Endgame
Playwright: Samuel Beckett
At: American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron
Phone: (773) 929-1031
Tickets: $20-$25
Runs through: Oct. 7
by Mary Shen Barnidge
THE INVENTION OF LOVE
RUM & COKE
SYNCOPATION
If ever there was an argument for government-sponsored Geriatric Care, this is it. The clan depicted in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame consists of a blind and wheelchair-bound patriarch, his amputee parents, and the former’s foster son, whose responsibility it is to minister to the whole sorry lot. The physical logistics of this situation would be grotesque enough—did I mention that they live in what appears to be an abandoned basement, with the sire and dame housed in twin garbage cans?—but even more disturbing is the psychological dynamic engendered by this proximity.
At no time has the question of duty to the elderly and enfeebled aroused more debate than today, with life-prolonging medical technology making for a burgeoning population of Golden Agers. But playgoers who might be rendered uneasy by Beckett’s gerontophobia and director Nicholas Rudall’s contemporary spin thereon will find it easy to ignore these subtexts in a production that appears to have been vacuumed, disinfected and otherwise purged of its icky imagery. For example, ancient Nagg munches on a rock-hard dog biscuit with no indication of weakened jaws or decalcified teeth. The family’s shabby and filthy garments are worn by the actors as if freshly laundered. And when Hamm announces that he is urinating in his chair, he might as well be commenting on the weather for all the onstage reaction provoked by his behavior.
The American Theater Company has assembled an all-star cast for its season opener. In the role of the self-absorbed Hamm, Michael Nussbaum blusters against the dying of the light with ironic humor and impeccable timing, closely flanked by David Darlow as the weary Clov (done up in Peking Opera redface—to symbolize his character’s superior vitality or simply exaggerate his facial expressions?). But Deanna Dunagan and ATC member John Möhrlein, playing a likewise clown-faced Nell and Nagg, come off as too lively to be convincing as living fossils languishing in twilight memories. (Individual speaking tempo and body language are particularly important when players’ ages do not necessarily correspond to those of their personae.)
But watching seasoned troupers do their stuff is always a pleasure. Though attributable more to technical expertise than artistic inspiration. ATC’s staging of this modern classic supplies sufficient panache to send audiences home satisfied by their safely-sanitized stroll through Beckett’s existential nightmare.
THE INVENTION OF LOVE
Playwright: Tom Stoppard
At: Court Theatre
Tickets: $28-$38
Phone: (773) 753-4472
Runs through: Oct. 15
by Gregg Shapiro
In 1998, Court Theatre scored with their acclaimed production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and in 1999 they had a hit with Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. With The Invention of Love, the first play of their 2000/2001 season, they come up with a winning combination of the two.
Written by Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love is an inventive love story about the unrequited love between British poet A.E. Housman and fellow Oxford classmate Moses Jackson. Upon meeting Charon (Maury Cooper), the river Styx’s boatman, an elder Housman (played brilliantly by Paxton Whitehead) says, “I’m dead then, good,” immediately setting the tone for the play, which is a mix of intelligent humor and painful introspection.
Critical and gossipy, Housman’s life was “marked by long silences,” but as soon as he realizes that he is not dead, only dreaming, he opens up about his life and the man he loved. While on the river, he crosses paths with his younger self (played by Guy Adkins), Moses Jackson (Martin Yurek), and another classmate and friend, Pollard (Bruch Reed), permitting him to openly express the love he felt for Jackson by saying that he “would have died for Jackson but he never had the chance.”
There are many places in which The Invention of Love is truly innovative. The conversations between the young and old Housman, for one, are a highlight of the production, giving the actors a chance to revel in the material. The more reserved Housman and the flamboyant Wilde were, for a brief time, at Oxford at the same time, and in a scene towards the end of the play, the older Housman meets with Wilde.
The verbose Stoppard packs his two and a half hour play with more than what the average audience is prepared to take in, including a debate about the aesthetics of the period, scholarship, the Oscar Wilde controversy, and what it meant to be a man in love with another man at that time. Still, Stoppard does for Housman’s lovelife, in The Invention Of Love, what he did for Shakespeare’s in Shakespeare In Love. He makes it theatrical, thereby suspending it in the realm of the imagination, which doesn’t make it any less touching or heartbreaking. This Midwestern premiere is a beacon of hope at the beginning of a very full fall theater season.
RUM & COKE
Playwright: Carmen Pelaez
At: Pegasus Players/O’Rourke Center For The Performing Arts
Tickets: $15 – $25
Phone: 773-878-9761
Runs through: Oct. 22
by Gregg Shapiro
Carmen Pelaez’s autobiographical one-person piece, Rum & Coke, is a good reminder of what makes the artform of the single-voice, multiple-character performance so enjoyable. The American-born daughter of Cuban exiles, Pelaez’s very personal show details her odyssey of self-discovery which began with a journey to Cuba.
On a simply set stage (a couple of chairs and a small table, a coat rack), with a screen in the background onto which various images (including photographs of Cuba and Miami, the artwork of Pelaez’s aunt) were projected, Pelaez makes her entrance smoking a cigar to the strains of Albita. She talks about her aunt Amelia Pelaez, “one of Cuba’s first modernists,” and her decision to see Cuba for herself, armed with a couple of bags of chocolate (“spiritual Tylenol”) to bring to Cuba.
With a few simple articles of clothing or devices (headband, strand of pearls, bandana) Pelaez transforms into the people who were essential to her journey. In Miami, before Cuba, we meet Juana (whose distinguishing artifact is a headband), who like “ruffles and spandex” and men. Pelaez becomes her grandmother by donning a pair of cat-eye glasses. Her grandmother, who came from Cuba “wearing a linen dress” and has been accused of being a “nostalgic aristocrat,” is opposed to Carmen’s trip to Cuba, having spent virtually all of her time in Miami protesting what has become of her homeland. While in Miami, Carmen consults a santera, in a blue scarf, who encourages Carmen to follow her dream of going to Cuba. Of these three characters, Juana and the santera were the most fully realized.
In Cuba, Carmen stays with her pearl-necklace-wearing aunt (who Pelaez says looked like a meringue), who opens up to Carmen, feeding her “family stories and a meal.” After learning about her family, Carmen ventures out into Havana, “the city that never was and will always be,” where her most eye-opening experiences occur. She meets a prostitute wearing a red-fringed shawl skirt, who equates her work with the ballet. The prostitute tells Carmen her own tragic story of being trapped in Cuba.
Carmen’s education continues at the Tropicana night club, beginning with rum. As someone who “has never been a rum girl,” Carmen has a change of heart. As she put it, “the rum was syrup, and I was a waffle.” In addition to being dazzled by what was happening on the stage at the Tropicana, she is equally overwhelmed by a conversation she has with a former Tropicana show girl, now working as a bathroom attendant at the nightclub.
Pelaez is riveting, and although a few of the characterizations were not as strong as some of the others, her voice rang true throughout the theater. Perhaps the fact that she was so close to the material, obstructed her performance, and another actress less involved in the events of the story might have done a better job. In any event, one still leaves the theater, drunk on Pelaez’s experiences. It was a pleasure to watch the self-described “walking Cuban identity crisis” regained her identity.
THE TWO
GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Navy Pier, 800 East Grand Ave.
Phone: (312) 595-5600
Tickets: $35-$45
Runs through: Nov. 11
by Andrew Patner
Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson have been lauded extensively—and appropriately—for their accomplishment in building the new Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a magnificent home for classic drama and comedy in the heart of the city’s populist concrete boardwalk, Navy Pier. Their first season on the Pier showed some of the understandable costs that all of the energy required to build this space exacted from the need to present an artistic product that could match these impeccable new surroundings. The launch of the second Navy Pier season with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, complete with an astonishing subscriber base of 21,000, allows for some assesment of where this company has come in its many years and where it still might go.
As always with CST (as under its earlier name of Shakespeare Repertory at the Gold Coast’s Ruth Page Auditorium), clear language and presentation remain hallmarks—never mean feats. But as so often in its earlier seasons, too, this production of Two Gentlemen reveals a refusal to engage with deeper meanings in the works presented. Guest director Penny Metropulos, of the acclaimed Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival has assembled a cast of CST regulars and supplemented them with an intelligent design team from her Pacific Northwest base. But despite intriguing program notes from Metropulos and an outside academic on the role of adolescence and of same-sex friendships in this work, perhaps the earliest of Shakespeare’s comedies, provocation comes only from the commentaries of the play’s supporting characters and never from its prinicipal players or the director’s handling of them.
As the Duke of Milan, CST veteran Larry Yando reminds us of the vanities of the rich and powerful, even those rich and powerful who are wise, in an hilarious scene where he forces a guest to participate in his morning exercise routine. The performances of Scott Parkinson and Eddie Jemison as the clowns, Speed and Launce are priceless. Parkinson, long-established (he’s only 30, but, yes, he’s long-established) as a serious actor of the first-rank, is transformed here to a bubblegum-chewing Brooklyn wiseacre on roller skates with all the timing and deapdan skills of an ace vaudevillian. Jemison must contend with a dog (blame Shakespeare’s script here), but on opening night, he showed with some on-the-money vamping that an expert fool and his wit are not easily parted by a mere disobedient canine.
The leads are pleasant, Brain Vaughn and Kate Fry as the wronged Valentine and Julia most especially, but they need to move us, and Proteus and his ungentlemanly behavior needs to chill us. The presence of Roderick Peeples, Brad Armacost, and Oksana Fedunyszyn in smaller roles is luxury casting of the most delicious sort.
In the end, along with the clowns, the production belongs to Gaines’s longtime music director Alaric (Rokko) Jans whose delightful live score—performed onstage by his own ragtime trio—offers the kind of needling re-examination of the script that the directors and producers at CST themselves need to give us more often.
SYNCOPATION
Playwright: Allan Knee
At: Apple Tree Theatre, Highland Park
Tickets: $28-$32
Phone: 847-432-4335
Runs through: Oct. 22
by Jonathan Abarbanel
The aging pixie Ross Lehman, who possesses the natural grace of Danny Kaye, and Ann Noble Massey, she of the expressively wide eyes, make the most of Syncopation, an unusual theatrical romance by Allan Knee, and a great showcase for two intense actors.
Syncopation is set to the rhythms of tangos, waltzes and ragtime two-steps in 1911 New York, and uses ballroom dancing as a metaphor and narrative device, along with a quasi-epistilary style in which the two characters address the audience as if reading diary entries, beginning with the date. These atypical devices, combined with complex characters, lift Syncopation above the standard tale it might otherwise be, of a quixotic and unlikely couple.
Henry Ribalow, a 42-year-old immigrant meat packer, has a passion for dancing, and places newspaper ads to attract potential partners to the sixth-floor studio he’s rented, suggesting that they will “dance for royalty” one day. Anna Bianchi, a 22-year-old garment worker, answers the ad in what may be her first-ever independent choice. In the course of many months, these two prickly individuals affect each other for good and bad, until they accept the fact that love, combined with dancing, conquers all.
The tale of Henry and Anna is funny, poignant and bittersweet. Henry is thin-skinned and frequently callous. Repressing his yearnings and fearing rejection, he declares that two people can be passionate dance partners without any personal passion. Personal passion, however, is the naive Anna’s dream, as she opens herself to new experiences, including friendships with “odd women with short hair and strong opinions.”
As the tale progresses, the period-perfect dance steps (by Marla Lampert) and the relationship become more and more complex. Setting his tale in a time frame of nearly two years, Knee does not short-change either the dance metaphor (dance is both freedom and commitment) or depth of character. Syncopations is not a play of easy solutions, and therein lies its strength.
Mark E. Lococo has directed with style and pace, recognizing that the play needs a degree of leisure, yet never letting it drag. He understands the intensity of Henry and Anna, conveyed in the unflagging focus of Lehman and Massey. The period details of costumes (Rebecca Powell) and the Italinate arched windows of the set (Tim Morrison) perfectly evoke time and place, as does Jeffrey Lundun‚s original music, matched to the Tin Pan Alley sounds of dance bands and Victorolas in those pre-radio days.