Henry Hettinger

The Side Project's production of Henry Hettinger, written and directed by Stephen Cone, is a tale of two acts. The first act literally lives according to the rhythm of Henry and the adults who live under his spell--an express train that makes very few stops, and that runs more or less at the same speed all the time. The second act lives according to a different rhythm, a rhythm of characters who finally develop the nerve to stand in contrast to Henry's charisma. Therein lies the play's most effective dramatic atmosphere.

Henry Hettinger is a play about a pedophile coming home from prison, and it is really about that problem only. Henry is basically a child. Even after twenty years in prison, a legitimate understanding of his crime and its effect on his family (and, indeed, his responsibilities as father) largely evades him. He shows up at his old front door twenty years following his conviction. Why? What does he want? He doesn't really know. He's just there, and knows that he doesn't want to go anywhere else. He stubbornly insists on staying there, and is remarkably successful. He gets by in life by constantly playing a hyperactive eight year old, unaware, as a child is, of what the world expects or thinks of him. Henry is so persistent in playing this game, and the adults he encounters in the first act (his ex-wife and her new husband) are so docile, that they are largely entranced by Henry's unrelenting childish energy. Only when Henry is confronted by the unrelenting alternate rhythm and energy of his twenty-something daughter and her half brother, is his rhythm broken. Henry must learn, as children coming of age in orthodox religions do, to confess his sins, and ask forgiveness. Once he does this in a religious context, he can metaphorically see the deficiency of his previous evasive apologies—he begs his family's forgiveness, in earnest, and then leaves them to celebrate Christmas. Thus, it is a coming of age play, in which the father comes of age.

I didn't see the show when it debuted as part of The Side Project's recent Harvest Festival of New Works. Then, it was directed by Side Project Artistic Director (and Chicago independent theater stalwart) Adam Webster. I'm sorry I didn't, because Cone's presentation of his own work is so highly stylized according to his vision for how the dramatic tension should unfold, that I wondered to myself how another director might have tried to present the same piece.

Henry Hettinger (played by local radio personality Mike Nowak), appears before us before any action unfolds, in a direct address (the only in the show) that establishes the rhythm of Henry's character. Henry doesn't have something to tell us, he has things in his mind that must be thought out loud in order to be understood. He snaps from thought to thought and decision to decision, in a freewheeling manner, with Pinter-esque stylized pauses and non-verbal interpolations (a manner of speech used by every character in the show). Henry doesn't really ever form whole thoughts to state them. Rather, he allows thoughts to escape and then worries about making sense of them later.

He's introducing himself, and yet, the issue of his "not unloving affair" with a 12-year-old is a rather tangential thing. Henry is clearly a bit oblivious--the atmosphere is that of a cold winter's night (the audience enters the house to the sound of a strong winter wind), and yet Henry appears in a buttoned up Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and black socks and tennis shoes.

The first action of the play takes place following a successful Christmas concert given by Melanie (Susan Price), Henry's ex-wife and concert flautist (or "flute player" in Henry's playfully demeaning, simplistic vernacular). She and her new husband, Jeremy (Will Schutz, as a sheepish, flabby born-again Christian math professor) are settling into their clean, warm (and warmly lit by Joe Mohammed), Schaumberg-esque home for the evening. Set designer Grant Sabin places the house on a small platform island—in a theater small enough that such a half-foot elevation is completely unnecessary from the perspective of sightlines. We can imagine that Sabin envisions this pure, warm suburban home as the island for which Henry has been swimming throughout his long incarceration.

Henry barges in (it was originally Henry's home). After leaving, knocking, and having the door opened for him, Henry begins to wrap Melanie and Jeremy in the seductively careless, snappy, stylized manner of his open inner monologue.

He is a naive child whose energy itself changes the room. Henry makes himself at home, playfully. He accepts Jeremy's hospitality (to his Melanie's docile chagrin), playfully, and after some small talk, physically attacks Jeremy, ineffectually, in an interestingly vain attempt to win his wife back. He doesn't really mean it; he's incapable of real nastiness, only brief, expressive glimpses of it.

Henry is thrown out, or more properly, he elects to leave at the suggestion of his ex-wife (at this point in the play Henry stubbornly refuses to obey anyone else without childishly demonstrating that he "chooses" to do whatever it is he was asked to do i.e. he never formally relinquishes control). Henry awakens the following morning on the stoop outside his old home (another stylized choice—Henry is so oblivious that he can sleep through a brutal winter night on the stoop in his Hawaiian shirt getup).

It is important to note, again, that it appears that none of the foregoing events were significant enough to alter the rhythm of the action. Everything keeps moving, and everyone keeps basically following the frenetic pace of Henry's nonchalant thinking out loud.

The first real event takes place nearly twenty minutes into the first act, when, in discussing the piece of music Henry heard Melanie play on the night they met, everyone on stage stops, shifts focus, and hears the music (to a change in lighting). This directorially created event is the first thing that truly alters the rhythm. After a change in scene (a time change, as unity of place is strict in this production), Jeremy comes home to discover that Henry has broken the door down. This event alters the rhythm (temporarily). Henry confesses the real reason he was sent to prison (hitherto concealed from Jeremy). This alters the rhythm (temporarily), as we and Jeremy mull the presence of his young-teenage son in the same house with a convicted pedophile. Jeremy attempts to get Henry to accept Jesus into his life. This alters the rhythm (temporarily), and gives us insight into the seemingly bottomless well of patience that Jeremy has for his wife's ne'er do well ex-husband. After each of these events, Henry re-establishes his rhythmic domination of the action on the play. No one, apparently has the power to create events that change Henry's action.

Jeremy goes upstairs to change. The broken door flaps in the winter wind--and, beautifully, we note an unspoken rhythmic change as Henry lies on the couch, and senses the harm he has done by breaking the door. In walks Melanie, with whom Henry is alone for the first time. Henry establishes his rhythmic control over her (or they re-establish their rhythmic intimacy) as they reminisce. They kiss.

This alters the rhythm.

At this point we're expecting an intermission and for the play to continue in the second act in this rather lighthearted vein. But in walks Sara, Henry and Melanie's daughter (Stacy Magerkurth). And Henry is no longer morally capable of playing the reckless, oblivious child. Sara is clearly fundamentally incapable of accepting her father's bullshit. The change in rhythm stemming simply from the event of Sara's appearance is immediate, and the ensuing tension was so palpable that it stayed with me throughout the intermission.

The second act opens to the same suburban home, but bathed in cold light. Henry has defiled the place and brought the outside in. As the family is thrown from one confrontation to another, the contrast from the first to the second act is apparent. The characters will simply not stand by and acquiesce to Henry any more. Real events happen and change the characters and their actions (about twenty more main events, by my count) The dynamic rhythm of the act pulls the audience around the room. Suddenly Henry's intrusiveness is really intrusive, not quirky. Suddenly Henry's ex-wife's token resistance is understood to be just that. The underlying questions raised by Henry's return suddenly must be answered now. When Henry offers a token un-apology “if my actions hurt you”, we feel it to be an event so galling that we see it affect every character on stage.

And when Henry is left alone with Jeremy and Melanie's born-again Christian but obviously gay and nominally repressed teenage son, we can feel the change. Henry's actions have consequences on Henry's family that he cannot simply tune out or jabber his way out of. Alex has googled Henry's case (how satisfying for something that current to make its way into a play—the show also included judicious on-stage cell-phone use) and is clearly empathetic and caring toward him. Henry and Alex clearly have a chemistry together. Ironically, the audience is left to wonder, out of context, at the possible propriety of a relationship between Henry and Alex as contrasted with Henry's relationship with the twelve year old (Henry, in his apologia to Alex claims that the relationship was consentual and initiated by the boy).

It is through the object of Henry's lust and downfall (a beautiful young boy) that Henry utters his first confession, and asks for Christ to enter his heart. Although I wondered at the sincerity of Henry's conversion, what followed seemed inescapably believable to me.

Henry repeats his confession, but this time it is a confession before and prayer to his family, begging their forgiveness. Henry, through his (possibly false) Christian rebirth, metaphorically learns that his family is God-like to him, and of the nature of his sin against his family. He undergoes a family rebirth. He understands just then, as we do, why he had to come home. Having accomplished something he never set out, consciously, to do, having understood the nature of his isolation, Henry walks out of the home as the new family opens their first presents on Christmas eve—just as they did when Henry was Dad.

I believe that Cone, as a director, scored the rhythm of this play very explicitly in an effort to create, in the first act, a rhythm that approximates the sound of adults assenting with one another—making the horrible comprehensible and ordinary so as to be able to continue. Life goes on, and no one seems to have the time to comprehend how ugly things are or how to take action. Conversely, it is only when Henry's childish energy is confronted by Sara and Alex in the equally stylized and highly dynamic second act that the rhythm and action of grown-up life is altered. The effect of the contrast is by turns funny and horrifying.

Why is this play necessary now? One good thing it does is remove sex offenders from the strict realm of the Nancy Graces of the world, and gives them a place within an artistic purview. In a cable-news milieu that salivates at the hint of any potential villainous pedophile, this work is a merciful look at a wretched type of criminal.

But I also believe that this play is important because it addresses, on a very small scale, questions of a childish society completely oblivious to the harm that it does to itself and its surroundings. While the narrative idea of children saving society by confronting it is not necessarily a new one, it is, I think, potent at this moment in history.

What Am I Doing?

I'm not a critic. I'm an actor.

I keep telling myself this.

Critics, especially critics in Chicago, while not useless, certainly do not criticise to many good uses, at least for me. They see a great deal of theater, true (although with over one hundred shows up at any time, it is hard to not be drowning in performances to see in this town). And then they "taste" it and tell us what it "tastes" like. Critics in the Reader, especially, and some other weeklies and bi-monthlies, tend to render this judgement in fewer than 200 words. Some critics, like Nina Metz, Hedy Weiss, and Chris Jones, devote a reasonable amount of print space to airing their tastes, describing the material that they have seen, and issuing recommendations.

I don't want to sound like a bitter old sow of the theater, but this is all perfectly useless to me as an artist. Not that I don't read these reviews. I've been reading them almost everyday for three years! Almost all of us in the theater community do. Why? Why, when they almost never provide a critical context for what they criticise, when they almost never give us an impartial description of what the director, designers, and actors were trying to accomplish, do we, as artists care so deeply about what these people say?

Because these critics are, at most times, the gatekeepers. A good or bad review doesn't make or break a show. But for theater practitioners at the smallest level, as most of us are, without a Steppenwolf-solid subscriber and audience base, we simply have to rely on the quality of reviews and word of mouth to get people to turn off the television or the hot-tub or whatever they're doing, and come and fork over $15 for entertainment. And because of this, we read the reviews, and, if they are universally good or bad, we forecast doom or success for a production. We're insecure artists. We want to know where we stand (and where others stand). And the public seems to need to know whether what they'll be sacrificing four taco dinners for will be a better use of their time than just one taco dinner.

Look, I fully recognize that this is the function of most reviewers. And honestly, I don't hold anything against them (although I could). Whether or not they are truly, vainly in love with the sound of their own fingers' typing, and their attendant subjective sense of taste, is a lovely subject for actors to discuss at the Four Moon after a savaging. The simple fact is, as Robert Brustein writes:

"...it is...demanded by the reader. Of immediate interest in a theatrical notice is not the critic's sense of life, ideas, or vision, but whether or not we like the damned thing--ironically, since our opinion is the most perishable thing we produce...Positive and negative judgements are rarely of practical use to theatre people; their only value is to the audience. Once responsible primarily to the theatregoer, for whom he prepares a form of consumer's report, a guide to comparative shopping...the least valuable criticism is that composed of naked assertions of taste (the kind Danny Kaye parodied when, being asked how he liked the Himalayas, replied,'Loved him, hated her!')"

It is in the nature of strictly commercial criticism to render starkly subjective positive/negative evaluations to audiences based on the critics' reputation for good taste. Unfortunately, we have all seen the discrepancy in the enjoyment promised by a review and the feeling actually experienced by us as spectators (a recent production by Steep Theater of The Night Heron was a shocking example of this, in the category of Panned By Critics But Life-Altering-ly Good). Brustein is urging critics, instead of being, in the worst case, obsessed only with their own impressions, to marry their subjective impulse with a sense of passionate conviction about where theater is and where it needs to go. And a sense of responsibility to that conviction.

I'm not there, yet. Why? As artists in this city, we are constantly touching our own little sliver of the elephant. But we don't have a clear picture of the elephant. And make no mistake, the world of Chicago theater is, without question, a teeming organism. My own convictions are still TBD (my biases are not). What I'm looking for, and what I think this city needs, is a picture, as provided by fanatically open-minded practitioners, of what is happening in the city at any given moment.

I mean: What are the stories being told right now, and how are they being told?

The type of critical survey work I propose with this project will make itself clear as reviews emerge. But it will be mostly descriptive and not evaluative I'm not going to tell you who was "good" or "bad", who can't act, can't direct, whose designs are clumsy, and what shows to see and avoid. The theater scene in this town is not a footrace for artists trying to "make it" for which critics are the judges. This theater organism is a collection of artists who need to say something. It is time for the organism to become more aware of itself.

If you want critics' picks, you probably know where to start looking for them. The freedom of the press of the Internet is such that this useful project, that is useless in the commercial papers, can fly on the Internet. No one else in this town is doing this kind of work, and this scene is as vibrant as ever. And that is why now is the right time for the project.

Hopefully, you'll agree.

And now for my biases, or as my friend Dennis says: "the post-modern convention where you describe your biases." I am biased toward narrative theater, but theater with less narration and more action. I prefer less plays in which the audience is recognized and clued into the details (Zimmerman's The Secret In the Wings), and more plays in which the audience is responsible for telling themselves the story and discovering the operant tensions without being told (Graney's Porno). I love subtext, but I also love Shakespeare. I tend to believe that theater helps us make sense of our experiences by helping us use catharsis to apply narratives to the events of our lives. I need to see more dance. I love music, but I think that atmosphere is useful only insofar as it helps actors create truthful performances steeped in the given circumstances. I tend to believe that theater is an actors art, and that no production can be successful without the audience believing, on some level, in the actors on stage. I don't feel like defining this any further right now, but I recognize that it stands in opposition to the ideas of expressionist theater, and to that extent, I will valiantly fight to remain open to the expressionist work being done here.

I can't think of any more biases now.

But what I am not is a philistine. I am not married to these ideas. I'm here, in this city, at this time so I can learn, grow, and become a greater artist. That's what we are all doing, to my mind. And to succeed, and become artists that change the world, we need to work, to stay fanatically open-minded, and we need to pay attention to each other. That is just what this project proposes to do.

In the course of the next year, I'll be seeing work by theaters and artists that in my experience as an artist and theatergoer are influential. I'll stay open to suggestions and word of mouth. And comps.

(The quote from Brustein is from an essay entitled "Convictions and Opinions" published as part of his collection "Who Needs Theatre".)