The Cryptogram
Playwright: David Mamet
At: The Journeymen at Stage Left Theatre, 3408 N. Sheffield Ave
Phone: ( 773 ) 857-5395; $15
Runs through: Sept 10
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
David Mamet surprised us in 1994 by departing from the swift-thinking, salty-talking, high-rolling lowlifes who populated such successful dramas as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Sexual Perversity In Chicago to pen the appropriately titled Cryptogram, a puzzler stark enough to make its early audiences wonder if they had wandered into a Pinter play by mistake. What were we to make of the cozy domestic household—in 1959, yet—comprising its setting? Why were modern middle-class American citizens speaking in that Chekhovian manner ( e.g. 'Oh, if we could speak the truth for one instant, then we would be free' ) ? And what was a little KID doing in a !@#!*&!!! MAMET play?
But Mamet's plays for children—no, that's not an oxymoron—had long before revealed an astute appreciation of cosmological perceptions in pre-adolescents. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this very adult fable of a boy gradually coming to understand the secrets that grown-ups would keep from him—and each other, and maybe from themselves as well.
The story begins with 10-year-old John looking forward to a camping trip with his father. That parent never arrives, however, instead choosing this night to announce in a letter that he is leaving his family. While his distraught wife struggles to make sense of her husband's decision, the frequent visits of the couple's long-time bachelor-buddy become increasingly sinister as inconsistencies in their recollections surface with distressing prevalence. Who DID what to whom and when? And how is anyone to know, when there are no disinterested witnesses?
Under the always-capable direction of Frank Pullen, the Journeymen actors likewise struggle to impose coherence on their painfully elliptical dialogue, adopting eccentric phrasing and anachronistic pronunciations ( who in 1959 says, 'curséd'—or 'cursed', for that matter? ) . The results make for well-wrought subtextual dynamics and baroque vocal harmonies, while the collectively credited scenic design uses every inch of the Stage Left space to conjure a preternaturally placid world seething with repressed turbulence. But Mamet's abortive attempt at minimalism ultimately proves as enigmatic to us as to its characters.
Waiting for Godot
Signal Ensemble Theatre at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division
Phone: ( 773 ) 347-1350; $10, $15
Through Sept. 4, www.signalensemble.com
By Catey Sullivan
Let's take a moment to ruminate on the pitch-black hilariousness of the human condition, shall we?
We spend our days repeating essentially the same, often ultimately meaningless actions. Day after day, like Sisyphus, we put shoulders to the grind and roll the boulder up the mountain, watch as it tumbles back down, and then start all over again. All the while, we're waiting for some sort of deliverance we can't quite define.
The perfect career? The perfect lover? Proof that we matter? A cure for cellulite? Godot? Whatever. It's the wait, not the thing waited for, that matters.
In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the wicked, cosmos-sized joke is that maybe Godot—and all that he/she/it implies—is never going to show up. Maybe Estragon and Vladimir, the vaudevillian duo so eagerly anticipating Godot's arrival, are just a couple of suckers. Vladimir and Estragon are just a couple of mopes pinning their hopes to an illusion—'Dumb and Dumber' in an existential hell.
Tomorrow, tomorrow and the tomorrow after that—they're all the same in Beckett's surreal exaggeration of all that is terrifying, despair-inducing, and absurdly funny about life here on earth.
With its production of Waiting for Godot, the Signal Ensemble Theatre captures the humor and the humanity of true friends bonding in the frustration of certain futility. Wandering a road to nowhere, Estragon and Vladimir present a force of life-affirming optimism in the face of the impending doom. They'll wait. They will not lose hope. And they will remain devoted friends.
Director Ronan Marra captures all of this in an antic production that is droll, full of heart, and wonderfully accessible.
The importance of that last can't be underestimated. This is, after all, the play in which nothing happens. Twice. With a plot like that, Godot can all too easily become a tedious, mind-numbing exercise in boredom.
Here, it's none of those.
As Estragon, Christopher Prentice captures the madness and the desperate hope of the wait for Godot in each, cleanly articulated movement and line. Forever tormented by shoes that don't fit and a best friend who alternately enrages and invigorates him, Prentice's Gogo is everyman banished to a nightmare twilight zone.
Aaron Snook's Vladimir is equally compelling, a clumsy little oaf of a fellow who trudges stoutly onward even as ambiguous events far beyond his control buffet him from all sides. ( If there's a more apt representation of a corporate soldier suddenly cast into the ranks of the unemployed, I can't think of one. )
Both are excellent physical comedians, but they never let the slapstick overbalance the universal emotions at the core of their characters.
Equally effective are Joseph Stearns and Anthony Ingram as Pozzo and Lucky, a bizarre pair bound to each other by cruelty and resignation.
Laura M. Dana's costumes are a wonder of stylized rags and tatters, with a quintet of identical bowler hats playing a key role in one terrific bit of physical comedy.
Godot remains a maddening mystery. But there's no mystery to Signal's mastery of Beckett's seminal drama.
Henry 4
( part one )
Playwright: adapted by Katie Carey Govier from the play by William Shakespeare
At: Stockyards Theatre Project at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 327-5252; $17-$20
Runs through: Sept. 4
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
There are many ways of staging Shakespeare's plays to showcase female actors: there is the unigender approach, in which we are to ignore the treble voices and slight physiques to instead focus on the dramatic dimensions of our story. Then there is the gender-BENDING approach, a concept employing cross-casting to comment on our own society's expectations—say, a Taming of the Shrew with a woman playing Petruchio and a man, Kate. Finally, there is the workshop/classroom approach, where each participant, regardless of chromosome-count, is given a scene to interpret as they see fit.
Henry 4 has not yet made up its mind which one of these it wants to utilize, however. Under the direction of Katie Carey Govier and Angela Bonacasa, Mary Ross's coifed and lipsticked King Henry recalls, not so much a monarch troubled over the fate of a faction-racked kingdom as a clubwoman kvetching at the caterers. Stacie Barra's Harry 'Hotspur' Percy rages in a shrill voice more suggestive of adolescent PMS than sanguine temper. And Elizabeth Urello's Glendower is played as a raving pagan mystic, to the discomfort of his skeptical allies ( who need to learn the correct pronunciation of such Anglo-Norman words as 'allies' and 'scourge' ) . But if the point is to feminize the play's male characters—did I mention Peto and Bardolph Caboodled up in ruffled blouses and face-glitter?—why, then, was Eric Frederickson cast along traditional lines as Falstaff, and both the 'perfect at lying-down' Lady Percy and the English-illiterate Lady Mortimer excised altogether?
That said, Elizabeth Styles, with her throaty voice and robust laugh, emerges a charming Prince Hal, while Frederickson, though Malvolio-ish of build and countenance, delivers a capable rendering of the amoral Falstaff. Stephanie Repin, Dana Januszyk and Sheila Regan likewise achieve appropriate gravity in their roles. And Actor's Gymnasium combat instructor Bonacasa has choreographed some exciting fights commensurate with each player's level of expertise. In the end, however, Stockyards Theatre Project's hodgepodge of eclectic motifs makes for an ambiance more reflective of communal insularity than professional aspiration.
American Rock Anthem
Playwright: C. Mithcell Turner
At: Sansculottes Theater Co. at Raven Th.
Phone: ( 773 ) 507-1898; $15
Runs through: September 10
By Jonathan Abarbanel
Other reviews of American Rock Anthem haven't been kind, and I'm not going to buck the trend. But I'm going to attempt to explain why this world premiere doesn't succeed.
It calls itself a comedy, in fact a farce, but author C. Mitchell Turner doesn't pursue a farce strategy. Theatrical farce is not TV sitcom, and this way-dumbed-down show is far more like bad sitcom than anything else. But sitcom does borrow farce's Golden Rule: you must believe the characters. Sitcom cheats a great deal on motivation and probability because it spends weeks, months, years establishing its lead characters as full, complete and real individuals.
Similarly, a well-written farce must spend one-third or even one-half its running time hardly being funny at all. Before you throw characters into an improbable whirl of events you MUST set them up as absolutely real, normal people ( or at least normally eccentric ) . That's what makes it funny when skewed circumstances force them to abandon normalcy.
But Turner doesn't take time to do that. He launches the plot within minutes, well before he's established the characters as believable, let alone folks we should like and care about. His teenage principal characters are unengaged and unengaging slackers who make the Wayne's World duo look like genius. Set in the 1980s in a sitcom-style livingroom, the story concerns two teen boys who discover corpses in the basement and hall closet, and immediately hatch a body disposal scheme rather than figuring out how the dead'uns got there.
Well-done farce requires some type of logic and well-oiled story mechanics which American Rock Anthem ignores. A character presumed dead proves to be alive, yet is dragged and hauled around for 90 minutes without ANYONE checking for a heartbeat or pulse, or noticing that she's warm. This is sloppy writing that assumes the audience is stupid; audiences rarely are.
But that's not all. In the final third of this 95-minute play, Turner turns solemn and serious. It becomes a play about teenage insecurities and self-image. There are, in fact, two real dead persons in addition to the girl who's still alive, and it becomes easy to predict who the murderer is; yet when the revelation is made—and it's horrifying if taken at face value—no one cares or reacts because the murderer isn't central to the story.
There are wonderful plays and movies about getting rid of bodies—Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry or Arsenic and Old Lace—and there are wonderful comedies about teenage angst. American Rock Anthem doesn't cut it either way.
Giving credit where it's due, the cast delivers with considerable energy and focus under director Frank Merle. Pace and attack are not the problems, it's the script.
Buicks
Playwright: Julian Sheppard
At: Precious Mettle Theatre at the Side Studio, 1520 W. Jarvis Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 989-0760; $15
Runs through: Aug. 28
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Bill Aberdeen, the hero of Julian Sheppard's play, sells Buicks in Fresno, Calif. Rather, he sells Buick's image of a man satisfied with his life. A man who has put away his Porsche and Lamborghini fancies to content himself with the family he loves. Bill thinks he is just such a man, but one day, his wife, fed up with his denial, takes the children and leaves him. And so he sets out, in a Buick Rendezvous, dragging along his bewildered secretary, to fetch his rebellious spouse home from Albuquerque.
Ho-hum, another Midlife Crisis/Road Trip play, you may be thinking. But Sheppard is not just another aging Huckleberry Finn charging admission for his own runaway-adventure fantasy. Sure, Bill's odyssey includes the traditional scenarios: he is counseled by an enigmatic, marshmallow-noshing desert guru. He drinks with a fellow outlaw ( who robs and abandons him ) . He sleeps with an exotic beauty ( who takes pity on him ) . But finally, our Quixote is forced to conclude, 'I'm a loser! I'm an asshole!'. 'No, you're not,' replies his wise Sancha, 'You're a good man who's TRYING to be an asshole.'
She's right. And Bill's climb back up from the depths of his dissatisfaction cannot be hurried if WE are to be satisfied with his redemption. But never in this deftly crafted production are we bored by its restrictive dramatic universe or, for that matter, its likewise restrictive physical dimensions in the Side Studio. Director Kevin Fox and a cast led by David Parkes as the clueless Bill, with Liza Fernandez as his practical-minded sidekick, Kathy Logelin as his beleagured wife and Scott Kennedy as a variety of strangers, steep their potentially soapy personae in compassion and intelligence to create an intimate empathy for humble citizens seeking happiness in a world of increasingly grandiose expectations.
The personnel of the Precious Mettle Theatre, making its debut with this Chicago premiere production, have appeared elsewhere on the storefront circuit, and will probably appear again, in plays far more shallow than this one. But nowhere will we see the investment of loving attention that we do in this coming-of-middle-age parable.