The Chicago Survey

A new year, a new post

2008-07-17T07:40:00.002-05:00

Here's my profile of a piece going up in Brooklyn for the Rail.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/07/theater/a-play-at-poolside-caridad-svichs-12-ophelias

Where have I been?!

2007-04-05T20:56:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the hiatus. I haven't posted anything for two months or so. That doesn't mean I haven't been writing--I've been working on the voluminous survey of The Sparrow that is just below this post. However, over the past few months my Ben Franklin gig ended, I transitioned to a new job as an office-monkey, and I've been out of town frequently for grad school interviews and one matzahlicious Jewish holiday.

There are two bits of good news: the first is that the long, agonizing process of writing the Sparrow piece is over: it is a very rich, deep show, and the writing process on it was long and difficult. I know it's long, so I've divided it into two parts. The first part attempts to place the House's work into a contemporary critical context. The second part strives to illustrate how they and their designers are telling stories in this instance.

The second bit of good news is that I've been accepted and will attend a dramaturgy MFA program at Columbia University in New York. So I'll be moving soon. While this means that this particular project will be ending soon, I hope to resurrect it in New York soon under a new domain name. I'll post it here.

I also hope that the type of project I've undertaken here can be continued in the future. I still believe that this type of discussion is necessary, and I believe that there is enough smart theater viewership in Chicago to pull together a staff of writers to do it. If and when I return to Chicago, I'll try to do it myself.

And, come to think of it, I have a third bit of good news: I've been hired to lead an adventure program for groups of kids to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. So following May there will be another long hiatus as I work on my tan, my camping and fishing skills, and my childish over-exuberance. Then, following my move to the Upper West Side, I'll resume posts in some respect.

To everyone who has visited--thanks for reading and supporting the project. It has been the beginning of a real adventure for me, and I hope you can be a part of the next step.
--Dave

The Sparrow, Part I

2007-04-05T20:54:00.000-05:00

In the absence of an "effective general mythology," writes Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, each person, in his dreams, furnishes himself with a particular language of dreams and images springing forth from deep beneath consciousness that expresses all of the terrors, angst, and exhilaration stemming from confrontations with the movement across the stages of life. Psychoanalysis, for Campbell (what he calls the "modern science of the reading of dreams"), represents an effort to navigate and understand these images so as to successfully bring full mental effort to bear on the quotidian, trivial, and many times (for Campbell) regressive tasks into which we are inextricably woven by virtue of our having been born in the USA in the second half of the 20th century.

Mythology, however, has always been a living metaphor through which such dreams have found meaning. Mythology, in every culture, according to Campbell, guides us, teaches us, and reassures us as we take on new roles in our development. For Campbell, life in the USA has an inherently regressive character. In a more mature society, mythology establishes social conventions through which its inhabitants actually take on new roles both internally and externally. In the USA, psychoanalysis aims to ameliorate internal tensions of development to enable participation in an external fantasy of everlasting youth. Mythology aims to guide the individual internally through such tensions--as well as teach societies of the nature of social roles which we all, simply by virtue of certain constants of the nature of the human the human experience, must confront.

There is a universal form to both creation and hero myths, that, according to Campbell, expresses these tensions across every cultural barrier. It should not surprise us that adolescents facing their own pressing crises of development have relied throughout the 20th century on comic books of all sorts, movie myths (Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, for example), and sports stars and athletics as their guides. We laugh at the archetypal gawky teenage boy in braces, hanging out at the comic book shop. But this aesthetic impulse reflects, specifically, what Campbell is talking about.

One role of storytelling, in this formulation, is the contemporary reinvention of the mythological forms. But something has happened in the 20th century, apart from what Campbell sees as the aforementioned regressive permanence of the American glorification of youth. Artists have grown deeply afraid of myth, in my view. Sarah Kane's work articulates this fear, especially in Red Orchid's current production of Blasted. Blasted is more than an absurd portrayal of violence and war--it is a systematic attack on the idea that we can be safely guided in large-scale questions of war and death by storytelling itself. Storytelling, narrative, and myth all retrospectively make some sense of violence as the result of a meaningful chain of causality. But the experience of violence, especially the violence enacted by the contemporary war-machine, is highly decontextualized. There is no army approaching the countryside in wars with sensible causes. There are bombs that drop randomly from the sky, and soldiers who appear out of nowhere. The traditional forms of storytelling, for Kane, when it comes to violence, are inherently misleading, except from a most facile perspective.

As participants in a western democracy, we vote, from a safe distance, by way of just these very facile, inaccurate narratives of violence, whether they are supplied by the media or the strictly creative artist. We encounter these narratives between Cheerios and the morning paper. We never experience the true, decontextualized nature of violence in war. And thus, Sarah Kane has made works that illustrate this non-narrative, senseless reality.

I have meditated at length on this blog as to The Pillowman and Martin McDonagh's perspective on questions of the balance between suffering as a result of, and truthfulness in, art. My interpretation of the Pillowman holds that Katurian's stories are necessarily meaningful, if flawed, and that his brother's response to those stories is not necessarily one of mechanistic recreation. However, The Pillowman is the perfect vessel for the questions of the contemporary artist's fear of myth, because depending on one's interpretation we see arguments for and against meaning and myth, and arguments that directly press on the nature of readership. Kane, and possibly the director of the Broadway production, might hold that Katurian's stories are infused with narrative meaning, but that readers are too irresponsible in their relationship to story, and will necessarily recreate violence irresponsibly and harmfully. (Actually, Kane might hold that Katurian is deluding himself into believing that narrative can be a vessel for making his experience meaningful, too). Hannah and WB Worthen, in their recent article in Modern Drama, tend toward an interpretation that holds that Katurian's stories are internally devoid of meaning, and therefore become "blank allegories," externally—that is to say: easily subject to a mechanistic recreation.

The ideas woven into Blasted and contained within interpretive discussion of The Pillowman nicely encapsulate the contemporary artistic-intellectual reluctance to embrace myth and meaning as Campbell defines it classically. However, myth has lost none of its currency with audiences either in Hollywood or in publishing--Frank Miller's "300" is the perfect example of this. And the enduring currency of myth may also explain the popularity of Chicago's House Theatre.

The House has succeeded in attracting an impossible demographic (ages 15 to 35) to come out in droves to the Viaduct Theater--which is especially impressive considering The Viaduct's remoteness from CTA lines at Belmont and Western. Commercial and big-time non-profit theater relies on 40+ viewership and that audience’s subscriptions. Any ensemble that can inspire devotion amongst 20-somethings has captured an audience of which every big theater in Chicago is envious, as this is the building block for those theaters' plans for the next generation.

Steppenwolf, I assume for both perfectly altruistic artistic reasons, and to develop a younger audience base, has recently started commissioning many of the younger companies in the city to create work for their Garage space, and occasionally invites current productions to extend their runs in that space too. They have wisely done this with The House's "The Sparrow."

On the Sunday night on which I attended The Sparrow, the devotion amongst 15 to 35 year olds was apparent. Not only was this Sunday evening show sold out (Sunday shows are notoriously tricky for storefronts in Chicago), but also the entire rest of the run was sold out.

I attribute this devotion to a number of factors, aside from general considerations of high-quality work (scores of high-quality productions go perfectly unnoticed): First, a deft guerilla marketing strategy that utilizes the internet and social networks to publicize the House. Then, a reinvention of every detail of the theater-going experience from the moment an audience member enters the space (which also incorporates the marketing strategy)--the net effect of which is that attending a House show is a far less imposing, formal, intimidating cultural experience than attending a show at a more "institutional" theater. Moreover, this reinvention extends to an innovative story-telling technique that utilizes the cinematic and visual possibilities at a theater's disposal in addition to design work that creates events with sound and light in previously unseen and viscerally effective ways. They also creatively use dance and incorporate physical storytelling into their work.

Most importantly, however, in my view, they embrace contemporary reimaginations of the ancient mythological structure in original work. This embrace of myth by The House is tantamount to their endorsement of meaning in storytelling--and their staking out a significant position with respect to the theater's pressing dilemma on some of the questions previously considered here. The success of this focus is tantamount to a ratification of meaning in storytelling by the American theater's most elusive target--20-somethings. They are thirsting for this type of work and the House is providing it.

Other prominent directors, like Mary Zimmerman and JoAnne Akalitis have done and continue to do excellent work in the mythological vein. But The House's work differs in two respects--it almost universally utilizes contemporary scenarios (along the mythological lines) and it lives within its own universe. In Akalitis' work especially, there is an active "standing outside of the text" by the ensemble performing. This amounts to a contemporary running commentary on the ancient texts that she reimagines. This is fine and important work. But there is no "meta-theatricality" in The House's work. While they are happy to break the fourth wall, their work is in earnest, and is contained within an enactment of the world they have imagined, apart from running commentary on that world. This work is clearly in demand.

In part two of this article, I'll try to survey the work being done by the House in The Sparrow. Their work is rich: and a document of this densely packed, technically detailed work is bound to be a bit long. However, I believe that the House will be an important theater in the future of Chicago theater and that we should study their methods in order to understand what audiences are responding to right now.

The Sparrow, Part II

2007-04-05T20:53:00.000-05:00

I cannot speak at length to The House's marketing strategy, but I can survey their other methods, as evidenced by this production of The Sparrow, and I'll try to do so here. From the start, the experience of a House show is different--we enter the cavernous warehouse of the Viaduct lobby, which doubles as a bar. Drinks are cheap, and although this was a Sunday, the slightly shabby interior (reminiscent of the Skylark in East Pilsen) puts aside any of the high-art anxiety we might have in attending theater. Company members are almost always present, and there is an open, inquisitive, sweet atmosphere present before we enter the space. Our tickets for the show, in keeping with the creative marketing genius of the company, are baseball cards themed to the show being performed that feature all of the ensemble and designers, with biographies. As the Sparrow is set in a rural midwestern high-school, the cards feature pictures of the ensemble and designers from school portraits.

As we file into our seats, we see cast and crew milling about--the scene is somewhat reminiscent of a moment in the film Rushmore, with characters in bizarre costumes in a high school filing past. There is high-energy music pumping from the sound system--Goody Mob and Christina Aguilera, for example. The stage is a square in a high-ceilinged warehouse. The audience is on three sides of the square, and there is a wall that conceals the dressing areas. Entrances and exits are almost universally unmasked in House shows, even when an entrance is a surprise, plot-wise.

As the music fades, a Master of Ceremonies enters. There is a "pep rally" feel to the atmosphere, as experienced House audience members and current ensemble members from off-stage hoot and holler to welcome the MC. Nominally, he is there to publicize future House shows, and to hawk merchandise. But his real role is to indoctrinate the audience into a different kind of theater going experience, one that condones childish response, one that doesn't seek to intimidate the layperson by placing an implacable pedagogical barrier between the audience and the interpretation and enjoyment of art. The New York Times, in their recent profile of Chicago theater, compared the House's audience experience to that of the groundlings in the time of the Globe. There is an energy, a frankness, and a joy in the atmosphere of a House show, and the curtain speech at the top sets this atmosphere in place. The theater, for the House, should be akin to the experience of a rock show--we should release our inhibitions and respond viscerally and intuitively. We shouldn't have to think about how we should respond, or how we should look to the other audience members and the artists. The audience, at various points in the curtain speech, cheers enthusiastically, encouraged by the ensemble.

The set is a blank stage with a wall behind it, featuring a hanging square to the right side in front of the wall. There are panels behind the audience on either side of the stage. During the introduction, the panels behind the audience were lit sky blue, and the panel behind the stage was a warm orange. We are encouraged to "make some noise" for The Sparrow. The production opens to a community meeting at which Principal Skor, played by by Stephen Taylor, is setting a very civil, restrained tone for a tense discussion. An advanced student wants to study at the high school. She needs to study with the Junior class, but graduate this year. Her grandmother has passed away. She needs to live with someone.

The audience hears these facts, but cannot string them together into any meaningful inference other than the tension underlying the admission of this outsider into the community. The writers are content to tease the audience with limited knowledge of a complex plot--and this is for better and worse. Throughout the first act we find ourselves anxiously trying to piece the story together (and as the play is driven by a rather straightforward plot, this is sensible). But we simply cannot do it comprehensively, and this inability inhibits the drama at certain points. On the other hand, the audience is intrigued by these facts, and does work to piece them together. The writers succeed in inspiring us to work with them to put things together.

One problem for me in this vein was my seating on the night on which I saw the show initially. I was sitting in the stage left section of the bleacher-like seats. Later, seeing the show—in its remount at the Steppenwolf—from a frontal perspective (and with the benefit of a prior viewing) many of the subtler points seemed to be communicated more easily.

However, from the top, the characters are clearly eccentric, bold, and yet communicate a certain pathos in this eccentricity that is touching. Michael E. Smith as Albert McGuckin and Lauren Vitz as Margaret Rosenthal are wonderful this way. As these rather oddball parents speak, holding framed school-age portraits of children, we sense their restraint. This is the atmosphere of the piece in a nutshell, a warm, genial, small-town brightness that is holding something horrible at bay. The community consents to allow the advanced student, and one of the families agrees to take her in. The girl enters, dressed darkly, and holding her own school portrait. To the sounds of original music that is somewhat reminiscent of Badly Drawn Boy (which is being featured prominently in a national ad campaign now) the parents and the girl arrange themselves in a living class portrait. The parents, to the sound of an explosion, turn the picture frames ninety-degrees at a time clockwise, in sync.

In another interesting usage of picture frames, Principal Skor and Margaret Rosenthal stand stage right and take the parents’ portraits (pictures of their children) and exchange them for framed landscape scenes, that the parents, one by one, display, walking behind a girl seated in a chair (simulating a car). Thus, the images, as they are handed off simulate expressionistically, the passing of scenery. This is a highly cinematic effect that does not use moving picture at all.

The images are of small town scenes and rural landscapes, but something in the characters and costuming of the oddball small-town parents in the meeting has tipped us off to the nature of the quirky small town already. Still, the montage is used to good effect here and it is a cinematic story-telling technique that the House uses frequently--occasionally bordering on overindulgence. Still it holds our attention and it connects, emotionally, especially with the original music.

She complains to her driver, a mysterious, bearded fellow named Thomas (about whom we learn very little) that she “can’t do it.” He insists “tell them what you did.” In the “Sparrow” theme, he insists that she, like a bird must be pushed from the nest to learn to fly.

The girl is unsubtly surnamed Emily Book (Carolyn Defrin). As she enters in the next scene, to a strange applause, her unwieldy brown case awkwardly breaks open, and she awkwardly rushes to gather her things. She is greeted by the community at an even, if halting pace that divulges some inner tension. For a moment the crowd’s attentions diffuses, and then clears. A woman openly stares at her. A chandelier lowers from the ceiling, and we find ourselves in the home of the McGuckens, Emily’s new family.

They greet her awkwardly, and they sit for dinner. Emily comments in a robotic tone that they have “nice plates.” The father, Albert (Michael E. Smith), speaks haltingly, at an almost snail’s pace that, again, reveals some raging inner tension. By contrast, his wife, Joyce (Kat McDonnell) speaks with an utterly sincere air–at a high pace that betrays nothing. Their son, Charlie rages, with an energy that reveals the community’s tension, at Emily, and she rushes from the table with her formidable old black case. At this outburst, we hear a sound event composed of what sounds like bass feedback from an amplifier or loose sound cable connection. It is highly jarring. Charlie, in response to Emily’s staying in “Sarah’s room” protests that not even he is allowed in Sarah’s room.

Many of these revelatory details were unclear for me in the first viewing and in the seat I occupied upon that viewing. After seeing the show a second time much of the elegance of the unfolding details made a strong impression on me. I wonder, however, whether Allen, Chris Mathews, and Jake Minton, the creators of the piece, could have done a better job in taking the audience from plot-point to plot-point.

Following Emily’s exit, Joyce reenters, saying “let me get that for you” offering Emily a small doll’s house diorama that is lit warmly from within, one of the most clever, intelligent design devices in the show. The chandelier rises. The music changes to the sounds of synthesizer vibraphone (reminiscent of Mr. Rogers’ xylophones). Joyce sets the doll’s house down and removes a room from it. They face each other, awestruck. Joyce’s pace slackens, and we sense for a moment that the inner tension that the ensemble has so capably been suppressing is also very much alive in Joyce. She comments, among other things, that Emily “has glasses now.” On the second viewing, it became abundantly clear that Joyce was acting as if Sarah had been away for a long time and was suddenly appearing before her in the form of Emily. However this was unclear on my first viewing of the piece. She hands the tiny room to Emily in a touching moment, and then reassumes the light, sincere tone she held previously. As Joyce exits, Emily reminds her that she’s “not Sarah.”

At this line, the music changes, with a shift in light. We see a series of projections on the back wall with violins being plucked and then violin music. They start with constellations, then moving landscapes. We see a bus, and then hear a build in music, and then the inside of the bus and children’s faces. We hear train sounds. Emily approaches the projection with her back to us. The projection and music suddenly stop, and we hear someone say “welcome to school.”

We hear a new music cue start, and we feel the baseline rhythm of the school to be different and higher from that of the home and of the projections that represent Emily’s memories. In the cinematic school montage of moving students and dance routines, Principal Skor dumps coffee on himself in the bustle. Emily, in her conservative dark suit, is, in her movement, a living rhythmic contrast to the colorful, playful costumes and frenetic pace of the hallways of the school. The students, at this pace, fetch lockers and place them at the back of the stage. They then rush from place to place and toss footballs to one another as Emily is spun around. A cheerleading squad takes the stage and performs apart from Emily. We see pink light, and Wilco-esque acoustic percussive sounds. We see yellow light that transitions to organ music. The students set a classroom of desks in place. Emily finds herself alone. The students enter on a school bell.

We see a young teacher, Mr. Christopher, giving a lecture in low light, with a transparency projection on the small rectangle at the back of the stage, of the heart. This youngish teacher is describing the heart as moving “involuntarily.” There is an adolescent, hormonal atmosphere set by the ensemble to begin with, but the young teacher describing the anatomical nature of the heart cleverly establishes a very flirtatious atmosphere. The teacher points to us in the audience and includes us in the atmosphere. He constantly shifts directions in his movement, constantly running himself at a higher pace than his students. The lights go up, the overhead goes out. Emily, again, is clearly out of rhythm in this young, raucous classroom. He asks Jenny, a brightly dressed girl, who, like every girl is class is somewhat ga-ga for him a question which she answers perfectly. In contrast the boys are almost all slacking off in the back of the classroom.

In the closest that the House comes to metatheatricality, Christopher asks a question that is, in his own words “arbitrary and unfair.” The feeling here is that the writers are letting us in on the joke of their obvious device for illustrating Emily’s bookishness (although her dress and her demeanor bespeak this without the additional elaboration). He asks her this exaggeratedly difficult and unfair question, to which she doesn’t bat an eyelash. She answers. He informs the class of the upcoming fetal pig dissection, which everyone celebrates. He pumps his fist enthusiastically. They cheer, and exit.

Emily is slower than the rest to leave (Emily’s rhythmic dissonance is continually used by Allen throughout the first act). Before the class is gone, Mr. Christopher introduces Emily to Jenny McGrath, that blonde who answered his question earlier, a head cheerleader-type, to give her an opportunity to make nice with someone who is obviously amongst the most popular in school. They greet, awkwardly, and Jenny exits.

Until now the play has more or less followed what Campbell would consider to be a standard monomythic form. The creators of the show, in the press pack, credit Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster for inspiration in their creation of the Midwestern “hero-myth” (through Superman). Superman is among countless comic-book heroes who correspond to Campbell’s mythology.

In Emily’s case, the hero is compelled to traverse her communal boundary–interestingly, this breaking of the barrier is presented initially from the perspective of the PTA meeting at which Emily entry into the community is discussed. Also interesting is the fact that, in this interpretation of the monomyth, the hero’s breaking out of the boundaries of her home community represents a homecoming in her return to the high school.

Initially, she refuses to accept her place in the new school–she stands apart. The bearded driver, Thomas, who reasons with her that she must be pushed from the nest may be her initial helper or mentor (another key theme in classic myth is this bearded, Obi-Wan-like helper), however Thomas is never elaborated upon.
She is then incorporated into the belly of a monster–another standard monomythic scenario–in this case the school itself is the whale swallowing up the contemporary Jonah. The ancient structural narrative points–Emily’s refusal of the challenge and the incorporation into the beast are communicated to us physically, in a manner that can only be accomplished in a theater.

Now, the hero faces the helper, who, in this case, is Mr. Christopher. Typically, according to Campbell, this is an older, bearded figure who bestows upon the hero an amulet of some sort that will aid the hero in his or her quest.

He takes an enormous bite of an apple (given to him at the top of the previous scene by Jenny). The apple is lovely here—it is dual symbol of the teacher and temptation. Jenny exits. He lamely jokes, in counterpoint to Emily’s bookish restraint and seriousness. He innocently flirts with Emily, and his frenetic pace is matched by another, awkwardly frenetic pace from Emily. He is pumping himself up, she is restraining something. Both are masking something. She blushes.

He recites to her from Whitman’s Body Electric, which is appropriate on several levels–first, as he is a biology teacher he glories in the wonders of the human body, which the poem celebrates. Second, the poem works as an invitation to physically self-conscious, highly intellectual girl to join the humming physical life of the school–so the implication of her aphysicality coming from the text in the use of this poem is foreshadowed physically throughout the first act prior to the poem’s recitation. In the scene it works as a form of flirtation (which, we might infer, is one of Mr. Christopher’s chief tactics), especially as it is coupled with his munching of the apple.
It is, in Campbellian terms, both a call to adventure and an amulet that will guide her in that adventure. Christopher gives her his wife’s copy of Leaves of Grass (the collection containing the poem), which serves as a physical counterpart to the words of the poem itself. Those words settle the dissonant rhythmic tension present at the top of the scene. In this interaction, the breadth of Emily’s reading is clear: she has read all of Dickens, among others.

To the strains of another musical sound event with accordion, Emily is then confronted en masse by a group. During my first viewing of the piece, the nature of this scene seemed a bit “mashed-up.” However, on my second viewing it was clear that it consisted of parents or other students asking Emily about their brothers and sisters or sons and daughters. Once I had a fuller understanding of the plot (after seeing the show through on the first viewing), this made sense.

We then transition to a scene in which Jenny suggests that Emily has arrived at school at just the right time–homecoming. She encourages Emily to join the cheerleading squad, a big favor considering that she would be bypassing the normal auditions and be placed on the team on Jenny’s authority. Emily refuses, but accepts a job as “towel girl” for the basketball team. Here, as elsewhere and with other characters, Jenny’s fluidity, play and grace are contrasted against Emily’s halting dischord.

Emily then finds herself confronted by Charlie (Sara Hoyer), the son of the couple that has taken her in. He is wearing an American Indian headdress and is fantasy playing. He orders her to halt and she gives him an offering to be allowed to pass. She walks toward the house, and as she does, he fires his slingshot at her. She instantly senses and catches the rock, which magically appears in her hand (the incorporation of live visual magic effects is very compelling aspect of the House’s work). He demands that she not talk about his sister.

I believe this moment of silliness turned to drama, besides another opportunity to highlight Emily’s alienation is a perfectly monomythic moment, in which Emily, the hero, must face and, using her wiles, appease a monster, namely the pesky monster with whom she finds herself living. Tasks like these are common in mythology–and here, the silly moment with Charlie is such a task.

The interaction closes with Charlie imploring Emily not to mention his sister. At the mention of the sister, we see a blue flash and hear a synthetic wind sound effect. Orange light fills the stage. Then we hear a bell and voices saying “happy homecoming.” Principal Skor mentions the hated rivals, the Hornets. We find Emily in PE class, where the coach asks whether Emily has a safety strap for her glasses. When she replies that she doesn’t, he goes off to get her “rec-specs” (Emily’s ostracization through such physical impediments is well-clarified). He leaves the class to play a game of their choice, and they elect to play the perfect game for abuse of the weakest, outcast classmates: dodgeball. We hear the vibraphone sounds and Wilco-esque percussion , and the lights cool. The action ramps up. The game becomes a choreographed movement piece in which, yet again (and at this point, the theme is redundant) Emily’s physical energy is contrasted with that of her classmates. We find ourselves in a montage in orange light followed by darkness. The class gangs up and circles her. Someone yells “get her!” and the students aim all the dodgeballs at her. The coach enters, rebukes the class, and escorts Emily out.
We hear the slow ticking of a clock, which harmonizes with the bomb imagery that we have just taken in. We find ourselves in a classroom, but this time, Emily isn’t the first to arrive, she is the last. Mr. Christopher is presiding. On my first viewing of the piece I did not get that this was detention, although Mr. Christopher’s statement that they all “know why they’re here” and the students dejected body language should have tipped me. Details like these may have been lost due to my perspective from the stage right seats.

As this is detention, and Emily is not being punished, her arrival is a dramatic act of solidarity and forgiveness. In a small way she includes herself. When a boy ridicules her that he hit her in the mouth, Emily retorts: “It must not have been that hard, because I didn’t feel it.” The delicious subtle double-meaning devastates the boy. Mr. Christopher then implores the students to be safe, in that he, and the community surrounding them, is trying to protect them. When a student asks “from what?” we hear the sound of passing trains, and the scene changes to orange light. The students then reenact a catastrophic accident in which they are turned upside down. After a long silence following this instantaneous, unannounced reenactment, Mr. Christopher again argues that the rules are present is there for their protection. Emily agrees, speaking chillingly: “the future has pain in store for all of us,” the implication being that there is no need to look for more pain.

A great deal of cultural comment is encapsulated in this business, and whether it is really necessary in terms of telling the story or not, it does bear discussion. First is the question of the American impulse toward creating a “pure” atmosphere for the upbringing of children, which is an outgrowth of the idea of America as a “city on a hill” in which a community could purify itself. The relationship between such a community and its youth, who push the boundaries of “safety” is artfully explicated here.

There is another interesting cultural spin stemming from this particular interpretation of the monomyth, that is related to this quest for purity (and hence the exclusion of Emily who is impure): Midwestern American hospitality. Emily is an outsider who, as will be made entirely explicit later, was complicit in a terrible accident in the town years ago. She is different, and yet, for all that, there is a veneer of kindness and love worn by nearly every student in the school. This veneer seems absolutely genuine to me–and yet it is a mask. This is an interesting critique of suburban, exurban, and rural values, as it highlights the peculiar contemporary character of the exclusion of outsiders in small-town life. The outsider is shunned, but this is done with a smile that may be sincere. The town is sincerely fighting its own impulse to ostracize Emily, but rather than lessen her pariahdom, this causes the ostracization to take on a more virulent and yet insidious quality. This portrayal is invaluable as a metaphor for how many perfectly polite and reasonable-seeming Americans process their discomfort with any number of types of minorities and outsiders in an age of Political Correctness, in which, in most communities, there is a deep impulse toward purification, yet in which it is impermissible to openly voice biased words.

We hear the sounds of the vibraphone again, and find ourselves in Emily's room. Joyce, it is clear has been asleep in Sarah’s old, and Emily’s current bedroom. Joyce asserts that she knows that Emily is not her daughter, but then reiterates her welcome to her. She mentions that she comes to Sarah’s room when she feels overwhelmed. The lights cool. Again, there is a sincerity to the Joyce’s rhythm here which she loses in an effective unraveling of composure. There is also a pathos illustrated by her sleeping in her late-daughter’s room. She begs to know what happened on “that day.” We hear a train sound. Joyce cannot, she says, remember what her daughter wore. As she exits, Emily replies: “yellow.” She heads downstairs to “make spirit boxes” for the homecoming festivities. Emily agrees to join her, in an unspoken acceptance of her role as surrogate daughter.

There is some elegant conceptually tight storytelling here, and there is also the need for fuller detail. For me, on a second viewing, with a full knowledge of the fact of the story in advance, it was easy to see the clues that the storytellers and designers give us to the accident and Emily’s role in it. We hear a train sound in the distance when it is mentioned. We have seen a catastrophic reenactment of it. But without a knowledge of the facts, and without a full frontal perspective on the action, many of these clues, I fear, are lost. However, the various light shades, the various musical styles that link to scenes and themes, and sound events are elegant and tightly woven together to communicate implications in a very creative way. Balance is the key here, and the House, I feel, is working of the balance between explicit and implicit storytelling techniques.

We hear the sound of an organ playing a school song. Cheerleaders enter in pricelessly tacky brown and red uniforms. The students sing in corny harmony, and the boys enter in basketball uniforms. We hear Wilco-esque drums as the music gets peppier, eventually taking on a dance beat. In the words of South Park: “we’re gonna need a montage.”

One problem in House shows is the disproportionate segmenting of things like this. To illustrate to an audience Emily's status as an outcast or the fervent atmosphere of a school event, can, especially given the energy with which their ensemble works, be accomplished in relatively short time. But oftentimes in The Sparrow, we spend a disproportionate amount of time on certain points in the narrative, and disproportionately little time on other points that might have greater impact.

Following the school song sequence, the music changes, and we hear the voice of a PA announcer. Cleverly, the actors playing for the Sparrows (Emily's new high school team's mascot), simply turn their jerseys inside out to assume the roles of the opposing basketball team. Again, in a very essentially theatrical way, the House makes the elegant equation between the kids on opposing sides of this rivalry (in which the Sparrows have been thoroughly dominated of late). The lights are warm and orange on the pre-game cheer routine.

The lights brighten as we transition to the game. The basketball game is a wonderfully unreal, highly choreographed dance of athletics, again, making use of the House's profound sense of physical expression. It is tempting for them to overuse this tool; in sequences like the basketball game, we find ourselves playing the role of the crowd in the bleachers. It is never explained why homecoming is, at this school, a basketball rather than football event, but as an audience we accept it without question. The game and the culture of the school enfold us naturally and thoroughly.

The cheerleaders perform a routine, and then the aggravated coach in a wonderful plaid jacket barks at Emily, to “get more towels,” as it’s so wet that a player could get hurt and cost the school the game. The possibility that Emily’s actions might lead to a loss clearly motivates her. We then find ourselves in the locker room, where the cheer squad is frantic. The lights cool. The cheerleaders are considering an outrageous, dangerous stunt: to catapult Jenny up to the rafters, have her pull down the opposing team's banner (which hangs there as a token of their recent dominance of the rivalry) and fall into her teammates' arms. When Emily, who has walked in to get the aforementioned towels overhears the plan, she objects. At the threat of her revealing the dangerous plan, the cheerleaders strip her, revealing her conservative underwear, and stuff her into a locker. A thrilling sound even coincides with this violence.

Again, at this point, the audience has experienced certain suggestions of Emily's involvement in a train disaster. But we know nothing of the specific circumstances of that disaster or her subsequent exile from the community. Furthermore, we have seen evidence that she has some strange power, but we don't know what that power is. We need more concrete plot development in this first act, and less indulgence in effective, but overused atmosphere-setting music, montage, and dance sequences.

Why? Because Emily's restraint from fighting back against her attackers is a key event in the piece, as is what follows. Until now, Emily has struggled to conceal superpowers from her community. She does this, I take it, as she fears for her safety—revealing these powers would implicate her (accurately) in the deaths of the rest of her kindergarten class years ago, in a school bus accident. We learn these details in full detail later, but the scene that follows Emily's attack constitutes a major event, because it amounts to her performing a key act in Campbell's understanding of the monomyth: “accepting the call to adventure.” Until now, Emily has denied the call. But forced to choose between unmasking her own powers, (and, she can presume, her culpability in her classmates' deaths) and the death of a classmate in a senseless stunt, Emily bravely accepts the dangers of heroism, calls out from inside her locker into a halftime meeting of the boys basketball team.

Now, this event is highly bracketed by Allen and his design team. And, poetically, Emily's half-nakedness articulates her unmasking. But without more concrete plot development up to this point, the gravity of her acceptance of the call is unclear, and as storytellers, The House lose the opportunity to throw their hero into the sharpest possible relief.

Emily frantically explains the danger and the team rushes to stop it. We transition in focus to the cheer routine in which Jenny is catapulted to the rafters to pull the Hornets’ banner down (the banner is located over the panel on the upstage wall. The music and the stunt turns slow at the climactic point of action. A montage is used effectively, as the slow violin music takes us in transition to the locker room. Emily bursts from the locker and puts on the only thing she can find–a bright white cheerleaders uniform. The lights transition us to the gym, as the same music piece plays. This time, as we find ourselves in the gym, Mr. Christopher is flat on the floor, reaching for Jenny, who is still hanging from the banner. This is another very clever device from Allen and the House. Rather than execute a complex stunt in the Viaduct loft space, they rely on their Cliff Chamberlain’s (Mr. Christopher) physical commitment to communicate the danger, from flat on the floor.

The string music swells. The lights go orange, and same violin musical piece builds as Emily flies. Her flying is implied in the “looking up” of the crowd, and her grace in pulling Jenny from the banner. The crowd circles, and Jenny is passed “down” into the circle. The frantic pace of the danger recedes. As it does, and the crowd realizes what Emily has done, they stare at her. On the basketball game’s “sub” horn, she zips away at a high pace, and her classmates chase her. We then hear the sounds of crickets. Mr. Christopher finds Emily, and, awe-struck exclaims that Emily just “flew.” He’s raving to himself that Emily is a superhero, and he gives her an enthusiastic high-five.

We transition to a plodding song incorporating the vibraphone sounds, transitioning to saxaphone sounds. Emily dances as the tempo increases. She executes a clearly bird-like “sparrow” dance that is very well designed and executed. The rhythm, and the dance, build, and the lights shift to a cool shade. We see a projection of stars projected, and as the music and dance crescendo, the show goes to intermission.

On the return from intermission, we see warm orange light, and Emily in a rather more "chic" black outfit. The lockers are out again, and we hear the voice of Principal Skor, (the high-pitched ringing tone used to bracket events, especially Emily’s magic plays underneat the announcement). We see another music montage in which Emily catches and returns the balls thrown about the hallway. We hear her new nickname "The Sparrow." Emily is in full physical harmony with the pace of the school. Meanwhile, Jenny is “bumped” by a rolling projection cart, underlining her diminished status.

We then find ourselves in Mr. Christopher's biology class. They are dissecting fetal pigs. Again, Mr. Christopher, in his energy, stays ahead of the class to whom he's speaking. In a nice effect, the House uses stuffed pig puppets in this scene. To expose what's hidden is the goal, and elegantly, the subtext of the class, and of the piece is articulated metaphorically through a science class exercise. In the first act, the biology class dwelt on the function of the heart. Now it is focused on the entire system of life beneath the surface–to “make ourselves better.”

The students fight to be Emily’s partner. During the experiment, Mr. Christopher guides Emily’s hand. We see the lights turn orange, and hear the high-pitched event tone. Suddenly the pigs’ hearts starts beating. Christopher, astonished, asks with fear if Emily is “doing this,” to which she replies in an entranced tone “yeah.” When he asks her what else she can do, we hear a big band play.

To the music of Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String”, we see a choreographed dance piece with the pigs. Mr. Christpoher sings. The other kids snap along as background dancers. The puppet pigs sing along in the back. Mr. Christopher, as part of this 40s style musical montage then, walks along a line of desks as they are placed in a line before him beneath his feet on a makeshift “bridge.” One of the boys allows a declaration of love for Mr. Christopher to escape. We hear a scream and learn the Jenny made out with a pig. One of the students asks if there is homework, to which Christopher hilariously shouts “GET OUT!”

What follows is an awkward interaction in which Mr. Christopher compliments her “aside from” her “superpowers” and confronts her about what appears to be her acting out on a crush through her powers. He calls her the “cats pajamas,” and acknowledges that he’s worked on this whole “cool teacher” persona. He asks if she’s going to the dance. The talk concludes with a dispirited high-five, and an awkward platonic understanding between them.

We hear the vibraphone sounds that take us home, and we see the inner-lit diorama. Emily's foster father, Albert, interrupts her reading. They have a persistent, matching, suppressed, halting energy in the interaction. He encourages her to attend the homecoming dance, and informs her that Margaret Rosenthal and Joyce want a picture of her with it. He touchingly lays the corsage on the floor. Again, the subtext of the tension is still not specifically clear, and we are in the middle of the second act.

Emily refuses to attend. Why? Is this related to her outsiderness, still? Is it related to her embarrassment at what has just happened in science class? Emily would appear not only to have transformed into an overnight school celebrity, but also to enjoy it. If the subtext of her reluctance is the danger she senses in the exposure of her powers (and thus, potentially her complicity in the decade old tragedy), it is unclear.

After a moment of chilling silence, in which Emily seems to rebuff the quintessential midwestern over-hospitality (betraying something underneath), Albert re-welcomes her. We hear the sound of the train. He encourages her again. Their interaction seems to calm to an intimate comfort and ease. We hear the easy sound of crickets. She takes the corsage from the floor and suddenly embraces him, again in acceptance of her role, fulfilling her foster family’s need for a high school age daughter, at the time when their daughter would have been of high-school age.

We move to the dance, with the mirror ball, and a jazz-sounded montage. We see another choreographed sequence featuring an electric piano and a baritone sax. As Emily enters, she is surrounded by a circle of admirers. She is the hero of the school. She dances with them, again, in harmony with the community.

The music slows, and there is a slow dance. Lauren Vitz is hilarious as Phoebe Marks, who is heart-breakingly rejected after asking for a dance. The dancers dissolve off stage–and Emily last. The scene shifts to Mr. Christopher's biology classroom, where we hear the muffled sounds of dance music. Mr. Christopher is alone with Jenny. He encourages her to return to the dance. She complains of Emily's newfound popularity–insulting her neck, and commenting that the other students want an encore from that days’ performance in class. She also, punctuates a sentence by addressing Christopher as “Dan.” As an audience, we sense a dangerous romantic tension between these two characters from the moment we see them alone. As the scene progresses, Christopher shines a light from the overhead projector on Jenny, complimenting her. They dance to the muffled music, and she kisses him. As she does, Emily enters, saying “...so I came...” We see the cue (orange light, ringing, a flash of light, crashing sound) signifying Emily's magic and we hear a crashing sound. Following the magic cue, we see a stain of blood on Jenny’s cheek.

In the ensuing blackout, we see projections of pictures of houses and another confrontation with a group of people en masse, just as in the first act. They are firing questions at her to the sounds of violins being plucked. Just as in the first act, this firing line questioning is followed by Charlie shooting at Emily with his slingshot, outside their home. This time, however, she does not catch the rock, and it hits her in the head. She sobs, and she and Charlie hug. She then senses Mr. Christopher behind her. We hear the sounds of crickets. In the subsequent interaction, he attempts to explain that he hadn't meant for the kiss to happen, that it had been a “one time thing.” Based on Jenny’s use of Christopher’s first name, we are left to wonder. He protests, in Whitman’s language, that “the body is not the soul.” Emily admonishes him on behalf of his wife. We then hear the sounds of trains, our cue to the mystery behind Emily’s exile from the town. Christopher reveals that his wife is dead, and was killed in "the" accident--she was driving "the" bus. He then reveals that he, too, bears a portrait--ie he also grieves.

The use of the portrait to signify a long-held grief is another elegant conceptual touch by the house. They create their own creative language from show to show, and when we see the portrait that Christopher bears, we automatically link him to the other grieving parents, and begin to assemble the details of the plot more clearly. The image of grief links in popular consciousness to 9/11 and crime victims and is very provocative.

In the scene change we hear the ticking of a clock, and see the panels behind the stage on all sides turn orange. Various character from the show appear as music starts again, striking poses–e.g. Charlie with his slingshot, and Albert with a bit of doll’s house furniture. We then a dance sequence featuring the characters moving through space, tearing pages from books in their hands. Mr. Christopher appears, sobbing. The characters toss the pages across the stage, in what I believe is a symbolic representation of the town’s self-imposed ignorance as to the details of the past. Jenny alone, appearing behind them, gathers the pages in her arms and makes a connection, to digital sounds and projected storm images behind. This conceptual point is again, very elegant, but it is rather lost unless we have a somewhat more advanced knowledge of the subtext of the play–a knowledge that is denied to us.

We see, in projection, behind Jenny with her arms full of pages, a series of projections and sounds from the bus. We see a young girl with glasses (clearly Emily). We see her make a fist, and we see rocks floating and train track bolds moving. We see a look of ferocity on Emily’s face. We see and hear a crash, that then fades and changes to a simple sound of moving water.

The film and graphic design work apparent in the projections is sophisticated and stylish, and without a strong background in film, I don't feel capable of placing it in any context. However, it is colorful, crisp, and very stylized.

We hear a bell and the school desks are arranged on stage (this scene was changed slightly in the Steppenwolf remount–I will describe it as it was presented at the Viaduct). We see Jenny in the same spot in which she was left during the previous choreographed montage, her arms full of the pages. A cacophony of students enter the room. Before class starts, Emily says to Jenny that she “won't tell anyone.”

Principal Skor enters and informs the class that Mr. Christopher has resigned. Jenny stands and confronts Emily: "Did you kill the senior class?" Emily runs from the scene, and Jenny sobs. All the students exit with their chairs, in horror. We hear a bell and see a scene and light shift. To the sounds of plucked violins, groups of parents on stage holding framed portraits are whispering to one another. Someone says "call Joyce!" We hear a phone ring off-stage. The scene shifts to the McGucken home, with the house diorama. Sobbing, Joyce and Emily embrace.

In an even, sincere pace, Joyce asks: "did you kill my daughter?" When Emily answers "yes." Joyce slaps her ferociously. Emily, restraining herself, attempts to defend herself. In a shriek that stands out from her composure throughout the piece, Joyce begs for her daughter back, and wants to know, suddenly, in all seriousness and need, if Emily can do that. Joyce then takes the diorama away.

In this scene as in many others, the actors on stage are not encumbered by a physically realistic portrayal of things. Joyce's act of expulsion from the family group isn't a slammed door or a scene that might be seen on "Cops." Rather, it is the simple, elegant appropriation of a diorama that, for the audience, has come to represent, and totally abstractly, home.

In the ensuing darkness, we hear piano music and voices discussing a "special school." We hear Emily protesting that she "doesn't want to go!" When the lights come up, we see Albert, at the front door informing the mob of neighbors that Emily has gone–that the window was open. The lights shift, cold, again, and we see Emily fleeing. This is interesting: the pretext for tehir search for her is, nominally, to save her, as a runaway. In fact she is being chased by an angry mob, and as she lugs her suitcase, she runs into Mr. Christopher, in orange light, that then fades. He offers her his ticket to Chicago--a talisman that will enable the hero to take her power to (in the words of Campbell) "purify" the larger world. In the Steppenwolf remount, this interaction was much angrier than it was in the first production.

The mob finds her, and, grasping the pictures of their children, lunges at her. The orange light and high-pitched magic sound intensify, as Emily “fires” magic at each person reaching for her, knocking them back. With is “firing” we hear a crash and see a flash. The Sheriff pulls a gun on her, and Jenny McGrath enters, seizes the gun, and shoots Mr. Christopher. The bullet pierces the eye of Mr. Christopher’s wife’s portrait, and hits him right in the heart.

There is a moment of silence. We then hear the sound of wind. The lights warm. A crowd with a medical background surrounds Mr. Christopher, and tends to him, with a professional suppressed panic that is compelling. The lights cool, and we hear a music cue swell. The crowd instinctively senses Emily approaching, and makes way for her. In another moment which elegantly incorporates live visual magic, we see her summon her power to pull the bullet from his body. As she does this the orange light intensifies almost unbearably, and we hear the high-pitched magic sound. The lights on the side panels turn orange. A spotlight highlights the body and the floating bullet. The spot fills in with orange, and all the lights on stage return to a normal wash color. We hear the sound of a heartbeat, and he gasps, coughing. Emily holds him. He tries to thank her, and she refuses his thanks. The separate, and we hear violin music.

To that music, Jenny begins building a choreographed "Sparrow" dance with the rest of the ensemble, that mirrors the dance done at the end of the first act. We see the projections of stars, and Emily sitting in a makeshift train car, made up of rows of seats, and we a projected Chicago skyline in movement on the screen behind, a link to her earlier position in the car in the first act. This time, she accepts the call of adventure, and embraces the journey to Chicago.
Emily has learned to use her magic to save a life, and in Campbell this is thought of as the "life-granting boon." A hero wrests or is granted this boon as a result of the struggle with the gods. In localized tales, the hero uses this boon to purify the community. In more general tales, the boon is used to save civilization. In this tale Emily will leave the confines of the town and come to Chicago.

Many 20-somethings living in Chicago left similar small towns (or reminiscent suburbs), and thus, the link between the audience and Emily is profound. And so, while certain narrative points are disproportionately emphasized, and while certain plot devices are rather simple, transparent, and frankly "Buffy-esque" (the scene in Mr. Christopher's class in which Emily answers an absurdly difficult question with ease comes to mind), the fact remains: The House's work resonates importantly with a very important audience. That their current run at the Steppenwolf is sold out is an indication of this.

Their work, technically, is creative and unique. And while the story seems simple at times, in its unique contemporary portrayal of the monsters and tasks of mythology, it is in fact a sophisticated portrait of our times that, should they continue to develop their work even more from a literary standpoint, may outgrow their current popularity and endure for years to come.

Collaboraction's week of Suzan-Lori Parks' 365 Days/365 Plays

2007-02-07T20:28:00.000-06:00

"To an absurd mind, reason is useless, and yet there is only reason."
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."
America, the Beautiful

"All of my plays are about love and distance."
Suzan-Lori Parks

Today, February 2, 2007, Barack Obama seems like a man of destiny. Everyone is talking about him, and more importantly, everyone believes that he is going to win and do right. Forget Biden's comparison of his articulateness compared to other African-American presidential candidates. Barack Obama is erudite by the standards of any American politician in the 20th or 21st century, period. By entering the presidential race, he is initiating a serious racial discussion in our country that has not been undertaken on a widespread level since the 1970s.

Now, of course, I live in Chicago, so my sense of this "destiny" is probably a bit overstated. Obama is a Chicago politician, and I went to the University of Chicago, while he and his wife were living and working down there. I met her a few times and she is a really interesting, charming woman. But aside from the pro-Obama-destiny bias stemming from my time in Hyde Park, and aside from the exuberance that Chicagoans feel at a hometown politician entering such a stage, there are other rational reasons to feel skeptical about this sense of destiny. The right-wing has not yet unloaded on him yet--indeed, no one, save for a totally ineffectual Keyes campaign (and a by-the-book Bobby Rush for congress campaign before that, which I also witnessed on the south side). And, of course, he's only been in the Senate for two years. And there are several other facts, that without turning this article into a New Republic submission, could still very seriously hinder his candidacy.

But we feel it, this sense of destiny, and I have come to believe that it is because of, and not in spite of, the very obstacles that we see between Obama and the presidency that we believe in him. Americans love their ideals, and the mood in the country is deeply pessimistic. Barack Obama's candidacy represents the coming-of-age of the ideals of 60s liberalism. This is America, the multi-cultural America, in which anyone, of any background, given a decent opportunity can do anything. This is the America that we learned about in elementary school in the 80s as the inheritance from Martin Luther King's martyrdom.

This sense of idealism in darkness fueled the enthusiasm behind Carter and Reagan, two deeply idealistic candidates entering the stage at profoundly difficult national moments. We need to feel good about America right now, and we need to make that which we believe to be the best and most lovable thing about America come true.

Barack Obama, for many on both the left and right, is an abstraction onto which they can project their fantasies about this American ideal coming true, and the more difficult it appears for Obama, the more they love his candidacy, because it is a miraculous awakening of a wellspring of patriotic feeling. It feels, for those who believe in the ideals to which Obama's candidacy appeals, like a miraculous destiny for a man of his skin color to be president right now. And Obama senses this--his campaign is the definitely shaping the contest to come as one between idealistic optimism that is going somewhere, and pessimistic pragmatism, that has gone nowhere.

Suzan-Lori Parks says that all her plays "are about love and distance." This is certainly true on the domestic level, especially in The America Play. But this love/distance obsession translates most profoundly, in my view, on the political level--in the expression of our political ideals. This is one reason why I believe the the recent 365 Days/365 Plays project in Chicago has been so resonant. Parks feels, in the air, the most recent incarnation of the American ideal shattered, and shows us the responses.

The 365/365 project is the result of a year in which Parks wrote one play a day. Jason Loewith at Next Theatre, whom I met when I was in Hyde Park, when he was casting at Court Theatre, is leading the project to produce this work, week-by-week, in Chicago's theaters. Actually, one wanting to survey the methods of Chicago theater could simply attend each of these performances to get a sense for how each ensemble presents a single playwright's vision.

Parks' vision is of a world in which we are conscious of the futility of action in the service of our ideals. In Chekhov, in Uncle Vanya, the inability to accept this reality amounts to despair for his characters. Parks' characters know that the ideals for which they strive can never be attained, that they enable exploitation and participation in political horrors, and yet, they cannot resist these ideals.

This is the world of Parks' best-known allegory, from both The America Play and TopDog/UnderDog, which both concern a similar principal character, a black man who plays the role of Abraham Lincoln in a carnival attraction in which patrons can act out assassinating him for kicks. In The America Play, we are invited into his nuclear family--which he abandons to go west and make his fortune (ie realize his ideal).

In TopDog/UnderDog, the Black Lincoln character is shown in a different situation--living with his brother, a ne'er do well, ironically named Booth by their father. Lincoln (that is his given name in the play this time) is portrayed as a reformed 3-card-monty shark. He has mastered the magical ideal that has the power to seduce, in spite of its clear fraudulence. His brother is a small-time shoplifter. Booth envies his brothers talent and demands instruction and initiation into the art.

Lincoln is presented to us as a shaman who has traversed the boundaries of his black community, and returned as master of the magic through which the community is ruled. As a card shark, he is a celebrity, a genius, and a hero. But he is not content with this status in the community, as his journey prior to the action of the play has conferred a certain wisdom. Lincoln has exceeded the need for adulation stemming from his mastery of the art. Moreover, he is aware of the dangers of this type of magic--he believes it would get him shot. He refuses to share the wisdom with his brother. He doubts his brother's ability to assimilate that wisdom and he fears for his brother's life should he attain the ability to master the magic without the life-expanding consciousness through which he (Lincoln) has managed to attain desirelessness at the top of the play.

Inscribed in these stories and characters is a radical reading of black and American identity, as well as a living metaphorical depiction of the relationship between Americans and their ideals. Three-card-monty is the metaphor for our impossible, and yet impossibly seductive ideals. We are aware of its fraudulence. But we cannot resist. How do we win our bread, if we are not in the game? By assuming a role and willingly submitting to our own humiliation. In Lincoln's case, he assumes the role of the white foreign patriarch undergoing martyrdom in the service of his ideal. But this is, for Parks, the essence of American life. We assume the role of another's ideal--and then we actively submit to it. But all the while, we are dreaming of mastering the impossible game.

Collaboraction's portion of 365/365 is a depiction of the responses to characters across a broad spectrum of backgrounds to a consciousness of this world. And through a highly audience-interactive style, they depict our own responses to this perverse awareness, too. For the plays produced by Collaboraction in their portion of 365/365 transpire in a world similar to that of Parks' other works.

I was expecting a more or less standard theatrical experience, a seat, a program, house music, and then the show. That is not how it worked. The audience climbed three flights of stairs, at the landings of which we were presented with signs with Parks' quotations--from which the quote at the top was taken. After milling about in the hall, checking in, getting tickets, briefly greeting those we knew, we entered a huge loft space, in which a monolithic DJ stand was built--above which hovered a living space/office from which tech was being run, and in which two giant loosely interlocking platforms ran across the floor. The feel was of an elaborate cocktail party at a club. There were photographic projections of post-industrial and other scenes, and a light show, consisting of light blue and green. There was also a glowing blacklight in the room, reflecting off of large cutouts posted on one of the huge walls of the space.

There was a free bar, and a table at which we could buy Collaboraction stuff. I saw several friends from the show milling about in costume, in character. I saw and chatted with several other friends, and it suddenly occurred to me that this experience of artists meeting and greeting was park of the experience. My isolation, taking notes in the corner, felt foreign. So I mingled.

Thus, the first portion of Collaboraction's presentation gave a representational presentation to the act of socializing. The plays would emerge from the social flux. But we, in our conversations, are shoulder-surfing, checking out to see who's doing what, considering ourselves in the same light. We objectify our peers, measuring ourselves against them in this foreign environment, and we feel ourselves being measured, too.

The stage manager toured the room, quietly giving places calls. The lights calm, and we hear the THX sound-intro. We hear melodramatic strings. The DJ starts talking and rapping over pounding beats. We start moving our bodies, unconsciously to the rhythms. This compounds the club/party atmosphere. Suddenly, we see Sienna Harris running, fast, up the right platform, then ducking and hiding from an imposing bolt of thunder. She is playing a small girl, wearing a depression era girl's dress. She calls out that there's "nothing here." A muscular man, Beethoven Oden, in dreadlocks, enters and tends to her. He is in a child's depression-era garb as well. Interestingly, Margot Bordenton, the director of the piece, chose not to cast actors with skinny, child-like bodies in this piece that features two anachronistically costumed children.

This is a choice. The underlying suggestion, from the top, is that this child's play is an allegorical restatement of the action in adult lives. In silence, watching the two actors, Oden and Harris looking for something, we feel an excruciating tension. From the precipice of the edge of the platform, Harris' character drops a belt and watches it fall. In a moment of physical play that was beautiful, Oden restrains her as she appears to want to jump from the edge of the precipice. As he restrains her, the tension that we felt underlying the action at the top of the scene explodes, as she recounts the horrors of nuclear devastation, and the sense of her own hypothetical and conditional culpability in the the US' dropping of the bomb, had she or other African-Americans been in power at the time.

Oden's character urges the girl to "come inside" with an contrasting, soothing authority and presence. The two characters hear a dog's bark in the distance, and the immediate action of the piece is clear: these two, the boy and girl, have been looking for their dog. We see them share a focus, out toward the dog. They celebrate the dog's return together.

As children, these characters bespeak innocence. But as black children in the garb of the Jim Crow era, they take on a special quality of innocence. This piece suggests an era when blacks in the south lacked virtually any influence on the political process. Harris' character, in this millieu, conjures the images of the bad choices that history leads us to, politically, and the attendant sense of culpability, even amidst the most innocent.

Further, as a mutual friend of Harris' and mine pointed out following the production (a by product of Collaboraction's choice of staging was to encourage this sort of reflection), there is the question of image. The only time the two characters share a point of focus is when the dog is discovered offstage. The larger question of culpability in the horror of Hiroshima is subsumed by the mundane, but shared and simple task of finding the dog, just as the question of the fraudulent appeal of the three-card monty game is subsumed by the everyday tasks of most characters in TopDog. Just as the game is a point of obsession, so is the political world and conditions that underpin the decision to drop the bomb. Just as the game feels inescapably appealing, so one's participation in large political decisions feels inescapable.

This ineluctable reduction of the individual's will to an ideal is then presented from an alternate perspective. We are presented another DJ'ed interlude, in which Anacron Allen refers to Chicago as a "town outside Gary" and plays sax to an infectious beat. The interludes set a baseline rhythm for normalcy for the evening, and the performers either consciously or unconsciously feed off of or play against this rhythm. The cool blue light sets the tone as we enter "The Palace at 4 AM", according to the play's title.

We shift our attention from utterly powerless characters, to the putatively powerful. There is a trill of stately medieval music. We see a woman in royal looking robes (Kay Schmidt), then a man (Len Bajenski), in similar robes, enter, entreating her to "come back to bed" at a similar rhythm to that set by DJ Anacron at the top of the scene. The woman, a mother and a queen, we learn, laments her son's estrangement at a contrastingly slow pace. The son, she says threw his crown in the dirt. We feel her persuade her husband to share the lament. The sun rises, brilliantly. We hear the sound of light string music. They contemplate who will rule. According to the scuttlebutt, it will be the servants. The king vows to protect her at the end.

The theme of a ruling class being supplanted by their servants resonates with the Cherry Orchard, and here, as in the Cherry Orchard, nature's action is a metaphor for the onstage action. The event of the sun's rising adds a nice metaphysical touch. Nature is moving from now to the future, and the social order is changing in just such a way. The mystery by which our community and world is ruled does not, in Parks' world, flow from human beings individually, but something higher, either people collectively or something even more mysterious than that. In Parks' world it is the awareness of one's powerlessness over that mystery that provokes a sense of despair. We are aware of how deeply we are subject to powers greater than our own, and yet we are forced to look for the dog, and we are powerless over our desire to hand the kingdom over to our son. There is this deeply felt distance between us and what we love and want.

Following another interlude from Anacron, we then move back to the other platform, to join a young man (Brad Smith) and woman (Sarah Gitenstein). They climb, with some effort, the platform, suggesting a Sisyphean struggle. The man asks the woman where she's taking him, again at what felt to be the baseline rhythm of the piece, stemming from Anacron's interlude. "Are you taking me to my parents? To the cemetery?", he asks. (I'm paraphrasing here). And at the suggestion of parents, I linked this young man to the preceding piece. The long backpacking trip or encounter with nature feels like a rite of passage, and I inferred from the preceding scene that that's is precisely what the son of the Royal couple was longing for. We have shifted from the cool light of the castle to the warm bucolic tones of nature. The two of them are in crunchy, earthy-looking costumes.

His subsequent question, and her reply are illustrative: "I'm not dead yet!" he asks--and she says "You will be!" The sense here of impending doom transitions from the first scene. The young man is seeking to escape his status as a putative member of the ruling class, and senses his powerlessness to do so. The humor in despair here is glorious: "I can dig the hole!" he replies.

He offers to give her a ride on his back. When he falls, and she grows scared, we sense the underlying fear and despair in the piece, and the pace slackens. After removing his backpack, he re-offers to give her a ride on his back, claiming that he's "still a man." "Sure you are," she replies, as the scene closes.

Following another infectiously scored interlude from Anacron, the same platform is the venue for the following piece, "Space Invaders," a meditation on fundamentalism and nihilistic secularism as a response to Parks' Sisyphean atmosphere of impossibly distant and impossibly seductive ideals. A man pointing "finger guns" with both hands follows sounds of wildlife and shoots. The lights remain in warm tones. Scooter, played by Brad Akin, wearing a mustache and a bathrobe enters, demanding skeptically "What are you doing?!" When Shooter (the other character, played by Max Lesser) responds that he's engaged in target practice, Akin responds, hilariously, in a wonderfully contrary tone and rhythm that he "doesn't see shit." Shooter warns that there are aliens and that Scooter, a non-believer is in danger. Scooter walks off, replying: "I'm gonna watch TV and jerk off." Shooter responds that Scooter can "suit yourself."

Thus Parks links the atmosphere of despair underlying the prior few pieces with the surge in eschatological expectations following from the aftermath of September 11. The fundamentalist response is to focus on the movement of supernatural ideals, and in seeing Shooter preparing for the aliens, we see a represented picture of the war-like mentality of those readers of Revelations who are preparing for the Last Days. We despair of our powerlessness, and we find comfort, on the one hand, from the eschatological expectations and preparations found in fundamentalism.

On the other hand is Scooter, who looks to television and cheap masturbatory titillation as a balm against the atmosphere of despair and insecurity, and as a response to the seeming senselessness of the Shooter. Here, form and content are married: Scooter is radically secular in response to Shooter's radical fundamentalism. But the form, the contrapuntal tone, is the vessel by which we see this response, and the piece succeeds brilliantly because of it.

Then, to complement the rural setting of the previous two pieces, we hear banjo music mixed with hip-hop. Our focus shifts back to the opposite platform. We see rich, green light, and a young man, David Dastmalchian, alone. He is meditating, out loud, on his ability to "barn burn." This is literal. He can "make himself known" by burning his uncle's barn. The title of the piece is "Hamlet/The Hamlet," which is perhaps a suggestion of the melancholy prince in a rural village. That is how the piece is presented by Collaboraction. The young man resents his status as poor, his dead father who is more useful dead than alive, he claims. He begs God for help, and as he does, a woman invites him in to eat. Here is an inversion of the previous form--a young man's torments interrupted by his mother (Gertrude, we presume), where previously in "There's Nothing Here" and "The Palace at 4am," the man consoles and invites inside the tormented woman.

The mother, Morgan McCabe, stands arm in arm with her son, in what we presume is a purposely romantically suggestive pose. She asks if he'll come into eat or simply stare at the barn. She demands at a challenging tone, "They say you're a barn-burner. Are they liars?" He returns inside, and the mother is alone on the porch. "God help us, every one," she prays fervently.

This linkage of the fundamentalist posture with the Hamlet "futility of action" conundrum is key, as they both seem understandable responses to the atmosphere created by the piece. We then hear a mix of 40s music with hip-hop beats, and see a sharply dressed woman strewing the opposite platform with belongings, and Eagan Reich (who recently appeared as Judas Iscariot in Steep's production of the Stephen Adly Guirgis' Last Days of Judas Iscariot) sitting nonchalantly. We see books, shoes and other belongings scatter. The formal action of the scene then starts, and we see the man playing a video game to antiquated "Atari" sounds. The woman is dressing and packing her purse. There is a yellow light on the stage. He loses his game, and at an even tone asks her what she's doing. She replies that that she has a meeting later that day with Brad Pitt (Hence the name of the piece, "Meeting Brad Pitt"). The man is clearly drunk from the bottle of Jim Beam on stage. He tries to make conversation about her life--and is so divorced from her reality that he cannot. The piece closes with his advice to her: "don't pay that guy top dollar!", which had the audience in hysterics.

There is a great link between Hamlet's struggles for meaningful action and Reich's character's prolonged, sodden, adolescence. He and the woman, played by Kristala Pouncy, remain a relationship which, we might infer, has seen her grow into the role of a professional and him remain an adolescent. We might also infer that they have met and fallen in love just as they are. But however we read their relationship, it is clear that Parks is offering us a vision of two sides of a coin in this relationship. His response to the futility of action is to retreat. Hers is to race forward in action. But they are essentially opposites that revolve around the same center. That such a match is absurd and hilarious highlights the absurdity of extremes around which characters in Parks' world settle their lives.

The final response of the evening is suicide, in "Trust Life," which features Merci Oni, doing really stunning work. The scene opens to the cast, in hospital gowns, moving through the space as we hear piano music slow. The lights go out. We see Merci in the center of the space beneath an intense special light. She looks frightened. We hear a clap of thunder. The rest of the hospital people emerge. We hear them whispering something out of sync, indistinguishable at first, that builds to an intense hiss at a high rhythm. "Trust life," they are saying. Merci balances on one foot. We hear another clap of thunder. She gasps. "Trust life," the cast says together. In a beautifully executed move, Merci flips her hand up and pantomimes slitting her throat.

Camus calls suicide the ultimate philosophical question, and as such, it is fitting that Parks' deeply philosophically-themed work ends here. Parks presents us a world in which we rely, rather than on the absurd mind's reason, on ideals to which we are inextricably linked by virtue of the circumstances of our birth. The responses to the impossibility of these ideals compose the theme of much of her work, and a prism through which Collaboraction helps us understand our political and social reality.

PIllowman Redux

2006-12-30T12:37:00.000-06:00

I rewrote the Pillowman entry from last month. This is a little clearer and very slightly more succinct. Enjoy!

Evil, All Grown Up: Adults Choosing Evil in The Steppenwolf's Pillowman

“...answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? [Ivan Karamazov asked his brother.]”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said softly.1

A brilliant young writer witnesses his brother being tortured by their parents. He frees his brother and cares for him. As they live together in the aftermath of the torture, the brilliant young man writes stories that, in various forms, represent the experience. In these representations he makes sense of the experience by attempting to answer certain questions: how could this have have happened? How could their parents have allowed and perpetrated this? Can any good come from this?

This is a simple restatement of the premise of The Pillowman. But it is also a restatement and clear distillation of the premise upon which the Hebrew bible was written and propagated. That premise has anthropological and religious roots in the period following the first Israelite exile in 586 B.C.E.

What had until then amounted to ancient Israel’s national life (anthropological customs, religion, etc.) was thrown into turmoil, following the Persian invasion and the exile of the nobility, as Persia administered government. This trauma caused profound suffering and upheaval for the Israelites who lived through it and its aftermath, in which Persia partially relinquished the conquest (they allowed the return of the nobility and the rebuilding of the temple). The priestly cult which had hitherto controlled religious life was undoubtedly undermined by new religious practices.

It is doubtful that, for the nobility, the experience was traumatic per se (the book of Daniel portrays the nobility—the priests and their families—living as guests amongst the court of the Persian king), but it was not easy, given certain trials and privations, and especially in light of what the nobility saw as their divine mandate. They witnessed Israel misdirected, religiously, from the path of the established religious norms (centering on the temple cult). Following their return, by 445 B.C.E., the Mosaic scripture (the five books of Moses, or Scriptural Torah) was collected and propagated. The priests were witnesses to the suffering of the population of Israel. What, according to Jacob Neusner (as a surveyor of Jewish history), was their response as witnesses? Literature (storytelling).2

According to Neusner, ancient Israelite religious and social life revolved around a few central principles. The priests collected ancient stories and built those stories around a simple narrative form: purity, exile, and redemption. This narrative form underpinned the central principles. The form is repeated throughout the Mosaic scripture, and it is a keen statement of the worldview of its creators, especially with respect to some of the young writer's questions: how could this have happened? How could God have allowed and perpetrated this? Can any good come from this?

They answered: God created a world in which man must be allowed to suffer as a condition of his eventual redemption. This narrative form both bolstered their orthodox view of Israelite life and recentered the Israelite world. While exile was not the personal experience of many Israelites, the Pentateuch's treatment of exile articulated many questions of identity that they faced.

The priests portray variations on their experience as a class in response to the suffering they have witnessed—they are a self-centered class of narrator-witnesses. The theme of a self-centered narrator telling stories to make sense of a relation's suffering recurs directly in The Pillowman. McDonagh casts Katurian in the role of the “self-centered priest-artist-chronicler” and his brother Michal in the role of “suffering everyman.” The Mosaic narrative structure is one of the most dominant in human history, and, like the priests who propagated it and the Israelite populace, it is key to Michal and Katurian, who uses and alters it as commentary on his experience.

Ivan Karamazov, quoted at the top, is similar to the priests and Katurian. He collects and chronicles stories of horrible abuses committed against children. He purposely narrows his theme to children, to heighten the starkness of the injustice. In this preoccupation he shares much with Katurian.

The “poem” (more a short apocryphal biblical story) that results from Ivan's years of preoccupation is The Grand Inquisitor. In it, Ivan undermines the basic Mosaic narrative form. Christ returns to earth in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition to comfort men in suffering (the exile part of the Mosaic narrative) and to aid in their redemption—i.e. to aid them in the process of enacting the narrative. A political leader, the Inquisitor, arrests and executes Christ, deciding for his constituents that the suffering that God allows as a condition of man's redemption is too abject. The Grand Inquisitor aims, as a terrestrial god, to lessen man's suffering, and refuses the redemption part of the narrative on man's behalf.

The Brothers Karamazov, writ large, takes on the related sufferer/witness to suffering theme, through a narrator chronicling a town's suffering over the course of several months in the late 19th century. Its story tends to respond to Ivan's treatment of the Mosaic narrative; it portrays, realistically, the suffering incurred by mankind as the result of spiritual freedom weighed against the basic human need for such a freedom, and its potential to regenerate mankind. Dostoevsky concludes, with a heavy heart, that the potential benefit of a world regenerated by a spiritually free, active love outweighs the manifest, horrible suffering necessarily incurred by mankind through such a freedom. He believes that it is impossible to sociologically reconstitute a world without suffering, and concludes that the struggle between these two extremes, freedom and suffering, is the divinely ordained struggle of creation. But he works within the framework of the Mosaic narrative structure to make this point.

The Brothers Karamazov states question of suffering versus spiritual freedom very politically, and in the post-enlightenment literary world, the political ramifications of this question were paramount. Today, this question takes on different forms, but thanks to the media's power to shape our view of reality, the aesthetic form of the question becomes the powerful political question.

Here's an example of such a question, directly related to a narrative we have just considered, related to the foundation of the State of Israel. It's fairly clear to anyone studying the history of the settlement of the modern State of Israel that the Jewish people largely acted out, politically, the narrative to which they as a people clung for two millenia. Now, did the Jewish people perpetuate the redemption narrative due to the existence of the narrative by itself or due to cultural norms that gave rise to the narrative? Or some mixture of the two?

The question of Israel's history is a pertinent restatement of a contemporary problem: what is the relationship between real world violence and violence in mass media? Do images of violence necessarily cause violence? And if so, what is the appropriate balance between artistic freedom and attendant human suffering?

Katurian, like Ivan, uses and undermines the Mosaic narrative throughout The Pillowman. But The Pillowman, writ large, portrays the distilled circumstances through which we receive basic stories considering theodicy and a balance between artistic freedom and suffering. In this portrayal, McDonagh, in collaboration with Amy Morton (the director of the recent Steppenwolf production), has created a stark, blistering work that, like The Brothers Karamazov, ultimately affirms the hope that mankind can balance artistic freedom (McDonagh’s brand of spiritual freedom in this piece) and its attendant necessary suffering, with a world redeemed from suffering. He shows us how artistic freedom plays out in the world, and he shows us the consequences and possibilities.

McDonagh gives life to the problem in the forms of Katurian K. Katurian (his full legal name; played by Jim True-Frost) his brother, Michal (Michael Shannon), and the detectives who have arrested them, Tupolski (Tracy Letts) and Ariel (Yasen Peyankov). To restate the action of the piece more elaborately: Katurian, an author of obscure short stories, and his brother, Michal, are arrested on suspicion of child murder. Michal confesses to having killed the children at the inspiration of his brother's stories. Katurian, in response, murders his brother in custody. Katurian agrees to confess to the murders of the children (although, in reality, he played no direct part in the murder of the children), as well as his brother and his parents (he did indeed kill his parents years before, in response to their abuse of his brother) as a bargain for the saving of his stories. He is then murdered by the police (the play is set in a fictitious totalitarian state where such police murder is commonplace), but his stories are saved.

The play is set with the stage from an old vaudeville or movie house, painted with gold foil, in the background. In the foreground is a vast police warehouse, with a portrait of the Fearless Leader (a Bashar Assad looking fellow), and flags on the wall. Great steel balconies suggestive of a steel mill run high up. There are old crates, old works of art, law books, and filing cabinets lining the floor, suggestive of the key Apollo and Dionysus dualism at the heart of the production—creativity and order, side by side. The relegation of law books to a warehouse is highly suggestive of our current questions related to rule of law with respect to enemy combatants. There is no house music. A great chandelier, suggestive of the old vaudeville, stares down at the audience from above.

I was a little disappointed that the totalitarian regime was so clearly suggested by the portrait. One nice thing about the Broadway production is how we as an audience were forced to piece together, like detectives, the nature of what we were seeing. The introduction of the totalitarian state and its implications happened at McDonagh's pace—unfolding grimly, yet hilariously. Katurian is obsessed with staying apolitical as a writer, and with a portrait of Assad in the background, we know why. But without it, his protestations of disdain for politics resonate with our understanding of the Hollywood screenwriter or the big city cynic—i.e. archetypes we can readily associate with artists we know or know of.

The play opens to Katurian being led, blindfolded, into a dimly lit room from one direction. Then the detectives exit and reenter through another door, disorienting Katurian. Tupolski “demands” to know who left Katurian's blindfold on (when it was him), introducing him as the “good cop”. The lighting here actually delineated the boundaries of the detectives' office, suggestive of the countless interrogations we've seen in popular culture featuring a lamp shone directly over the suspect's head. Ariel proceeds to pull a lamp directly over Katurian's head here, completing the image, and introducing him as the “bad cop.”

The rhythmic scoring of the action from the police at the top was fantastically aggressive, intimidating, and disorienting. When Tupolski seeks intimacy with Katurian by joking about how he needs information to fill out a form (which he subsequently tears in half) the rhythm slows, and his tool for acquiring intimacy with the suspect is clear. When Ariel loses his temper at being told “he can draw his own conclusions,” the action ramps up to such a frenzy that we can feel Katurian's torture in our bones. We become intimidated and confused as the detectives rattle through details of Katurian's first story (of a little girl who carves little apple soldiers stuffed with razors) and of questions about visits in the “Jew quarter” (even in McDonagh's bizarrely representational alternate universe the Jew is the other and is corralled into a ghetto). As Katurian learns that his brother has been arrested, his panic raises his rhythm from laconic to frenzied.

It would be easy for a production of this play to simply allow the storytelling that takes place to transpire at a haphazard pace. In this production, the pacing is concerted: stories are told at a wonderfully simple yet unsaccharine pace. As a result, the audience has time to make sense of Katurian's allegories. To wit: the little girl with apple soldiers. This story is key to how Katurian, despite his protests, makes sense of storytelling. An abused little girl with a crass, piggish father, carves little apple soldiers, stuffs them with razors, and gives them to her father as a gift, warning him to only admire them and not to eat them. He does eat them, however, and dies, choking on his own blood. Then, as the little girl sleeps, the soldiers invade her dreams and crawl down her throat, killing her. The story is, abstractly, a melding of Katurian and his brother's experiences. But it is clearly written from his point of view: the girl creates something deadly in response to abuse—we can imagine that she knows full well that her crass, gluttonous father will eat the apples. The deadly creation eventually kills her.

Of course, a story of abuse leading to destruction could certainly be Katurian's representation of Michal's experience. And later in the production, we see Michal, as a response to abuse, construct a creative action (acting out Katurian's stories, and this one especially) that will end destructively. Rather, I believe that this story is about creating works that depict violence and knowing that those depictions will result in real world violence. And as such, this story is Katurian's own personal and specific meditation on violence in art. The little girl's response to abuse is the creation of these deadly soldiers—and it eventually destroys both her abuser and herself.

As we hear the story of “Three Gibbet's Crossing”, (a caged man is shot without understanding why) we feel the rhythmic dissonance between Katurian and the detectives ease. They establish a banter. We hear another story, a midrashic interpretation of the Pied Piper story, in which a boy, who accepts his poverty and ostracization, and offers his measly sandwich (his only dinner) to a traveler who passes by. The traveller thanks him by chopping off his toes. It turns out that by crippling the boy, he has saved him from the fate of the other children of Hamlin, who will be led off by the Pied Piper, the traveler, later.

Soon, the air in the room depletes as we hear the sounds of Katurian's brother screaming next door. The rhythm crawls. And then the detectives strike, and the room throbs. There have been two children murdered, and there is a third missing. The two children were murdered in an apparent imitation of Katurian's unpublished stories, pointing the finger at him. The detectives want confessions. In a grim moment that caused the couple beside me to cringe, the detectives confront Tupolski with a box of toes that apparently comes from an imitation of the Pied Piper story. There is a certain staged quality here to Ariel and Tupolski's shtick, that becomes apparent as Tupolski implores Ariel not to feed the toes to Katurian. This is welcome comic relief.
Then, in a chilling moment, scored at a snail's pace, Ariel growls that “to kill a writer”, as they are planning to do, “sends a message. And that message is that YOU CAN'T GO AROUND KILLING LITTLE FUCKING KIDS!”

Katurian responds, with dignity, that he refuses to say another word without seeing his brother. Perhaps the potential for a prisoner's dilemma type of subterfuge has occurred to him. But the even dignity with which True-Frost delivers those lines clearly articulates the love that he has for his brother. He is left alone as Ariel goes to retrieve electrodes.

Here we see the giant vaudeville stage and the fabulous crystal chandelier slide out from the background, to the sound of a foghorn. In a play about art, it is appropriate that this production, a work of theater art, emphasized the theatrical aspect, by making the vaudevillian stage a centerpiece. Katurian addresses us as a spotlight follows him (perhaps echoing the vaudeville theme). And in a very astute choice, we see the story of Katurian and Michal's childhood unfold directly before us, on a stage near to the one on which the preceding action takes place, suggesting, implicitly the equality between the two tales. On Broadway the action of Katurian's past unfolds on a balcony high above the stage, behind a scrim. In this production the story unfolds as near to us as everything that has transpired until now.

We learn the story of a boy writer, Katurian, showered with love and affection by his parents and recognized for his stories. As the boy matures, he begins to hear sounds of torture through the wall (akin to Michal's screams earlier). The screams through the wall are also suggestive of the Republic's allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher's job is seen as discourse on the nature of the shadows of formal reality that compose everyday life. In McDonagh's world, suffering is reality and the writer is the philosopher, whose job is to discourse on the shadows he witnesses thereof. Michal's experience is the direct opposite—he experiences the shadows of a joyous reality through the wall. Were Michal the storyteller, we can imagine that his stories would be inversions of Katurian's. In this world (as imagined by Morton), the sufferer and the witness are inversions of each other. They even (we learn later) look similar.

When the boy enters the room adjacent to his, he finds his parents have played a joke on him, with sounds that mimic suffering. Eventually, Katurian discovers that his brother is indeed being tortured. True-Frost as the nerdy writer is quirky, almost like an eccentric Crispin Glover persona here, in disturbingly describing, at a very even pace, the murder of his own parents, in response to the torture.

Katurian's story is Mosaic in nature; he lives idyllically, then suffers, then repents, then is redeemed. Michal's is directly opposite. He suffers, is saved, lives idyllically, then sins, then suffers.

The stage and chandelier retract, and we find Michal alone on stage. On Broadway, Michal was depicted as Katurian's eternal little brother; fat, childish, plaintive. Here, he is depicted as Katurian's doppelganger, physically. As we see him respond to the sounds of Katurian's torture through the wall, we recognize his responses as rather adult responses. He has stubble. He and his brother have petty squabbles, and just as any two brothers who are contemporaries have resentments, Michal resents Katurian—and we sense it immediately, even in the moment Katurian is thrown on stage. The brothers have a rhythmic rapport, and their interactions feel deeply rooted in their decades-old relationship. The rhythm of their interactions is the baseline for normalcy in the production.

Michal reveals that he told the detectives whatever they wanted to avoid torture. Michal jokes that he might blame the whole thing on Katurian. Michal's banter with here is akin to a petulant adolescent, not to the eight year old characterization presented on Broadway. He's not a savant, and he's not a child. He rather resembles a frat boy with tattered clothes. He begs to hear his brother's short story, The Pillowman, which Katurian tells at an easy pace.

That story is the allegorized rendering of a storyteller whose stories prompt his audience/subject (they are the same character) to self-destruction, and whose sometime failure initiates a story he tells himself, prompting his own self-destruction. The Pillowman's stories are all told to a child living in an idyllic scene in the past (echoing the Mosaic nature of Katurian's sense of personal narrative). The storyteller tells the child of the impending corruption of the future and the futility of living (these are future lonely suicides). The stories prompt the children to destroy themselves as children (and disguise the suicides as accidents) so as to spare themselves from the horror of the corrupted future. To the Pillowman, like Ivan, the suffering (exile) is too abject to expect people to bear. The Pillowman (somewhat like the Inquisitor) aids his wards by helping them to refuse redemption. The Inquisitor knowingly refuses a real redemption, where, for the Pillowman, there is none.

Finally, the Pillowman, by failing to convince a future rape victim to self-destroy as a child (the storytelling by True-Frost builds to a fevered crescendo), becomes despondent, and goes back to his own self as a child, and tells his child self the story of his future lonely suicide, and convinces his child self to immolate himself. As the grown Pillowman disappears, he hears the screams of the people whose childhood self-destruction spares them from a horrific future. We can imagine that he realizes, in horror, the relative selfishness of his suicide before he dies.

Herein is contained Katurian's message to himself as a storyteller: though my stories may incite self-destruction and pain, they are truthful, and in the end, more humane than a life of untrue illusion. The story is Katurian's affirmation of a miserable life as a chronicler of human suffering. It is also a larger affirmation of the ultimate value of the enterprise, so long as his stories (destructive, but true) survive. Humanity may destroy itself as a result of his stories, but Katurian's creative spirit believes that this is the best of all possible outcomes. Is this the underlying message of the play? I do not think so. As we will see, the self-centeredness of Katurian's narratives and the critical disposition of his readers are crucial to the picture outside of the specific short story of The Pillowman.

The story finishes. Michal confesses to having actually killed the boy by cutting off his toes. He did tell the police what they wanted to hear—but he also happened to kill the kids. Michal asserts that he killed because his brother told him to. (At this point several audience members left). Katurian accuses his brother of being a “sadistic asshole.” Michal has convinced himself of an informal critical theory. Art causes violence, and therefore I did violence. Michal has critiqued Katurian's work by killing in response. He points out that as a result of the murders, Katurian will become a famous writer, to which Katurian responds that the most likely outcome will be the destruction of the stories. He tell his brother he would rather be burnt alive, and have Michal burnt alive before having the stories burnt.

Michal is obsessed with his brother's stories—he wants his brother and the stories to be famous. Yet if he is sophisticated enough to act out murder to further that result, he is surely sohpisticated enough to realize that he will destroy his brother. As an adult in this production (and again, not as the Broadway production's child), he makes an adult choice, springing from complex motives. I'm convinced that, in this production, he hates and resents his brother, and at the same time, longs for his brother's success and the success of the stories.

Why? Every story in the play can be recognized as Katurian's meditation on his own suffering as a witness to his brother's pain or Katurian's meditation on his brother's pain itself. The relationship between the chronicler (the artist) and the subject forms the foundation of this Cain and Abel story, because the artist, Katurian, grasps for meaning from the suffering he has witnessed, and his brother makes sense of his own experience via Katurian's stories. As a result of Morton and Shannon's choice to characterize Michal as an adolescent, we see a being whose understanding of the world has taken shape as a teenager.

This makes sense. If Michal is the older brother, and is liberated from his parents' torture at, say, age eleven or twelve, we can safely assume that he is taught or learns to read (he can read) in the subsequent few years. He is socialized during those years and educated otherwise. But most importantly, he can come to hear and comprehend (for Shannon's Michal, as opposed to the Michal on Broadway, can comprehend) fully his brother's representation of the world in story.

There is deep resentment in the relationship. On Broadway, the relationship was portrayed as a George and Lenny relationship. That is to say: Katurian is in no wise Michal's peer. The resentment in the relationship, therefore, is of a child complaining before his God. Katurian, on Broadway, is the settled authority in the relationship, and Michal destroys him unknowingly, as a child might break an antique vase. In Morton's production, the two men contend with each other, as peers, even as Katurian plays God. There is resentment in Michal, but his resentment is proud and spiteful. If Katurian plays the role of Michal's God, then Michal is Katurian's Miltonic Satan, a tragic hero, an angel, who has come to see himself as a God.

This is a remarkable artistic statement from Morton. If Katurian is the artist speaking for God, delivering contemporary revelation through fiction, and Michal is a symbol of mankind, suffering uncomprehendingly, and deriving meaning and direction from story, then the portrayal of Michal becomes the director's meditation on the nature of mankind and his suffering. Forgiving the superficial elitism of McDonagh's casting of mankind as a Faulknerian idiot (at least great writers come by this elitist portrayal of mankind honestly), I feel that Morton does her best to present Michal less as an idiot than as a damaged adolescent genius. Michal is intelligent, angry, and most importantly, an adult.

In New York, mankind is portrayed from the ultimate parental elitist perspective: as a child. Recalling the stereotypical cultural elitism of New York's cultural and intellectual congonscenti, we might not find this all that surprising. Chicago's portrayal of man's contention in life is a dignified one, and one for which Morton should be proud. It cannot be emphasized clearly enough—portraying Michal as an adult was a masterstroke.

Soon after Michal's confession, we learn that the third, undiscovered, child was the victim of a reenactment of Katurian's story “The Little Jesus.” We can only imagine, in horror what that entails. Katurian reacts furiously at the idea of the reenactment of such a gruesome story. Actually, his reaction here was far more interesting than Billy Crudup's on Broadway. Crudup reacted instantaneously to Michal's revelation. In True-Frost, we actually see the information land and be processed.

Michal reassures Katurian that everything will be okay—and that they will “hang out in heaven.” When Katurian points out that child killers go to hell, and that it is most certainly a hell in which their parents' abuse is revisited on them, Michal loses control, flopping on the floor, at a frenzied pace, in an act of physical play that bespeaks Morton's mastery as a director of physically free acting. In the post-show discussion True-Frost mentioned that much of the physical acting was improvisational. In this moment of the production it was also moving.

All Michal has, he says, are Katurian's stories. We can imagine that he wants better stories. His beef is critical. But he has already accomplished what he set out to accomplish. It's all over but the shouting. He settles down for a nap—which, as he points out, is sensible, considering the torture that he may about to endure. Katurian points out that the torture may be unbearable, and in crystal-clear moment of Michal's resentment, Michal reminds Katurian that Katurian has no idea of the pain that Michal knows how to endure.

Then Michal demands to hear the story that he enjoys. This moment was timed perfeclty. It seemed that the tension in the piece became unbearable just before Michal made this demand. Another masterstroke from Morton—as the audience is getting uncomfortable, and might think to walk out to hear another story themselves (i.e. leave the theater at the impending intermission), Michal expresses the same sentiment.

Before Michal nods off, he begs to hear his favorite story, The Little Green Pig, which is as follows: The Little Green Pig liked being green—even though he was different, and ostracized by the other pigs. The farmer, noticing the difference, snatches the pig, and dips him in special pink paint that can never be painted over and never washed off. The little green pig is unhappy—his only claim to dignity has been painted over. Subsequently, a special green rain falls, making the other pigs green, and making the little green pig special again.

I believe that this is Michal's piece for a very good reason: it is the only one written exclusively from his own point of view. The pig starts out exceptional, but suffering. He is important even in pariahdom. He is then removed, and forcibly made to conform to the other pigs.

It is a story about someone exceptional in pariahdom who is then removed, from without, from that pariahdom and then made to conform. The pig's suffering is alleviated, but his sense of dignity is diminished. Then, as the rain falls, he realizes a new dignity. To me, this is the perfect meditation on Michal's experience from Michal's own perspective as the direct recipient of suffering, and not from Katurian's perspective as the witness to suffering. We can imagine a fourteen year old Michal hearing his brother's stories and making sense of the outside world (the other pigs) through them. Through his brother's stories, Michal's understanding of the world assumes that every child experiences suffering akin to Michal's prior to his salvation by his brother (i.e. is green just like the little green pig used to be).

Thus, Michal's understanding of the world is that his dignity (recognized retroactively, through the story) as a child, was a false dignity, because he was not truly exceptional in his suffering (i.e. his greenness). His new dignity, as one who has been saved from suffering, is true—the other pigs experience the biblical cycle of innocence corrupted and subsequent suffering (to be followed by repentance and redemption). Michal's dignity is as one whose torture ends as he enters maturity and whose redemption follows directly. Michal's experience is the direct inversion of the biblical narrative.

As he socialized following his grisly experience, the sense of alienation must have been profound. He sees Katurian as supremely powerful, and wonders why, given their equal innate intellectual faculties (they both come from the same sick genius parents), he was not given the power and the pleasure. He heard sounds of enjoyment behind that wall every bit as surely as Katurian heard suffering. In this production Michal both loves and hates his brother, and we understand the reasons. His love stems from the direct relief of his suffering initiated by his brother—his brother is the savior. His hate stems from his resentment at being the freak brother and from his critical distatste for his brother's portrayal (or lack thereof) of his life. He hates that the stories are arranged incorrectly or portray things inaccurately. And most horribly both to Michal (and we discover, Ariel) they incite people to violence—and this incitement may have led to his personal suffering. Michal hates the fact that violence in stories causes violence and he hates Katurian for perpetuating violence, through him and through others, like their parents. When Michal accuses Katurian of being “like them” (the parents) he equates Katurian's words depicting the tortures of hell with their parents' enactment of those tortures, setting the matter before the audience clearly. Words are deeds. They inspire others to violence and they inspired Michal, with his own critical permission, to it.

Inasmuch as Michal's experience is the inversion of Katurian's, it is appropriate that his actions lead to the destruction of the stories. Michal's act of destruction is the ultimate active inversion of his brother's act of creation, yet, interestingly, he rationalizes it as the means by which Katurian will become famous and through which the stories will survive.

Michal falls to sleep, and then, as Katurian did their parents, he smothers Michal with his pillow. As he does it, and Michal struggles and dies (at uncomfortable length), Katurian whispers, repeatedly, that “it's not your [Michal's] fault.”

This key moment, in New York, was portrayed as a mercy killing—of the smart brother sparing his idiot brother more torture. The idiot accidentally came across the wrong stories and now has to die for having acted them out. Better that his brother should do it. In this production, of course, the disagreement between the brothers is a critical one, and much darker. Katurian's murder, Cain slaughtering Abel, is all at once mercy, yes, but also revenge. Michal resented his brother and has destroyed him. Further, Katurian belives, his stories have been destroyed. And the stories call out “from the ground” for justice.

Katurian finishes the murder and goes to the door to announce his confession to six murders. He has only one condition—it concerns his stories. At those words, the lights go black and we head to intermission trying to make sense of 90 minutes of the most dense literary theater we have ever seen.

When intermission ended, approximately 20% of the Saturday night audience had defected—electing to hear other stories for the rest of the evening. As we enter, the chandelier is low and the vaudeville stage is out. We transition gradually into story time.

There once was a little girl who was convinced that she was Jesus. She had good parents and she went around acting Christ-like. Following one of her shenanigans, her parents are tragically beheaded in an auto accident (hilariously portrayed in shadow by Morton, and a bit of self-parody from Katurian and McDonagh). She is then transferred to horrible foster-parents who lied about their horribleness “on the form” (more comic relief). They abuse her horribly and goad her with her belief in her own divinity. They test her by putting her through Christ's trials and by crucifying her and burying her alive. The story ends to the sound of her scratching the top of the coffin.

As I recall, this story was also told, on Broadway, on the same balcony as Michal and Katurian's story. And it was told from behind a scrim, giving the audience comfort and safety in the distance and concealment of the acts. Again, in this presentation, the action is put right before us: we see the little girl lowered into the coffin, and we see her scratching at its top.

Of course, this is paralyzingly unpleasant, but the larger issue is not of how unpleasant we feel, but why Katurian wrote this story. I believe that this story is Katurian's allegorized personal history, every bit as much as The Little Green Pig is Michal's. As a gifted young writer, he was loved and encouraged, just as the little Jesus. After his discovery that his parents are monsters (i.e. the old, kind parents were killed and replaced by the evil foster parents), they test his resolve to be an author by confronting him with the ultimate horror and torture. The sounds of the girl's scratching are Katurian's stories, written in the darkness, heard only by a passing stranger.

At one point in the story, the little girl's foster parents goad her: “You still want to be Jesus?!” The little girl replies: “I don't want to be Jesus, I fucking am Jesus.” The Little Jesus was distinguished in this production by the interpretation of the line: “I fucking AM Jesus!” In In New York, in keeping with the picture of humanity as children, this line was uttered innocently, and our laughter stemmed from the absurdity of such a thing coming from the mouth of a child. In Chicago, the laughter stems from the little girl's grown-up wrath. She IS Jesus, damn it, and she is furious that you would question it!

The Mosaic narrative structure of the idyllic beginning corrupted is in place here. That Katurian, egoistically, sees himself as a Christ figure when he has only been the witness to his brother's suffering (of course suffering in a different way, subsequently) is rather ludicrous, but here McDonagh is having fun with the writer's sense of self-importance. It is also ironic that later in the play Katurian specifically disavows biographical fiction. His stories, while allegorical, are almost exclusively autobiographical. Perhaps McDonagh is portraying the author's unawareness of the nature of his own creation. Perhaps Katurian is having a joke on us all—disclaiming all autobiographical storytelling, but secretly loving it.

It is appropriate that Michal's coup de grace of resentment/destruction/promotion of the stories lies in the performance of The Little Jesus. It is also interesting that Michal's story should be The Little Green Pig, while Katurian gets to be The Little Jesus. If anyone has a claim to sinless suffering, it is Michal, not Katurian. We can imagine him reading this story and seething—yet feeling a sense of dignity that his suffering has resulted in some meaningful representation. Katurian reacts severely to the revelation that his brother has acted out The Little Jesus. We can imagine (from this production) that this is just what Michal intended.

Following the portrayal of The Little Jesus, we are taken back to the office. Katurian has offered to confess to an active role in his parents' murders, the murder of his brother, and the murder of all the children, in exchange for the preservation of his stories. Ariel, recounting the story of The Little Jesus, shreiks primally: “Why does there have to be people like you!” Morton casts the two detectives as “everyman” types as opposed to clever “detective-genius” types (typically in the crime genre, as dueling good and evil, cop and criminal reveal each other most interestingly as geniuses). On Broadway Jeff Goldblum and Zelko Ivancek played the duo, and while both are physically powerful, they can be rather brainy and nebbishy in their affect. Not so at Steppenwolf. Rather, Peyankov and Letts are men whose hearts drive their desires, even as their minds facilitate those desires. They are, deep down, boyish in their energy. Ariel hates Katurian, because he supposes that Katurian is a child abuser. But even more deeply, he hates Katurian for writing about it and thus promoting others to it. But something happens that makes Ariel face with the realization that he is himself an admixture of Katurian and Michal.

Ariel exits to “get some sweets,” (a wonderfully childish impulse). He reenters, bent on showing Katurian no sympathy—preparing to torture him. As Ariel prepares to perform his own idea of justice, Katurian astutely notices Ariel's response to Katurian's having murdered his parents to relieve his suffering. We learn that Ariel was abused by his father and murdered his father in response. As an admixture of the two brothers he is a fully realized human being, while remaining a symbol character in the dualistic structure of the play. He sympathizes with Katurian. He hates Katurian. He finds himself largely in the position that Michal finds himself: he blames Katurian for his suffering and wants to destroy him; yet, the stories represent Katurian's attempt to give meaning to his suffering.

In New York, Ivancek's intellectual portrayal of Ariel rendered his passion at this point (the point of his inner conflict) somewhat dishonest. In Morton's production I implicitly understood the nature of Ariel's sympathy and hate for Katurian.

After Tupolski humorously confirms Ariel's secret, Ariel stalks off painfully. He reenters. Tupolski sips tea elegantly, acting like a detective-genius. Ariel retorts, resentfully, to Tupolski, that the Commissioner likes him better, and that he should be made the number one on the case and run it. Tupolski retorts by deducing, in humorously short order, that Katurian cannot confirm that the little girl used in the reenactment of The Little Jesus was dead or alive at the time of her live burial. Tupolski then informs the squad cars rushing to the scene where Katurian described the little girl's burial (Michal told Katurian and Katurian, in his fictitious confession, told the detectives) to move more quickly.

Ariel storms off again. Tupolski, preparing to execute Katurian, discourses with him at a leisurely pace about a story he himself wrote—the title of which contains far to many words and punctuation marks to be recalled accurately here. It is the story of a deaf little Chinese boy walking alone a long set of railroad tracks along a long plain. Tupolski addresses the audience as he informs us that a train is coming and that the little boy will not hear it—and thus will be killed. An old Chinese man (Letts, as Tupolski, employs some hilariously insensitive and savage racial humor here) sees, from afar, the boy strolling innocently on the tracks and correctly concludes that the boy will be killed. We can assume that this is why the story is set in China, Tupolski, like Katurian, has license to assign himself whatever role that he in his vain self-image likes. For Tupolski, the archetype of wisdom and intellectual fortitude is the Old Chinese Man.

The old man calculates the speed of the train and the point at which the deaf boy would be struck (Katurian correctly points out the hole in the story: how can the old man know that the boy is deaf? Tupolski brushes this detail aside—the symbolism is most important to our detective-author). The old man then, nonchalantly, folds the paper with which he made the calculation into a paper airplane, in just the right spot to distract the boy and pull him away from the tracks.

Tupolski, at the beginning of story time with Katurian, gives him license to speak. When Katurian criticizes Tupolski's title, he revokes the freedom of speech (illuminating some of the resentment Katurian felt for his brother/critic, and delightfully unravelling his assumed air of rational detective-genius). Katurian flatters Tupolski that he loves the story. And, as an allegory for the protector-detective, the character of the nonchalant Old Chinese Man is very expressive of Tupolski's own character, and illuminative of how McDonagh conceives of the act of storytelling. Each character in this play has stories that give his life expression and meaning, except Ariel. But Ariel's stories take a different form, as we will see.

Following story time, Tupolski describes the process by which Katurian will be executed. Ariel enters—they found the little girl, only not dead. She is painted green, like the pig. In this production Michal's final creative/destructive act was darkly humorous. He killed as little as possible in order to make his point. He lied about it, knowing that his lie would be exposed, and that this exposure would reveal his cunning and possible mental equality to his brother. Ariel exposes Katurian's plot to deceive the detectives. We see Tupolski's intellectual self-image deflate, and we see Ariel (who we previously think of as childish muscle) assume an intellectual role. Peyankov here does a fantastic golf swing after putting it together in front of Tupolski's wondering eyes.

Tupolski starts a fire in the tall trash can in the office (in New York it was a tiny paper basket; here a full aluminum alley can). The deal was that Katurian would be honest in his confession, and that his honest confession would earn him the preservation of the stories. Tupolski's vanity as a wise detective has been wounded. His pride as an author has been wounded by Katurian's criticism. He wants to hurt Katurian in the only way he knows how, and “as an honorable man” (as he constantly refers to himself, and as Katurian constantly refers to him) he is within his rights, within the context of the bargain, to burn the stories.

Ariel pleads on Katurian's behalf to save the stories. Tupolski then initiates the execution by placing a black hood on Katurian (Abu-Graib-esque). Stanislavski, in My Life in Art recalls, as a demonstration of tempo/rhythm (internal/external action), a portrayal of Mary Stuart going to a beheading. Her internal rhythm is frenetic. But, to maintain royal bearing, her external rhythm is easy. I was reminded of this when I saw True-Frost's portrayal of Katurian's final moments—as he says “I was a good writer.” Tupolski, after explaining that Katurian would be shot following a countdown from ten, shoots him on four. Tupolski excuses himself to go “warn the parents”, but we can imagine that this is to save face. Ariel has pleaded on behalf of Katurian's stories and Tupolski is leaving them in Ariel's hands.

Before the play ends, two things happen. First, in the seconds prior to his execution, Katurian imagines a story for his brother. It is one in which Katurian, as the Pillowman, tells his brother, as a child, of the future that is about to transpire, in hopes that his brother will destroy himself as a child. His brother, citing the stories that will survive as the result of their mutual suffering, refuses to un-wish his life.

That Michal's place in Katurian's story is as a living, suffering instrument of story production highlights the justice in Michal's sense of grievance. Every story except The Little Green Pig is a direct meditation of Katurian's experience as the witness to suffering, as opposed to a consideration of Michal's experience. While Michal's torture is germane to the stories, he is not, except, abstractly, in The Little Green Pig, the subject of the stories. Herein lies Katurian's, and the artist's, failure: preoccupation with the self as a witness to the action of humanity, rather than with humanity itself.

The other thing that happens is that Ariel proves himself to be the real good cop: he saves the stories, and they become his stories. Where he was the only character without any meaningful narrative interpretation of his life as detective/chronicler/sufferer/actor, he will find, in Katurian's stories, his own story. And in the preservation of the stories he will find some measure of hope. Bizarrely, in the world of The Pillowman, this constitutes a happy ending.

Steppenwolf wisely holds post-show discussions following every production of The Pillowman—helping an audience process, together, the disturbing material they have just shared. One criticism of the show was that the evil in the world of the play was unexplained, and that this was somehow a cop-out. I disagreed. The parents who initiate the suffering in the play never betray their motives, and as such, as gods, they give us no theodicy. But mankind and mankind's artists are portrayed as responsible for the creation of their own God in this production. McDonagh charges mankind with responsibility for deciding how to read and understand art, and he charges artists with responsibility for creating relevant, truthful art. He also indirectly accuses the authors of the bible of self-centeredness as narrators. But in The Pillowman, mankind constructs his own sense of the meaning of his suffering and perhaps a way to save himself.

In Martha Lavey's (the Steppenwolf artistic director) introductory notes, she addresses the issue of dualism in the play: “two rooms, two brothers, two detectives”. What is so fascinating about The Pillowman (and this production specifically) is how deeply opposite those dualisms run within the context of brotherhood (not just between Katurian and Michal, but between Tupolski and Ariel, as brothers in police). It is also fascinating how the intimacy between the doubles illuminates them and their shared dialectics of obsession. Katurian experiences the exact opposite of Michal—an idyllic childhood interrupted by the discovery of suffering, and thus, ensuing suffering. Michal experiences suffering until he is discovered and relieved of it. Katurian and Michal, by being portrayed both as adults (and rather similar looking, in shape and face, at that), are contemporaries. The same is true for Tupolski and Ariel, who, as mentioned previously, are played in this production as ruddy, rugged, and strong. Tupolski is the one obsessed with reason and structure, and Ariel is the one obsessed with acting out justice (i.e. torture). And yet, each of these brother/others comes to embody the core identity of his other. Katurian passionately kills. Michal intellectually chooses. Tupolski kills. Ariel solves the case. Ariel saves the stories.

The two sets of men are themselves doubles, as Katurian (a good cop like Tupolski) is obsessed with giving the world's experiences order through story, and Michal (a bad cop like Ariel) is obsessed with acting impulsively. And yet, Michal's intellectually chosen (if evil) action, the murder of the children, is ultimately what gives, us, through the action of the play, a sense of the true meaning of his experience. Ariel's ability to reason leads to the preservation of the stories. Even their names, Katurian and Tupolski (cold sounding last names) and Ariel and Michal (gentle sounding first names) suggest this dualism of duals. The brothers are criminals and the detectives are cops. But, as Nietzsche does in The Birth of Tragedy (with the orderly Apollo and the drunken Dionysis), The Pillowman, beautifully, outlines the boundaries of McDonagh's view of the world, through the living relief of its opposites—cop and criminal, artist and humanity, and others. Each character, remarkably, is endowed with the essential qualities of every other character in the piece, even within the context of a sybolic dualistic structure. This miracle of characterization contains within it McDonagh's vision of man's holistic nature.. Man is all at once a sufferer, artist, critic, and as a spiritual being, capable of acting comprehensively on his own behalf.

Humanity makes a critical choice in this production that is the key to McDonagh's view of good and evil: people (especially Michal) justify evil actions by choosing to believe, critically, that narrative causes violence and that they are helpless to stop it. They use this critical resentment to deny the idea of free will. How can we blame them? The stories themselves seem to concede the point. The little girl knows or is willfully ignorant of the fact that her apple men will kill her father. The Pillowman knows that his stories will destroy his subjects. Michal's parents were prompted by a bizarre literary fascination to torture Michal, and Katurian's stories prompt Michal to violence. Ariel may believe that his father's abuse (and all abuse) is rooted in representations of that abuse in media, and Ariel's narratized self-representation of that abuse (along with, we can imagine, media representations of vigilanteism) inspires the violence that he undertakes. Humanity is both a sufferer and a critic in this production, and humanity's critical beliefs inform its performance of evil.

But this critical choice is just that, critical, and therefore normative. The hope in this production lies in the possibility that the artist can fixate more clearly on his subjects, and that his subjects can learn a critical lesson, namely, that stories of abuse don't necessarily lead to real abuse. And that hope is underscored in Michal's (possibly rosy) ending as imagined by Katurian, and Ariel's choice to preserve Katurian's stories. Michal, mankind as sufferer and reader, can choose not to destroy himself, and have faith in the redemptive power of art, even in the midst of the artist's self-preoccupation. Ariel can overcome his belief that art causes violence, can feel art's redemptive power, and can act on this belief by preserving the stories. He and Katurian's imagined Michal affirm the possibility that representations of evil may have a function beyond an incitement to more evil—indeed that art itself may, at some point, offer the redemption that the Pillowman believes will never come.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's Grand Inquisitor indicts Christ for having denied Satan's three temptations in the desert, thus denying man both certainty in faith and food as incentive for that faith. The basis for this indictment is that mankind is too weak to withstand the suffering inherent to such spiritual freedom (i.e., man's faith should not be bought). McDonagh demands a truthful artistic freedom over a false, socially balmy constriction. He wonders at the spiritual freedom inherent to artistic freedom, and hopes that man need not continue to suffer.

1-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (London: Vintage, 1992), 245.
2-Jacob Neusner, An Introduction to Judaism (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) 131-155.

Dear Grad School,

2006-12-23T17:22:00.000-06:00

Chicago needs a magazine that consolidates serious dramaturgical analysis into one place. It needs such a publication to support the ongoing cultural discussion taking place in its theaters. It is my goal to publish this magazine, and further, to participate in the ongoing discussion realized in it, as both a creative artist and as an artist-critic.

Why does Chicago need such a publication? What do I hope to contribute to Chicago's cultural discussion as a creative artist? And why do I need training from your program?

First, let's consider the question of Chicago's need for a dramaturgical magazine, which I consider to be the most important. Let's consider the living personality of Chicago Theater. It may be absurd to assign human qualities to something as abstract as a city or a scene, but in conversation we do this constantly (I endow Chicago with "need" in my first paragraph). When we use this form of synecdoche, we express, usually unscientifically, our feelings toward abstractions such as cities and organizations. Often these unscientific feelings are entirely accurate.

Chicago is, approximately, an actor. This actor is driven by an irrepressible, super-conscious, organic impulse to create. This actor-leviathan creates a vast amount of cultural material in its theaters every year. It is obsessively driven to perform. It neither fully understands why it is performing nor can it fully see or hear itself. To the extent that it learns and grows, it does so incompletely or not at all. Yet this drive to create is so basic that it stubbornly, obsessively, persists.

What stories does it tell or, (to avoid narrative-centrism) what types of performances does it make? How does it make these performances—how does it, for example, conceive of events on stage? How does it create atmosphere? How does it use rhythm and movement to accomplish its aims?

Like a great organism without well-defined brain functions, it lacks a central consciousness. Partly, this is due to the “neighborhood” culture of the city. But I reject the notion that, because Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, it is somehow, with respect to theater (or in general), not a discrete cultural unit. Its artists and other citizens move across every part of the city in every aspect of their daily pursuits, from day-job, to leisure, to creative endeavors. Even when theater artists work exclusively in standing ensembles, they experience the city comprehensively. If artists rarely left their neighborhood (as is sometimes true of artists in Hyde Park), then I would accept that the diffusion of Chicago's theatrical-aesthetic consciousness is the result of the nature of its neighborhoods.

But Chicago is indeed an integrated, discrete cultural unit, and the only reason it, as a theater artist, lacks a central consciousness is because no one person or organization has made it their goal to foster one. This must be remedied by the establishment of a forum for the analysis of cultural material being incessantly produced by Chicago Theater.

I speak of Chicago as an actor, and this is based on my feel for the scene. While directors and designers of every type prosper artistically in Chicago, it feels, to me like a scene dominated by young actors (since I am a recovering Chicago actor, this likely is not coincidental). Chicago is, in fact, a very attractive destination for young, energetic actors, and this is due to a unique confluence of conditions that only meet in Chicago, and the consequent “mode of production” of theater in Chicago (to borrow a Marxist economic term).

For example, for a major city, rent is uncommonly inexpensive, even near functional public transit. The midwest is nearly unipolar with respect to theater, and the artistic energy of a vast portion of the country collects here for reasons of relative proximity to home. Chicago's economy has boomed in the past 20 years, relative to other industrial midwestern cities. Thus, actors find day-jobs that afford them a relatively balanced lifestyle compared to most U.S. actors starting their careers. Training is accessible, varied and inexpensive. Representation is attainable, and actors who make an effort can, in a short time, work in commercials, voice-overs and industrials. Most importantly, however, actors in Chicago can work constantly, practice and develop as artists.

The conditions that make the (to borrow another economic term) barriers to entry low for young actors also make Chicago an excellent place to start a small theater company. There is an enormous body of young, diverse talent, through which one can cast a variety of shows for little to no pay. Rents for performance and rehearsal spaces are inexpensive, even near good public transit. Further, Chicago has an attentive, consumer-oriented press that reviews every sort of company's work. Chicago has a body of ethnic, neighborhood, and special-interest organizations who support non-profit art groups both as donors and ticket-buyers. The spirit of the city is generally supportive of the arts, as well.

As a result, theater in Chicago is produced by over 200 companies, mostly small-scale, itinerant operators. It is relatively easy to put up basic, technically simple productions in Chicago. The spirit is collaborative, non-profit, low budget, actor-centric, and productive. At any given time there are 50-100 (and sometimes more) productions running.

The non-profit theater scene is divided between two general types of companies. First, there are many companies mostly made up of young actors who, realistically speaking, use their companies as career vehicles, or as an outlet for their basic desire to create something. They believe, implicitly, and not altogether incorrectly, in my view, that the idea of theater is the exhibition and development of acting, in ensemble. This dramaturgical vision is not particularly profound, nor is it commonly consciously considered. Many ensembles consider staging works on the basis of whether a prospective work evokes a vaguely positive sentiment in a majority of its membership. While this collaborative/democratic operation is a step up from strictly commercial motives, it results in work that is, frankly, basic. It is entertaining enough to watch. It is "good enough" and is meant to be. But it is not really ambitious, and it is not really interesting cultural material.

Many companies do, however, seriously engage dramaturgical questions. That is to say: they are innovative in confronting questions of what they do and how they do it, and oftentimes they are very technically innovative on a small budget. They are meditative about questions of what stories should be told or what performances should be made, and they are typically highly cognizant of the dialogue between art and culture. Some of these companies conceive of the Chicago theater community as a discussion amongst different niches—we have historical theater, various ethnic theaters, theater focused on classics, and others. Still others conceive of their role in this discussion more generally and flexibly: they choose seasons that speak to the cultural dialogue that they find important that year.

The scene is so vast and most artists are so hard at work on their own careers that they cannot comprehensively learn from their peers' work throughout the city, industry nights notwithstanding. It is impossible to know what is happening artistically throughout the city, or to, in the words of the African proverb: "see the whole elephant." We are all touching our own small part of the scene, the elephant. There is, therefore, little widespread discussion of trends or dramaturgical standards, even amongst those whose work aspires to participate in such a discussion.

We must find a way to analytically survey the work being done in Chicago theaters each year. To do this we must establish a critical vocabulary and tone that will defy the "consumer reports" nature of what passes for criticism, and strive to give the reader a comprehensive, objective, and yet analytical understanding of what ensembles or directors did and how they did it, throughout the city. This survey must support the dramaturgically serious theaters in their awareness of the cultural material being created by Chicago Theater, and it must support their effort to speak to each other and to the city at large. And this survey must be a first opportunity for theaters that don't profoundly engage such dramaturgical questions to listen to and hopefully take part in the discussion.

Primarily, theater practitioners must write the survey, because the spirit of the thing must be the enrichment of the artistic process—it must consist of artists helping one another to understand the cultural material and cultural discussion produced by the community. Others may profit by adding to or witnessing this discussion, but this discussion must find its center between working artists.

To the question of what I hope to contribute as an artist, the answer is much less developed. That is partly due to the fact that I want to learn from the directors of your program. I am largely driven by the same irrepressible, organic impulse of creation that I feel (probably not altogether coincidentally or unsolipsistically) driving Chicago's theater. And my quest to understand my own artistic nature does, somewhat, drive my quest to understand Chicago.

I do have some firm beliefs, however: I believe strongly that a director or producer must know why they are producing a work of art, and more importantly, why they are producing that work of art now. I believe that art must operate on many levels (while understanding the cultural artifice of the idea of such levels)—metaphysical, political, cultural, domestic, and personal. I am a firm devotee of narrative theater, but I love deconstructed narratives (so long as the narrative is in the first place well-known, as with, for example, Charles Mee's adaptations of classics). I believe in constantly striving to find new ways to create events and affect an audience. I believe in experimenting with new ways to create atmosphere. And I am very open to unconventional and physical rehearsal, ensemble building, storytelling and story-creating processes. I have a very open mind about these “firm” beliefs—precisely because I anticipate that the training and apprenticeship I will receive in grad school will change me personally and the nature of the artistic contribution I wish to make.

As an actor, I have worked in professional theater in Chicago for 7 years. I have trained with Jessica Thebus, Kurt Naebig, Gavin Witt, Curt Columbus, and the Moscow Art Theater at their summer program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have done workshops with both SITI Company and Joanne Akalitis. That work has expanded my vocabulary for describing analytically what happens in performance, from moment to moment. My collegiate training in close readings of fundamental texts has supplied me with a vocabulary with which to discuss close readings of performance in their larger context—as cultural products. I have worked to employ this vocabulary toward the goal of the widespread survey I aim for by starting and writing a blog, chicago-survey.blogspot.com. These efforts, however are not enough. I need training in support of my goals.

I need training in critical and narrative theory (beyond the study of the aesthetic and other texts I handled in college) to develop a tone and vocabulary of criticism that facilitates the necessary sort of discussion. Furthermore, as a working dramaturg, a sharply developed and articulate critical faculty will be necessary in advising directors in production or in the development of texts, productions and seasons. I need training in theater history and theory (beyond what I have taught myself through Marvin Carlson's survey), exposure to texts and analysis (beyond efforts at ongoing literacy), and I need apprenticeship with innovative and imaginative directors (beyond the work of an aspiring actor and dramaturg in Chicago). I need to develop skills as a translator (beyond my collegiate French and Italian, and possibly adding a language). I need to work overseas and in other American cities, and I need to eventually work to bring the work of international and American artists from other cities to Chicago.

These goals are dear to me, because Chicago is is dear to me, and because my creative spirit is the most important thing to me. I believe that through such training I can evolve personally. More importantly, I believe that by working to centralize and enhance Chicago's theatrical-aesthetic consciousness, I can help Chicago evolve culturally. That is an ambitious goal, but it is attainable, and worthy of my effort and your support.

The Pillowman

2006-11-15T23:53:00.000-06:00

[Ivan Karamazov]: “...answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architech on such conditions?”

“No, I would not agree,” Alyosha said softly.

--From Volkhonsky and Pevear's translation of The Brothers Karamazov

In his indictment of God's creation, Ivan Karamazov purposely narrows his theme to children (to heighten the starkness of the injustice), and in this preoccupation he shares much with Katurian, the main character of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, recently produced at the Steppenwolf. Both are chroniclers of anecdotes of the horrible abuses of adults toward children. Dostoevsky's theme is similar to McDonagh's: the suffering that stems from human beings' living representations of good and evil. However, McDonagh specifically explores the role of the storyteller in those representations, and the relationship between humanity and humanity's artists.

There is another helpful context within which to understand McDonagh's methods: The history of the Israelites following the destruction of the first Temple. The first Jewish Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E.--however, before that, Ancient Israel had national rituals and habits (such as could be called "national", then) and had a religion, in which priests transacted one's business with God, and which dictated certain legal and ethical norms. The state was almost uniformly Israelite, without the intense social mixing and interacting that largely define our picture of civilizations in the ancient world.

In 586, the Persians destroyed the temple, took the priests and various other nobles and their families captive, exiled some other common Israelites, and proceeded to administer the government of the area. The change provoked a huge influx of language and culture, and forced the Israelite people to confront the idea of their own identity separate from the old order. Surely, various ideas of religion were propagated, in replacement of the priestly view. And, of course, new ethical and legal norms were being lived out.

Three generations later, Persia quit the conquest of Israel, and the captives were returned. Ancient Israel was in recovery from a massive trauma, and was left with profoundly difficult questions of their future as a people.

The priests and their families had another experience of the trauma—they witnessed Israel misdirected, religiously, from the path of the established religious norms (centering on the temple cult) and they themselves were traumatized by a different sort of experience, namely that of being taken captive. By 445 B.C.E., the Mosaic scripture (the five books of Moses, or Scriptural Torah) was collected and propagated. The priest's response to what they saw as the key questions of the day? Literature (storytelling).

According to Jacob Neusner's indispensable Introduction to Judaism, their system of religion saw Judaism as a) an intense and distinct identity, b) a specially elected people, with a special relationship with God, and c) a people subject to a covenant with God. They saw the temple as the center of the religion. They collected ancient stories and built those stories around a simple narrative form: purity, disobedience, exile, repentance, and redemption. This narrative form is repeated throughout the Mosaic scripture, and it both spoke to them personally as a class, but also informed ancient Israel's resettled sense of self. While exile was not the personal experience of many Israelites, the Pentateuch's treatment of exile adequately articulated many questions of identity that they faced. And it also happened to make sense of the experience of catastrophe—and most importantly to the priestly class, it reinforced their systemic understanding of the true religion.

Whatever the original audience's reasons for the resonance of the Torah (and whatever the motivations of its propagators), it, obviously, emerged as one of the central and enduring tenets of Jewish identity through the ages. As a narrative structure, it is one of the most dominant in human history.

It's fairly clear to anyone studying the history of the settlement of the modern state of Israel that the Jewish people largely acted out, politically, the narrative to which they as a people clung for two millenia. Now, did the Jewish people perpetuate the redemption narrative due to the existence of the narrative or due to cultural norms that gave rise to the narrative? Or some mixture of the two?

The question of Israel's history is a pertinent restatement of a contemporary problem: the relationship between real world violence and violence in mass media. Do images of violence necessarily cause violence? What are the artist's responsibilities to his audience/subject?

McDonagh, in The Pillowman, directed by Amy Morton, gives life to the problem in the forms of Katurian K. Katurian (his full legal name; played by Jim True-Frost) his brother, Michal (Michael Shannon), and the detectives who have arrested them, Tupolski (Tracy Letts) and Ariel (Yasen Peyankov). McDonagh casts Katurian in the role of the “priest-artist-chronicler” and his brother Michal in the role of “suffering everyman”.

The Pillowman deals with interaction of the witness to suffering with the sufferer himself, almost a contemporary reenactment of the aftermath of the first exile. The action is relatively simple—Katurian, an author of obscure short stories, and his brother, Michal, are arrested on suspicion of child murder. Michal confesses to having killed the children at the inspiration of his brother's stories. Katurian, in response, murders his brother in custody. Katurian agrees to confess to the murders of the children (although, in reality, he played no direct part in the murder of the children), his brother and his parents as a bargain for the saving of his stories. He is then murdered by the police (the play is set in a fictitious totalitarian state), but his stories are saved.

The play is set with the stage from an old vaudeville/movie house, painted with gold foil, in the background. In the foreground is a vast police warehouse, with a portrait of the Fearless Leader (a Bashar Assad looking fellow), and flags on the wall. Great steel balconies suggestive of a steel mill run high up. There are old crates, old works of art, law books, and filing cabinets lining the floor, suggestive of the key Apollo and Dionysis dualism at the heart of the production—art and order, side by side. (And the relegation of law books to a warehouse?) There is no house music. A great chandelier, suggestive of the old vaudeville, stares down at the audience from above.

I was a little disappointed that the totalitarian regime was so clearly suggested by the portrait. One nice thing about the Broadway production is how we as an audience were forced to piece together, like detectives, the nature of what we were seeing. The introduction of the totalitarian state and its implications happened at McDonagh's pace—unfolding grimly, yet hilariously. Katurian is obsessed with staying apolitical as a writer, and with a portrait of Assad in the background, we know why. But without it, his protestations of disdain for politics resonate with our understanding of the Hollywood screenwriter or the big city cynic—i.e. archetypes we can readily associate with artists we know.

The play opens to Katurian being led, blindfolded, into a dimly lit room from one direction. Then the detectives exit and reenter through another door, disorienting Katurian. Tupolski “demands” to know who left Katurian's blindfold on (when it was him), introducing him as the “good cop”. The lighting here actually delineated the boundaries of the detectives' office, suggestive of the countless interrogations we've seen in popular culture feature a lamp shone directly over the suspect's head. Ariel proceeds to pull a lamp directly over Katurian's head here, completing the image, and introducing him as the “bad cop”.

The rhythmic scoring of the action from the police at the top was fantastically aggressive, intimidating, and disorienting. When Tupolski seeks intimacy with Katurian by joking about how he needs information to fill out a form (which he subsequently tears in half) the rhythm slows, and his tool for acquiring intimacy with the suspect is clear. When Ariel loses his temper at being told he can draw his own conclusions, the action ramps up to such a frenzy that we can feel Katurian's torture in our bones. We become intimidated and confused as the detectives rattle through details of Katurian's first story (of a little girl who carves little apple soldiers stuffed with razors) and of questions about visits in the “Jew quarter” (even in McDonagh's bizzarely representational alternate universe the Jew is the other and is coralled into a ghetto). As Katurian learns that his brother has been arrested, his panic raises his rhythm from laconic to frenzied.

It would be easy for a production of this play to simply allow the storytelling that takes place to transpire at a haphazard pace. In this production stories are told at a wonderfully simple yet unsaccharine pace. As a result the audience has time to make sense of Katurian's allegories. To wit: the little girl with apple soldiers. This story is key to how Katurian, despite his protests, makes sense of storytelling. An abused little girl with a crass, piggish father, carves little apple soldiers, stuffed with razors, and gives them to her father as a gift, warning him not to eat them. He does, and dies, choking on his own blood. As the little girl sleeps, the soldiers invade her dreams and crawl down her throat, killing her. The story is, abstractly, a melding of Katurian and his brother's experiences. But it is clearly written from his point of view: the girl is abused, and then creates something deadly in response—we can imagine that she knows full well that her crass, gluttonous father will eat the apples. The deadly creation eventually kills her.

Now the murder of a parent is not specific to Katurian per se. And certainly, later in the production, we see Michal, as a response to abuse, construct a creative action (by acting out the stories) that will end destructively—perhaps both abstractly and specifically acting out the story. But I believe that the story is about creating works that depict violence and knowing that those depictions will result in real world violence. And as such this story is Katurian's own personal and specific meditation on violence in art. The little girl's only response to the violence is the creation of these deadly soldiers—and it eventually destroys both her abuser and herself.

As we hear the story of “Three Gibbet's Crossing”, (a caged man shot without understanding why) we feel the rhythmic dissonance between Katurian and the detectives ease. They establish a banter. We hear another story, a midrashic interpretation of the Pied Piper story, in which a boy, who accepts his poverty and ostracization, and offers his measly sandwich (his only dinner) to a traveler who passes by. The traveller thanks him by chopping off his toes. It turns out that by crippling the boy, he has saved him from the fate of the other children of Hamlin, who will be led off by the Pied Piper, the traveler, later.

Soon, the air in the room depletes as we hear the sounds of Katurian's brother screaming next door. The rhythm crawls. And then, the detectives strike, and the room throbs. There have been two children murdered, and there is a third missing. The two children were murdered in an apparent imitation of Katurian's unpublished stories, pointing the finger at him. The detectives want confessions. In a grim moment that caused the couple beside me to cringe, the detectives confront Tupolski with a box of toes that apparently comes from an imitation of the Pied Piper story. There is a certain staged quality here to Ariel and Tupolski's schtick, that becomes apparent as Tupolski implores Ariel not to feed the toes to Katurian. This is welcome comic relief.

Then, in a chilling moment, scored at a snail's pace, Ariel growls that “to kill a writer”, as they are planning to do (police station executions are routine in this state), “sends a message. And that message is that YOU CAN'T GO AROUND KILLING LITTLE FUCKING KIDS.”

Katurian responds, with dignity, that he refuses to say another word with seeing his brother. Perhaps the potential for a prisoner's dilemma type of subterfuge has occurred to him. But the even dignity with which True-Frost delivers those lines clearly articulates the love that he has for his brother. He is left alone as Ariel goes to retrieve electrodes.

Here we see the giant vaudeville stage and the fabulous crystal chandelier slide out from the background, to the sound of a foghorn. Katurian addreses us as a spotlight follows him (perhaps echoing the vaudeville theme). And in a very astute choice, we see the story of Katurian and Michal's childhood unfold directly before us, on a stage near to the one on which the preceding action takes place, suggesting, implicitly the equality between the two tales. On Broadway the action of Katurian's past unfolds on a balcony high above the stage, behind a scrim. In this production the story unfolds as near to us as everything that has transpired until now.

We learn the story of a boy writer, Katurian, showered with love and affection by his parents and recognized for his stories. As the boy matures, he begins to hear sounds of torture through the wall (akin to Michal's screams earlier). The screams through the wall are also suggestive of the Republic's allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher's job is seen as discourse on the nature of the shadows of formal reality that compose everyday life. In McDonagh's world, suffering is reality and the writer is the philosopher, whose job is to discourse on the shadows he witnesses thereof. Michal's experience is the direct opposite—he experiences the shadows of a joyous reality through the wall. Were Michal the storyteller, we can imagine that his stories would be inversions of Katurian's.

When the boy enters the room adjacent to his, he finds his parents have played a joke on him, with sounds that mimic suffering. Eventually, Katurian discovers that his brother is indeed being tortured. True-Frost as the nerdy writer seems almost like Crispin Glover here, in disturbingly describing, at a very even pace, the murder of his own parents, in response to the torture.

Katurian's story is Mosaic in nature; he lives idyllically, then suffers, then repents, then is redeemed. Michal's is directly opposite.

The stage and chandelier retract, and we find Michal alone on stage. On Broadway, Michal was depicted as Katurian's eternal little brother; fat, childish, plaintive. Here, he is depicted as Katurian's doppleganger, physically. As we see him respond to the sounds of Katurian's torture through the wall, we recognize his responses as rather adult responses. He has stubble, and just as any two brothers who are contemporaries have resentments, he resents Katurian—and we sense it immidiately, as Katurian is thrown on stage. The brothers have a rhythmic rapport, and their interactions feel deeply rooted in their decades-old relationship. The rhythm of their interactions is the baseline for normalcy in the production.

Michal reveals that he told the detectives whatever they wanted to avoid torture. Michal jokes that he might blame the whole thing on Katurian. Michal's banter with here is akin to a petulant adolescent, not to the eight year old characterization presented on Broadway. He's not a savant, and he's not a child. He rather resembles a frat boy with tattered clothes. He begs to hear the story of The Pillowman, which Katurian tells at an easy pace.

The Pillowman is the allegorized rendering of a storyteller whose stories prompt his audience/subject (they are the same character) to self-destruction, and whose sometime failure initiates a story he tells himself, prompting his own self-destruction.

The Pillowman's stories are all told to a child living in an idyllic scene in the past (echoing the Mosaic nature of Katurian's sense of personal narrative). The storyteller tells the child of the impending corruption of the future and the futility of living (these are future lonely suicides). The stories prompt the children to destroy themselves as children (and disguise the suicides as accidents) so as to spare themselves from the horror of the corrupted future. Finally, the storyteller, The Pillowman, by failing to convince a future rape victim to self-destroy as a child (the storytelling by True-Frost builds to a fevered crescendo), becomes despondent, and goes back to his own self as a child, and tells his child self the story of his future lonely suicide, and convinces his child self to immolate himself. As the grown Pillowman disappears, he hears the screams of the people whose childhood self-destruction spares them from a horrific future. Herein is contained Katurian's message to himself as a storyteller: though my stories may incite self-destruction and pain, they are truthful, and in the end, more humane than a life of untrue illusion. The story is Katurian's affirmation of his life of suffering as the chronicler of human misery, and of the ultimate value of the enterprise, so long as his stories (destructive, but true) survive. Humanity may destroy itself as a result of his stories, but this is the best of all possible outcomes.

The story finishes. Michal confesses to having actually killed the boy by cutting off his toes. He DID tell the police what they wanted to hear—but he also happened to kill the kids. Michal asserts that he killed because his brother told him to. (At this point several audience members left). Katurian accuses his brother of being a “sadistic asshole.” Michal has convinced himself of an informal critical theory. Art causes violence, and therefore I did violence. Michal has critiqued Katurian's work by killing in response. He points out that as a result of the murders, Katurian will become a famous writer, to which Katurian responds that the most likely outcome will be the destruction of the stories. He tell his brother he would rather be burnt alive, and have Michal burnt alive before having the stories burnt.

Michal is obsessed with his brother's stories—he wants his brother and the stories to be famous. Yet if he is sophisticated enough to act out murder to further that result, he is surely sohpisticated enough to realize that he will destroy his brother. As an adult in this production (and again, not as the Broadway production's child), he makes an adult choice, springing from complex motives. I'm convinced that, in this production, he hates and resents his brother, and at the same time, longs for his brother's success and the success of the stories.

Why? Every story in the play can be recognized as Katurian's meditation on his own suffering as a witness to his brother's pain or Katurian's meditation on his brother's pain itself. The relationship between the chronicler (the artist) and the subject forms the foundation of this Cain and Abel story, because the artist, Katurian, grasps for meaning from the suffering he has witnessed, and his brother makes sense of his own experience via Katurian's stories. As a result of Morton and Shannon's choice to characterize Michal as an adolescent, we see a being whose understanding of the world has taken shape as a teenager.

This makes sense. If Michal is the older brother, and is liberated from his parents' torture at, say, age eleven or twelve, we can safely assume that he is taught or learns to read (he can read) in the subsequent few years. He is socialized during those years and educated otherwise. But most importantly, he can come to hear and comprehend (for Shannon's Michal, as opposed to the Michal on Broadway, CAN comprehend) fully his brother's representation of the world in story.

There is deep resentment in the relationship. On Broadway, the relationship was portrayed as a George/Lenny relationship. That is to say: Katurian is in no wise Michal's peer. The resentment in the relationship, therefore, is of a child complaining before his God. Katurian, on Broadway, is the settled authority in the relationship, and Michal destroys him unknowingly, as a child might break an antique vase. In Morton's production, the two men contend with each other, as peers. There is resentment in Michal, but his resentment is proud and spiteful. If Katurian is Michal's God, then Michal is Katurian's Miltonic Satan, a tragic hero, an angel, who has come to see himself as a God.

This is a remarkable artistic statement from Morton. If Katurian is the artist as God, delivering contemporary revelation through fiction, and Michal is a symbol of mankind, suffering uncomprehendingly, and deriving meaning and direction from story, then the portrayal of Michal becomes the director's meditation on the nature of mankind and his suffering. Forgiving the superficial elitism of McDonagh's casting of mankind as a Faulknerian idiot (at least great writers come by this elitist portrayal of mankind honestly), I feel that Morton does her best to present Michal less as an idiot than as a damaged adolescent genius. Michal is intelligent, angry, and most importantly, an adult. In New York, mankind is portrayed from the ultimate parental elitist perspective: as a child. Recalling the stereotypical cultural elitism of New York's cultural and intellectual congonscenti, we might not find this all that surprising. Chicago's portrayal of man's contention in life is a dignified one, and one for which Morton should be proud. It cannot be emphasized clearly enough—portraying Michal as an adult was a masterstroke.

Soon after Michal's confession, we learn that the third, undiscovered, child was the victim of a reenactment of Katurian's story “The Little Jesus.” We can only imagine, in horror what that entails. Katurian reacts furiously at the idea of the reenactment of such a gruesome story. (Actually, his reaction here was far more interesting than Billy Crudup's on Broadway. Crudup reacted instantaneously to Michal's revelation. In True-Frost, we actually see the information land and be processed).

Michal reassures Katurian that everything will be okay—and that they will “hang out in heaven.” When Katurian points out that child killers go to hell, and that it is most certainly a hell in which their parents' abuse is revisited on them, Michal loses control, flopping on the floor, at a frenzied pace, in an act of physical play that bespeaks Morton's mastery as a director of physically free acting. In the post-show discussion True-Frost mentioned that much of the physical acting was improvisational. In this moment of the production it was also moving.

All Michal has, he says, are Katurian's stories. We can imagine that he wants better stories. His beef is critical. But he has already accomplished what he set out to accomplish. It's all over but the shouting. He settles down for a nap—which, as he points out, is sensible, considering the torture that he may about to endure. Katurian points out that the torture may be unbearable, and in crystal-clear moment of the Michal's resentment, Michal reminds Katurian that Katurian has no idea of the pain that Michal knows how to endure.

Then Michal demands to hear the story that he enjoys. This moment was timed perfeclty. It seemed that the tension in the piece became unbearable just before Michal made this demand. Another masterstroke from Morton—as the audience is getting uncomfortable, and might think to demand to hear another story themselves (viz. leave the theater at the impending intermission), Michal expresses the same sentiment.

Before Michal he can nod off, he begs to hear his favorite story, The Little Green Pig. He liked being green—even though he was different, and ostracized by the other pigs. The farmer, noticing the difference, snatches the pig, and dips him in special pink paint that can never be painted over and never washed off. The little green pig is unhappy—his only claim to dignity painted over. Subsequently, a special green rain falls, making the other pigs green, and making the little green pig special again.

I believe that this is Michal's piece for a very good reason: it is the only one written exclusively from his own point of view. The pig starts out exceptional, but suffering.
He is important even in pariahdom. He is then removed, and forcibly made to conform to the other pigs.

It is a story about someone exceptional in pariahdom who is then removed, from without, from that pariahdom and then made to conform. The pig's suffering is alleviated, but his sense of dignity is diminished. Then, as the rain falls, he realizes a new dignity. To me, this is the perfect meditation on Michal's experience from Michal's perspective as the direct recipient of suffering, and not from Katurian's perspective as the indirect witness to suffering. We can imagine a fourteen year old Michal hearing his brother's stories and making sense of the outside world (the other pigs) through them. Through his brother's stories, Michal's understanding of the world that assumes that every child experiences suffering akin to Michal's prior to his salvation by his brother (i.e. is green just like the little green pig used to be). Michal's understanding of the world is that his dignity (recognized retroactively, through the story) as a child, was a false dignity, because he was not truly exceptional in his suffering (viz. his greenness). His new dignity, as one who has been saved from suffering, is true—the other pigs experience the biblical cycle of innocence corrupted and subsequent suffering (to be followed by repentance and redemption). Michal's dignity is as one whose torture ends as he enters maturity and whose redemption follows directly. Michal's experience is the direct inversion of the biblical narrative.

As he socialized following his grisly experience, the sense of alienation must have been profound. He sees Katurian as a God, and wonders why, given their equal innate intellectual faculties (they both come from the same sick genius parents), he was not given the power and the pleasure. He heard sounds of enjoyment behind that wall every bit as surely as Katurian heard suffering. In this production Michal both loves and hates his brother, and we understand the reasons. His love stems from the direct relief of his suffering initiated by his brother—his brother is the savior. His hate stems from his resentment at being the freak brother and from his critical distatste for his brother's portrayal (or lack thereof) of his life. He hates that the stories are arranged incorrectly or portray things inaccurately. And most horribly both to Michal and Ariel, they incite people to violence—and this incitement has led to their suffering. He hates the fact that violence in stories causes violence and he hates Katurian for perpetuating violence, through him and through others, like their parents. When Michal accuses Katurian of being “like them” (the parents) he equates Katurian's words depicting the tortures of hell with the parents enactment of those tortures, setting the matter before the audience clearly. Words are deeds. They inspire others to violence and they inspired Michal, with his own critical permission, to it.

Inasmuch as Michal's experience is the inversion of Katurian's, it is appropriate that his actions lead to the destruction of the stories. Michal's act of destruction is the ultimate active inversion of his brother's act of creation, yet interestingly he rationalizes it as the means by which Katurian will become famous and through which the stories will survive.

Michal falls to sleep, and then, as Katurian did their parents, he smothers Michal with his pillow. As he does it, and Michal struggles and dies (at uncomfortable length), Katurian whispers, repeatedly, that it's not Michal's fault.

This key moment, in New York, was portrayed as a mercy killing—of the smart brother sparing his idiot brother more torture. The idiot accidentally came across the wrong stories and now has to die for having acted them out. Better that his brother should do it. In this production, of course, the disagreement between the brothers is a critical one, and much darker. Katurian's murder, Cain slaughtering Abel, is all at once mercy, yes, but also revenge. Michal resented his brother and destroyed himself, Katurian, and Katurian belives, his stories. And the stories call out “from the ground” for justice.

Katurian finished the murder and goes to the door to announce his confession to six murders. He has only one condition—it concerns his stories. At those words, the lights go black and we head to intermission trying to make sense of 90 minutes of the most dense literary theater we have ever seen.

When intermission ended, approximately 20% of the Saturday night audience had defected—electing to hear other stories for the rest of the evening. As we enter, the chandelier is low and the vaudeville stage is out. We transition gradually into story time.

There once was a little girl who was convinced that she was Jesus. She had good parents and she went around acting Christ-like. Following one of her shenanigans, her parents are tragically beheaded in an auto accident. (Hilariously portrayed in shadow by Morton, and a bit of self-parody from Katurian and McDonagh). She is then transferred to horrible foster-parents who lied about their horribleness on the form (more comic relief). They abuse her horribly and goad her with her belief in her own divinity. They test her by putting her through Christ's trials and by crucifying her and burying her alive. The story ends to the sound of her scratching the top of the coffin.

As I recall, this story was also told, on Broadway, on the same balcony as Michal and Katurian's story. And it was told from behind a scrim, giving the audience comfort and safety in the distance and concealment of the acts. Again, in this presentation, the action is put right before us, and we see the little girl lowered into the coffin and we see her scratching at its top.

Of course, this is paralyzingly unpleasant, but the larger issue is not of how unpleasant we feel, but why Katurian wrote this story. I believe that this story is Katurian's allegorized personal history, every bit as much as The Little Green Pig is Michal's. As a gifted young writer, he was loved and encouraged, just as the little Jesus. After his discovery that his parents are monsters (i.e. the old, kind parents were killed and replaced by the evil foster parents), they test his resolve to be an author by confronting him with the ultimate horror and torture. The sounds of the girl's scratching are Katurian's stories, written in the darkness, heard only by a passing stranger.

At one point in the story, the little girl's foster parents goad her: “You still want to be Jesus?!” The little girl replies: “I don't want to be Jesus, I fucking am Jesus.” The Little Jesus was distinguished in this production by the interpretation of the line: “I fucking AM Jesus!” In In New York, in keeping with the picture of humanity as children, this line was uttered innocently, and our laughter stemmed from the absurdity of such a thing coming from the mouth of a child. In Chicago, the laughter stems from the little girls grown-up wrath. She IS Jesus, dammit, and she is furious that you would question it!

The Mosaic narrative structure of the idyllic beginning corrupted is in place here. That Katurian, egoistically, sees himself as a Christ figure when he has only been the witness to his brother's suffering (of course sufferning in a different way, subsequently) is rather ludicrous, but here McDonagh is having fun with the writer's sense of self-importance. It is also ironic that later in the play Katurian specifically disavows biographical fiction. His stories, while allegorical, are almost exclusively autobiographical. Perhaps McDonagh is portraying the author's unawareness of the nature of his own creation. Perhaps Katurian is having a joke on us all—disclaiming all autobiographical storytelling, but secretly loving it.

It is appropriate that Michal's coup de grace of resentment/destruction/promotion of the stories lies in the performance of The Little Jesus. (Interesting that Michal's story should be The Little Green Pig, while Katurian gets to be The Little Jesus). If anyone has a claim to sinless suffering, it is Michal, not Katurian. We can imagine him reading this story and seething—yet feeling a sense of dignity that his suffering has resulted in some meaningful representation. Katurian reacts severely to the revelation that his brother has acted out The Little Jesus. We can imagine (from this production) that this is just what Michal intended.

Following the portrayal of The Little Jesus, we are taken back to the office. Katurian has offered to confess to an active role in his parents' murders, the murder of his brother, and the murder of all the children, in exchange for the preservation of his stories. Ariel, recounting the story of The Little Jesus, shreiks primally: “Why does there have to be people like you!” Again, Morton's casting of the two detective roles, especially Ariel, as simple everyman types as opposed to clever detective-genius types (typical to the crime genre, as dueling good and evil, cop and criminal reveal each other most interestingly in the most brilliant shades). Rather, Peyankove and Letts are men whose hearts drive their desires, even as their minds facilitate those desires. They are, deep down, pre pubescent boys. Ariel hates Katurian, because he supposes that Katurian is a child abuser. But even more deeply, he hates Katurian for writing about it and thus promoting others to it. Then Ariel is faced with the realization that he is himself an admixture of Katurian and Michal.

Ariel exits to “get some sweets.” (A wonderfully childish impulse). He reenters, bent on not showing Katurian any sympathy, preparing to torture him. As Ariel prepares to torture Katurian to perform his own idea of justice, Katurian astutely notices Ariel's response to Katurian's having murdered his parents to relieve his suffering. We learn that Ariel was abused by his father and murdered his father in response. As an admixture of the two brothers he is a more fully realized human being, while remaining a symbol character in the dualistic structure of the play. He sympathizes with Katurian. He hates Katurian. He finds himself largely in the position that Michal finds himself: he blames Katurian for his suffering and wants to destroy him; yet, the stories represent Katurian's attempt to give meaning to his suffering.

Actually, as detectives, in this totalitarian state, Tupolski and Ariel embody both the role of the chronicler and the everyman. They are responsible for taking the swirl of experience and building it into a narrative. And they are responsible as the executioners for active justice.

In New York, Ivancek's rendering of Ariel was rather intellectual, and thus, at this point, (the point of Ariel's inner conflict) the passion did not read honestly. In Morton's production I implicitly understood the nature of Ariel's sympathy and hate for Katurian.

After Tupolski humorously confirms Ariel's secret, Ariel stalks off painfully. Tupolski sips tea elegantly, playing the role of the detective-genius. Ariel retorts, resentfully, to Tupolski that the Commissioner likes him better, and that he should be made the number one on the case and run it. Tupolski retorts by deducing, in humorous short order, that Katurian cannot confirm that the little girl used in the reenactment of The Little Jesus was dead or alive at the time of her live burial. Tupolski then informs the squad cars rushing to the scene where Katurian described the little girl's burial (Michal told Katurian and Katurian, in his fictitious confession, told the detectives) to move more quickly.

Ariel storms off. Tupolski, preparing to executed Katurian, discourses with him at a leisurely pace about the story he himself wrote—the title of which contains far to many words and punctuation marks to be recalled accurately here. It is the story of a deaf little Chinese boy walking alone a long set of railroad tracks along a long plain. Tupolski addresses the audience as he informs us that a train is coming and that the little boy will not hear it—and thus will be killed. An old Chinese man (Tracy Letts, as Tupolski, employs some hilariously savage racial humor here) sees, from afar, the boy strolling innocently on the tracks and correctly concludes that the boy will be killed. We can assume that this is why the story is set in China, Tupolski, like Katurian, has license to assign himself whatever role that he in his vain self-image likes. For Tupolski the archetype of wisdom and intellectual fortitude is the Old Chinese Man.

The old man calculates the speed of the train and the point at which the deaf boy would be struck (Katurian correctly points out the hole in the story: how can the old man know that the boy is deaf? Tupolski brushes this detail aside—the sympolism is most important to our detective-author). He then, nonchalantly, folds the paper with which he made the calculation into a paper airplane, in just the right spot to distract the boy and pull him away from the tracks.

Tupolski, at the beginning of the story time with Katurian, gives him license to speak. When Katurian criticizes Tupolski's title, he revokes the freedom of speech (illuminating some of the resentment Katurian felt for his brother/critic). Katurian flatters Tupolski that he loves the story. And, as an allegory for the protector-detective, the character of the nonchalant Old Chinese Man is very expressive of Tupolski's own character, and illuminative of how McDonagh conceives of the act of storytelling. Each character in this play has stories that give his life expression and meaning, except Ariel. But Ariel's stories take a different form, as we will see.

Following story time, Tupolski describes the process by which Katurian will be executed. Ariel enters—they found the little girl, only not dead. She is painted green, like the pig. In this production Michal's final creative/destructive act was darkly humorous. He killed as little as possible in order to make his point. He lied about it, knowing that his lie would be exposed, and that this exposure would reveal his cunning and possible mental equality to his brother. As Ariel exposes Katurian's plot to deceive the detectives we come to realize that Tupolski has a greater level of actor (as opposed to intellectual) than he lets on. Peyankov here does a fantastic golf swing after putting it together in front of Tupolski's wondering eyes.

Tupolski starts a fire in the tall trash can in the office (in New York it was a tiny paper basket; here a full aluminum alley can). The deal was that Katurian would be honest in his confession, and that his honest confession would earn him the preservation of the stories. Tupolski's vanity as a wise detective has been wounded. His pride as an author has been wounded by Katurian's criticism. He wants to hurt Katurian in the only way he knows how, and “as an honorable man” (as he constantly refers to himself, and as Katurian constantly refers to him) he is within his rights, within the context of the bargain, to burn the stories.

Ariel pleads on Katurian's behalf to save the stories. Tupolski then initiates the execution by placing a black hood on Katurian (Abu-Graib-esque). Stanislavski, in My Life in Art recalls, as a demonstration of tempo/rhythm (internal/external action) a portrayal of Mary Stuart going to a beheading. Her internal rhythm is frenetic. But, to maintain royal bearing, her external rhythm is easy. I was reminded of this when I saw True-Frost's portrayal of Katurian's final moments—as he says “I was a good writer.” Tupolski, after explaining that Katurian would be shot following a countdown, shoots him on four. Tupolski excuses himself to go “warn the parents”, but we can imagine that this is to save face. Ariel has pleaded on behalf of Katurian's stories and Tupolski is leaving them in Ariel's hands.

Before the play ends, two things happen. First, in the seconds prior to his execution, Katurian imagines a story for his brother. It is one in which Katurian, as the Pillowman, tells his brother, as a child, of the future that is about to transpire, in hopes that his brother will destroy himself as a child. His brother, citing the stories that will survive as the result of their mutual suffering, refuses to un-wish his life.

That Michal's place in Katurian's story is as a living, suffering instrument of story production highlights the justice in Michal sense of grievance. Every story except The Little Green Pig is a direct meditation of Katurian's experience as the witness to suffering, as opposed to a consideration of Michal's experience. While Michal's torture is germane to the stories, he is not, except, abstractly, in The Little Green Pig, the subject of the stories. Herein lies Katurian's, and the artist's, failure: preoccupation with the self as a witness to the action of humanity, rather than with humanity itself.

The other thing that happens is that Ariel proves himself to be the real good cop: he saves the stories, and they become his stories. Where he was the only character without any meaningful narrative interpretation of his life as detective (chronicler)/sufferer/actor, he will find, in Katurian's stories, his own story. And in the preservation of the stories he will find some measure of hope. Bizarrely, in the world of The Pillowman, this constitutes a happy ending.

Steppenwolf wisely holds post-show discussions following every production of The Pillowman—helping an audience process, together, the disturbing material they have just shared. One criticism of the show was that the evil in the world of the play was unexplained, and that this was somehow a cop-out. I disagreed. The parents who initiate the suffering in the play never betray their motives, and as such, as gods, they give us no theodicy. But mankind and mankind's artists are portrayed as responsible for the creation of their own God in this production. McDonagh charges mankind with responsibility for deciding how to read and understand art and charges artists with responsibility for creating relevant, truthful art. Mankind thus constructs his own sense of meaning in his suffering in The Pillowman, and perhaps a way to save himself.

In Martha Lavey's (the Steppenwolf artistic director) introductory notes, she addresses the issue of dualism in the play: “two rooms, two brothers, two detectives”. What is so fascinating about The Pillowman (and this production specifically) is how deeply opposite those dualisms run, and how the intimacy between the doubles illuminates them and their shared dialectics of obsession. Katurian experiences the exact opposite of Michal—an idyllic childhood interrupted by the discovery of suffering, and thus, ensuing suffering. Michal experiences suffering until he is discovered and relieved of it. Katurian and Tupolski, by being portrayed both as adults (and rather similar looking, in shape and face, at that), are contemporaries. The same is true for Tupolski and Ariel, who, as mentioned previously at length, in this production are played as ruddy, rugged, strong men, as opposed to Broadway, where they were played as intellectuals (no one, I think mistakes Jeff Goldblum and Zelko Ivancek for ruddy or rugged). Tupolski is the one obsessed with reason and structure, and Ariel is the one obsessed with acting out justice (i.e. torture). The two sets of men are themselves doubles, as Katurian is obsessed with giving the world's experiences order through story, and Michal is obsessed with acting impulsively. And yet, Michal's action, the murder of the children, is ultimately what gives, us, through the action of the play a sense of the true meaning of his experience. Ariel's actions lead to the discovery of the little girl at the end of the play, and his ability to reason leads to the preservation of the stories. Even their names, Katurian and Tupolski (cold sounding last names) and Ariel and Michal (gentle sounding first names) suggest this dualism of duals. The brothers are criminals and the detectives are cops. But, just as Nietzsche does in The Birth of Tragedy (with the orderly Apollo and the drunken Dionysis), The Pillowman, beautifully, outlines the boundaries of McDonagh's view of the world, through its opposites—cop and criminal, artist and humanity, suffering and joy, and others.

Humanity makes a critical choice in this production that is the key to McDonagh's view of good and evil: people (Michal) justify evil actions by choosing to believe, critically, that narrative causes violence and that they are helpless to stop it. They use their critical resentment to deny the idea of free will. How can we blame them? The stories themselves seem to concede the point. The little girl knows or is willfully ignorant of the fact that her apple men will kill her father. The Pillowman knows that his stories will destroy his subjects. Michal's parents were prompted by a bizarre literary fascination to torture Michal, and Katurian's stories prompt Michal to violence. Ariel's believes that his father's abuse (and all abuse) is rooted in representations of that abuse in media, and Ariel's narratized self-representation of that abuse (along with, we can imagine media representations of vigilanteism) inspires the violence that he undertakes. Humanity is both a sufferer and a critic in this production, and humanity's critical beliefs inform its performance of evil.

But this critical choice is just that, critical, and therefore normative. The hope in this production lies in the possibility that the artist can fixate more clearly on his subjects, and that his subjects can learn a critical lesson, namely, that stories of abuse don't necessarily lead to real abuse. And that hope is underscored in Michal's (possibly rosy) ending as imagined by Katurian, and Ariel's choice to preserve Katurian's stories. He and Katurian's imagined Michal affirm the possibility that representations of evil may have a function beyond an incitement to more evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan's Grand Inquisitor indicts Christ for having denied Satan's three temptations in the desert, thus denying man certainty in faith and food as incentive for that faith. The basis for the indictment is that mankind is too weak to withstand the suffering inherent to such spiritual freedom (i.e., man's faith is not bought). McDonagh demands a truthful artistic freedom over a false, socially balmy constriction. He wonders at the spiritual freedom inherent to artistic freedom, and hopes that man need not continue to suffer.

King Lear

2006-10-27T18:14:00.000-05:00

1-“O, do not love too long
Or you will grow out of fashion,
Like an old song.”

2-“A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of Love
The folk who are buying and selling
The clouds on their journey above
The cold, wet winds ever blowing
In the shadowy hazel grove
Where mouse grey waters are flowing
Threaten the head that I love.”

3-“But what if excess of Love
Bewildered them until they died?”

(All 3 by WB Yeats. 1-O Do Not Love Too Long, 2-The Pity of Love, 3-Easter 1916—as suggested by Harold Bloom in “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”)

I don't feel qualified to write about this or any production of King Lear. It exists on such as scale as a piece of literature that I literally am awestruck at the prospect of trying to unravel it. However the Goodman's recent production was so provocative and interesting that any survey of Chicago theater during the year 2006 that doesn't attempt to depict it is doing its readers a disservice. With that caveat, I'm happy to try to do so.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of a highfalutin conversation with a fellow UChicago alum about the virtues and downfalls of life in Chicago, we hit upon an interesting point: one of the liberating things about living here is the easygoing manner in which one can put forth political and social opinions without feeling ostracized for having crossed some line of political correctness. In other words, people in Chicago aren't so uptight.

On the other hand, we realized, talk in Chicago is very cheap. Contrast this with the atmosphere in Washington, DC, the city in which I was born, and in which my sister works as a congressional aide. A few weeks ago, while out drinking beers with her coworkers, I immediately felt the difference. I was a novelty because I would brashly pontificate on any political or social subject without feeling worried about saying the wrong thing. These people work in an environment in which arguments made today affect opinions tomorrow, which affect policy for the most power nation on earth. The sense of responsibility and power surrounding words is awesome.

Why is talk so cheap in Chicago? We posited that the nature of politics in this city made it so. You could make all the arguments you wanted about policy, but this is a machine city, based on neighborhood ethnic and other organizations in which loyalty and blood are invested in authorities who make decisions about the perceived best-good for their constituents. Tocqueville it ain't. But Chicago is decently run, I suppose, even if offices are handed down from father and son and from paisan to paisan.

Robert Falls' production of King Lear is set, in time for the Borat movie, in a repressive Eastern/Central European dictatorship. As we enter the theater, Stacey Keach's (Lear) Charles Foster Kane-like portrait looms down on the house. Lear is hailed in song at the opening banquet as “papa”.

For a while throughout the first two acts, questions of the design conceit nagged at me: why was it necessary to place Lear in such a setting? I made a connection, and I wonder at its validity, but here goes: Lear's kingdom is ruled as Chicago is, on the basis of ethnic or tribal organizations that are connected directly to families. In other words, it is a society organized around the love that holds a family together. I am loyal to my neighborhood ethnic group, just as I am to my family. And as I am loyal to my ethnicity, I am loyal to our political boss. Lear is papa, just as, for many Chicago Irish in the 50s, Daley was papa. It's a family affair, and arguments don't count for as much here as elsewhere. When Todd Stroger is set to inherit his father's office, with precious little democratic imprimatur, the atmosphere is pertinent.

Given such a political environment, the rationale for setting Lear, the consummate play about the nature of love and loving, in such a state is apparent, even if this diminishes its effect somewhat. If familial love is the glue that holds this society together, what happens when that love turns tragic?

In King Lear, the answer is simple: War. Robert Falls' production is a visual feast in this regard, and he creates events and images in dialogue with Shakespeare's text that are gripping, haunting, and frankly, distracting from the text itself. That it was difficult for me to follow the meditations of Lear and Gloucester thanks to the feast of ideas profferred by the design is both a detraction and a note of high praise for this ambitious production.

One other question nagged at me after seeing the production: If Lear is a Milosevic-type torturer, murderer, etc., then why should I care if his daughters steal from him? If these are archetypes of trashy European gangsterdom, then why should I feel for them? In the text, the play is set generations before King Arthur, a mythological setting in which Lear is at worst benign (though tragically flawed) and at best a just old King. From a revisionist perspective we of course know all about authoritarian rulers and the torture that underpins them, but I cannot say I think that the text is eager to paint Lear as a Stalinist leader. I believe that we are supposed to feel him to be a full and just papa.

Harold Bloom posits that Lear defies criticism. In my mind this is true because love and our need for it spring from such a deep and unknown place within us, in which all of our basic emotional beliefs about ourselves and our validity and value as human beings live. As someone who's recently been brutally dumped, I can speak from personal experience: Lear is an abstration in which we see our own love. Why does Lear need the over the top reassurance of his daughters? Why is Edgar so naïve in his faith in his brother's love for him? Why can't Edmund feel any love whatsoever, and does this give him the power to direct the events in the play? Why do Goneril and Regan need him so passionately, and why do they destroy themselves for him? And what do “father”, “mother”, and “lover” mean to us?

This production treats these questions abstractly—that is to say that our experience of love informs our reading of these motivations. If I associate the Citizen Kane portrait with brutality, that is MY reading of the design. As an audience we are never lead deeply into the text to find the answers. But I found some moments of the play tremendously moving as a confluence of images and personal associations with them. As a visual comment on the text and as a work of art, the play worked magnificently.

The show opens in a fabulous banquet hall, covered by Lear's image. Facing us is a men's urinal attended to by a woman whose job is possibly the worst in all of the kingdom. The strains of 50s era Slavic songs, in the vein of Yeats' out-of-fashion songs play from an old radio. Is it 1955 or 2005? It's not immediately clear. As Gloucester, Edmund and Kent (Edward Gero, Steve Pickering, and Jonno Roberts) relieve themselves, Edmund's status as a bastard is made clear, as is the wear and age of the ruling class. Their bathroom is worn and as we watch them piss, we find them to be worn. In a beautifully constructed act of generousity, the soon-to-be villainous Edmund leaves the beleaguered bathroom attendant a huge tip.

We find ourselves in a breathtaking gold banquet hall lined with red linen. The guests enter—a trashy bunch of European gangster-types, with ugly, tacky hair and clothes, getting down to the new music—European dance hall hip-hop, spun by none other than Oswald, Goneril's steward and lover. He preens on his stand costumed in saggy pants and protruding boxer shorts, and the best knockoff hip-hop fashions. He beat-boxes, spins and raps and runs the party. AK-47s wave, vodka is gulped. The king is introduced.

Lear enters in a fabulous light blue suit, gladhanding and backslapping like a charismatic pro. He shakes hands and kisses his daughters—Goneril in gaudy purple sequin, Regan pretty in pink. He sits beside Cordelia, who, in blue jeans, rather resembles Jeanine Garofalo's character from The Truth About Dogs and Cats. In a shocking event that further confirms Lear's status as a brutal dictator, he jokingly pulls out an enormous pistol and mocks shooting himself, only to subsequently shoot at the ceiling. He wheels out a cake, representing his kingdom, and professing to divest himself of rule, would carve it up to give his lands to his daughter. He takes the mic and, in the spirit of a drunken wedding toast gone awry, asks which daughter loves him best.

Goneril a redhead, in a demure fashion, well-suggested by her evening gown, takes the mic and professes effusively. Regan a blond, as suggested by her prissy, girlish dress, plays dumbly at following her sister's act. Cordelia the brunette, lacking concern with appearances in the first place, refuses to play along.

Falls' take on this scene seems to be that the refusal to maintain appearances is what sets the action of the play in motion. This is a cogent point within the design framework of the piece, as we certainly sense the way in which apostate politicians are routinely destroyed for not towing a party line. So there seemed to be a contemporary resonance in the microphone wielding PR failure. But for me, the question of love and Lear's overabundance in it and need for it could have been addressed in a much more intimate manner. However, I had to appreciate the spirit of the interpretation—the coercion of someone with a microphone forcing one to say something.

At Cordelia's refusal, Lear becomes incenced, cuts her off from an inheritance and stabs the cake. Kent, for attempting to reason with Lear is nearly murdered before our eyes. The scene closes with Burgundy's refusal to accept Cordelia as a mate without a dowry, and France's acceptance of her, as “she is herself a dowry.”

We are then introduced to the Edmund, whose conservative gray suit is a welcome relief from the gaudiness we've just witnessed. This is the young man who tipped the bathroom attendant. We don't think of him as a villain, and this is another beautifully executed aspect of the production—Edmund seems perfectly humane as a potential ruler. We see him set his plan to usurp his father's lands into action—as his father falls for Edmund's lies, hook, line and sinker. Directly following, we see his brother, dressed similarly to Oswald, buying coke from Oswald at the DJ stand. Our white, middle class audience thinks to itself: “Who's the bastard around here?” Joaquin Torres' Ed Grimley-esque portrayal of the naïve Edgar gives us a visceral sense of the injustice that Edmund experiences and that drives him. Roberts' performance as the cool-headed villain Edmund sings. We are literally putty in his loveless hands.

There is, however, a flip-side to this portrayal of things. Edgar is almost so adolescent and naïve that it becomes difficult to see the possibility of his becoming the mature avenger of the final act. As a stylistic touch to set the audiences sensibility, it works. It doesn't necessarily agree with the text.

The play is filled many such touches. We viscerally experience Goneril's lust as we witness Oswald performing oral sex on her and her throwing him off her in the midst of sex, with obvious blue-balls. The commentary on her nature as a lover is explicit.

We are then introduced to a Sid Caeser-esque personality, the fool, one of Shakespeare's most baffling characters. Lear refers to him in the text as a child, and he refers to Lear almost exclusively as “Nuncle.” He appears to us as a character out of Pirandello or Beckett, with white clown makeup on, a sort of 50s avant-garde jester. At the fool's witty comic commentary, without which he has denied Cordelia her inheritance, he vows to retake the shape of a King, even as his daughters move to disarm him of his knights (in this production, they are police in riot gear).

As the play progresses, we see the conflict deepen into civil war. Some amazing design touches—an early model Benz filled with cigarette smoke pulls onto stage and Regan, trailed by a line of Luis Vuitton luggage enters Gloucester's home (girded dazzlingly by a huge iron gate). Kent, after getting into a second scrape on Lear's behalf is duct-taped, stuffed into two tires, covered with gasoline, and nearly lit ablaze. The danger of the moment was palpable.

As we face Edgar's exile, we see him strip down to his ridiculous red underwear and take to the underground sewer, below the stage. As Lear orders Kent freed from the tires, in which he's been trapped all night, he is revealed to be a blustering old man, growling and shouting, but no longer capable of inflicting fear. As Edgar descends into madness, and disguise himself as the lowest street urchin (Poor Tom), we see Lear begin to do the same. As the storm hits, and the metaphysical reality of Lear's and Edgar rejection becomes clear, we see them rant at the thunder. We see Edgar running around naked. Gimme Shelter, perhaps the ultimate music of foreboding, and recently used again cinematically in The Departed plays as they dance naked in the rain and thunder—literally disdaining shelter in their madness. Following their exile to Dover, we never see the Fool again, and from this production we can only assume that he is another victim of the civil war.

We see Cornwall smoke crack from Edmund's gun, in alliance with his recent takeover of Gloucester's estate. We see trash fall from the sky into Lear's new domicile, and a mock trial in which Regan is compared to a used bidet. Gloucester leads the exiled party to Dover to run from the Lear's warring daughters.

Following intermission we find ourselves in Gloucester's home, and in a a jarring event, see his eyes pulled out by Cornwall, Regan's husband, played as a Michael Chikliss-looking thug by (Christopher Genebach). In the text, Gloucester's eyes are gouged out by a boot. In this production, we see them brutally wrenched from his head. Poetically the point is clear—Love's tragedy is both Gloucester's blindness and Lear's madness. In the text, Cornwall is wounded by a servant loyal to Gloucester (he later dies, off-stage). In this production, Cornwall is strangled to death by Edgar (with a tie!), in what might seem to be an immediate act of revenge for the blinding. He makes love to Regan, the new widow, directly following.

We are then transported to a burned-out, smoldering cityscape. Edgar, as Poor Tom, finds his blind father, and leads him, without revealing himself. We subsequently see Goneril's husband Albany (Kevin Gudahl, who will soon appear as Uncle Vanya in Court's production) rape Goneril from behind, in an ugly attempt to wrench power from her. She laughs.

Cordelia leads masked, Al-qaeda looking stormtroops in a flak jacket. Oswald is nearly seduced by Regan as he delivers her a letter from her sister. Between these interactions we see, in the background, Gloucester and son wandering toward Dover. That loyalty is the backdrop of what transpires. It is this visual journey of these two that informs our understanding of Edgar's progress from child to King-to-be.

Lear enters as a bum in long, filthy white beard, with a roll-cart behind him. He meets Gloucester, and in a fantastic growl, impersonates “a dog obeyed in his office.” The French army arrives, and claims Lear. Oswald finds and captures Gloucester and then is summarily shot in shockingly cold blood by Edgar.

Roberts, as Edmunds, oozes with cold blood in the “Which of them shall I take” monologue, which Falls sets between the two sisters on either side of him. Lear and Cordelia are reconciled as Lear, freshened and all in white is seen in restraints in a wheelchair. Falls' equation of Lear with a contemporary homeless person reads clearly. In perhaps the most indelible image of the piece, we see Gloucester in the midst of dozens of corpses dragged on stage by the ensemble, and dumped into a pit. Although Shakespeare denies his audience Gloucester's recognition of his son, Falls gives it to us in the midst of the mass-grave. Gloucester falls dead upon such recognition, and is dumped into the pit with the other victims.

The question arising from a reading of the play might be: Why does Edgar conceal himself from his father for so long? This production asks the question: Is Gloucester's death of the same nature as the countless other victims of this civil war?

In the midst of an ever-widening post-apocalyptic scene, Albany embraces Edgar, and challenges Edmund. Edgar challenges Edmund, and much as he did Oswald, shoots him coldly. The finality of gunshots leaves a mark on the audience. Edgar has become someone capable of the most final and definitive destructive act. Goneril, rather than poisoning, strangles her sister to death with a plastic bag. Subsequently, she, in a shockingly final moment of her own shoots herself in the head, as huge warm lights escalate behind the action toward the plays conclusion.

I didn't feel that Edmund's progress to troubled contrition read very clearly, but after witnessing a series of events such as the audience witnesses after the intermission, it isn't hard to understand why. We are numb from the violence and war, and the evolution of Edmund's character is peanuts by comparison. In the end, Edgar's triumph lives in this light—he wins, but in the light of such brutality is it any victory to be savored? Edgar's final words, as he grabs the mic (back to scene 1) is to implore us to “speak what we feel, not what we ought.” Falls' message, on the expression of love publicly and the dangers of love as a social fabric comes through clearly.

I was exhillerated by this production—warts and all. For its deficits, it does something that one doesn't often see in theater in this town: engage in a conversation with the text and highlight events to diverge from a traditional, balanced rendering. As a piece of contemporary art, it works.

Stacy Keach is thrilling as Lear, even if the nuances of his performance are overshadowed by the scale Falls' design. Keach's growling, snarling, blustering Lear is a character that, along with this production, I will never forget.

Yeats' theme, in harmony with the text of Lear, is that the tragedy of excessive love turns us into static, stone-like creatures, around whom the world swirls, as we sit oblivious to the torment surrounding us. In this production, we find ourselves in our security and our personal sense of love turned to stone, as the swirl of civil war unfolds around us. When the play expires, we live through the pathos of the living human beings on stage whose love left them incapable of mastering those changes, and we are left wondering at the extent to which love can make victims of us all.

Clay

2006-10-11T19:41:00.000-05:00

In Genesis, in the beginning, before God creates the earth, or the sun, He creates light. It's a little odd. Before there's a sun to create light, before there's fire, and before there are even photons or eyes against which those photons could bounce, God creates light.

Actually, God doesn't create any physical, tangible light whatsoever. His first act in presiding over creation? Calling light into being: “Let there be light.” Before there can be anything physical, before there can be a concept of light as a distinguisher from the primordial void, God must speak. God must use language. Words come first. To make sense out of the idea of light from the swirl of unformed chaos that comes before, God must call it forth.

I thought of this last night, when I saw Clay at the Lookingglass (in a coproduction with About Face). Well, this and one other thing. A few months ago some friends of mine and I were carrying on a really highfalutin argument about which was the first art. It's the sort of question that ties you into impossible knots and which says more about your philosophical and personal understanding of art and its definitions than anything else. Being a devoted pretentious so and so (Aristotelian), I said rhythm, as the Aristotelian idea is that art begins in imitation, and I imagine that without rhythm there is nothing to imitate.

Okay. Enough first principles. Clay got me thinking about these ideas because, for a one man hip-hop musical, it is at heart a philosophical and kinesthetic meditation on the soup of experience and how we make sense of it in order to create lives for ourselves. Further, it uses these meditations to illustrate contemporary realities about hip-hop, the American experience, and larger narrative ideas that come from Shakespeare.

It opens on a stage draped in red velvet curtain with a man on stage who calls himself Sir John, hyping up a crowd for the much ballyhooed arrival of the star of the show, Clay. But this is not just Clay's announcer for the night introducing us to the star of our show. Sir John is the master of ceremonies for a fictitious concert at which Clay is to perform his hit single. Clay is the newest hip-hop sensation.

But that fiction and the reality we witness on stage are constantly confused. And this is the first of the many hip-hop conventions Clay introduces his mostly white and affluent audience to. He articulates the confusion of fictitious and real identities and the irrelevance of those distinctions according to the hip-hop form. Whether we see Clay, Matt Sax (Clay's real-life persona and the writer and performer of the show), or Clifford, the boy out of whom we see Clay emerge, what we see is from a “true place” as Sir John might put it.

A note on conventions: when artists misuse them, they're called cliches. When used appropriately, they are homage or narrative convention. And Matt Sax uses many conventions. Beyond hip-hop, he operates in the popular contemporary convention of the one-man show, which is becoming a popular vehicle for talented young actors and others who want to control the way they present themselves artistically. Actually, the popularity of the one-man show is an interesting prism through which to examine the experience of the contemporary American actor, but I digress.

As the play unfolds we see a boy in an idyllic childhood experience the downfall of that childhood (convention!). We witness the boy reinvent himself as an MC (microphone controller) and become renamed as an MC (convention!). We see plenty of what would seem conventional sex and violence, too.

What makes Clay special is that he aspires to illustrate to his white, affluent audience that hip-hop is not simply the conventional sex and violence to which they are accustomed to seeing on Cable. He aspires to unite the hip-hop universe with narrative ideas emblazoned on our culture by Shakespeare.

Harold Bloom, in “Shakespeare—The Invention of the Human” posits that certain emotions that we experience were first introduced to us, culturally, by Shakespeare's ideas. That may be true of certain emotional sentiments, but Shakespeare uses the vessel of certain mythological conventions to carry those emotional ideas to our culture. Amongst these are the Mentorship, the Coming Of Age, the Renaming, and the Return of the Prodigal. We get many of these most profoundly through Henry the IV. Furthermore, from Shakespeare we have received very strong ideas about filial duty, vengeance, parental replacement, and parental-sexual associations through Hamlet.

These conventions are woven into the part hip-hop, part monologue narrative of Clay. Obviously, Sir John is an open homage to Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal's gargantuan mentor. And Clay is part Hal-part Hamlet. His father is part Claudius. His mother is part King Hamlet. And his stepmother is part Gertrude.

Following the introduction by Sir John (in which he uses a beautiful meditation on the inadequacy of language in communicating), Clay appears to us, and we are introduced to Clifford, Clay as a boy, and his crass, obnoxious father (the father as a failure; a hip-hop convention). We are introduced to his sedate mother, smoking cigarettes, and presented in a vaguely saintly light. Of course the ghostly pale of Clay's mother is a meditation on Hamlet's relationship with his father as a ghost. Subsequent events and the telling of stories determine the nature of our ghosts. It is clear that we are seeing a representation of the past through an evolved context. That is to say: Clay might not have told this story this way when he was a boy, but part of the story is the story itself. Clay's understanding of the context of life has come to him through the telling of stories and through a prism defined by his later experience.

We are then confronted with Clay's parents' divorce and the court proceedings at which he is asked to choose between them. We see Clay bribed by his father and implicitly corrupted by the choice of his father over his mother. We later learn that Clay's father was a traveling businessman, compounding the travesty of Clay's choice of this absentee father for custody. The moment of childhood lost and first implication in evil is of course a biblical idea, but it is strongly echoed throughout hip-hop, and a major theme in Clay.

Directly thereafter we are taken backstage as Sir John begs Clay to appear on stage. We see Clay's face is covered with blood. We are then transported to Clay's memory of his mother's over-the-phone suicide (including a reference to Notorious B.I.G.'s “Suicidal Thoughts”), his subsequent misunderstanding smile, his grief, his guilt, and his journey several years later from the curtained theater of Manhattan to the exposed brick (he actually pulls the curtains back to expose the brick) of the hip-hop Eden, Brooklyn.

Clay's father is the Claudius murdering his mother. His mother's ghost is the narratized memory that Clay has come to after discovering hip-hop. Clay can only see his guilt and responsibility to his mother through memories accessed and articulated by hip-hop. And here is where we see him introduced to hip-hop.

He wanders into Sir John's bookshop, with Sir John in full control of the mic—and telling his story. He asks for help to learn hip-hop. Sir John quizzes him, humorously, on music from Wu-Tang to Michael Jackson—neither of which Clay has any idea of. Sir John teaches him rhythm before anything else—by asking Clay to repeat his rhythms. In a thrilling sequence, we see Clay go from total novice to rhythmic expert.

Hip-hop starts simply—through rhythmic call and repeat. It is primal, and it applies basic meaning to the swirl of experience living in our memories. Subsequently Clay starts rapping, but at first, all he does is recite what Sir John (and Sax, I imagine) considers crass, commercialized hip-hop conventions: money, bitches, blunts, and hos. When Sir John asks about whether Clay has ever met a prostitute, he makes the point clear—hip-hop, for John, is about the definition of our experiences through rhythm, and not the gangsta rap that has found its home in the hearts of suburban white kids for a generation now. Instead, real hip-hop has to come from a “true place.”

Clay finds that “true place” in love...a love affair with his stepmother, who we learn then, married Clay's father “hard upon” (to quote the Bard) Clay's mother's suicide. We are taken to Clay's house following a soccer practice in which Clay's stepmother walks in and ogles his naked body. His father is on the road. The affair ensues as the stepmother performs oral sex on Clay. And following that, she orders him to the bathroom to shave.

As Clay shaves, he contemplates how he got to the point where choosing to shave, that symbol of becoming a man, became the choice to betray his father by sleeping with his wife. We feel the vulgarity and the exploitation of his stepmother's actions, and we also understand the underpinning emotions of hate and revenge that compose Clay's choice. Again, it is clear that this understanding comes to Clay through the retelling of the story.

Following the seduction, we're transported to Brooklyn again (though the sliding curtains), to hear Sir John's story. Hip-hop replaced his parents, who were killed tragically when he was young. The narrative parallels between Clay and John are made clear. Hip-hop is therapy. John begs Clay to allow him to train him to be a famous MC. Confused, Clay storms out, back to Manhattan, where his father soon returns to discover the affair. This section features a fantastic sequence in which Clay and his stepmother make love as Clay's father leaves a message on the machine. Upon his father's discovery of the affair, Clay is thrust into a whirlwind, without a father. For a moment, I thought that Clay might emerge from Clifford in this moment—in an act of self-renaming and self-fatherhood. Rather, Clifford returns to John's bookshop and is renamed by John, his only true father. As we see him perform, the lighting of Clay goes from directly overhead, special lighting, to followspot “entertainer” lighting.

Thus, a hip-hop convention, the rebirth/renaming through hip-hop, meets Falstaff, Hal, and Hamlet. We are then transported back to the backstage of the present time, and Clay's face covered in blood. Clay takes us into the scene a few moments earlier, as his father comes to him, humiliated, begging for money (a hip-hop convention—the betraying old friends seeking a handout). As Clay rejects him, a fight ensues in which Clay stabs his father in the neck, achieving his mother's revenge, and destroying (and purifying) himself at the same time.

The blood purifies him of the stain of the betrayal of his mother—and the stage is washed in a shockingly bright light. Of course as, the show closes to the sounds of Outkast's Chonkyfire, we are left to wonder at Clay's destruction—but it is a destruction that is nothing short of tragic. Clay's heroic quality, the ability to create meaning from the flux of experience, through rhythm and rhyme, leads him to the inescapable conclusion that he must murder his father and destroy himself to attain purification.

Matt Sax is an electric performer, who assumes, convincingly, several characters in the show. His narrative technique, which constantly shifts the audience's attention from one compelling scene to another time and place manages a frenetic pace, which allows him to create meaningful events from small alterations in rhythm. Of course, having an expertly produced and contagiously energetic sound design doesn't hurt, either.

For Matt Sax and Eric Rosen (who co-developed and directed the project with Sax) to undertake a project like this is admirable. The questions “why?” and “why now?” are shockingly clear from the moment we leave the theater. Hip-hop as an art form is so deeply misunderstood, especially by the white elite in our country, yet it is the essential sound of the zeitgeist of the moment. If you want to hear and feel what's in the air, in the cities, tune into a streaming broadcast of any college radio station playing non-commercial hip-hop.

But, as this art form of the moment is misunderstood, so are the stories of those who practice it. Clay, in a theater, accomplishes one of the things that Eminem has: he has drawn the parallels between the hip-hop experience and the universal experience. While Eminem focuses his energy on poverty and middle-class hypocrisy, Clay strives to draw parallels between the experience of a neglected, middle-class white kid, the hip-hop experience, and ultimately the grand narrative themes that we have inherited from Shakespeare. He elevates both his experience and hip-hop's, and in so doing, elevates his audience's cultural understanding.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2006-09-24T20:42:00.000-05:00

Theater is the most ephemeral of all arts, and, at the same time, it also has the greatest capacity to entertain. Stanislavski meditates in My Life In Art on this combination of qualities as the reason for the lack of aesthetic development of the theater when compared to other media (like literature, music, painting and sculpture, all of which had been turned on their ears repeatedly when Stanislavski was working). It is simply too easy for artists in the theater to get by by entertaining their audiences, or, to put a finer point on it, it is too hard for them not to. An audience walks into a theater expecting a less formally aesthetic experience. Theater exists in time, as life does, and is gone in a moment, just as events in life are. Acting exists in the minds of much of the audience as entertaining diversion and realistic imitation, thanks to television and film—where other arts are more clearly (and obviously) formal and at times abstractly imitative. And, until recently, audiences would only pay for theater that gave them exactly what they expected.

James Tyrone (played in the Gift's production by Gary Wingert, whose face seems the archetypal aging Irish actor), the central character of Long Day's Journey Into Night, is an ephemeral man. He worked his way up from desperate poverty to prominence as an actor. As he ages, he is living with the regret that he sacrificed any chance of serious artistic work (for him, this means attaining status as a “great” Shakespearean) for financial security. Security is his chief concern in life—to live on a solid foundation, so that he never runs the risk of returning to the poverty in which he was raised. To that end, he endlessly sinks his money, over the objections of his family, into land investments. His summer home, in which the play is set, is bathed in fog, and a foghorn keeps his addled wife up at night, a fact to which he is brutally senseless. He lives in a self-induced haze of delusion and alcohol, and he cannot allow himself to see the solid truth about himself or his family.

The play is itself largely about Tyrone and the other members of his family (who are to varying degrees living in the same haze that envelops James) forcing themselves and one another to run aground upon the realities that they deny to get by. It is a metaphysical piece, in which the forces of time and nature themselves are allegorically illustrative of the story. As the forces of nature conspire to run these tortured characters aground on the rocks of their delusions, we see them sink themselves deeper into addiction and recrimination.

At the risk of being labeled a complete lackey of Robert Brustein, I quote him again, this time in his review of The Iceman Cometh: “the length of the play contributes to its impact, as if we had to be exposed to virtually every aspect of universal suffering in order to feel its full force.” I would actually go further: because O'Neill wrote such metaphysical work, I believe that his style (the long, dense interior drama) is actually meant create a different theatrical context in which the audience experiences things in time. It is meant to use time to make the audience sense, in their bodies (through the natural change that physically occurs in several hours) the passage of time, and to link that physical sense of the passage of time to characters—in order to elevate those characters to the level of archetypes. We make emotional realizations, in time, and this elevates these emotions to a different context from others we experience in drama. It is as such that he has created such a lasting impact on American theater.

However, therein lies a dilemma, in addition to the inherent dilemmas of making theater. If O'Neill's (novelistic in scope) work is set close to or at real time, how should it be presented? Should we stage it realistically (or as O'Neill himself said “holding the old family Kodak up to ill-nature)? Should we present it in real time, at the risk of alienating our audience?

Fortunately, O'Neill is a master storyteller, who is constantly supplying his audiences with fresh and interesting events, actions, and conflicts, all the while endowing his audience with a sea of facts from which they can make very rich inferences about the world of characters in the play and the emotional stakes for those characters. All the same, an O'Neill play is not for the faint of heart, or for that matter, of backside. Audiences should know what they're getting going in.

The Gift has chosen to stage the piece in a very realistic, well-constructed, setting. The Tyrone summer home is a spartan, wooden building, complete with shutters at the top of the walls, with manly swords and busts and paintings of Shakespeare and Booth, woven rug, wood floor, and dirty windows. It is lit warmly, in the morning of the first act, through slots between the wooden wall panels, creating a very nice effect.

The first two acts are scored at a very fast pace, as we see the family men's attempt to insulate Mary Tyrone, the mother of the family (Alexandra Main, cast as a woman easily 20 years her senior), from the strife that consumes them. She has recently returned (we discover later from a cheap clinic, being treated for morphine addiction) and everyone wants to protect her. This quickly disintegrates as James accuses his sons of laziness, drunkenness, lechery, and leeching. Jamie (John Kelly Connolly), the eldest son, is quick to respond with accusations of James' cheapness and cruelty, while Edmund (Brendan Donaldson), the effete and sickly youngest son, tries to stay clear of the punches. The characters in this play, in addition to doing yard work, visiting doctors, eating, and napping are constantly trying to define the past in conversation to blame each other for the misery in which they find themselves.

The play follows a pattern of accusation, recrimination, repentance, incomplete forgiveness and incomplete peace, followed shortly thereafter by more accusations. In this production, the events in the first two acts, as O'Neill is informing us about the world into which we have entered, are not well articulated. Some of the most horrible accusations and recriminations pass without the tempo of the piece altering. The events are not well bracketed. Perhaps this is meant to emphasize the hazy banality of the fighting. Perhaps this is to emphasize the dynamism of the fourth act, in which the key event, of Edmund's accusation of his father of willful neglect runs him aground on reality. In any event, the acting was fast, and I was unable to discern what director Michael Patrick Thornton conceived to be events in the flurry of the information rushing at me.

The third act opens to the family's temporary servant, fresh Irish immigrant Catherine (Sue Redmond, using an excellent brogue) and Mary chatting in the aftermath of another of Mary's relapses into morphine abuse. Catherine is getting drunk on James' whiskey, and lapping it up, at Mary's urging. Mary needs the company, as she is all alone, in a house she despises, without any roots surrounding her or companionship. Catherine's energy in this production alters the stasis of tone achieved by the family's fighting in the first two acts, and is also an interesting quiet counterpoint to Mary's cascade of illusions about her own childhood and the source of her addiction. O'Neill is charitable to Mary, exposing her to the moral indictment to which all other characters in this piece are subjected, but chiefly using Catherine's charming skepticism to call the bullshit. The tempo of the piece is dramatically altered here. And when Edmund returns from the doctor's office with news that he indeed has consumption (TB) and will have to be hospitalized, his confrontation with Mary is very evocative.

The fourth act, however, is made to stand out in this production. I suspect it is presented in boldface because in it, we are presented with accusations and admissions that happen once in a lifetime and alter the lives of the characters forever. It is, in this production, the only act in which major events transpire. It is intense, dynamic, and built around Edmund's accusation that his father is willfully neglecting him, possibly to death, in the treatment of his consumption. The men are all drunk, and their drunkenness gives them real license to say what needs to be said. James paints the bleak picture of his childhood that Edmund is accustomed to hearing, but he then admits that his stinginess and fear of the poor house led him to destroy his artistic potential, by allowing himself to be typecast lucratively. This is another key event, as we experience the pathos of regret with the hypocritical, cheap, cruel father. Jamie returns and drunkenly confesses his secret wish to destroy his brother, as well as his love for his brother. The play ends with Mary's recounting of a story in which she was rejected from the convent, to test her religious devotion in the secular world, and with a tunnel of light on Edmund, as the fulcrum upon which the family has now shifted.

The lighting in the piece (Heather Gilbert) is fairly straightforward, with Thornton using a special to create a tunnel of light on Mary at various moments in her downturn. The lighting suggests, very subtlely, shifts in mood in the third and fourth act, and the darkness that envelops the house as the day wears down. The costumes (Kimberly G. Morris) evoke the period well, and James' rubber-band billfold is one of many nice touches (another is the collection of Kipling's poems that were aptly a part of James' library). I found myself straining to hear over the air conditioner at various points in the piece, a price one pays at storefront theaters. The changes in scenes were marked by Brahms-esque piano sonatas, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and the show closes to Pachelbel's Cannon. (Sound was co-designed by Bob Mihlfried, Jr. with his brother Kenny, who also composed the original music). In the third and fourth acts we get some very nice atmospheric sound—of crickets and of the water and sea bells in the distance.

The script is so rich in themes: it explores the American need to establish and maintain oneself individually. It is also an examination of the animating hypocrisy of those caught in addiction—who obsess over moderation and willpower, but whose obsession in that regard is indicative of their deep fixation on those qualities as inadequacies. But it is, chiefly, a metaphysical work, aided by the brothers' fixation on post-enlightenment writers and literature. By the art they admire and strive to create, they are wresting the future of American culture from those like James, who has spent his life groping for solidity in the mists of uncertainty. They are more comfortable with a future without absolutes, and the art and culture of the past fifty years has borne out O'Neill's view of the world changing. Of course, the enduring power of the story is that is is generational in nature—with the old reaching for certainty as they face mortality, and the young embracing it.

The work in the fourth act was so powerful that I was left speechless. A question nagged at me, however, as I drove home from Jefferson Park (in addition to questioning the casting of such a young woman as Mary, opposite such a powerful older actor like Wingert): Why? Why was this play staged, now? The Gift Theater has a wonderful reputation as an acting repertory, and many of the scenes in this play are meaty enough for a tight ensemble and director to display their acting chops (to mix metaphors). Of course, any time an actor ascends the stage his embodiment is itself a representation living in the present time—as such the actor’s interpretation is itself, upon close examination, a commentary on the here and now. And of course, O’Neill’s play itself is rich enough that one can find apt metaphors pertaining to the current degeneration of society under vice and the attendant recriminations (amongst others) to one’s interpretive heart’s delight. But these interpretations are at their heart general, and based upon abstractions, and not the basis for any firm statement in a dialogue between the artist and his culture.

Indeed, there is little to no suggestion provided by Thornton’s production about why O’Neill’s work is relevant today. The production could have fixated on any of the relevant themes in the script as a focus for engaging contemporary issues. However, I could very easily see the same production having been staged in the mid-nineties, or at any time in the past forty years. There is something to be said for a “light touch” in the creation of art theater, and for providing a venue in which the actor’s art can by itself provide commentary enough on society—and this is what the Gift achieves, for better or worse. Directors of Shakespeare’s plays are constantly working to expand their productions’ cultural context—I wonder if it is possible for a director working with O’Neill’s behemoth literary masterpiece to do the same.

The fourth act was diverting, but it was the apex of a show whose power was more or less as an actor's piece—and relatively ephemeral. O'Neill's literature is itself rich enough to create atmosphere without the construction of a period set to make it tangible. I wonder if a staging that would have embraced the key metaphysical uncertainties which compose the play's obsessions would have been more effective than one that strives to reach for an elusive sense of security. What I mean to suggest is that a realistic staging may actually render the piece less effective than one that suggests a critical context in which the piece should be viewed as social or cosmic commentary.

James Tyrone's regret is that his legacy is totally ephemeral. A realistic staging may be clear, comfortable, and reassuring to unsteady audiences, but if this play is staged only as an actor's piece, then its power is itself ephemeral, and its tragedy is the same as James Tyrone's—that in striving for security, it eradicates any chance for a lasting impact and legacy.

Proving Mr. Jennings

2006-09-08T14:16:00.000-05:00

Proving Mr. Jennings is based on an interesting conceit. Take a rather self-righteous, pompous, white urban professional liberal lawyer and place him in a succession of predicaments identical to those endured by many enemy combatants and captives taken under shadowy pretenses in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Then, explode his guts all over the inside of the theater.

While George Cederquist is a gutsy director, he isn't that gutsy. He is satisfied to close the show with the sound of an intense interior bomb blast. It is an effective move because the rest of the play is defined by an atmosphere that can best be described as “Disney Symphonic.” As the audience enters the spare Actors Workshop Theatre to take in this story of torture, denial of due process, and startling humiliation, it is to sounds that are reminicient of naughty cartoon characters engaged in wacky hijincks on Saturday morning.

This, I expect, is Cederquist's response to the challenge of staging a play that takes on such a serious contemporary subject. James Walker, with whom Cederquist went to high school, has written a stinging political satire in the style of Christopher Durang. Like Durang, he uses the convention of storytelling to discover effective metaphors for the ridiculous in our culture, and constantly raises the stakes in terms of the ridiculousness. When the audience is confronted with the on stage torture of a main character who looks and (judging by the conversations overheard by this intrepid reviewer) thinks like them, the production could shock them with the veracity of what transpires, or it can use a Brechtian “wink” to signify that the events are slightly exaggerated for instructional purposes. This does more than save us from discomfort. It highlights the distinction between our treatment of western and foreign, brown-skinned lives. We know that what Walker highlights is happening to others in some form—and yet our response to the thought of someone like us enduring that type of treatment is powerful, and completely distinct from our response to what we see in the news. We are able to think about, rather than respond to, what we see. While I feel that Durang's satire is more indirect than Walker's, the parallels are certainly there.

Brustein (in his essay on Rum and Coke in Who Needs Theatre) cites a Philip Roth quote about the impossibility of writing social satire due to the extremity of Americans' actions in the late 20th century. The key in plays that strive to satirize the inherently ridiculous, Brustein points out, is tone, and this play, and the tone established by Cederquist manages to satrize not only the government's absurd actions, but our response to the government's actions during the past five years.

Jennings (Damien Arnold), singing to himself, has checked into an apparently “excellent” National Heath Service (he's English) clinic for a life-saving heart transplant. It's clear that Walker has written this from the beginning unrealistically—the transplant is treated like a severly ingrown toe nail—somewhat life-threatening, but nothing to be too worked up about. The nurse (Julie Griffith) enters to perform a series of ridiculous tests, but mostly tries to seduce Jennings. The unreality of the atmosphere has the audience considering the symbolic relevance of a pinstriped Englishman blithely refusing sex with a beautiful woman and being given a new heart. The point is clear—Jennings isn't just English, and doesn't just have a deficient heart—he has a deficient heart, and he's cold, even for an Englishman.

He's fastidious about the red spots on his hospital gown—he's fastidious about everything. As he changes, we see his socks with stirrups. He recognizes the slutty nurse as a woman he once prosecuted for engaging in certain “fashionable sexual offenses.” This adds to his chagrin at the conditions of his treatment.

He's then questioned as to medical history, and then, suddenly, about subversive activities—including membership in subversive societies. He admits to only one, his local cricket club.

He takes a tablet that puts him to sleep in the large hospital bed that occupies the center of the small stage. Cederquist has chosen to stage the piece on a shallow procenium—the audience sits in two-thirds of the shoebox, and the action of the play takes place in the other third. The scene change is marked by more Disney music, a ticking clock, lowered lights (one of a few variations in lighting in what seemed a simple light design), and other cast members pulling down the green hospital gown walls to reveal brick underground and a pane of one-way glass. The bed is rearranged.

The doctor (Don Swanson) walks in and revives Jennings with a shot. Jennings has had an awful dream, which he describes. In a comic turn, before he's been told of the outcome of his surgery, Jennings celebrates its success, and resolves to Live Every Day Like It's His Last—this surgery was his “call to arms.” After being slightly perturbed at the idea that he has received a black man's heart, he regains his optimism and is shocked when he hears that no heart was found. Thus ensues a bit of Monty Python style gabbing that results in our discovery that a bomb was found instead of his heart, and that the bomb was left in. Again, the unreality of the scene is played unapologetically. Jennings has had his ribcage spread open recently, and yet bears no apparent physical after effects.

At this point, it's worthwhile to again consider the wealth of choices that Cederquist had at his disposal when crafting the atmosphere of the play. In a small venue, the threat of physical violence (as demonstrated richly by R & D Violence design in their work in the recent production of Extremities) can be very, very upsetting. The threat of imminent explosion from nails and ball-bearings could be unbearable. Walker and Cederquist conspire to create an atmosphere that makes this subject palatable.

Then the parallels to the GWOT are presented. Jennings is confronted by a simpleton MI-5 agent named Psmith (played by Brian Parry and pronounced “Smith”), who electrocutes him to get him talking. The Gitmo parallels start flowing. “It's not torture,” says Psmith, in the reletivistic jargon of the Bush administration, “it's medication.” The portrayal of Jennnings' electrocution is so unreal that it almost becomes funny.

Psmith is the operative whose work isn't publicized or explained. The coerced confession, Jennings righteous demand for his rights, the promise that “we'll open up everyone we have to [to discover more bomb-implanters]” all follow. Psmith jusitifies his actions in times of war, and squeezes a confession about a Muslim client of Jennings' being a terrorist. Act I closes to Psmith's threat against Jennings' family (and the showing of an home video shown on an on-stage TV). Jennings is bathed in a lonely green light as he calls for his wife's help.

Act II opens to the same lilting music and the entrance of a Colonel (Dan McNamara), the Good Cop. He frees Jennings' bindings and gives him water. He takes testimony from Jennings about his treatment up to that point, and expresses his dismay at it, offering an apology, and assuring Jennings that the account of his treatment will make its way into a government report. We can safely assume that this will be another Abu Graib bureaucratic report that has relatively little political or other consequence. The Colonel cites Jennings' mistreatment as the result of a “bad apple.” For the Colonel, Jennings' mistreatment is a cool rhetorical subject. We later learn that Jennings wrote an indignant letter to the Times of London on the subject of human rights issues in the GWOT. Until recently, Jennings approached the subject of human rights violations just as we do (and as the Colonel does)—blithely and as a hypothetical question.

The Colonel is a slick creation, as the warrior with a “conscience.” He may be acting on hysterical impulses, but where Psmith is excitable, the Colonel calmly assimilates innocuous facts into worst-case scenarios. He is the satirized public face of the excesses and stupidity of the GWOT. He wants a confession to track down the other members of Jennings' cell. Rather than torture him, he blackmails Jennings with photos taken of him in a comprimising position with the slutty nurse as he was unconscious prior to his surgery. (Another Abu Graib style humiliation). Jennings agrees to sign a confession.

Why are Jennings' captors acting this way? Clearly, if Jennings purposely had a bomb implanted, there is no reason for him to have voluntarily walked into a government clinic for open-heart surgery. None of the government agents consider this. We later learn that Jennings had been tracked by the government ever since his letter to the Times. The slutty nurse was of course a government agent, as was the doctor. Was this a government plot to frame an ordinary white liberal as a terrorist to justify further intrusions on civil liberties? Was this a plot by the doctor to frame Jennings, whose wife he absconds with at the end of the play?

The bigger picture is never really elucidated. The authorities' actions are senseless. We learn that the room in which Jennings is lying is girded by thick concrete, and he will be allowed to explode there. We endure a projected explosion deadline that passes calmly. We begin to wonder if there really is a bomb, or if something else is happening. Jennings' wife (Lauren N. Goode) enters and confronts him with her abandonment and the prospect of his childrens' placement in foster housing (as his wife starts a new life with the doctor), completing his utter ruin. Another deadline is announced, for which Cederquist builds suspense with the proverbial ticking time bomb sounds. (The rhetorical justification for torture typically involves the phrase “Ticking Time Bomb”). Jennings responds to the prospect of his imminent explosion in a defiant, beautiful speech in which he implores the audience to “stop the madness.” When death doesn't come precisely at the moment that it was predicted, he celebrates. And then his celebration is cut short with the sound of the explosion.

In the world of this play, is the threat of mass destruction through terrorism real? We don't ever really understand why Jennings has a bomb inside him, but the fact is that there WAS a bomb inside him. There WAS a threat, and, unless the bomb was implanted to frame Jennings (which it may well have been), lives were saved by his having exploded underground.

In this play the threat is mysterious. The only thing that is clear is the government's ineffectiveness and absurd cruelty in actually understanding and uprooting it—that is, unless they created it in the first place. I feel that the play would have been a more effective treatment of the GWOT if it were clear that there weren't some nefarious government scheme by which the bomb was implanted in Jennings—but that's because I'm not given to conspiracy thories. If the bomb were presented as a real parallel to how I perceive the threat, then I believe that this play would have a much darker varnish. We're in danger, and, while we may be occasionally saved from well-publicised attack plots, the government really is too stupid and cruel to solve the problem in any meaningful way.

Damien Arnold's work in this piece is excellent. He changes rhythm and tone in connection with Cederquist's lightening and darkening of the mood with sincerity and pathos. The rest of the cast is appropriately in rhythm with pace of the storytelling throughout (including Julia Siple in a thrilling voice-over cameo). Cederquist's staging, and the designs of Sean McIntosh (sets), Jon Kohn III (lights), and Jennifer M. Hawk (costumes) are all appropriately scaled down and simple for the tiny black box at Actors Workshop. I wonder if the play would be more appropriately staged in a larger venue, and more elaborately, to allow the ensemble and designers to create a running commentary on the material without worrying about rendering the tone of the subject too “real” for the audience to maintain analytical perspective. In any case, Cederquist and Walker have conspired to offer the first history of the GWOT that I've seen in a theater in Chicago, the beginning of a necessary conversation on the subject between artists and the culture.

Henry Hettinger

2006-08-23T21:48:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-08-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

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".)