Mitchell Oldham

 

Live long enough and there’s no telling what you might see.  Watching the Goodman’s wonderful production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Gloria, you’d never guess the playwright would be so unexpected.   As much as we may want to think we are past assumptions about who writes what and how, we still

connect dots in very specific ways.  Engrossing not only for its fast, very smart plot; drenched as it was in the look and language of the young, you’d think it the sole province of an astute wasp.   Only very small hints revealed this play was written by a brilliant young MacArthur award recipient who happens to be black.

 

Set in a New York magazine publishing office and peopled by characters who are disgruntled, anxious, angry, loquacious and most importantly, ambitious; the audience gets to see the underbelly of what’s considered a glamorous career.   It’s work that deifies literacy and the last place you’d expect to find carnage.

 

That’s where insight, understanding and creativity step in.  Combined in a particular way, where timing, dialogue and creativity gel into an alternate reality thriving with life on a stage, it becomes a kind of genius, too.

 

What would you do if you were young, bright, well educated, confident, in a prestigious work space and stuck.  Get out?  Chill because you were still under 25 and had wiggle room?  Scheme in order to advance?  What if you were approaching 30 or past 30 in a place that looked at anything over 27 as nearly mummified?

 

These are the questions Gloria explores and slides around like a serpent.  And remember, this is all happening in a very special place.  New York; a place that “runs on ambition”.

 

Broken up into 3 parts, you see the most visceral answer to those questions first.  Then you see what people plan to do post trauma.  In New York or Chicago or even Podunk Idaho for that matter, if you’re driven to succeed by any means necessary, ambition will vanquish morality every time.  The art here is to show how it’s done.  To hear how that ambition is rationalized and later crafted for profit.

 

There’s a whiff of a golden age on the Chicago stage these days.  The young are throwing down some awesome work.  Not only is the already much acclaimed playwright just creeping into his 30’s, the cherry cheeked cast who look as precious as cupids with their sleek skin and chicly outrageous banter happen to be killer actors.  Jennifer Kim as Kendra will stalk you in your nightmares. It’s dangerous to be that smart and that mean.  Kyle Beltran goes from privileged ingratiating intern on any fast track he chooses to homeboy barista in Starbucks as easily you dot an i.  Ryan Spahn’s Dean gives nobility to the doomed Everyman in the critical opening act and in Act 2 is the jerk tech guy anybody who’s ever worked in an office hates without a second thought. It’s a dream cast with some of them are following their parts from New York.  They are a delight to watch ply their craft.  Michael Crane deserves a special shout out for his splendid interpretation of Lorin, the fact checker guy.  Jacobs-Jenkins uses him as one of the higher profile threads that connects beginning to end.  One of the few voices, or perhaps he is actually the only voice of empathetic reason in the entire play, his understanding and analysis of the final outcome is of interest to no one on the stage.  You don’t keep it any more real than that.

 

 

Goodman Theater

170 N. Dearborn

1/14/17 – 2/19/17

 

 

 

AIDS has not disappeared.  It sits behind a curtain made up of time, forgetfulness and life extending drugs.  It’s lost all of its urgency and settled into treatable ever present danger mode.

It wasn’t always like that and in the play, Roz and Ray, currently running at Victory Gardens Theater; the full scope of the disease’s once swift and unrelenting fatality flares hot with its old intensity.

Using her father’s experience as a physician treating hemophiliac patients in the midst of the epidemics peak during the 80’s, playwright Karen Hartman recalls the tragic impact AIDS had on the parents and physicians of children.

 

Reliving those dark days during the play’s one act performance was difficult.  Framed from the perspective of a father whose twin hemophiliac sons are caught in a net of draconian medical bureaucracy, woefully inadequate knowledge of the disease and a cynical profit hungry pharmaceutical industry; the anger and anguish the disease once created exploded into life again.

 

Roz, the boys’ pediatrician, develops a close relationship with their father.  The depth of the doctor/parent intimacy challenges the imagination but the poignancy of the boys’ circumstances does not.   The reality is that in the late 70’s through the mid 80’s nearly half of the hemophiliacs in this country became infected with AIDS through a contaminated blood supply.  Roz and Ray tells the story of those people; the ones who don’t come to mind when you hear that word: AIDS.

 

On the evening of this viewing, the two characters, James Vincent Meredith as Ray and Mary Beth Fisher as Dr. Roz Kagan took some time to fall in sync and escape into the illusion of the story.  Once they did however, things got much more real.  The audience felt the frustration of a grieving father and understood his feelings of betrayal by a person and a system.  It also felt the exasperation of a doctor hamstrung by protocol and hounded by guilt.

 

Victory Gardens Theater

2433 N. Lincoln

 

11/11/16 – 12/11/16

 

The constellation of the elite is expanding in the American galaxy of exceptional playwrights.

Although he has been creating or interpreting as either an actor or a storyteller since the 70’s, Eugene Lee has attained a new high in writing excellence with his East Texas Hot Links.  An amazing mix of raw reality and Shakespearean lyricism, the play manages to move fast and tell a rich story about a segment of black America we don’t hear nearly enough about.  The true mark of a great play or story of any kind rests on its ability to sting with truth.  The kind that elicits that tiny gasp of recognition and surprise.  Lee accomplishes this as well as a Sophocles or an Arthur Miller or an August Wilson; to whom he’s often compared.  Linking the two is understandable.  The sheer beauty of the language each uses and the ever-present grit to which each pays homage binds them. But Lee’s style is rooted in different soil.

 

East Texas and Wilson’s Pittsburg certainly shared a common enemy.  Virulent racism was as familiar in the backwoods of East Texas as it was Pittsburg’s concrete streets.  In both places it was immovable, rigid, unsparing.  If there is a difference it is one of style rather than effect.  Where it might appear slightly veiled in Pittsburg; its East Texas guise is much more raw, open and brutish.  Escaping the suffocation of that most oppressive form of racism is the engine that drives the action in East Texas Hot Links.  Populated by some of the most captivating characters you’ve ever encountered on the set of a stage, the audience is reminded of the breath of the American experience and of how magnanimity can rise in the face of deadly challenge.  One that’s made more precarious with a Judas lying coiled in the mix.

 

A young kid, Delmus (Luce Metrius) just flowering into manhood meets a girl and dreams of moving to the big with his sweetheart.  Because everything depends on who these lovers are, the complex and tainted soil of east Texas makes this dream a desperate one. They’re both black, but she’s got enough white blood in her to be “claimed” by the other side.  That makes her off limits.  Although you never meet her on stage, every indication points to her using her flowing hair and fair skin to lure young black men into a lethal trap.

 

The play opens innocuously enough.  Filled with charm and light-hearted revelry of people in their safe place, we’re dropped into a small rural bar off in the woods.  A black rural bar where people come to comfortably shed their defenses and spend time with folks they’ve known all of their lives.  Having inherited the bar from her father, a shapely and pretty proprietress Charlesetta (Tyla Abercrumble) runs the place with genuine hospitality on one hand and a bat in the other for anybody who doesn’t understand that no means no.

 

The people in this room know each other as intimately as blood relations.  They grew up together and married into each other’s families.  They know each other’s habits, peculiarities and flaws.  Much is tolerated as long as all present abide by one unspoken maxim:  You may not get the respect you deserve out there, but you’ll get at least that here.

 

The wit and charm Lee brings to his characters fill the theater with their abundance.  Ray Moore’s (Kelvin Roston Jr.) a regular at the bar and flirts with Charlesetta relentlessly.  He’s got as much chance of success as Santa Claus does in going on a cookie diet at Christmas.  Even though there’s a tiny bit of heat there, you recognize this teasing; true seduction.   A game among friends.

 

When the conversation travels to the mysterious deaths of two young men Delmus’s age on a construction site, the motives behind the largesse of the Judas slowly reveal themselves.  XL Dancer (Namir Smallwood) constantly talks up his importance to his white boss and one begins to question just how far his loyalty to this boss extends.  Why is XL so adamant about Delmus taking a job with this boss who has a reputation of conscious mistreatment of black workers?

 

It’s here the play plunges you into the roiling waters of chance.  Just as a hungry man will kill to eat, a greedy man will sacrifice life to prosper.  Whose life is sacrificed can be surprising as this wonderfully engrossing story reveals.  A.C. Reed as the clairvoyant card shark Boochie once again shows what a delightful chameleon he is.

 

Nothing could have been a more refreshing surprise than Buckshot (Antoine Pierre).  Think Paul Bunyan with swag or maybe Paul Robeson totally down.  Big big presence infused with nuclear joie de vivre and the courage of Samson.

 

Writer Theater

325 Tudor Ct.

Glencoe, IL 

 

There’s a lot to be said about a story that can move with the speed and grace of a cheetah and that is genuinely good. Cocked hit all of its entertainment targets with ease. A couple in Chicago’s trendy Andersonville own a condo above a toxically nasty neighbor. It’s Chicago and it’s Andersonville where unorthodox couples are the norm. The couple is lesbian. One is black. The other white. All good. Except the ex-Marine downstairs who goes out of his way to taunt them with loud military music and a constantly barking dog is not down with the black thing. And probably not the lesbian thing either. So far we’re ringing very true to life.

 

Taylor (Kelli Simkins), the white half, practices law. Izzie’s (Patrese McClain) journalist covering the city’s endless killing season. Professional and articulate, the language they use between themselves is intelligent, considered, incisive and often amusing enough to provoke a wry smile. Izzie is well aware of the need to get away from the loner and potential killing machine downstairs before he goes Columbine. Taylor is resisting because she’s afraid of taking a bath when they sale the condo.

 

Enter Taylor’s hilarious but totally nuts brother, Frank (Mike Tepeli). Everybody either has a Frank or knows of one. Can’t keep a job of any kind, knows absolutely everything, has con artist so deeply ingrained in his DNA that he thinks it’s normal and always looking for a handout. And in this case, he could also easily be nicknamed Destructo. Frank’s supposed to be living with Mom in Iowa or someplace but he just pops up at his sister’s for some vague reason secretly packing cold steel.

 

A good con artist first assesses. Then he ensnares. And finally he acts. That’s Frank. Once he finds out about Mr. Timebomb downstairs, Frank decides to man up and take care of this problem; with the ultimate objective of enriching himself. He instead sets in motion a series of events that puts them all in mortal danger. It’s those events that make up the meat of the play and they are delicious. True suspense descends and saturates the play. Dread and desperation combine and swirl both around and through all of them.   It’s during this escalation of fear that a number of revelations surface which could easily destabilize or even destroy the relationship itself.

 

The audience as well as the characters are forced to confront the reality of living in a gun culture. As Izzie sees it, the gun debate has already been lost. To survive the losers have to decide whether they will arm themselves to simply survive. Grappling with that decision butts against other realities that are true of many major American cities; particularly Chicago. The discounting or even discrediting of grievances from the black citizenry by the police factors into Izzie’s decision not to seek their help when it would seems absolutely the right thing to do. Cocked brings ugly and unsettling realities to the surface and makes you see them if not confront them. Left with only one recourse to defend yourself against volatile and lethal force, what would you do? That is the ultimate question the play asks and it does so very powerfully and beautifully.

 

Congratulations to playwright Sarah Gubbins for presenting an aspect of city life you don’t see very often and exposing the the complexity of the commonplace. Using dialogue that is bright and sharp, Gubbins doesn’t blink when true grit is needed to make a point that is both artistic and provocative.

 

I had one point of confusion. Izzie and Taylor, in their speech, sound perfectly suited to one another. But they don’t look compatible. It’s a question of types; not colors. If their few moments of mild affection looked more sincere on stage it may not have been so concerning. Fortunately, it wasn’t a distraction that hobbled or blighted the production. It simply remained a curiosity.

 

Both McClain and Simkins melted into their characters beautifully; making it a joy to watch them do their dance of drama. Tepelli’s Frank, like the dowager Countess on Dalton Abbey, got all of the best lines and he delivered them with consummate skill. His Frank was unqualified treat.

Another Word for Beauty

Surprises and Reaffirms

There’s a big difference between coping with adversity and prevailing over it. The Goodman’s production of Another Word for Beauty brought that point home with a vengeance.

 

Who would want to enter a beauty pageant in a prison? Why would a prison even have a beauty pageant? Those questions and many more were answered in this story about the five women competing in the contest and the circles of fellow prisoners who surround, support and encourage each one of them.

 

 

 

A brief trip to Colombia several years ago left me very discouraged about the country’s views on race. Even in this story set in a prison, I did not expect there would be any representation of the country’s Afro Latin presence. It was a pleasant shock to see that I was wrong and an even greater shock to see that the young woman playing Luzmery (Danaya Esperanza) bore such an amazing resemblance to one of my nieces.

 

 

As the old woman (Socorro Santiago) who provides the narrative bridge between scenes explains, Colombia is a country obsessed with beauty pageants and a country full of beautiful people. Incorporating something so central to the culture into the setting of a prison is not so far fetched after all.

 

Flashbacks explaining how each of the five women got to prison is just one of the many details that fill the play with a constant stream of fascination. Many but not all of the women came from challenging backgrounds or were compromised by the most meager of educational opportunities. In a country staggering from more than 60 years of civil war, saturated in political corruption and awash in the commerce of drugs, the roads to incarceration are many. Add to that the various forms of sexual predation a woman can find herself subjected to and the high stakes socio-political allegiances that entice and motivate both the idealistic and the intelligent, prisons become an inevitable destination.

 

Playwright Jose´ Rivera’s never veers from his chief intent of conveying the humanity of these women. Indeed, this play serves as homage to their perseverance and strength. Whether they’re mothers raising children in prison (until they’re three), political prisoners who have killed to advance a political ideology or like the narrator, repeatedly committed crimes in order to return to prison, the only real home she’s known, they each maintain a hefty dose of dignity through Rivera’s pen. More importantly, they retain the ability to dream. Their stories prove where there are dreams, you’ll find hope.

 

The cast was made up mostly of New York actors; some like Esperanza Juilliard trained. They were a striking group. Carmen Zilles who played Isabelle, the boastfully confident stunner who’s secretly haunted by some of the people she’s killed, has true stage charisma and is a powerfully talented actor. The scene in which she reenacts a killing was stunning.

 

So many of the performers in what is essentially an all female show dazzled. This truth even trickled down to some of the more minor characters like Carmen (Marisol Miranda). Confrontational, tough and sporting enough swag to rock the block, your eyes and ears gravitated to her whenever she appeared.

 

It was odd how little the audience responded to Esperanza’s Luzmery. Charming in the way youth is charming and so comfortable in the theatrical element. It’s as if she clearly understood and welcomed the wonderful role she was playing and had every confidence in her ability to send it soaring. She did.

 

 

Goodman Theater

Main Stage

January 16 – February 21, 2016

                       Love for the theater is all about intimacy. You can even say that about the most extravagant musical. For mega productions like the Wiz or even Kinky Boots, it’s an intimacy brought on by proximity. The magic is live. It’s tangible. Real. And if the story is especially strong, the audience is left a little changed as well as thrilled.

 

All of the above is amped up when this sense of intimacy and alteration can be pulled off with just two people on a stage talking to each other. We forget that through this simple act people enter on the road to marriage and nations enter wars.

 

Venus in Furs demonstrates the full power of live theater. Two people simply talk to each other and somehow there are suddenly high stakes, danger, confusion; and in this play, reversals, domination, submission, and sexual intrigue.

 

Thomas (Rufus Collins), a playwright, is at the end of a day spent auditioning actors for the female lead in his newest work. On the phone, he laments he may never find someone who can carry the intelligence or possess the gravitas to pull it off. An actress sweeps in from the street minutes before he’s about to roll.   He’s got dinner plans; seems anxious. He and the actress, Vanda, magnificently played by Amanda Drinkall, go back and forth on the meaning of the play and how it should be approached. She’s in camouflage mode; not yet disclosing her thorough and deep understanding of the work. That comes later. They dance through a verbal wrestling match before she finally convinces him to let her read for the part. It’s not long before you begin to see she’s much less naïve than she initially appears and understands the play she’s auditioning for far better than she earlier suggests. Soon she begins to take over what’s becoming a match of wills. One that is thick with sexual overtones; skewed clearly to the sadomasochistic.

 

Conflict conducted in the landscape of the mind can be just as intriguing as conflict waged on a battlefield. What’s better suited to warfare than the game of seduction?

 

As Vanda sheds her façade of false ignorance, she also transforms physically. Gone are the vestiges of turn of the century prudishness in keeping with the play she was originally auditioning set in the turn of the century. The high collar and long skirt vanish and suddenly the butterfly emerges as a full out dominatrix; wielding a tongue as finely crafted as a very elegant whip.

 

To see such a topic handled with high wit and like intelligence made it a joy to watch. In the wrong hands, the impact of this wonderful play would be noticeably diminished. Fortunately, David Ives’ brilliant story of a play for power between the sexes rests in thoroughly competent hands with Drinkall and Collins.

         Playwright Samuel Hunter seems to relish in the banal, the everyday dramas of everyday people who usually remain invisible and seem completely inconsequential. His characters are small and are forced to confront issues as big as mountains. Rest, the most current Hunter play in performance at Victory Garden is no exception and is wonderful.

 

Set in a bland assisted care facility that has been sold by its venture capitalist owners, its last remaining residents must find another nursing home that will take them in as the staff confronts looming unemployment. There are only three residents left; Etta (Mary Ann Thebus), her 91 year old husband, Gerald (William Norris) and pugnacious no nonsense, Tom (Ernest Perry, Jr.). Etta’s blessed with the good common sense of the totally sane and Gerald has been descending a terrifyingly steep cliff of severe dementia for the past 12 years. Once a brilliant and highly regarded university music professor, Gerald’s mind, his pride and his glory, is a fragile and all but empty of any memories. Etta’s concerned how this move will affect him. Their dilemma is as fascinating as it is tragic. Etta functions more as a full time caregiver to someone who barely recognizes her than she does as a wife. Thebus does a superb job of portraying the love and humanity of meeting such a daunting challenge. It’s the belief in her integrity that gives the play its weight and credibility.  To her credit, Thebus is unerring in convincing us of the purity of Etta’s ethics.

 

Nursing homes and assisted care facilities employ a motley mix of people who choose to care for the elderly for as many reasons as there are grains of sand on a beach. They are human beings dealing with their own demons and demands. Ginny (McKenzie Chinn) is a young supervisor who recently survived pelvic cancer. Her co-worker and friend, Faye (Amanda Drinkall), has agreed to and is carrying a child for Ginny’s as a surrogate. The facility’s manager, Jeremy (Steve Key) is recently divorced and is about as commanding and threatening a boss as a poodle on Zanex. Ken (Matt Farabee) is a kid who’s as tentative as a kitten. He’s brand new at the facility and is just taking on a cooking gig for a few days as the building closes down. Very young, fearful of death and the dark, religious in a gentle way, he seems more suited to an episode of South Park than in the middle of so much bare boned reality. Farabee plays his character straight and lets him slowly show Ken grows during the play. And grow they must all do when they learn Etta, who decides that her husband has suffered enough and should not go through the  trauma of weathering an agonizing move  to another facility, has killed Gerald.

 

Judgment erupts of course as well as fear considering the magnitude of what’s happened.   Tom, content with laying in the background until the spaghetti hits the fan, rises to impose reason and restore compassion to the mix. Beautifully played by Ernest Perry Jr., the wisdom we all hope for in advanced years sits comfortably on his Tom.

 

We’re left with the notion that there is strength and possibility and indeed heroism in even the least of us. For that alone, Hunter’s Rest is a gift.