RECOMMENDED

“Survival is the synonym for Jewish,” says Golda Meir in Pegasus Players’ brilliant production of William Gibson’s “Golda’s Balcony.” During Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur War, Meir details the painful lengths that she and the fledgling state would go to survive. Russian-born and Milwaukee-raised, Meir defied convention and left America for Israel in the 1920s. Her rise through socialist leadership put her at odds with her family; Meir experienced any modern woman’s guilt over cheating loved ones and beloved causes out of time and commitment. Gibson’s script effortlessly flips from personal past to political present. Janet Ulrich Brooks poignantly captures Meir’s conflict over the decisions necessary to shepherd Israel to nationhood (she is horrified yet resigned over the decision to use nuclear weapons). Brooks’ comedic timing and dramatic pacing is rock solid from start to finish. Her Golda is not afraid of a fight, not when survival is at stake. (Lisa Buscani)

At the O’Rourke Center for the Performing Arts, 1145 West Wilson, (773)878-9761. Through Jul 13.

The summer I moved to Chicago I rented an apartment without air conditioning. I thought I could deal with it. I thought wrong. You can’t focus on anything else when you’re that uncomfortable, and no amount of cold showers or cold beer can help. The main thing is, you can’t sleep. There I was, watching “Deliverance” at 2am in a puddle of sweat and thinking: How pathetic. It gave me a real appreciation for anyone who suffered through the heat wave of 1995 without the benefit of cooled air. Weather might be the last frontier uncontrolled by humans, and the tragedies of 1995—739 Chicagoans died that summer—are the subject of “Heat Wave,” a co-production from Pegasus Players and Live Bait Theater. Steven Simoncic’s script is based on the book by Eric Klinenberg, “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,” a detailed look at the various ways the city and the local media failed to recognize (and in the case of Chicago officials, failed to respond to) the enormity of the problem. Or as someone in the play puts it: “This is what fucking up looks like.” With uneven direction from Ilesa Duncan, the show attempts to go “The Wire” route, but without “The Wire” results. Scenes that feel like bad sketch comedy (mainly about television news) or narratively redundant (those set in the city morgue) are interspersed with more serious moments, including the story of a daycare worker who accidentally caused the death of two of her charges after leaving them strapped in a car. Occasionally a line stands out for its verisimilitude, of “tenements that smell like sour socks.” That really paints a picture. But overall the show doesn’t feel true or genuine, or even complex. More importantly, it fails to capture what it feels like to drown in all that heat. There are other issues; Duncan’s production design includes what seems like hundreds of plastic bags, containing the personal effects belonging to the dead. They are meant as metaphor for all the lives lost, like the enormous pile of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Shoes somehow feel personal; not surprisingly, plastic bags feel plastic and inert. So much for symbolism. (Nina Metz)

At the O’Rourke Center for the Performing Arts, 1145 West Wilson, (773)878-9761. This production is now closed.

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

“You see it with any kind of tragedy. There’s that knee-jerk press that crunches a story down into the sound bite you’re going to get through the beginning, middle and end. Even if you aren’t necessarily doing stuff to back it up, you get out there with the messaging. You manage a crisis through PR.”

Writer Steven Simoncic is the 37-year-old playwright of “Heat Wave,” a fictionalized docudrama—based on the non-fiction book of the same name by sociologist Eric Klinenberg—that imaginatively reconstructs the private conversations and public events that transpired in the summer of 1995 when an unprecedented heat wave engulfed the city of Chicago and claimed the lives of 739 people, most of them poor, elderly and/or minorities. Yet on the Friday after Valentine’s Day, in a quiet alcove on the second floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Simoncic is sipping a Perrier and responding to the shootings in DeKalb just twenty-four hours earlier. “Already you can see the narrative being shaped for the Northern shootings. There are all those natural human emotions people do to deal with the healing or the hurting right now, and the arc becomes fairly similar. We’re groping for that convenient and understandable reason. I think the cool thing about theater is that you can get past that. You can recognize and honor that arc, but you can also dig a lot deeper and come at it from lots of different angles.”

In “Heat Wave,” to dig deeper means taking the media machine to task, as well as the city’s failed social programs and a negligent emergency response system circa 1995. And approaching the issues from different angles—in “Heat Wave” race and economics, culpability and personal responsibility—constitutes the incorporation of a variety of perspectives that refuse to pander to an audience’s liberal prejudices. “It would have been easy to just come down on the Daley administration. But I think responsibility goes a lot of different ways. The last thing I want to do is get on a pulpit and give people answers. I think it makes for an interesting piece of theater to present all these perspectives when there really isn’t one pure truth.”

To say that Simoncic appreciates different perspectives is a bit of an understatement. On paper, he could be the poster child for a liberal-arts mentality, possessing an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Michigan and an MFA in writing from North Carolina’s pastoral and very New England-ish Warren Wilson College. In person, the down-to-earth colloquialisms that frequently pepper his speech (“yeah”; “totally”; “you know?”) betray his blue-collar background growing up in Detroit, and his egalitarianism reflects the influence of a father who labored at a Detroit GM plant for thirty-five years and a mother who was a teacher. “I kind of get inspired by all kinds of stuff. Everything’s on the same playing field for me. I like ‘Hamlet’ but I also like a bad movie. You don’t have to accept the definition of blue-collar kid from Detroit. I can write, too. And I can be in a band and play music, why not?” Why not, indeed? In a good month—when he’s not super busy—he can be found jamming with his band, Super Genius, at venues such as Beat Kitchen or the Elbo Room. The married father of a 5-year-old girl and 1-year-old boy admits how insane this is. “Being a parent and being in a band is pretty extreme,” he chuckles. And especially when you also factor in Simoncic’s day job as the chief creative officer for a NASDAQ company, not to mention the fact that he will soon enter his final semester in pursuit of an MLA from the University of Chicago, for which he will have to produce a creative/critical thesis. Can’t he just send his thesis committee to the opening night of “Heat Wave” and call it a day? Simoncic laughs. “Believe me, it would be nice. Here it is, boys. Your ticket is my thesis.”

Still, this creative chameleon wouldn’t have it any other way. “Honestly, I think I’m most comfortable moving among many groups. It’s nice to be able to break out of one subculture and to a certain degree genuinely belong to another—my family and friends in Michigan, my friends in finance, my musician friends, the community of writers and theater artists, the families in Garfield Park where my wife is co-executive director of the Charter School. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing but I think I have an interesting perspective because I’ve been able to traverse those different subcultures in my life.”

Add to that list proud Chicagoan. “I’m proud that ‘Heat Wave’ is a Chicago story. Chicago is the quintessential American city—just on a massive scale—but I think the themes and nuances [of the play] are bigger than any one city. I hope that an audience two time zones away will see this and really connect with it. I don’t think that there will be a loss in translation because it was a Chicago happening.”

At the O’Rourke Center for the Performing Arts, 1145 West Wilson, (773)878-9761. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

If you’re looking for the absolute freshest theater experience currently on stage look no further. Pegasus Players begins the New Year with its 22^nd Annual Young Playwrights Festival. This year’s one-acts includes productions by four female Chicago teenagers. Though some of the pieces feel much like works-in-progress, the bases of all the stories are imaginative taking the audience from senior prom to Queen Elizabeth’s garden to a slave plantation to a Southern diner. While the show as a whole provides hope that the future of Chicago’s theater scene will be bright, it is evident that these pieces are only quick glimpses of what young writers can do. (Mary Kroeck)

At the O’Rourke Center for the Performing Arts, 1145 West Wilson, (773)878-9761. This production is now closed. 

By Dennis Polkow

How did a white guy from Rockford end up directing the biggest all-black musical ever to hit Broadway? “It’s a question I get a lot,” admits a grinning Gary Griffin, relaxing in the upstairs library at Chicago Shakespeare Theater after an afternoon rehearsal for Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion,” which begins previewing October 2, “usually along with, ‘What is Oprah really like?’”  

The irony is that Griffin’s involvement with “The Color Purple: The Musical,” which closes a nearly six-month Chicago run at the Cadillac Palace Theatre on September 30 before heading off to San Francisco, actually predates Oprah Winfrey’s by a couple of years. “It was in this very room that [producer] Scott Sanders met with me when I was here directing [Sondheim’s] ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ back in 2002. At that point, there were only a handful of songs and a different book writer, but there was an authenticity there that I really liked.”

Griffin admits that some of his colleagues are surprised to see him back home in Chicago after directing such a big show that is still running on Broadway and wonder why he hasn’t packed up and moved to the Big Apple. “I’m a Chicagoan,” says Griffin in a very matter of fact manner, “and while I do have a New York apartment for all of the work I do there, I still have the same place I had in Andersonville for the past fourteen years. This is still—and will always be—home. And for me, the reward is in what you do. I learned as a young director not to do anything in the theater for the money. Of course, you have to make a living, but the challenges are too great to do anything that you don’t love doing.”

Griffin has been criticized by some for bringing some New York talent to Chicago for “Passion,” when plenty of Chicago talent was on hand. “The irony is that I brought my musical director, for instance, from New York because I wanted him to see how a Chicago production is done,” Griffin says. “There is much more focus on the work here and much less of the pressure and gossip that surrounds everything you do in New York.”

Griffin got the theater bug by coming to Chicago from Rockford to see shows “as soon I could drive,” he recalls. Two memories particularly stand out for him: “My senior year in high school, which was 1978, I saw ‘A Chorus Line’ at the Shubert three times. It spoke to me so powerfully about theater and the struggles of the individual in the theater world. A show like that does what any great show does—it makes you feel less alone by dramatizing a particular struggle that is universal. And then, coming to Steppenwolf productions, particularly ‘Balm in Gilead,’ which knocked my socks off.”  

Although Griffin did play a member of the Jets in a high school production of “West Side Story,” he admits that it was the backstage stuff that fascinated him more than appearing onstage himself, which motivated him to major in theater at Illinois State University. “I had heard that all of the Steppenwolf folks had attended ISU, so that was enough for me. I headed off with the intention of directing shows.”
Upon graduation, Griffin moved to Chicago and began directing “some really small-time stuff that nobody saw, just a few friends and family members” before he began directing shows for Pegasus Players and Apple Tree Theater in Highland Park. His real break came when late Drury Lane impresario Tony DeSantis hired him to be the artistic director of Drury Lane Oakbrook in 1993 and suddenly Griffin was in the position of directing several shows a year. “That was an amazing experience,” he says, “not only because I got to do a number of shows I had always wanted to do but never had, but also because I learned so much about how shows were structured and put together. And Tony was a theater producer in the old David Merrick mold, so I learned how to please a crowd and how to take care of an audience, which is an invaluable thing to know and is one of the main reasons that I get along well with commercial producers.”

And what is Griffin’s take on “Passion,” one of the least-performed shows of the Sondheim canon? “Sometimes with Sondheim,” he says, “it just takes time. It’s a great show, but it’s newer and we don’t know it as well. I fell in love with it doing a couple of numbers from it for last year’s ‘Sondheim in the Park’ in Millennium Park, enough to want to do it, and immediately thought that the space at Chicago Shakespeare is so ideal for it, because it not only reveals the intimacy of the work, but the work’s structure is more transparent because we are able to set up a simultaneously vertical instead of a horizontal stage.”

Griffin has chosen former “Saturday Night Live” comedienne and former “Wicked” star Ana Gasteyer to star as the mysterious Fosca, having worked with her on a couple of musical workshops in New York before she donned the green makeup here in Chicago for “Wicked.”

“She is a remarkable performer,” says Griffin, “who not only can sing up a storm, but she brings such depth to a text. It is amazing how someone who has a comic sensibility can discover hidden corners even in a ‘serious’ work that the rest of us would simply miss.”   

“The Passion” runs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 East Grand, (312)595-5600, through November 11.