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.