Ali
Playwright: Geoffrey C. Ewing & Graydon Royce
At: Congo Square Theatre Company
at Chicago Dramatists,
1105 W. Chicago Ave.
Phone: (312) 913-5808
Tickets: $20
Runs through: Dec. 15
by Mary Shen Barnidge
To some, he was a clown, a sports celebrity who rejected the laconic image favored by prizefighters of his time to elevate showboating to a fine art. To others, he was a traitor who abdicated his patriotic duties to affiliate himself with a potentially subversive cult. To still others, he was an inspiration to Black American males—indeed, to males the world over—who saw in the 15-times heavyweight champion an Everyman for the late 20th century. The life and times of the Kentucky lad christened Cassius Marcellus Clay, who later adopted the name Muhammed Ali, have been documented in accounts as filled with speculation as with fact—rendering ironic the enigma still surrounding the man known throughout his career for his loquacity.
Geoffrey C. Ewing and Graydon Royce have crafted a succinct and astonishingly comprehensive biodrama, reverent but never sycophantic. Framed in a personal appearance by the retired athlete, the play introduces the mature Ali addressing us while he looks back on his youthful self. As he recounts them, a screen replicating the cover of Time magazine shows us the faces and events that determined his destiny—the racial segregation, the Black Muslim movement, the Selective Service Board, the censure by the New York State Athletic Commission, the hostile reporters, the smug sportswriters, the adoring fans, the initial warnings of brain damage and Parkinson’s disease, and, of course, the fights.
As the young Ali, Javon Johnson has Clay’s braggadocio down pat, but even more impressive is the kinetic verisimilitude he brings to the scenes of Ali sparring in the ring, thanks to daily workouts with Boxing Consultant Joe Kahn (himself trained by Ali’s mentor, Angelo Dundee). But what engages us immediately is Ron OJ Parson’s mischievous portrayal of an Ali still playful despite his disabilities (the latter reproduced so convincingly that an unexpected manifestation of the old energy makes us fear for his physical safety). In the Chicago Dramatists’ intimate environment—where a benedictory “As-Salaam Alaikum” brings forth replies of “Wa-Alaikum Asalaam” from the audience—they together paint a picture of an American icon whose popularity shows no sign of waning even as his body goes the way of all mythic heros born merely mortal.
THE GLAMOUR HOUSE
Playwright: Lydia Stryk
At: Victory Gardens Theater,
2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; Tickets: $28-$33
Phone: (773) 871-3000
Runs through Dec. 23
by Rick Reed
“In the Glamour House, silence reigns.” Such is the strict imperative of dress storeowner, Trudi Stein (Deanna Dunagan). It’s 1947, and the Glamour House is the place where ladies come to feel beautiful. Located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the store is owned by the strict, cold Mrs. Stein, whose dedication to commerce outweighs even the slightest hint of the personal in her two employees, Rosa (Carmen Roman), a gregarious seamstress, and Mrs. Stein’s most recent addition, Esther Bayer (Anne Fogarty), a young salesgirl just relocated from Germany. Esther is young and eager to make her mark; her warmth with the customers immediately boosts sales. Mrs. Stein is at odds; Esther’s personal touch and ability to make customers see beauty in the mirror when trying on a dress is making the inventory fly off the shelves. But that same outgoing charm is not Mrs. Stein’s style, and she is continually reminding the young Esther that she must reign in her impulses to be overly friendly to the customers and her co-workers.
The Glamour House is one of the most accomplished productions I’ve ever seen on the Tony-award-winning Victory Gardens mainstage. Playwright Lydia Stryk displays an extraordinary talent for the medium. Her dialogue has an astonishing rhythm, a cadence that lets characterization flow naturally from the actors. She is capable of crafting short, almost elliptical scenes that move the action along deftly and economically. The Glamour House doesn’t have a wasted moment. But what Stryk is best at is constructing a feeling of dread and of making the audience want more. Why is Mrs. Stein so cold? What secret tragedies does the cheerful and charming Esther harbor? Esther, when her arms are exposed (a no-no in The Glamour House), displays a tattooed number on her forearm, hinting at a past that includes Nazi concentration camps. Stryk slowly metes out the revelations in this compelling and touching drama, keeping us intimately involved.
When Esther mentions that a woman called Ada in Germany sent her to the Glamour House, Mrs. Stein’s marble façade begins to crumble. The name touches something deep and painful in Mrs. Stein’s psyche and for the remainder of the play, Esther acts as a catalyst, unleashing long pent-up feelings in her unresponsive, all-business boss.
It would be unfair to reveal The Glamour House’s ultimate revelation. It’s sufficient to say that this revelation is not predictable at all, but once revealed, it makes perfect sense. It brings the stalwart Mrs. Stein to tears, and, in all probability, brings most of the audience to tears as well.
There isn’t a weak moment in The Glamour House. Each actor, including very funny and heart-warming contributions from Cindy Gold as Mrs. Pauschel and Marc Jablon as Esther’s smitten would-be suitor, works together to bring the story to life. Sandy Shinner’s direction is flawless, maintaining a pace and mood that holds one in its grip and never lets go. Timothy Morrison’s set is evocative, calling forth both a piece of Americana, as well as contributing to the stark mood of suspense that surrounds the production. Judith Lundberg’s gorgeous costume designs are a visual treat, especially the elegant dresses worn by Deanna Dunagan.
This is the kind of drama that’s certain to be performed for years to come. It has all the right ingredients of a classic.
Will He Bop, Will He Drop?
Playwright: Robert Alexander
At: National Pastime Theater at The Old Speakeasy, 4139 N. Broadway
Phone: (773) 327-7077
Tickets: $18-$22
Runs through: Dec. 22
by Mary Shen Barnidge
It’s four o’clock in the morning and Jack, his face war-painted with white-out, is seeing snipers at the windows, surveillance officers in the UPS van parked across the street and wire-taps on his telephone. The source of the drummer-turned-writer’s paranoia, we learn, was the guerilla training imposed on him as a boy by his militant Afrocentric father, who exhorted him to purge his writing of “white words.” Jack’s wife, now in her tenth year of pregnancy—that’s right, ten years—and weary of this siege mentality, enlists that parent’s aid in hopes of persuading her husband to take his medication, but their efforts are in vain.
The fantasies of a frustrated author are hardly original, as literary premises go. Neither is the free-form phrasing (more associated with poetry than with dramatic prose) employed by playwright Robert Alexander in acquainting us with his hero’s grievances. But Director Laurence Bryan and the National Pastime Theater company find rhythms and breaks in the rhetoric, forging jazz-like themes and variations from language that could easily have been reduced to a single Ginsbergian rant. (Did I mention that Jack, when in his altered consciousness, assumes the identity of one “Willie Bobo”? And that he regards his father’s decision to rejoin The System as betrayal of the African-American ideals?) This lyrical approach to the material provides the actors with a consistent style capable of sustaining the dramatic tempo even in the moments when Alexander is clearly time-stepping.
Michael Hargrove endows the hallucination-racked Jack with a manic energy, his extravagant emotions contrasting with Arch Harmon’s icy portrayal of Jack’s drill-sergeant Father (awakened at 4 a.m., he declares, “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I never sleep! Sleep is the Black Man’s enemy!”). Tippi Tanesha Thomas does what she can with the thankless role of Jack’s ever-supportive spouse, while Dana Block makes the most of her stage business as the enigmatic “clean-up lady” who alternately torments, taunts and titillates Jack. Further intensifying the action is Wanda Ross’ percussion-driven stageside accompaniment, culminating in an intricate four-part chorus (from which the play’s title is drawn) with spoken-word harmonies as contrapuntally complex as a baroque cantata.
ST. NICHOLAS
Playwright: Conor McPherson
At: Victory Gardens Theater
(downstairs studio), 2257 N. Lincoln
Tickets: $26-$28
Phone: (773) 871-3000
Runs through: Dec. 30
by Rick Reed
The play opens in pitch-black. From behind, a stentorian voice, made a little less intimidating by an Irish brogue, intones, “When I was a child, I was afraid of the dark.” The clever opening of Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s one-man piece sets an appropriate chill over the audience, immediately putting them under his spell. McPherson is renowned for his storytelling (his This Lime Tree Bower and The Weir have both played in Chicago with great success).
Greg Vinkler, a generous, immensely talented actor, becomes an Irish theater critic, much to the delight and recognition of the critic-laden crowd. Vinkler immediately folds us under his wing, and the downstairs studio of Victory Gardens becomes an intimate room. It’s almost as if each of us is alone with this Irish critic, besotted with drink, possessed of a dark and wry sense of humor, and with a singularly cynical view of life. His cynicism springs from many sources: his passionless marriage, the distance he suffers from his children, growing up (and away) from him, but most of all, from his inability to create. Oh sure, he tells us, he’s good at “stringing together words,” the talent that’s gained him a comfortable, but unsatisfying life. But he recognizes himself as a hack, and admits he has no ideas. He can only write about what’s already there. As he confesses, “I wasn’t dyin’—I was dead.”
The critic’s life may have continued in this vein, fueled by regret, vitriol, and booze, had it not been for a sudden obsession with a young actress, whom he, in a funny and bizarre turn of events, winds up following from Ireland to London. And it’s in London that the critic’s story, and his life, takes the strangest of turns. He passes out in a park and when he awakens, meets an intense young man named William, who, without any effort, bewitches him. William, you see, is a vampire, and he needs a charming procurer to bring young life to himself and the other vampires with whom he lives in a ramshackle house in the English countryside. The unhappy critic fits the bill.
McPherson paints perhaps one of the freshest portraits of vampirism to come along since Bram Stoker took some historical detail and wedded it with the supernatural to create the grandfather of all vampire stories, Count Dracula. McPherson’s vampires are charming, sinuous, sexy and have none of the attributes our cinematic culture has ascribed to them. They can bear the light of day; they do not kill their victims; they do not make their victims into other vampires. They are simply otherworldly.
The critic, at first, is grateful. He has a purpose, and believes the vampires have endowed him with a charm that makes him irresistible to the young men and women he brings to their nightly revels. But, in a poignant twist, McPherson brings the critic’s new vocation and his old one together one memorable night, and the experience opens his eyes. He realizes that the vampires possess something the supernatural mythos about them never told us: they have no ability to reflect (in the literal, not the mirror sense) ; they have no conscience, and as such, are unable to understand the human ability to create art. As the critic says, “Art is for itself—like nothin’ else. Havin’ a go at making virtue.”
And with this realization comes another, the critic finally has something he’s longed for all his misplaced life. A story. And thus, he’s redeemed.
This production, with an actor, a small table, and chair, is one of the richest and liveliest shows you can see right now in Chicago. Actor, playwright, and director (Todd Schmidt) have simply conspired to create magic.
ROBERT’S RULES OF ARDOR
Playwright: Robert Patrick
At: Great Beast at Heartland Studio, 7016 N. Glenwood; Tickets: $10
Phone: (312) 409-2135
Runs through: Dec. 19
by Jonathan Abarbanel
Since Robert Patrick once propositioned me, I’m an expert on his work. His more than 60 mostly one-act plays all are clever and glib, frequently creative in their manipulation of stage reality, and always quintessentially gay and proud. Under the collective title, Robert’s Rules of Ardor, these four one-acts—including two world premieres—reflect changes in sexual attitudes, 1960s to the 1990s. Ranging from sketch to drama, the plays are as uneven as the Great Beast production, which suffered opening night technical disasters of near-comic proportions, including a malfunctioning sound system and a collapsing coffee table.
Evan on Earth, set in the 1990s, opens the quartet. The two-character world premiere pits a middle-aged protector (gratuitously nude Michael Martin) against his spoiled, pretty-boy, HIV+ lover (smooth and slender Tim Ballard). The older man is an unreconstructed hippie and writer, a description of Robert Patrick himself, now 63. Despite typical Patrick word-play—phrases like “sodom your bottom” abound—the piece is repetitive as the passive-aggressive lovers play I love you, I love you not. Under director Michelle Power, they shout far too much. Volume is NOT the only way to express anger or intensity.
Pouf Positive, set in the 1980s, is a classic bitch-wit monologue, in which drag queen Robin discusses life, love, AIDS and Pig Latin (did you know Alice Faye is phallus?). In a listless turn, Charles Christensen speaks the role rather than performs it. And what’s with the 2001 headset phone?
The second half opens with Sitcom, a three-man world premiere set in the sexually liberated, pre-AIDS, 1970s. Complete with laugh track and applause (when the sound system is working), old married couple Ron and Doug spice up their lives with a priapic third who joins their menage. Costumer Eric Martin Webb’s brightly patterned body shirts and outrageous wigs help put this one over as do energetic performances by BC Kalz, Ed Jones and Stephen Leaver.
The final work, Fog, is by far the evening’s best, set in the pre-Stonewall 1960s of discrete cruising and fake names. Owing a great deal to Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, it concerns a Central Park meeting between an effete queen and a young stud during an intense fog that obscures faces, intentions and realities. Even though it ends with a Men’s Room quickie, there is a great deal of compassionate conversation about the rolls we play or force upon others. Supported by Andrew-Kain Miller as the Stud, Ed Dzialo gives a lovely performance of vocal and physical nuance as the queen (think Charles Nelson Reilly) who transforms into someone else. Michael Martin directed.
Fog is worth the wait, although it would help the longish evening to drop one of first two pieces.