lorenzoandhismom

[lorenzoandhismom]

Teenage Dick

by Mike Lew

Directed by Brian Balcom

Theater Wit

(Macgregor Arney and Courtney Rikki Green)

What happens to live theater in a pandemic? Close the theater. Go home. Send everyone home. Pay everyone. Theater Wit adapted swiftly and impressively to this current reality, recording the final live performance of Teenage Dick, and offering it for personal at-home viewing. 

We did not attend the theater, but we sat at home in our living room and played a recorded performance. Mike Lew’s play, here in its Chicago premiere, is a contemporary spin on Shakespeare’s Richard III, set at Roseland High, where Richard is junior class secretary. He’s bullied for his disability; he wants acceptance and love. In an important early scene, Richard details the lesson of Machiavelli’s The Prince; over the course of the play, we watch as he (tragically) tries to claim his own power. 

Teenage Dick could be described as a play about a disabled boy in a high school. He is bullied, he falls in love; the girl he loves is cyber-bullied. There is a plot and a crisis and a climax and more action than I could process from my living room couch. And yet, it was moving to see the audience there in attendance, if just once - to know that this play, after weeks (months) of preparation - would not go on. Theater is community and like democracy that way - it does not work in isolation. It is transience, as Sarah Ruhl put it, and that is the beauty. The people gathered here today with you for this performance today - that moment, those moments won't exist again.

Lew’s play isn’t really about a disabled kid. It’s about a kid who is lost and longing and wanting something solid; and it’s about a world wherein that can so easily go wrong and become wholly tragic.

Macgregor Arney is wonderful in the lead role, as are Ann (Courtney Rikki Green) and Tamara Rozofsky as Buck. It was exciting to see bodies of all types and abilities represented on the stage; how rare this is.

(Macgregor Arney and Tamara Rozofsky)

Lew's plot, which I won’t spoil here, is inspired by Shakespeare. The plot shifts here take precedence over character and relationship. I found myself wishing the play had stayed longer in the realm of inspiration - as meditation or homage - and not felt tied to Aristotelian structural imperatives.

Of course, it is possible that the spectacle of the script makes more sense from the vantage of a live audience. Spectacle is wholly different when mediated through a screen. We are less implicated, somehow.

I want more theater like this - available this way - but I would be remiss to say that I did not feel the lack - did not feel with more intensity how essential the audience member is to the creation of a performance.

And as with everything now, we have to notice the silver linings: the most beautiful moments here occur at a dance, where Richard and Ann connect most beautifully. We danced along in our living room - something we could not have done at the theater. 

(Macgregor Arney and Courtney Rikki Green)

[lorenzoandhismom]

A Christmas Carol

by Charles Dickens

Adapted by Tom Creamer

Directed by Henry Wishcamper

Goodman Theatre

There’s a moment in A Christmas Carol, now in its 41st year at the Goodman Theatre, when the Ghost of Christmas Present (played this year with magnificent gravity by Jasmine Bracey) reminds Scrooge that the acts done in the name of Ignorance are not done in her name. The moment was one of chilling resonance, on a day when the news came in with dreary regularity, including that of migrant children teargassed as they tried to pass into the border. How much ignorance is required to believe that a person can be illegal?

Scrooge doesn’t bother himself much with politics, though there are hints of the society in which he thrives, at least financially: when asked to contribute money for the poor and needy, he retorts, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” The question comes to haunt him, as he gains empathy, and unlocks his heart.

Scrooge’s cruelty comes out of heartbreak, we soon learn. Early on, his niece hints at this, noting, “His offenses carry their own punishment. I am sorry for him.” When Jacob Marley haunts him with the warning, “I wear the chains I forged in life,” Scrooge doesn’t yet realize that Marley, like him, shut himself off to true happiness - something only possible within our relationships.

The story of Scrooge’s awakening, which takes place over the course of a night marked by three ghostly visitations, is well-known, but Goodman’s current version of the story is radically improved from what I saw as a child, or even what I saw ten or five years ago. There are a range of casting choices that make the show feel like a true reflection of our diverse city, as well as a number of  production elements - from a constellation of stars, to robotic door knockers. 

Directed by Harry Wishcamper, the production is carefully paced and layered. It’s hard to say enough about Larry Yando, in his eleventh year as Scrooge, who carries the show. His ability to reveal so much in a mere facial expression, or a gesture, or a shift in vocal tone, is impressive. Yando’s Scrooge is lovable even at his worst, which I suppose is how it should be. He’s campy and playful, and we are all very pleased to learn that he is human, too. Perhaps that is why Dickens’ story endures, beyond the message of redemption and hope; Scrooge’s transformation reminds us all that we, too, might change, that change is possible, that to be human is to evolve. We have to give others the chance to change, too, remembering that the strategies we use to keep others away, to protect ourselves, cause us more pain. Break free of your chains, Marley warns Scrooge. Tear down that wall. No more teargas, and no more cages. Yes, there are prisons, but there is also, always, hope. We can change, all of us, so god bless us, and save us, everyone.

[lorenzoandhismom]

(Frances Guinan & K Todd Freeman)

Downstate

by Bruce Norris

Directed by Pam McKinnon

Steppenwolf

Downstate opens with a scene of confrontation: a middle-aged man and his wife are confronting Fred, who listens from his dilapidated wheelchair. Fred is kind and hospitable, even as he listens to the scripted confrontation. Tim tells him that he hates him and wants to kill him. Fred is constitutionally gentle and kind; he’s also a pedophile, who, according to Timmy, ruined his life.

The single set where the entire play occurs is rather terrifying, a recognizably downbeat apartment. On one wall a poster that says ENDURANCE and another PERSEVERANCE. Those awful posters.

What Norris does well is to take a bunch of characters and put them in conversation. It’s as if he said “I want to have a conversation about sexual abuse and the justice system and punishment and retribution and human dignity” And because we all know it is impossible for most people, for our culture, to ever have this conversation in a complicated and honest way, I’m going to create this play and these characters to have the conversation for you.

And they do. The first act is excruciating. We learn why each man is there, we learn the extent to which their lives have been ruined and limited far beyond the years they served in prison. We see the ankle bracelets; we hear the patrol officer (Cecilia Noble) explain to them the latest restrictions on their whereabouts. We hear one or two try to defend himself and we hear the PO respond angrily, as if for all of us: “You should have thought of that when you put your dick in her mouth.” She is referring to his teenage daughter, whom he claims to love. We believe him that he loves her, but we are disgusted.

We are sickened to even have to think about sexual abuse for over two hours - and yet, here we are. I did not see anyone leave the theater. Maybe we can handle more than we give ourselves credit for; maybe we enjoy being discomfited. Maybe art can be the equivalent of a truth and reconciliation committee.

At intermission, I heard one woman say to another, “My gage is if I’m totally interested or has my attention swayed - and it did not sway.”

A man in the elevator could only say “Incredible” and that he wondered what would happen next. Another woman said “I can’t bear it but I will.” Another suggested that the coming act would be worse (she was right).

I’ve never seen a play to create a sympathetic portrait of a child abuser. I don’t know if it’s happened before. But it happened.

My companion wondered why we didn’t see these characters in the rest of their lives, and I said well of course not. I said, do we see King Lear in the rest of his life? Do we know anything about how he treated Regan and Goneril and Cordelia when they were children?

No. We see his late, near final moments and we judge Lear (sympathetically) and his daughters (harshly).

My companion and I had just been in London and had seen Ian McKellen in King Lear, so it was on our mind.

I do think an American play can take a moment and create an epic of it. I believe that was the ambition of Bruce Norris in Downstate - a play far more ambitious and daring than The Qualms, his play about polyamory.

The second act brings more detail on the lives of these men who have been punished without end. It reveals the reality of our justice system which does not stop at inhuman punishment or justice being served in some cases. It reveals (through Timmy) the insatiability of the accuser, the victim. The impossibility of reconciliation, or resolution. We understand that.

And we understand, though we may not have wanted to, that the victimisers are victims, too. That people are not easily separated into good and evil, as we’d like to believe. That there are those among us who do horrible things but are not horrible people. That we don’t really have a justice system that accounts for this, and that we possibly don’t care.

William Blake wrote that Milton was “of the devil’s party” without knowing it. He (Milton) wrote of the passion of the snake, of evil, more powerfully than he wrote God.

Some critical response has placed Norris in Milton’s camp, but that is a willful misreading, perhaps a symptom of our times. This is not a play aligning itself with child abusers. It is, however, aligning itself with the range of humanity, with all that we wish not to see or acknowledge or hear in our endless, insatiable desire to separate ourselves from evil. From those we can not understand.

What would it mean if you had to understand these people - one is sick, one is perhaps a victimizer who himself was victimized, who truly never understood that what he called love was a violation. Love can be a very fucked up thing, depending upon who is defining it. And most of us have our own ways of defining it, understanding it, resisting it.

In the way this play rather vividly tortured the audience - provoked, challenged, confronted - I was reminded of one other theater experience, and that was seeing Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Silvia, at the Goodman. Albee’s play had another way of asking us to test the limits of our tolerance, and most of us in the audience don’t want to go that far. No, thank you. Can’t we agree that there are limits to human understanding?

Maybe it’s just me, but I like theater that makes the audience very very uncomfortable. And I don’t like it for gratuitous reasons, for shock value - I like it because I think that is art’s job: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

In the ladies room, I heard one woman ask another, “Do you think all child molesters are so witty?” It was a good question. I take her point. But does it matter? She’s speaking of K. Todd Freeman’s character, who is witty and angry and enduring. He did something awful to a 14 year old, which he called love. Awful things were done to him, we are told. Of course they were. Hurt people hurt people. When Timmy notes that 75 percent of abusers go on to abuse, we wonder what he wants, exactly. People survive horrible circumstances and others fall apart over singular or seemingly minor circumstances. It is hard to gauge trauma, and hard to gauge recovery, survival, justice.

(Cecilia Noble & Edwin Torres in Downstate)

[lorenzoandhismom]

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Adapted by Simon Stephens

Directed by Jonathan Berry 

Steppenwolf for Young Adults, Oct. 5 - 27

Review 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tells the story of 15 year old Christopher Boone, played by Terry Bell in a tour-de-force performance). Christopher sees the world in a very particular way: He is a math prodigy who admires the writing of Sherlock Holmes. He does not like the colors brown or yellow. He asks his priest where heaven is, exactly, and how we can get there, the priest is flummoxed. Like the titular incident, Christopher is curious and direct; not everyone (including his otherwise loving mom and dad) knows quite how to deal with him. He can’t handle loud noises or too much stimulation in general. When presented with such, he puts his hands over his head, curls up into a ball and rocks. He is self-soothing, the best he knows how.

The woman who does see and hear him is Siobhan (Steppenwolf member Caroline Neff), Christopher’s paraprofessional and mentor. She works with him to draw out his particular strengths, and to adapt to a world that isn’t always kind to the hypersensitive.

Much of the play’s narration is delivered by Siobhan, who reads from the notebook that Christopher wrote about the incident. Simon Stephen’s adaptation (of the novel by Mark Haddon) is a play within a play, with many charming asides and meta-commentary. (Christopher says that he “doesn’t like acting” because “it’s not real.” Later, Siobhan warns him of boring the audience as he begins to detail a math proof.)

Our favorite part of this play was that neither the author nor the director diagnoses Christopher Boone; as a result we come to know him more fully, and not through the lens of a reductive diagnosis. Yes, he may have a way of being in the world that is not our own - and yet, we come to understand him. 

Steppenwolf’s production, directed by Jonathan Berry, allows us to see the world through Christopher’s eyes - and we are better for it.  

Steppenwolf’s design team uses film and lighting and a simple set to highlight the ensemble quality to the production. Six actors make up the ensemble, playing various roles and supporting each other in every scene. There are striking stage pictures, backlit by projections, and ensemble  choreography that brings to mind Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints. 

Terry Bell so completely inhabits Christopher, in body and mind, that it is hard to imagine him out of character. As his mother, Rebecca Spence is lovely, and maintains one of the more consistent and convincing British accents.

Lozo and the Moms recommend this play for families. Zo thinks that it might be a bit disturbing for kids under 11 years old; he and his buddy loved it, but found it pretty sad, at least in the first act. The Moms found the plot emotionally overwhelming - by intermission she wasn’t sure she could handle any more devastating plot twists. Still, Zo and the Moms know that the pain of this play reflects and sheds light on the pain of life, like all good art; the audience is rewarded for going on this journey with Christopher. You will gain empathy and understanding, and have the chance to live another life, at least for a few hours.