war—although I would hate to call it a “war component”—that also incorporates the romantic relationship elements that dominate the plays of the first half of the evening… drawing towards a grittier interpersonal darker side of humanity. So out of the relationship half there continues a thread of how relationships are informed by aggression, and it evolves from there, in a connected but different tone.

It sounds like it took a lot of work—or luck—to get these plays to work in an intertextual, narrative way. How did that come about?

As part of the side project’s mission, I accept new plays all the time. I’ve collected something like 200 plays, and the ones I can’t forget about ended up in a pile. It helped having those seven or eight plays to start.When I was ready to start the festival I read those plays and said, you know, these kind of go together in a broad sense, how can we fill in gaps and take the audience on a real journey?

“Cut to the Quick” consists of 19 plays presented in three programs. The programs are: “Splayed Verbiage,” ten-minute-plays about love and war, runs Fri-Sat at 7:30; Sundays at 2pm; “Static/Cling,” three pieces surrounding the language of families, runs Wednesdays at 7:30; Sundays at 5pm. “Splinters & Shrapnel,” four pieces exploring our skewed world and how we skew it, runs Thursdays and Sundays at 7:30. More details at thesideproject.net. (Monica Westin)

By Monica Westin

Ten-minute play festivals have one distinct advantage over other nights spent at the theater: the odds are strongly stacked in favor of seeing at least one play that touches the quick, and the ones that make you squirm are over before you know it. On the flip side, short-play festivals tend to be a very mixed bag, and often without any coherence of aesthetic or ideas tying the shows together.

Enter LiveWire Chicago Theatre’s first annual VisionFest, a forward-looking theater festival in search of relevant short plays that speak to one another through a common theme. Using online polling, LiveWire discovered that one of the most central themes the public wanted to see explored onstage was that of control. They then selected a lineup of nine plays, from submissions of more than 100 local, national and international playwrights, that concern control: whether political, artistic, religious or otherwise. The playwrights hail both from Chicago and as far away as Los Angeles and Massachusetts, in traditions ranging from Beckett to sci-fi, in various stages of their careers. LiveWire will be performing nine of the plays over two nights, and if you only get a taste of short plays one weekend this year, it should probably be this one.

The festival runs Friday, August 29 and Saturday, August 30 at the Chemically Imbalanced Theater. If you’re worried that the $15 ticket prices will eat into your entertainment budget, rest assured that the festival is BYOB, alcohol permitted—audiences are explicitly invited to relax and share feedback on the nine plays LiveWire eventually chose. The festival also features live music interludes to clear your theatrical palate. A preview of the lineup shows the range of styles LiveWire’s included:

From Peter Snoad, “The Greening of Bridget Kelly” follows a 16-year-old climate-change activist with a dark secret and revenge on her mind, who confesses to her priest more than he wants to hear. While most of the playwrights featured in VisionFest are emerging writers, Snoad is an established playwright whose past plays have won numerous awards.

In “Why Does Bush Hate Flags” by Kent Forsberg, two teenage boys, one gay and one straight, try to make sense of the world and themselves according to their religious and political beliefs.

Walter Thinnes’ “Muse” takes place in a sparsely furnished studio apartment, where the mother and girlfriend of a man who committed suicide four months earlier struggle for control over the young man’s inspiration, memory and art.

In a more figurative articulation of control, Larry Pontius’ “Their Master’s Voice” features a speaker mounted on the corner of a ceiling that describes the actions of two main characters… that is, until it experiences technical difficulties.

Jami Brandli’s “The Delivery” explores what happens when a husband and wife must come to terms with their different philosophies when the most planned procedure doesn’t turn out the way they expected. Brandli is another established playwright, with shows produced in the Los Angeles area.

An interview on improving efficiency in the workplace, “Flux” by Dale Perreault, follows one woman’s thoughts in the future while he co-worker is re-thinking the past. Can either know what will happen, or just happened, respectively?

At a remote, desolate bus stop, Sebastian Aguirrre’s characters in “Green” come in search of fertile soil to grow a rare breed of flower, where they meet a stranger who might have the answer.

On a more surreal note, “Happy Hour” by Scott Glander, a man tries to find a way to tell his buddies, two ostriches, that he may not be coming around that often to their hangout, the local watering hole.

Finally, Dan Morra speaks to perhaps the most timely theme of all: what happens when we seek control where it not necessary or even possible. In the playwright’s “Perfectly Human,” when a top secret project is about to lose its funding, a group of scientists (and their experiment) try to convince a hard-driving general to reconsider.

At Chemically Imbalanced Theater, 1420 W. Irving Park, (312)533-4666. August 29th and 30th, 7:30pm.

RECOMMENDED

As part of Stages 2007, a weekend festival of eight new musicals in progress, Richard Rodgers’ 1976 colossal failure of a musical, “Rex,” will be presented and analyzed with its original creative team (minus Rodgers, who died three years later), including lyricist Sheldon Harnick (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Apple Tree,” “The Rothchilds”) and book writer Sherman Yellen (“The Rothchilds,” “Oh, Calcutta!”) after the Sunday afternoon performance (its Friday premiere serves as the gala opening for the festival). “Rex” is a musical, believe it or not, about King Henry VIII and his aspirations so obsessive for producing a male heir to maintain the new Tudor dynasty that his singing wives will lose their heads (offstage, of course). Henry even sings his way through a wrestling match with the King of France, and becomes a singing sore loser as well. The amazing thing is that Rodgers’ extraordinary gift for melody is evident throughout the work, but that wasn’t enough to save this famous golden turkey. Perhaps this rare revival will spawn “Sadaam: the Musical.” (Dennis Polkow)

Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, (773)327-5252.  Fri 7:30pm/Sat 3:30pm. $15-$75.  This production is closed. 

RECOMMENDED

As part of the Jazz Dance World Congress—where dancers and dance companies from across the globe are gathering in Chicago for intense classes and workshops given by renowned jazz-dance studio owners and jazz-dance masters and faculty as well as for jazz-dance choreography competitions—nightly dance presentations open to the public will be held, taking advantage of such a vast gathering of jazz dancers and companies from Canada, Japan, Italy and Mexico as well as from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, Salt Lake City and Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »