Steppenwolf's New Season

Steppenwolf has announced its new season, organized around the theme of "Our Private/Public Self", to much fanfare and Facebook posting. (At least half a dozen of my friends had mentioned it online within hours of the announcement.) Shall we look into why? Full details at their website as well as the theatre blogs of the Chicago Tribune, Time Out, and just about everyone else.

Detroit
By Lisa D'Amour
Featuring ensemble members Kate Arrington and Robert Breuler
In the Downstairs Theatre
Thu. September 9, 2010 — Sun. November 7, 2010


Picture-perfect couple Ben and Mary fire up the grill to welcome the new neighbors who’ve moved into the long-empty house next door. Three barbeques later, the fledgling friendship veers out of control, shattering Ben and Mary’s carefully maintained semblance of success - with comic, unexpected consequences. Detroit is a fresh, off-beat look at what happens when we dare to open ourselves up to something new.

I'm not at all familiar with D'Amour's work--I don't believe she's ever had a Chicago production, or at least a high-profile one--so I don't know what to expect. It's gratifying to see something genuinely new. The description makes it look quite fascinating--we'll see how it goes.

Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By Edward Albee
Directed by Pam MacKinnon
Featuring ensemble members Tracy Letts and Amy Morton
In the Downstairs Theatre
Thu. December 2, 2010 — Sun. February 13, 2011


On the campus of a small New England college, George and Martha invite a new professor and his wife home for a nightcap. As the cocktails flow, the young couple find themselves caught in the crossfire of a savage marital war where the combatants attack the self deceptions they forged for their own survival. Ensemble members Tracy Letts and Amy Morton face off as one of theatre’s most notoriously dysfunctional couples in Albee’s hilarious and harrowing masterpiece.

Did you hear that? That was the sound of every theatre nerd in Chicagoland having a spontaneous orgasm. For the less nerdy, let me explain why. Edward Albee is a leading candidate for both "Greatest Living American Playwright" and "Crankiest Old Man in the American Theatre," and Virginia Woolf is arguably his greatest play--certainly his best known. It's three-plus hours of two couples destroying each other and themselves--at once draining and exhilarating for the audience. McKinnon is a highly regarded director who's become a favorite of Albee's in recent years. And the expectations for Letts and Morton are stratospheric: he won the Pulitzer for August: Osage County and acts frequently, to great acclaim, and she gave one of the finest stage performances I have ever seen in August, only one of the 35 (!) shows she's done as actor and director at Steppenwolf. Fireworks are certain to result, and you better believe I'll be there.

Sex with Strangers
By Laura Eason
Directed by Jessica Thebus
Featuring ensemble member Sally Murphy with Stephen Louis Grush
In the Upstairs Theatre
Thu. January 20, 2011 — Sun. May 15, 2011


Ethan is a hot young writer whose online journals of "sexcapades" are the buzz of the blogosphere. Olivia is an attractive 30-something whose own writing career is fizzling. They hook up, sex turns into dating and dating into something more complicated. A break-out hit at Steppenwolf’s 2009 First Look Repertory, Sex with Strangers explores how we invent our identity - online and off - and what happens when our private lives become public domain.

This is the first production to make the jump from the First Look Festival (small-scale productions of new works in the Garage space in repertory) to the mainstage, which is certainly a good trend. The play itself got a great response upon opening, and I'm interested to see it on a larger scale. (Grush returns from the original staging while Murphy is new.)

The Hot L Baltimore
By Lanford Wilson
Directed by ensemble member Tina Landau
Featuring ensemble members Alana Arenas, K. Todd Freeman and Yasen Peyankov
In the Downstairs Theatre
Thu. March 24, 2011 — Sun. May 29, 2011


The Hotel Baltimore used to be the swankiest place in town - now it has a date with the wrecking ball. Eviction notices just went out to its residents, who live on the fringes of society and call the seedy hotel home. This acclaimed play from the author of Balm in Gilead is filled with everyday humanity - unexpectedly intimate and moving. Helmed by visionary director Tina Landau, The Hot L Baltimore reveals the private lives of an unconventional community about to be turned inside out.

Steppenwolf has a good history with Wilson--their 1980 production of Balm in Gilead was a huge hit in Chicago and New York and was one of the first to really put them on the map. I've seen a production of this play that didn't really hit me, but this has the potential to be quite good: it's a big ensemble piece, which is one of Landau's specialties, and I'm sure the cast will be filled out with a great group of people. I'm excited to see it.

Middletown
A new play by Will Eno
Directed by Les Waters
Featuring ensemble member Alana Arenas in the Steppenwolf Downstairs Theatre
June 16–Aug. 14, 2011


Mary Swanson just moved to Middletown. About to have her first child, she is eager to enjoy the neighborly bonds a small town promises. But life in Middletown is complicated: neighbors are near strangers and moments of connection are fleeting. Middletown is a playful, poignant portrait of a town with two lives, one ordinary and visible, the other epic and mysterious.

I haven't yet managed to see any of Eno's work, but his THOM PAIN was very highly regarded, and he's generally seen as one of the bright hopes of playwriting. The Steppenwolf Downstairs is a much larger stage than most of his works are seen on--I am interested to see if he effectively scales up from the intimate, even claustrophobic, world of his biggest success.

Zoo/Box

This is not, strictly speaking, a review. I went to see InnateVolution's production of Edward Albee's one-acts The Zoo Story and The Sandbox because I have a friend in the cast--Casey Chapman, who plays Jerry in The Zoo Story and Daddy in The Sandbox. The show was interested in being blogged about, and I wanted to see it, especially since I'd never seen either onstage, so I went. What little journalistic objectivity I may have still had probably went away when my drink after the show with my friend turned into karaoke with the entire cast. So take this with a grain of salt.

Disclaimers out of the way, how were the shows?

The Zoo Story and The Sandbox were among Albee's earliest plays, and the former was the major hit that put him on the map. Both demonstrate a strong Absurdist influence, though it is more obvious with the latter.

Zoo appears to be a realistic story of a meeting between "permanent transient" Jerry (Chapman) and buttoned-up executive Peter (Raymond Cleveland) on a Central Park bench. Jerry tells increasingly bizarre and frightening stories to Peter, who gets more and more aghast at what he's gotten himself into. The violence that erupts is somehow both inevitable and shocking.

But pay careful attention and it becomes harder to find your way. Why is Jerry so hostile? Where does he really come from? Why doesn't Peter just leave? These questions aren't answered, and maybe they can't be. But the play hints at depths of despair and furious violence that are always just out of reach, and even at an hour long has a surprisingly intense impact.

This production mostly brings that impact across. Director Toma Langston made one very strong choice that I'm not sure about. Throughout the story, Jerry describes the residents of his boarding house. It seems to me that we should never be sure whether anything Jerry says is true, that all of these stories are inherently untrustworthy. Langston chooses to put all of the boarding house residents onstage when they are mentioned. In fact, they appear before the play proper begins, showing the chaos from which Jerry emerges.

For me, this had two effects: it gives Jerry a realistic context, which seems to take away from his status as a mysterious, inexplicable force of disruption, and it puts the audience in the place of Jerry more than Peter. Both effects are fascinating, and some might find them quite illuminating. For me, they subtly threw off the play's balance.

However, whether or not this choice works, it's certainly done well. The figures are not overused, and the characterizations are vivid and creepy. They create some startling stage pictures, and always feel like they are supporting the images in the text, whether or not they are necessary.

Incidentally, Albee himself is responsible for another problem--he recently revised the script to take place in the present day, rather than the late 1950s when it was written. However, a few references to Stephen King are not enough to cover up how rooted it is in its time, in the details--a boarding house and pornographic playing cards are not very common today--the attitudes of the characters, and the general philosophical concerns. Apparently Albee won't allow productions of the original script, which is unfortunate.

However, those concerns aside, the production still works. Much credit goes to the work that Chapman has done. He and Langston wisely realized that this is not a realistic play, and Jerry is not a realistic character. A naturalistic portrayal would flatten Jerry into a case history. So the heightened, theatrical performance that Chapman gives works very well. Jerry is a destabilizing force of nature, and that's disturbingly clear.

Cleveland, as Peter, has far less to do, and the production seems not quite to have settled on who he is. Is he a buttoned-up businessman or a more relaxed, artsy type? Is he who he appears to be or not? (And why, when his being married is constantly referenced, did he not have a wedding ring on?) Still, despite this blurred presence, Cleveland certainly stepped up at the crucial moments.

As for The Sandbox, well...big choices don't always pay off. It's a very odd show, with a sitcom-perfect Mommy (Lyn Scott) and Daddy (Chapman) taking Grandma (Patricia Tinsley) to the beach and placing her in a sandbox, while time passes suddenly and a Young Man (Christopher Boyd) stretches and does exercises. It's billed by Albee as a tribute to his grandmother and it's clearly a meditation on death.

The program notes say that it's being presented as a sitcom, rather than a drama, but that doesn't seem quite accurate. Langston has encouraged his actors to leave any subtlety or clarity behind in search of any joke they can find. There are bad wigs, spontaneous arias, dance numbers, and a variety-show announcer (who I think was completely invented for the show). The scripts genuine humor--dark and absurd--is completely lost, along with any understanding of the play's point and ideas. The actors are clearly capable of being funny, but the staging and the script clash so completely that the effect is grating rather than funny.

A few more thoughts on elements surrounding the production:

1) InnateVolution is so named because of the Buddhist concept that all people have the innate ability to evolve. In fact, the entire company is animated by the principled of Nichiren Buddhism. It's a lovely idea, but the company's name crosses the name between intriguing and silly.

2) Serving drinks in the lobby is always a good idea, even if they are flavored vodka. I hear that Thursdays and Sundays also have appetizers. Excellent decision.

3) Don't read the program notes before the show--they spell out the plays' ideas, and the production is quite clear on its own.

So should you go? If you've never seen The Zoo Story live, absolutely--it's a hugely important play, and this is a very strong production. And what's heartening is that this is a production that takes risks. Some succeed, some bellyflop, but the desire to try something new is definitely something to encourage.

The production plays Thursday-Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 3 PM through August 9th at the Oracle Theatre, 3809 N Broadway. For tickets ($10 Thurs and Sun, $20 Fri and Sat) call 312-513-1415 or visit www.innatevolution.org.