Victory Gardens announces its 2012-2013 season

Season to include works by Bill Cain, Philip Dawkins, Anupama Chandrasekhar, Samuel D. Hunter, and Marcus Gardley with directors Sean Graney, Seth Bockley, Dexter Bullard, Joanie Schultz and Chay Yew

Chicago, IL— Artistic Director Chay Yew and Executive Director Jan Kallish announce the 2012-2013 Victory Gardens season. The season will include Equivocation by Bill Cain, directed by Sean Graney; Failure: A Love Story by Phillip Dawkins, directed by Seth Bockley; Disconnect by Anupama Chandrasekhar, directed by Dexter Bullard; The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Joanie Schultz; and Chicago is Burning by Marcus Gardley, directed by Chay Yew.  Read the rest of this entry »

Dana Omar, Robert McLean, Ryan Bourque, Lindsey Gavel and Shawn Pfautsch/Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis

RECOMMENDED

The Hypocrites haven’t simply reimagined this Gilbert & Sullivan classic; they’ve wholeheartedly re-appropriated it, paring its grandiosity down to a much more streamlined, folksier scale. Light-opera purists might scoff at the idea of putting the Major General in Big Bird slippers or introducing the daughters by having them sing “Milkshake,” but those people would be forgetting that G&S had a sense of humor in their own time. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis

RECOMMENDED

It feels almost beside the point to note that, in turning Sophocles’ seven surviving plays into a four-hour theatrical event (with dinner), some elements are going to get edited out or lost. Each of the plays has been compressed to half an hour or less, so that the tension inherent in, say, the dramatic irony of Oedipus’ self-delusion, never builds over enough time for it to be unbearable for the audience, as with the Hypocrites’ 2009 adaptation of the play. And the most common critique volleyed at writer-director Sean Graney—that he butchers literature to make entertaining theater—could certainly be applied here, for Graney’s trademark high and low language is out in full force, modernizing the stories and adding in comedy at every turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from The Hypocrites:

THE HYPOCRITES’ 15TH SEASON FACT SHEET:
A SEASON OF WORLD PREMIERE ADAPTATIONS

Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses
Based on Sophocles’ seven surviving texts: Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes & Oedipus at Colonus)
Adapted & Directed by Sean Graney
WHEN: September 6-October 16, 2011
A FIVE HOUR EVENT!

Pirates of Penzance (Remount)
Music by Arthur Sullivan, Libretto by W.S. Gilbert
New Arrangement by Kevin O’Donnell
Directed by Sean Graney
WHEN: November 24, 2011-January 22, 2012

Six Characters in Search of an Author
By Luigi Pirandello
Adapted by Steve Moulds
Directed by Halena Kays
Winter 2012 TBD

Romeo and Juliet
Based on the libretto for the Bellini opera I Capuleti e i Montecchi by Felice Romani
Adapted & Directed by Sean Graney
Spring 2012 TBD  Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Patrick Fawcett and Geoff Button/Photo: Ryan Bourque

RECOMMENDED

This is Sean Graney and the Hypocrites doing what they do best: chilling, dark comedy that establishes an unmatched atmospheric aesthetic. Georg Buchner’s unfinished, somewhat disjointed play about the dehumanizing effects of poverty gets the Graney treatment, with thrilling, if sometimes confusing, expressionistic movement and dialogue. The forces crushing antihero Franz Woyzeck are claustrophobic but Brechtian, with haunting songs and sound design by Mikhail Fiksel; and when Woyzeck finally succumbs to murder, the rampant bloodshed approaches a true theater of cruelty without ever losing a moment of controlled precision. Particular kudos to the exquisite set design, which, with its Damien Hirst-like medicine cabinets, stuffed reindeer, plastic sheeting, and tree stumps, evokes an apocalyptic element that somehow adds even more tension. (Monica Westin)

At the Chopin Theater, 1543 West Division. Through May 22.

As the economy slowly lifts us back to our feet and we look around, we see a remarkable sight: a performance industry in Chicago that survived the worst recession since the Great Depression wholly intact. Sure, we had a few brushes with death, and no doubt a few very small, very new theater companies threw in the towel, as they do even in good years, but unlike many other cities across the country, we’re in pretty good shape. How good? The League of Chicago Theatres issued a press release last week proclaiming our town as America’s theater leader, with more than 250 professional theaters, including four Regional Tony Award winners, and a combined annual budget of $250 million serving five million audience members. Add in our thriving dance community, a comedy scene that’s the envy of the nation and two world-class opera companies and you’d have to say we’re doing pretty damn good. But neither the economy nor any cultural organization is fully out of the water yet, and the dramatic uncertainty injected into the political sea by Mayor Daley’s decision to call it a day means Chicago’s performance community will need some steady hands at the wheel these next few years. Accordingly, for this edition of The Players, we’ve broadened our horizon and taken a closer-than-ever look at the individuals in charge of the financial fitness of our local institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Those who only like their Gilbert & Sullivan served up with all of the trimmings—trained voices, full orchestrations, full chorus, et al—would be well-warned to stay away from Sean Graney’s musically minimalist version of “Pirates of Penzance.” Its famous melodies are merely approximated, by and large, by Graney’s small troupe of committed actors who dabble in singing, and Sullivan’s orchestrations are stripped down to the lowest-common-denominator guitar chords, largely strummed by the performers themselves hootenanny style, sometimes incorporating clarinet, banjo, mandolin, ukulele and accordion.

And yet the charm, energy, integrity and youth of the Hypocrites re-imagining of this familiar warhorse is so contagious and so dramatically convincing that their spirited irreverence suggests a contemporary approximation of how G & S might have been experienced in their own time. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Goodrich and Erik Hellman/Photo: Michael Brosilow

A hot mess. If there’s such a thing as Shakespeare lite, “The Comedy of Errors,” with its slapstick physical comedy and absurd plot involving two sets of long-lost twins, is it. So when Sean Graney adapts it into a ninety-minute production, it’s easy to imagine that he’ll take a lot of creative license—and Graney does, getting rid of vast amounts of the original script and replacing it with lines that could have come from contemporary mainstream Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, and surprisingly given Graney’s past work, the show appeals to the lowest common denominator (read: jokes and songs about blow jobs). Recognizable cultural touchstones include “Norbit,” where the part of a kitchen wench is played by an actor in a fat suit as a hideous man-eater who demands, among other favors, a colonic from one of the manservant twins whose character channels Will Ferrell’s persona so completely that it’s actually distracting. Cross-dressing and quick-changes (six actors play twenty-three characters), the theatrical elements that helped make Graney’s production of “Irma Vep” at the Court last year so funny, here feel like pointless showing off because there’s so little substance left to the production. If only Graney had stuck to the comedy that’s already in Shakespeare rather than inserting lines like “I’m gonna drink the shit out of this Diet Coke”—there’s a pervasive sense of anxiety at making the comedy accessible that’s totally unnecessary and, frankly, insulting to any audience. (Monica Westin)

At the Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472, through October 17.

Beth Stelling, Maari Suorsa, Mary Hollis Inboden and Meg Johns in The New Colony Ensemble’s “Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche”/Photo: Saverio Truglia

RECOMMENDED

There are many similarities between “Sketchbook” and IML, the International Mr. Leather celebration.

“Sketchbook” is, of course, Collaboraction’s annual festival of mixed-media theater, music and performance art, a Chicago-flavored and smaller version of the Edinburgh or New York Fringe Festivals. IML is one of the biggest gatherings of leather, fetish and kink lovers from around the world, also a Windy City tradition. “Sketchbook” is celebrating its tenth anniversary in style and has taken over the upstairs theater and lobby of the Chopin Theatre for the next three weeks. IML just celebrated its thirty-second subversive year and commandeered the entire Hyatt Regency Hotel this past Memorial Day weekend. Both events are a peculiar mix of sexy, strange, funny, clever, physically mind-boggling, gross-out and consistently surprising entertainment gathered under one roof. Some sequences are painfully long and awkward to watch:  at IML they involve whips and chains; at Sketchbook it’s the cumbersome and time-draining scene changes. The smell of beer permeates the air at both events, indeed, both experiences become exponentially better the more inebriated you become (for the record, this critic never drinks on the job). There’s a lot of techno and trance music blaring at both events (I’ll be forever thankful to Sketchbook for bringing to my attention a wicked good house version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”).  At both Sketchbook and IML, you’re guaranteed to see things you have never seen before, things you will never see again, and things you hope you never see again. There’s tons of experimentation although the creativity at IML could get you arrested and thrown in jail in some states while at Sketchbook it wins you an NEA grant. You can see people make incredible fools out of themselves at both:  at IML the performers do it for sexual kicks; at Sketchbook they do it for artistic fulfillment. At both, there are some things that make no sense brilliantly; there are some things that just make no sense. Sketchbook has better lighting. IML has better men. Both are terrifically entertaining. Both have moments that are terribly boring. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Visual jokes are the smartest aspect of this stylish adaptation of Sartre’s existential classic about three malefactors trapped in a tiny room in hell together for all of eternity—the origin of the famous quote “hell is other people.” In this production, the scariest aspect of hell is its interior designers: the set, an inclined, cramped, shocking pink Schiaparelli-esque nightmare with a giant nude statue and ugly powder-blue furniture (with one comfortable chair the characters fight over) is a perfectly awful place to spend the hereafter. Director Sean Graney handles the story adeptly, and if anything with almost too much vitality; the exquisite claustrophobia that marks the beginning of the production gets dispelled by madcap chaos by the end. As the characters begin to admit why they’re in hell and to work their torture on one another, Graney has them pacing like caged animals, pasting torn-out pages of ”Being and Nothingness” on a wall with toothpaste, switching clothes and seducing one another crassly as they destroy the space around them. The action makes the show imminently watchable but results in a frenetic energy that seems less suited to somber Sartre than to farce. Ultimately, it’s a smart, immensely entertaining but psychologically superficial treatment. “I can’t go on without making people suffer,” one character declares; I wish the Hypocrites would let the audience suffer just a little bit of the torture Sartre’s characters go through. (Monica Westin)

The Hypocrites‘ No Exit” plays at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport, (800)982-2787, through July 11.