By Fabrizio O. Almeida

“I might be exactly the right kind of person for a project like this,” says 30-year-old James Wilke, the director of “SoloHomo4,” a full-length evening of original solo performances by gay writers and artists running for two nights next week at the Bailiwick Arts Center. Hardly a declaration born of hubris, Wilke’s statement seems apt given the various artistic hats he’s worn in both Chicago and Los Angeles since graduating from Northwestern University in 1997. With a resume that includes successful stints in the worlds of theater, independent film and music videos, to name just a few, he’s one of those all-around creative types who, artistically speaking, gets around, hates complacency and defies easy categorization. Alas, these are qualities that help when tackling that ever-shifting and encompassing artistic medium known as performance art. To quote über-performance artist Laurie Anderson (via über-solo performance director Jo Bonney in “Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century”): “The best thing about the term ‘performance art’ is that it’s so ambiguous; it includes just about anything you might want to do.” For the solo homos involved in next week’s presentations—Wilke and the all-male cast of performers are openly gay—this will translate into a two-hour evening incorporating monologue, multimedia, musical cabaret, stand-up comedy, a monodrama and a partridge in a pear tree.

“SoloHomo,” which borrows its title from a 1998 literary anthology of queer performance texts entitled “O Solo Homo,” is the brainchild of 45-year-old Chicago native and “SoloHomo” co-producer Mike Rogers, a longtime aficionado of the genre whose local credits include last year’s installment of Live Bait Theatre’s “Filet of Solo,” an annual affair that provides visibility to emerging and established solo performance artists. But three years ago, Rogers, like many before him, had to create his own performance opportunities. Through his association with NewTown Writers, a Chicago-based gay writing group that last year celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary of nurturing queer literary voices, Rogers was around when colleagues produced “Working Stiff,” a showcase for queer-based material and its performers. Equally inspired to do the same, and with the support of the folks behind “Working Stiff,” Rogers and co-producer Timothy Rey, another longtime Windy City solo artist, delivered the first “SoloHomo” in Bailiwick’s loft space for one night only in 2003. “It started out so amateurish and very informal,” says Rogers, “And there were maybe twelve people in the audience total,” he recalls with a laugh. But word-of-mouth, a tight-knit Chicago solo performance community and increased attendance for the second installment eventually helped “SoloHomo3” land Bailiwick’s larger studio space downstairs for a two-night sold-out run last year. By this time, however, Rogers was more than just a little exhausted. “I took a shot at it [as co-producer, performer and director], and it was good, but it needed to improve and to be brought up a few notches. We needed direction, desperately.” Enter Wilke and a chance meeting last October with Rogers, who immediately thought the young director’s energy and ideas could transform the promising but “raw” evening of random monologues into “more of a polished product.” Wilke concurs: “Each piece lends itself to a certain theatricality that I thought would have been wasted with a lights-up-presentational-lights-down approach.” Wilke has also carefully arranged the order of the pieces so that collectively they might give the audience an emotional ride akin to that of a play. And musical transitions, using everything from well-known songs to obscure mood music, will be the glue that holds the pieces together.

Whatever the overall visual and musical stamp Wilke gives the evening, the pieces should be memorable for their stories and the quality of their story telling. Promising to explore different aspects of the gay experience, “SoloHomo4” will cover familiar thematic stomping grounds from love to loss, albeit through diverse narrative strands and modes of expression: “Judgement,” by playwright Don Bapst, has the author playing three characters in a dark drama of seventeenth-century European persecution; “La Maquina de los Sueños (The Machine of Dreams),” a piece by New Mexico-based visual artist Patrick Weishampel (the only artist brought on board by Wilke and not by Rogers), will feature projections and five television sets each broadcasting a different film that has been independently shot and edited; “Dorm Life/Off Campus,” a narrative celebrating the lighter side of life, will be delivered by a transvestite named Cookie Crumbles. Local actor and performance artist Richard Richards (making his final Chicago stage appearance before moving to Boston in April) and Columbia College Chicago film professor and author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Independent Filmmaking” Joe Steiff, among others, will also be featured. “You’re only paying $10 (for admission), but you’re going to get more ‘bang for your buck,’” promises Wilke. If that current roster is any indication, “SoloHomo4” may very well deliver.

“SoloHomo4” plays two evenings at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 West Belmont, (773)883-1090, on March 13 and 14, at 7:30pm. $10.

Illustrating the seductive power of wish-fulfillment escapism through flashy production numbers, delivering composers Kander & Ebb’s haunting and anthemic songs with vocal bravura and featuring an eye-catching, multi-level, prison setting of squalid sumptuousness, Bailiwick Repertory’s production of “Kiss of the Spider Woman—The Musical,” based on the 1976 novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig, is certainly stamped with musical and visual showmanship throughout. Unfortunately, in failing to capture the complex sexual and psychological dynamics within the relationship between an incarcerated gay window-dresser and a heterosexual radical revolutionary, it is also devoid of emotional resonance and loses the heart of the story. To be fair, dramaturgical obstacles are inherent in the script: an under-dramatized first act; the under-developed character of Valentin; extended Hollywood B-movie sequences that—although entertaining—are ultimately redundant. As for Terrance McNally’s book scenes, like a delicate spider web they are a gossamer affair so that a perfunctory reading of them—like the one that saddles this production—easily misses the subtext and shadings. The marketing copy of this “Spider Woman” trumpets “In a new age of political prisoners…” a point of view that also seems to be this production’s raison d’être. And while the atrocities of prisoner abuses—evoked here with grit—are certainly relevant today, I’ve always felt that “Kiss of the Spider Woman” was psychologically more akin to “Midnight Cowboy” than to “Midnight Express.” (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. Thu – Sat 7:30pm/Sun 3:30pm. $25-$30. Through Feb 18.

Some four months after the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the iconic images of Hurricane Katrina are fading from the collective memory, while the resolve to confront the issues of race and poverty that those images created is all but invisible. Jeffrey Bruner’s documentary play demonstrates that a few snippets from the media-storm surrounding the actual storm seem destined to survive: W’s “Brownie, you’re doing a hell of a job,” and his mom’s “They were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” Unfortunately, “Katrina” demonstrates little else. A barrage of words from politicians, journalists, and (all too few) actual survivors collaged together, Bruner’s play feels like an overdose of CNN, with asides from the blogosphere. There’s too much information here and too little perspective. Patrick Rybarczyk stages “Katrina” like the glorified school assembly that it is, and the performers are most successful in avoiding cheap W. impressions. The moment of greatest dramatic tension in the evening is Anderson Cooper’s on-air confrontation with Sen. Mary Landrieu (awkwardly blocked here as a face-to-face argument). That’s a fact about modern journalism that could itself be the kernel of a fascinating play, but Bruner’s effort never rises beyond the level of mere data. (John Beer) 

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Of all Elizabethans, Christopher Marlowe seems best suited to our telephone-throwing, Katie-Holmes-marrying Age of Celebrity. When he wasn’t crafting a thrilling new blank-verse style for the stage (a style ultimately perfected by his altogether lower-profile contemporary from Stratford), Marlowe was brawling in taverns, quite likely spying for the Crown, and leaving suggestive clues about dalliances with women and men in the highest reaches of his society. Harlan Didricksen has given Marlowe the full biopic treatment in his play, currently mounted at the Bailiwick. Didricksen’s script is not without its flaws. Apparently dissatisfied with the lurid enough historical record of Marlowe’s shadowy death—he accidentally stabbed himself in the head during a tavern fight with the mysterious Ingram Frizer—Didricksen fingers a ludicrously unlikely target as Marlowe’s real killer. And throughout, Didricksen’s playwrights and nobles lapse too frequently into anachronistically therapeutic language. But David Zak’s production downplays these weaknesses to deliver a compelling portrait of Marlowe and his milieu. Zak shifts deftly between reenactments of Marlowe’s plays and scenes from his frenetic life, employing Brian Sidney Bembridge’s multilevel set, Jared Moore’s subtle, painterly light design, and R&D Choreography’s dazzling violence design to keep the play’s action moving relentlessly forward. The result is an absorbing look at this figure at once contemporary and remote. (John Beer)

“Marlowe” plays at Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, 1229 West Belmont Avenue, (773)883.1090, through July 17.

By the time the second movement of “First Lady Suite” lays out its imagined meeting between Mamie Eisenhower (Elizabeth Hailey) and opera singer Marian Anderson (Winifred Brown-Noll), the musical has firmly established its resemblance to a Disney Animatronic show gone awry. Anderson sings an impassioned plea to Mamie on behalf of the embattled students in Little Rock: “The situation in Little Rock is dangerous. The President must intervene,” Brown-Noll intones with an admirably straight face. Mamie responds by traveling back in time to instruct then-General Dwight in the imperative of integration, a lesson disturbed when she discovers Dwight carrying on with chauffeur Kay Sommersby. The cast of this Bailiwick production performs Michael John LaChiusa’s demanding, and occasionally majestic, score beautifully. The frequently ludicrous and prosy book, though, makes LaChiusa’s limitations as a dramatist evident. We see a nervous Jackie Kennedy, a vulgar Lady Bird Johnson, an earnestly flirtatious Eleanor Roosevelt (stroking the hand of Amelia Earhart), but never venture beyond a schematic understanding of these women or their larger significance. LaChiusa may be striving to emulate the contemporary history of John Adams (“Nixon in China,” “The Death of Klinghoffer”), but “First Lady Suite” reminded me more of Troy McClure. (John Beer) 

This production is now closed.

An unholy marriage of Dennis Cooper and M. Night Shyamalan, Stephen Cone’s new play “Just Wanderer,” premiering at the Bailiwick, tells the story of a haunted ex-cop who takes the standard route to laying his demons to rest: retreating to a lonely cabin to write his memoirs. A lonely cabin may not be the worst place for him, actually, given that his wife habitually leaves videotapes of herself having sex with other men for him to find. The basic problem with “Just Wanderer,” as I hope is becoming clear, is that it takes place in the Gamma Quadrant, with characters that look like human beings but act in ways I have trouble recognizing. They spend a lot of time underlining themes, for instance: ex-cop Anthony insists on the importance of the law, haunted drifter Max wants to find the childhood he never had. Anthony’s response to an unexpected knock in the middle of the night? “I didn’t order a pizza.” David Zak’s direction finds all the energy it can in this piece; lightning flashes and thunder crashes as half-naked Max swings from the rafters. But neither Zak nor his valiant performers are able to overcome the essential silliness of Cone’s ungainly script. (John Beer)

This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Like Martin and Lewis, Penn and Teller, or Cheney and Rumsfeld, Philip Earl Johnson and Brian Howard as MooNiE and BrooN exploit the latent hostility in any buddy pairing for both laughs and pathos. Johnson and Howard present a two-act vaudevillian entertainment. In the first half, they appear individually, with Howard performing a sarcastic busker’s routine and Johnson a meticulous, lyrical silent comedy. They combine forces in the second act, still playing versions of their initial characters (though Johnson now talks). Throughout, they intersperse spirited audience participation and sideshow stunts (fire-eating, bed of nails) with an aggressive, improvisational humor. Some of the bits are more effective than others: a meandering beat-style poem about cat stylists, for instance, didn’t go beyond mildly amusing no matter how drawn out it became. But Johnson and Howard have managed to develop winning stage personalities, capable of easy banter both with each other and with the audience. Their show is by turns inspired and thrilling (and in some cases, as with a bit involving an audience member, a nipple clip, and six juggling pins, both). And anyone who can convince a paying customer to stand on stage for several minutes with his head stuck to a broom has my vote. (John Beer)

MooNiE and BrooN: Foolish Mortals! plays at Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 West Belmont, (773)883-1980, through March 13.

RECOMMENDED

Invisibility permeates Steven Dietz’s “Inventing Van Gogh”: most notably, the invisibility that worldwide fame, scholarly attention and massive financial value can bestow upon a painting. A sort of Stoppard-lite, Dietz’s play of ideas switches frenetically between past and present in order to hack away at the encrustations of myth between us and Vincent van Gogh. Like its eponymous hero, “Inventing Van Gogh” won’t win awards for subtlety. It lays on its themes (art, love, money) thick and broad, and its nominal plot (about a contemporary artist forging a “lost” van Gogh) is pursued so half-heartedly that it’s easy to forget why van Gogh is supposedly haunting the studio. But the play, at least in Bailiwick’s current production, makes up in a restless energy what it lacks in refinement. The heart of the play is the confrontations between Patrick Stone (Scott Aiello) and van Gogh (Michael Sherwin), and both actors ignite these debates with a passion that defies their shopworn quality. Jared Moore’s lighting design drenches Stone’s studio with color, transforming the set into a post-impressionist tableau. If the play itself seems something of a throwback, the kind of workmanlike piece that once slaked a theatre-going public’s relentless demand for new material, its vibrant theatrical pleasures underline the merits of that world now mostly lost. (John Beer)

This production is now closed.

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We’ve always known we were a town for theater. But this year perhaps we needed outsiders to remind us of just how great Chicago’s theater community is compared not only with New York, but with the rest of the world. Venerable London theater critic Michael Billington went so far as to herald our city as the “current theatre capital of America” after a recent visit, citing not only the three big S’s (Chicago Shakespeare, Second City and Steppenwolf), but also Victory Gardens and the Goodman. Other critics from New York and Toronto sent similar, although not quite as superlative, love letters this year. So it seems fitting this year that  our Players issue, in the past reserved for members of the theater community who wield the most power, focus on the artists—those both on stage and behind-the-scenes who make out-of-towners go home and drool. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of the Bailiwick’s Pride Series, Jamie Black’s monologue “Living Inside Myself” charts his odyssey from girl to man. Black is an enormously winning performer whose self-deprecating wit charms the audience, and he effectively employs minimal props (an Ace bandage, a suit jacket) as indices to the simultaneously confining and liberating potentials living inside our conceptions of gender. But Black’s monologue ends up domesticating the unruly subject of transsexuality; behind the mentions of strap-ons and ooverectomy lies a relatively conventional story of a journey from shame to self-empowerment. Instead of exploring the implications of transsexuality for both conservative and progressive assumptions about gender, “Living Inside Myself” sticks to “men are like this, and women like that” routines; even if Black is uniquely positioned to comment, these jokes don’t get much funnier coming from him. Paradoxically, the confessional quality of most of the monologue ends up obscuring the impact of Black’s own experience. One of the most moving moments occurs when he steps into character, presenting in quick succession the reaction of a psychiatrist and of his best friend’s mother to his new self-definition. The contrast between the former’s well-meaning befuddlement and the latter’s worldly acceptance speaks more eloquently about sex (and class) in America than any sociological or therapeutic generalization. (John Beer)

This production is now closed.