A promising absurdist satire about Marxist revolution and the lampooning of the bourgeoisie that ultimately loses its focus in a crescendo of incoherence and farce gone amok. Beata Pilch works hard to invigorate the story of a middle-class family’s rise and fall in a generic proletariat uprising turned fascist regime, where the feminist daughter alone resists and is destroyed, and there are a lot of choices in the production to admire, from a sixties sitcom laugh track in domestic scenes to an inspired Devo soundtrack. The real problem, though, is that nothing in the story feels particularly fresh, and no matter how much theatricality the production achieves (a lot, and probably worth a visit to admire the acting and technical theater alone), the cleverness of director and talented actors doesn’t accomplish as much as they deserve. While the language of “The Unconquered” is often poetic, there’s a “broken record” trope of repeated lines that simply becomes redundant, and as the main antagonist morphs from a somewhat compelling southern-boy soldier to an Austrian fascist practicing mind control with a TV remote, it’s hard to know if the show asks to be taken seriously at all. There are a few powerful scenes, including an unforgettable John Kahara as the dweeby father who brings roadkill home for dinner during the famine of war, and all four actors work superbly with what they’re given, but Trap Door’s admirable impulse to stage difficult plays outdoes them this time—Betts’ play just doesn’t do anything innovative, and even with all the creativity put into this production, the show feels dated and somewhat derivative. (Monica Westin)

At Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, (773)384-0494.Through December 19.

RECOMMENDED

What might happen if Henry Miller and Edward Gorey sat down to rewrite “Our Town” when both were going through a surrealist phase and hitting the absinthe hard. “No Darkness Round My Stone” is one long, creepy, sexy poem about death and twisted love, and it’s a massive understatement to say that the play is hard to stage. Very few Chicago theater companies other than Trap Door Theatre could have really pulled it off with style (in fact, this is the first time Frabrice Melquiot’s play has been performed in the United States), but director Max Traux has created an impossibly entertaining production that makes the fact that the story doesn’t go anywhere completely irrelevant. The story centers around a pair of grave-robber brothers, straight out of a dark Jacobean tragedy, and with dazzling dialogue to match, but there are as many laughs as winces, with a fabulous Bob Wilson as a grieving father and transvestite, and the requisite corpse bride providing comic relief. Technically it’s incredibly beautiful, and the thoughtful choreography, mostly centering on dead bodies slumping to the floor in various ways, adds to the Gothic ambiance. (Monica Westin)

At Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W Cortland, (773)384-0494. Through October 11.

RECOMMENDED

The writer/director team Ken Prestininzi and Kate Hendrickson have teamed up for a delicate yet vivacious study of Paula Modersohn-Becker: painter, muse and object of Rainer Maria Rilke’s love. Drawing on letters, notebooks and Rilke’s own poetry, the writing is superb, and actors keep up. The play follows Paula, played by a luminous Betsy Zajko, her close friend Clara, and the two men they marry, four artists whose paths are both inspired and then limited by their romances and marriages. Paula’s relationship to her work outshines those between the couples, and the passion for vocation and artistic creation emphasized is inspiring. Sometimes actors don’t show quite enough restraint—emotions run high throughout the play, from idyllic beginnings involving a little too much giggling to the harsh life of bohemian Paris that comes on a bit too heavy—but the story is compelling enough to easily carry the feelings along. Special mention must be made about the set, which is exquisite, impressively interactive—appropriately artistic. (Monica Westin) 

At Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Courtland, (773)384-0494. This production is now closed.

There is a certain kind of madness going on at Trap Door Theatre right now and it has an appealing go-big-or-go-home quality to it. But this satirical musical by Julien Nitzberg and Roger Neill never lifts off into the comedic stratosphere its aiming for. A mash-up of Gilbert & Sullivan, Mel Brooks and Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America,” the piece is a faux opera that isn’t quite scabrous enough about American foreign and domestic woes to nail the sweet spot. A series of connected sketches, the characters aren’t developed so much as plunked down before you as if that’s enough. It’s not—especially with a two-plus-hour running time. Nitzberg’s lyrics are witty (a pair of drug-addled sisters sing, “Lunch we skip with Ritalin, then for dinner Mescaline”), and Neill’s score is bouncy and easy on the ears (his TV credits include “King of the Hill” and “The Simple Life”). But the show doesn’t go far enough to offend. This type of thing should shock you into laugher, it’s so out there. Under Kevin Remington’s direction, only Stephen Lydic really pushes it. He plays the president as a manic Eddie Munster, and yes, it’s over-the-top. But boy, it works. (Nina Metz)

At Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, (773)384-0494. This prodcution is now closed.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

The name Copi is synonymous to most Europeans with the Abusurdist movement of the mid-twentieth century, and Chicago’s Trap Door Theatre began its love affair with the Argentinean-born playwright over a decade ago, when Artistic Director Beata Pilch embarked on a two-month theater-research trip to Paris, funded by the French embassy. I caught up with Pilch during a rare break in her preparation for the opening of Trap Door’s latest Copi production, “Eva Peron,” and she spoke about discovering the work of this prominent figure. “[In Paris] I saw all this avant-garde work that isn’t seen in America…[including] a Copi play, actually the first [of his plays] that we produced, called ‘The Homosexual,’ or ‘The Difficulty of Sexpressing Onself.’ I fell in love with that production and thought it was perfect for Trap Door, because of our mission [to produce] rare, obscure European work. I did a production of that show here [in 2000], also funded by the French embassy. Now, ten years [after first encountering Copi], we still have such a great relationship with the French embassy, and they came to us this year hoping we were going to do a French piece. I had proposed this to them awhile ago, so it all matched up, and that’s why we’re doing it now.”

It’s the cultivation of such lasting artistic relationships, coupled with a willful determination to produce challenging, underrepresented theater by any means necessary, which have kept Trap Door going strong as a respected and innovative Chicago storefront theatre staple for nearly fifteen years. “Eva Peron,” part of the company’s season “focused on female revolutionaries,” is a darkly comic, dreamlike imagination of the volatile political figure’s final hours (see separate review in listings), which, when it first premiered in Paris in 1969, brought a mob of angry Peronists storming into the theater, trashing the set, releasing stink bombs and attacking the performers and spectators in an effort to stop the production. Radically inventive in his own lifetime and beyond, Copi, like so many other highly influential and regarded theater artists of the European avant-garde, hasn’t really gotten his dues stateside, something that Pilch has made it her mission to change.

“That movement happened decades ago, and I’m just perplexed as to why we are not open to this kind of material in the United States, or why we are not even taught it at our fancy universities,” she says. “This is old material. Copi was [writing] in the late fifties and sixties. Everybody in France knows [him], his work is almost considered classic.”

Pilch began her theater career as an actor, but knew early on that she had no interest in squeezing into the accepted design of contemporary American commercial theater. “I never wanted to be an actor that goes from theater to theater, just doing random projects and not have my own voice…I think that was the artistic director in me being born to guide my own choices in material that I wish to spend my time and life working on, as opposed to doing the same plays [that you see] playing in three different theaters, every year, all across the country. I’ve been able to perform in over ninety shows at Trap Door that I would never be able to do anywhere else, unless I moved to Europe. And that excites me; [but] to do a play that I already learned in college or high school, that really doesn’t excite me at all.”

Pilch’s fiery enthusiasm for the experimental has attracted a slew of loyal collaborators, many who, even though they may have moved on to more financially lucrative careers in the industry, return to Trap Door time and again for the opportunity to perform roles that they wouldn’t get to explore anywhere else—and in a performance space that is as reflective of the company’s vision as the plays they produce.

“The name came before the building, which I think is just magic, because we have three trap doors in here, a huge basement, people are coming in through the ceiling, coming up through the ground, we’re nestled behind two buildings, with this long gangway, and we now have a new restaurant door in front of us, so Trap Door is really a trap door…[it's something] immediately theatrical, in that you could fall into one, or someone could pop out and grab you. I want people to come in feeling like they’re doing something naughty, or know a secret that nobody else knows about.”

Eva Peron at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 West Cortland, (773)384-0494. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

What to make of Eva Peron? If it’s any consolation—and this is crucial to an understanding of playwright Copi’s “Eva Peron”—I don’t think the late playwright himself knew. Copi (nèe Raul Damonte) was an exiled Argentine who died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 48. He lived and worked in Paris as a writer and cartoonist, and this helps to explain why “Eva Peron,” at times a caustic anti-Eva satire, at others a pro-Evita melodrama worthy of a Latin telenovela, is a mess. More importantly, Copi was a homosexual and his play reads like a flamboyant gay man’s love letter to the strong woman he idolizes, adoring her Prima Donna fabulosity as fiercely as he covets and resents it. This fascination and repulsion with its subject is why for most audiences “Eva Peron”—that imagines what Eva’s final hour within the Casa Rosada battling cancer might have been like—is going to feel like either the theatrical equivalent of a fun Argentine acid-trip or an unbearable stage migraine. And probably what director Beata Pilch and her hard-working cast have done with Copi’s blueprint of a script is probably all that can be done with this difficult, difficult piece—try to stage a physical production to match Copi’s scatological craziness. To that degree, this “Eva Peron” is a triumph. Filling the pre-show with beautifully edited archival footage, incorporating lyrics and song fragments from the famous musical, using extensive video and film multimedia to flesh out Copi’s thin script—in essence, creating a visceral experience, Beata seems to have taken “Evita” lyricist Tim Rice’s line “Oh, What a Circus/Oh, What a Show” to heart when approaching the script. And yet. Although the stylized acting is at times great fun—Eva (Holly Thomas) looks like Gwyneth Paltrow on heroin and sounds like a drag queen doing Kathleen Turner, Eva’s mother (Carolyn Hoerdemann) is clearly impersonating Faye Dunaway doing Joan Crawford—it feels laborious after awhile because the acting settles on commenting on its characters rather than inhabiting them, and rarely does it tap into any psychological depth. So while a great deal of time and effort has clearly gone into the minutia of staging, the production is ultimately lacking in pathos and the spectacle feels at times rather empty. Just because Copi was on the fence about Eva did not mean that this revival had to end up so. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Courtland, (773)384-0494. This production is now closed.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

The plays of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) have been widely produced to great acclaim throughout Europe; and yet, his work has had minimal attention in North America. But that’s changing, in large part due to the efforts of Adam Seelig, artistic director of Toronto’s One Little Goat Theatre. The company (which was founded by Seelig in New York City in 2002), in conjunction with the Goethe Institute Chicago, brings their production—the North American premiere—of Bernhard’s “Ritter, Dene, Voss” to Chicago’s Trap Door Theatre this week.

“Bernhard is a perfect fit for One Little Goat in the sense that [our] mandate is to…work towards what I call ‘poetic’ theater,” says Seelig, from his home in Toronto. “And ‘poetic’ theater is not poems that are adapted to the stage, they are plays that are capable of multiple meanings, they are plays that require major interpretation on the part of the actors, the director and, of course, the audience… They are plays that pay close attention to the rhythm of speech and text, so what could be a better [match] than Bernhard?”

Bernhard’s “misanthropic, psychosexual comedy” centers around three siblings—two actress sisters awaiting the return home of their troubled philosopher brother, who has just been released from a mental institution. (The title refers to the last names of three actors who originated the roles.) The troubled clan’s struggles to reintegrate themselves into normal daily family life amid deep-seated resentment, regret and misplaced desires is fugue-like in its caustic and often hilarious exploration of upper-class entitlement and the universally contentious nature of family. “Bernhard is obsessed with obsessive characters, and he’s obsessed with characters…who strive for perfection and are aware that it’s ultimately impossible, so they are tragic characters, but their awareness of the impossibility of perfection makes them comical as well. Especially the character in this play, he is constantly aware of the meaninglessness of life. But where that could create a despairing and dark universe, in Bernhard he turns it into, what he calls, ‘a world of entertainment.’”

Bernhard’s inspiration for the brother character was, in fact, real-life philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Austrian-born Wittgenstein, considered by many to be one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century, continues to have a strong impact on contemporary philosophical thought and global aesthetics. Though Seelig assures that one not need know about Wittgenstein in order to understand and appreciate the themes of the play. “The principle theme that we work at in our play…is that this is a play that involves siblings. The philosophy, the cultural background, that’s part of the furniture, so to speak. The more important aspects here are the desires, the love and hatred between these characters.”

But rest assured that this is no typical, kitchen-sink realism; Bernhard’s text is written in short, clipped lines, almost stanza-like on the page, entirely without punctuation and with minimal stage directions. The action of the play is guided by what Seelig identifies as games, almost ritual structures, which offer the director, the actors and the audience a myriad of possible meanings; precisely what the director finds so compelling. “What is important to me, in what I’m calling ‘poetic’ theater, is the ability to…create multiple meanings—what in poetry people will call ambiguity—for an audience, so that if something is said onstage it can hold two, three, four possible meanings…so it becomes interpretive for an audience as well.”

Seelig’s approach to mining these ambiguities is to look at the play not only as a thing in itself, but as action, play as verb. “There are two words that capture our entire approach: histrionics perversity. Histrionics, once upon a time, was the definition of the art of acting. Today it’s become synonymous with overacting, melodrama, scene-making. In Bernhard’s world, histrionics are essential in both senses. And perversity, this is a perfect definition of what we do in the play, but it’s also an incredible definition for what happens in the theater. What actors do, and what these characters do in the play, is the same thing; they take sincere emotions and they pervert them…for the purposes of power and of influencing the audience. That’s the whole world of Bernhard, and, in large part, the world of theater as well. Actors really feel what they’re going through onstage, but they’re also perfectly aware that those feelings have an impact on the people watching. That’s histrionics perversity.”

“Ritter, Dene, Voss” at Trap Door Theatre, 1655 West Cortland, (312)263-0472. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Trap Door Theatre’s interpretation of “Emma,” Howard Zinn’s portrayal of a captivating radical, succeeds phenomenally in the company’s mission statement of bringing life to difficult stage text. Zinn’s no studied playwright, and his depiction of anarchist, feminist and free-loving Emma Goldman involves heavy use of polemic and endless impassioned speeches. The twenty-three scenes that compose the play attempt to cover an ambitious number of years in Emma’s life, so that had the acting dragged even for a moment, the show could have lost cohesion altogether. It didn’t. Trap Door counteracts the play’s broad chronological scope and sometimes leaden messages of capitalist evil and police brutality with beautifully choreographed, fast-paced scenes, ingenious use of props and space, well-chosen music by the Sex Pistols, Gil Scott-Heron and Jewel, and a DIY black-box ethos that informs the message and elevates it, even frees it, from the script. Vibrant, even electrifying acting across the board, with a particularly dazzling Beata Pilch as Emma. (Monica Westin) 

At Trap Door Theatre, 1655 West Courtland, (773)384-0494. This production is now closed.