Here’s the press release from Goodman:

FOUR WORLD PREMIERES, A BROADWAY-BOUND DOUBLE-BILL,
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN’S GOODMAN DIRECTORIAL DEBUT AND
INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS HIGHLIGHT GOODMAN THEATRE’S 2009/2010 SEASON

Note: On June 26, Goodman announced that Joan D’Arc had been dropped from the new season and replaced by the solo performance show, Stoop Stories. Click here for more information.

(March 12, 2009 – Chicago, IL) Artistic Director Robert Falls proudly announces a diverse line-up—from musical hilarity and classic yarns, to memory pieces and family dramas, to stories with ethnic roots that reflect today’s world—in Goodman Theatre’s new 2009/2010 season.

The madcap Marx Brothers musical Animal Crackers, book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, music and lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, directed by Henry Wishcamper, launches the season in the Albert Theatre (September 2009). Next, Falls and Brian Dennehy team up again for a Broadway-bound double-bill of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie directed by Falls, and Samuel Beckett’s one-man-show Krapp’s Last Tape (January 2010) helmed by Canadian director Jennifer Tarver. In March 2010, Rebecca Gilman’s Goodman commission, A True History of the Johnstown Flood makes its world premiere production. Finishing the season in June 2010—and launching the fifth biennial international Latino Theatre Festival—is Karen Zacharías’ The Sins of Sor Juana, directed by Henry Godinez, following one of the legendary figures of Mexican arts and literature. Still to be announced is one Spring 2010 production directed by Chuck Smith in the Albert Theatre (now updated to include this production of The Good Negro). Read the rest of this entry »

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

Recently, I found myself defending foreign-language theater to a colleague who loves opera. We were discussing curator Robert Falls and The Goodman Theatre’s ambitious stage event “Global Exploration: Eugene O’Neill in the 21^st Century,” and while he could share my enthusiasm for its controversial (Wooster Group’s “Emperor Jones”), community-boosting (Hypocrites’ “The Hairy Ape” and Neo-Futurists’ “Strange Interlude”) and classic programming (“Desire Under the Elms”), he could simply not understand why anyone would want to see O’Neill performed in Portuguese or Dutch. (The festival, now midway through its run, features theater companies from Brazil and the Netherlands performing the notoriously obscure “Sea Plays” and the rarely staged “Mourning Becomes Electra,” respectively). I can see his point. After all, experiencing some foreign-language theater—the kind staged in the playwright’s native tongue, for example—makes sense. It’s the operatic equivalent of hearing Puccini in Italian, or Wagner in German: the authentic cultural-aural experience. So why do I still think, having now sat through two of Brazilian Companhia Triptal’s three productions of “Homens Ao Mar” or “Sea Plays” (the final installment, “Cardiff,” completes the triptych this weekend) without understanding one peep of Portuguese, that it would be an absolute shame if any viewer missed out on this rare and once-in-a-lifetime experience afforded by the good folks at the Goodman?

I think for me it’s quite simply all about the language. It helps, of course, being a linguaphile and having under my belt a history of international theatergoing that includes not just plays rendered in their original spoken-languages (Chekhov in Russian by the Moscow Art Theatre; Strindberg in Swedish courtesy of The Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm), but also straight plays and musicals originally performed in English but enjoyed in a half dozen other foreign languages. Nevertheless, even without this primer, any curious individual wishing to be provoked by a piece of exotic theater but wary of the potential for pomposity, can rest assured that there is nothing pretentious about or posed by Companhia Triptal that the average theatergoer can’t handle.

So you’re afraid you may not “get it” in another language? All you need to know about “Sea Plays” is that they are informed by a playwright whose early life experiences were spent at sea, and who must have had a love-hate relationship with this siren that tore individuals from—and reunited them with—their families. As well, O’Neill’s early plays were exercises—not always successful—in lacing realistic situations with symbolism and heightened theatricality. Even in English, these plays can come across as ambiguous. Companhia Triptal’s aggressively atmospheric and mood-enhancing staging puts you there and offers a visceral experience not dependent on narrative details.

So you hate the idea of supertitles? After all, why shell out $20 to “read” a play? Well then, don’t. The first installment of “Sea Plays,” whose original English-language text was projected back to the audience via supertitles, was a cumbersome experience if you sat too close to the stage: halfway through the performance I felt like a nodding dog with my head tilting up and down between the words across the sky and the action down on stage. It also seemed at times like the supertitle projector could either not keep up with the actors or vice versa, making for some ponderous pauses (I wondered if this is what it would be like to see Pinter in Portuguese). So for the second installment, armed with a quick scan of the synopsis only, I ignored the supertitles, took in the experience as if I were watching the show in its hometown of São Paulo and learned to appreciate a company of actors whose robust physicality, brandy-soaked vocal instruments and Latin temperament were the perfect interpreters of O’Neill’s motley crew of sailors and whores, as well as of the playwright’s famously demanding and persnickety stage directions. In fact, my relationship as audience member with these Brazilian actors was probably heightened precisely because we could not depend solely on words for communication.

So you know nothing about Brazilian culture? Well, maybe you’ll learn something. In my case, the “global” insights were unsurprising but nuanced and pronounced: a patriarchal culture whose dichotomous existence between beauty and violence—as might be experienced every day on the dangerous streets of Rio or São Paulo—echoed through the ebb and flow of O’Neill’s symbolic sea.

All good stuff, but for me secondary to the unique thrill of letting go, letting the experience wash over me and allowing a foreign language to caress my ear. Inherently disorienting at first, but that’s the way O’Neill’s rough-hewn dialogue—especially at this point in his early writing career—affects some in English. And in the case of the Portuguese, with its emphasis on elongated open vowels, a curious case of unintelligible aural beauty reminding me of this playwright’s later gift for the poetic vernacular. (Dutch’s guttural-heavy pronouncements for the upcoming “Mourning Becomes Electra” will most likely re-emphasize the jagged aspects of O’Neill’s language.)

You’ll be hard-pressed to see, let alone hear, something like this again for a long time to come. And what do you mean you think an Afghan “Anna Christie” sounds like fun?

“Global Exploration: Eugene O’Neill in the 21^st Century” runs through March at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, goodmantheatre.org

Carla Gugino (Abbie Putnam) and Brian Dennehy (Ephraim Cabot)

RECOMMENDED

Let’s get right to the point. Robert Falls’ production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire under the Elms” exceeds all expectations. And although I cannot quite declare it “the theatrical event of the year”—there are, after all, eleven months remaining—I will concede that this exceptional revival, showcasing a director and design team working at the top of their game, and boasting three mesmerizing performances at its core, is currently the best thing on a Chicago stage and deserves a place on every critic’s “Best Of” list twelve months from now.

“Desire under the Elms,” one of the playwright’s earlier works, is set on a rural New England farm in the mid-nineteenth century. O’Neill stage vet and Chicago adopted son Brian Dennehy plays septuagenarian Ephraim Cabot, a proud paterfamilias whose third marriage, to a wife thirty years his junior (Carla Gugino), threatens to deprive his embittered son Eben (Pablo Schreiber) of what he believes is his rightful inheritance: the family farm that bore witness to Cabot’s tyrannical younger years and the subsequent deaths of his first two wives (one of them Eben’s mother). From there on, “Desire” charts the greed, ambition and murderous passions that drive this father-son-stepmother saga through its Greek-tragedy-inspired twists and Freudian turns.

With this play there exists the danger that a modern audience’s seen-it-all sensibilities could spot these plot developments coming from a mile away, blunting their impact and potentially stripping the play of its original shock value. Falls’ choice to jettison the play’s intermission and present it as one continuous sequence, right through to its depressing denouement, is therefore a smart one. But it’s his overall pitch-perfect and restrained directorial hand that’s responsible for this production’s grab-you-by-the-throat intensity and the fact that not one mundane minute registers during the play’s one-hour-and-forty-minute intermission-less running time. (And given this playwright’s penchant for prolixity, that’s certainly saying a lot.) Indeed, whether navigating three excellent performers safely through O’Neill’s melodramatic meltdowns, using Bob Dylan’s haunting song “Not Dark Yet” for a six-minute musical montage that conveys the longing and loneliness of rural existence, or creating stunning stage tableaus, Falls proves why he is the foremost directorial interpreter of O’Neill working in the American theater today. To this end, he’s aided by Walt Spangler’s stunning set design, Michael Philippi’s exquisite lighting plot and Richard Woodbury’s original music and sound design. Their work each merits more praise and attention than I have room to give it here, but overall its combined effect is one that adds and sustains—in some cases quite literally—the play’s dramatic tension.

Finally, there are the three leads. Schreiber expertly modulates his character’s internal journey from hatred to love, and his rugged handsomeness and bursts of virility make for some searing sensuality. Gugino, a beautiful and sexy actress who resembles a young Barbara Hershey yet sounds like Judy Davis—thanks to a husky vocal instrument that makes full use of its earthy chest tones—plays her role like it’s a warm-up to take on Maggie the Cat. (Her feral ferocity is evident from the moment she first rubs the palm of her hand—and eventually herself—upon the floors and furniture of the farmhouse.) Last but not least, there is Mr. Dennehy, an actor who could have plowed through his part and made this “Desire” about one man’s tragedy. Instead, through an understated performance that ultimately uncovers more sympathy for his character than O’Neill affords him in the script, Dennehy unselfishly shares the spotlight and allows this tragedy to belong to three individuals. Classy and admirable. Just like everything else in this perfect-storm of a production. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, (312)443-3800. Tue-Thu 7:30pm/Fri 8 pm/Sat 2pm & 8pm/Sun 2pm. $25-$82. Through March 1. Note that Carla Gugino leaves the cast February 17 and will be replaced by her understudy, Amy J. Carle.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Karen Aldridge as Lady Macbeth

RECOMMENDED
No play has more superstition surrounding it than Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” a name and title that traditionally dare not even be spoken backstage nor anywhere near a theater lest it become haunted; hence, the moniker “The Scottish Play,” a safer alternative that will keep the goblins and witches at bay. That is certainly one interpretation. Another is to see “Macbeth” as conscience gone berserk in blood-lusting after power and, ergo, nothing in the play is taken literally.

And then there is Barbara Gaines, who updates “Macbeth” to the present day but where nothing, absolutely nothing, is left to the imagination. Given how many metaphorical Macbeths roam the moors of our minds, there is something to be said for the novelty of having everything spelled out, however unnerving. And from the opening moments when we see soldiers in commando fatigues machine-gunning those who are lying face down on the ground, we are reminded that however much we think that Macbeth’s era was a more brutal one than ours, think again.

When Lady Macbeth (Karen Aldridge) speaks of her plucked nipples, she does so topless and the audience is staring right at them, fully exposed. The three witches meld in and out of a hoard of paparazzi and journalists and one of them who shows us a bloody, newborn baby is male (Mike Nussbaum), not that it matters much, as they are unisex witches, and their voices during their incantations and prophecies are electronically altered to eerie effect. When Macbeth starts to lose it at the dinner table, we see what he sees: a grotesque, bloody head staring at him accusingly that gradually becomes more real, taking the physical form of a mutilated walking corpse that interacts and chases him, right into the audience. When the children of Macbeth’s rival are murdered, we are mercilessly shown the act, complete with an audible neck crack. Lady Macbeth’s death, the details of which are never spelled out in the play itself, is shown as her naked body in a bathtub of blood, making the suicide often implied in the text explicit.

Macbeth (Ben Carlson) has the physical demeanor of a skinhead and imagines himself as king via video clips of statements that he makes, ironically, which become no longer necessary nor relevant after he actually becomes king. And when an African-American becomes king at the end and those video clips are restored overhead, an analogy to the start of an Obama presidency is made complete.

All of this could be viewed as violent theater of the absurd for its own sake, but whatever we may chose to make of all of this—and I suspect that many will find it all much too much—Gaines’ gratuitous interpretation can be fully supported by the Bard’s own words. In this, the proceedings are a marked contrast from say, Robert Falls’ “King Lear” where the excesses had little if anything to do with the text and where special effects ended up concealing far more than they revealed.

In the end, Gaines’ “Macbeth” gives us plenty of haunting and disturbing images to take away, to be sure, but none more explicit or timely than bearing in mind that all of the excesses come about as the direct result of the potentially corrupting effect of power. (Dennis Polkow)

“Macbeth” plays through March 8 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand (at Navy Pier),  (312)595-5600. $44-$70.

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

Mary Zimmerman’s disappointing “Mirror of the Invisible World” caps a disappointing main stage season for the Goodman Theatre. With the exception of August Wilson’s “Radio Golf” and David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” the latter of which I neither saw nor reviewed, I just did not get Artistic Director Robert Falls’ twentieth-anniversary main stage season. Falls’ “King Lear” I will most remember for convertibles and copulations. Frank Galati’s “Oedipus Complex” was thrilling only if you were a graduate student with a double major in psychology and the classics. And now there is “Mirror.” Drawing from a twelfth-century Persian epic, the “Haft Pakar,” and relating seven romantic stories about seven princesses from China, Greece, Turkey, Africa, India, Persia and Russia, it has been hyped as an “inter-cultural conversation” with the Silk Road. But the experience ends up feeling as ethnically authentic as the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland, yet not nearly as entertaining. So while yes, “Mirror” is plodding, pretentious and badly acted—and its dialogue devoid of any noticeable poetry or magic—its greatest offense is surely in how it culturally castrates each of these legendary stories, cultures and peoples it tries to represent. Read the rest of this entry »

The hugely anticipated and overly hyped production of “King Lear” at the Goodman Theatre ends up saying little about the title character and more about the director at the top of the program’s title page. Slick, visually bloated and self-indulgent—the second half drags from some ponderous verse speaking—this modern-dress revival is not so much Artistic Director Robert Falls’ twentieth-anniversary production as much as his twentieth-anniversary party, where for $75 dollars you can get a ringside seat to the Bacchanalian festivities. Just don’t expect King Lear to show up. Memorable for all the wrong reasons, here are some of the prurient visuals and eye-popping highlights one can expect to see: pastel colored suits and fur coats for its Euro-trash denizens; “Scarface”-like Mafiosos clutching Uzis; a gratuitous appearance by a Mercedes Benz convertible; a stainless-steel kitchen worthy of an Architectural Digest spread featuring a sauté pan that figures into Gloucester’s famous eye-gouging; sodomy and cunnilingus; a handgun that doubles as a crack pipe; “Road Warrior” costumes and post-apocalyptic sound effects. Buried at the bottom is a valiant but ultimately hopeless attempt by stage and screen actor Stacy Keach to find an interpretation for “Lear” that is as equally impressionable. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Goodman begins its David Mamet festival by reviving his early study of youth and age in the theater. Mamet’s deceptively slight play remains an awe-inspiring display of craft, suggesting layers of relationship in the sparest verbal touches. It’s also frequently hilarious, as he conjures up a lost world of hospital melodrama and lost-at-sea stories. Given the play’s delicacy, it lives or dies at the mercy of its performers. Luckily, Robert Falls’s production features the exceptional David Darlow as the older actor, Robert. Darlow’s expansive manner seems from the first to conceal depths of uncertainty and disappointment. He’s ably matched by Matt Schwader’s John, whose apparent lack of guile itself covers a fervent ambition. Both actors play Robert’s gradual eclipse by John with impeccable timing and pathos. Mark Wendland’s remarkable stage design thrusts us into a simultaneously claustrophobic and multidimensional backstage space, from which the only visible route to freedom is the occasional glimpse of the stage. If the rest of the Goodman’s festival sustains the quality of this production, it’ll be a major event indeed for Chicago’s theater. (John Beer)

“A Life in the Theatre” plays at Goodman Theatre, 170 North Dearborn, (312)443-3400, through April 9.

RECOMMENDED

In this topnotch Goodman world premiere of Rebecca Gilman’s updated spin on “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen, Nora does leave her man in the final scene, per Ibsen’s original. But a few minutes later, she changes her mind and returns to her tony Lincoln Park condo and resumes, if uneasily, life with her prig of a husband. “You’re going to pay for this,” she informs him, though she just as easily could have been saying this to herself. It is Gilman’s one major plot tweak, and while certainly realistic, it sort of defeats the purpose of the entire play. What’s the point if Nora doesn’t leave at the end? It’s the one drawback in an otherwise excellent reworking that is less about feminist awakening than skewering a very particular kind of status-obsessed lifestyle. It all takes place in set designer Robert Brill’s box-within-a-box living room and kitchen—a magazine-worthy domain rendered as a yuppie wet dream, with the behemoth plasma TV and expensive cabinetry. Read the rest of this entry »