Those who have followed The Hypocrites’ work over the past several seasons, particularly that directed by Sean Graney, have come to expect certain things: a strong, sometimes overwhelming concept, and a rapid-fire pace. When these elements come together, their work brings new life to scripts (Machinal). When they don’t, they yield productions that feel out-of-balance (Camille/La Traviata).

Equus, now in production at the Athenaeum, seems to be a bit of a departure for Graney. With a simple staging and a less overt director’s hand, Graney and The Hypocrites give Peter Shaffer’s best known play a top-notch production.

Firmly placed in the psychiatry-as-theatre genre, Shaffer’s play seems a little obvious at times. Dr. Martin Dysart (a commanding Kurt Ehrmann), caught in the midst of a mid-career crisis, faces the challenge of an unusual patient, Alan Strang (an intense Geoff Button—above with J.B. Waterman), who has blinded six horses. Given that the audience and Dysart knows all along that Alan committed the crime in question, the drama lies in the gradual revelation of Alan’s psyche, while Dysart simultaneously struggles with his own reservations about making Alan part of a passionless society.

Dysart’s professional quandary provides the less interesting dramatic issue—it’s his interaction with Alan that’s compelling, and in this case Ehrmann and Button have developed an admirable rapport. Equus doesn’t fly without a commanding and charismatic Dysart, and Ehrmann fills the role admirably, though at an occasionally wearying high emotional pitch. Button’s Alan, though extremely well-drawn, doesn’t quite attain the character’s far edge of sanity. Still, these are minor quibbles and the supporting characters, particularly Robert McLean and Karin McKie as the troubled parents and Halena Kays as Alan’s almost love interest Jill, all give exceptionally credible performances.

When Graney does get more overt in his staging, as in Jill and Alan’s ritualistic undressing, it truly serves Shaffer’s story. All in all, The Hypocrites offer up as solid an Equus as any audience can hope for.

Editor’s Note: The Hypocrites are affiliated with PerformInk’s former editor, Mechelle Moe, and Karin McKie is a company member at Stage Left Theatre, where the Kevin Heckman is artistic director.

Equus—The Hypocrites

Chris Jones, Tribune—“Most of the audience members at the Chicago revival from The Hypocrites weren’t even born when this post-absurdist psychodrama first galloped onto the international theatre scene, snagging both a Tony and an unusually broad following in the 1970s. But thanks to an uncommonly passionate production from the director Sean Graney, those young viewers at the Athenaeum Theatre sat riveted in their seats. This inventive, hyper-kinetic show might—and probably should—become the biggest hit of The Hypocrites’ institutional life.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“The play, which first rocked the London and Broadway stages in the 1973-74 season, is now receiving a riveting revival by director Sean Graney and his troupe, The Hypocrites, who have taken up residence in an intimate Athenaeum Theatre studio space. It’s perfect material for Graney, whose own writing frequently deals with the split between superficial human relationships and the kind of soul-wrenching passion that either gets suppressed or destroyed in those brave or crazy enough to seek it out. And the production is a potent reminder of why this drama continues to generate such visceral excitement.”

Justin Hayford, Reader—“Director Sean Graney has a knack for amplifying and even distorting a play’s subtext, creating a kind of neo-expressionism. But for Peter Shaffer’s 1973 psychological drama to work, the subtext must remain hidden: the characters conceal their own motives as they search for others’. From the opening moments of this Hypocrites production, the characters wear their traumas on their sleeves—a particularly problematic strategy for Alan’s troubled parents, who would never advertise the depth of their emotional turmoil before the psychiatrist’s accusatory gaze. Graney’s corral-like design is handsome and efficient, and the performances are committed; the always volatile Kurt Ehrmann is particularly compelling as Dysart. But little intrigue develops, and the play’s rich sexual-religious symbolism is obscured by excessive emoting.”

Nina Metz, Newcity—“(W)ith this potent revival by The Hypocrites—sharp, funny and intellectually engaging—it is easy to overlook the weaker points. Again, Sean Graney shows why he is one of the most interesting directors working in town these days. Talk about an eye for casting: Graney packs his ensemble with actors who give even the smallest roles a compelling nuance. As Alan’s favorite horse, Nugget, J.B. Waterman—costumed by Graney and Jennifer Grace in brown velour yoga pants and a horse-like headpiece—absolutely nails the physicality. He even gets the heavy sound of exhaling breath right. It’s the kind of performance that only works if the actor goes all the way with it, and Waterman goes all the way and then some. It’s not every director who can manage that feat.”

Rick Reed, Windy City—“Thankfully, The Hypocrites’ powerful and compelling production of Peter Shaffer’s Tony-award winning play, clocking in at around 2-1/2 hours, is not a minute too long. This is a play and a production (with spirited direction from the inspired mind of one of Chicago’s most exciting young directors, Sean Graney) that does superbly what all good theatre should do: grabs you in its clutches and refuses to let go. You forget about time. It achieves this feat by giving you a deeply engaging story, characters you can care about (even ones that have done reprehensible things), and a lot to think about after you leave the theatre.”

Seagull—Writers Theatre Chicago

Michael Phillips, Tribune—“The great and mysterious strength of Chekhov’s major plays lies in how little plot Chekhov needed. The Seagull—Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe just opened a richly compelling revival—is beautiful and heartbreaking in its apparent randomness. Conversations, affairs, fates ripple across the lake in the horizon. Deep feeling and deep, painful hilarity—so much love, so little given and received between the right two people—inform every scene.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Director Michael Halberstam’s idea to experiment—floating the play between the Russia of the moment and that of Chekhov’s time, and imitating the experiment in the play itself—is intriguing. But it works only sporadically. And overall, the show seems a bit too unmoored and diffuse. Nevertheless, Christopher McLinden is refreshingly unaffected as Treplev, the Hamlet-like young writer. Robert Scogin is marvelous as Sorin, the aging bureaucrat wallowing in disappointment. Best of all are Brian Sidney Bembridge’s whimsical sets—part scaled-down architectural models and part bohemian chic, with colors, patterns and textures that are a sort of Russian take on CB2 designs.”

Venus Zarris, Gay Chicago—“An absolutely sublime Seagull sours over the oblivious heads of the dull-eyed audience at Writers’ Theatre. This lavish and remarkably beautiful production was lost on most of the viewers who seemed to buy their tickets as either a tax write-off or as a place to go for an expensive nap. The exquisite staging was greeted with a crowd that barely reacted to the excellent timing and humor, and at least a third left after the intermission. I have seen people occasionally leave a play. Usually, one or two will go for personal reasons or if there is something surprisingly offensive to particular audience members, but this is a fantastic and fresh production of a Checkhov classic that rivals anything you would see on any stage. This production is a complete triumph.”

Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“This Writer’s Theatre show seems to be aiming somewhere between its play’s ill-starred debut and its later triumph. Why else is Christopher McLinden’s Konstantin done up to look like Harry Potter’s gawky school chum, Karen Janes Woditsch’s Masha as a stoop-shouldered GothChick and Susan Hart playing Irina in full Margo Channing mode? Did director Michael Halberstam, like Chekhov, underestimate the time necessary to slow the ambient tone from satirical artifice to weary despair? Whatever its inspiration, the results diminish our emotional investment as we watch these characters ruin their lives and those of everybody around them, so certain are we that a satisfying resolution to everyone’s troubles will be forthcoming.”

Burn This—New World Repertory Theatre

Jack Helbig, Daily Herald—“I caught Joan Allen and John Malkovich performing in the play’s premiere production on Broadway. I never thought anyone could equal the sensitivity and power of Allen’s Anna. I was wrong. Mary Grill does both, matching or besting my fondest memories of Allen. At times she performs with the sensitivity and vulnerability of a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. At other times, she shows that steely strength that makes Anna such a fascinating character. If I didn’t know otherwise, I would have thought Wilson had written the role for Grill and not for Allen. As impressive, though, is Ian Shaw’s performance in the role created for Malkovich, the tortured, half-articulate blue-collar man Pale.”

A Streetcar Named Desire—Raven Theatre

Chris Jones, Tribune—“This is not a definitively poetic treatment of the Williams masterwork, nor is it a radical re-interpretation. Sultry passions set not this former Clark Street supermarket on fire. This is a solid rather than a textually revelatory production. But while Menendian’s smart, careful, thorough and well-paced show might be too prosaic and irony-free for some aficionados of this oft-revived play, there’s no doubting here that Dominica Wasilewska’s certain, nicely grounded Stella has the genuinely all-trumping hots for Mike Vieau’s deliciously coiled-up Stanley. We absolutely know why she stands by her man—his brutal mistreatment of two disparate sisters notwithstanding. That gives this production an advantage over most Streetcar revivals.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Menendian has crafted a finely realistic, easily colloquial production that steers clear of the tendency to wallow in the play’s humid poetry and hallucinatory, molasses-like Big Easy heat. He has set the production at an unusually brisk pace. And his principal actors suggest very real characters who are forced to share a hot, cramped apartment where their distinctive personalities are bound to chafe, and where at least two of them are destined to go into meltdown. The whole play makes perfect sense, and the ache of it is not at all diminished as a result.”

Lawrence Bommer, Reader—“Michael Menendian’s perfectly cast staging of Tennessee Williams’s domestic tragedy for Raven Theatre abounds in discoveries. Nick Keenan’s evocative sound design renders the seedy French Quarter setting painfully audible, and Liz Fletcher makes us taste the insanity in Blanche’s shabby-genteel fantasies. Mike Vieau plays Stanley Kowalski with a territorial brutality rather than the usual smoldering eroticism, and Dominica Wasilewska registers Stella’s anguish: caught between an abusive husband and a prevaricating sister, she’s easily the tale’s greatest victim. Daniel Ruben gives salt-of-the-earth Mitch, Blanche’s last hope, so much bedrock realism you keep expecting him to see the audience and flee. The claustrophobic slum set, by Menendian and Leif Olsen, completely grounds us in this field of screams.”

Jennifer Vanasco, Free Press—“Director Michael Menendian has stripped away the usual fluff and melodrama surrounding Tennessee Williams’ classic and has left a taut story of life at the bottom. Menendian and set designer Leif Olsen have created a cluttered French Quarter apartment that heightens the tension between the characters. It is clear they can’t escape each other. The cast all draw fine, empathetic portraits…Dominica Wasilewska is an ebullient, solid Stella, clearly in love with her husband but with a strong responsibility to care for her mentally sick sister. Wasilewska is astonishing here; she transforms gradually from carefree effervescence to tense resignation as she gets drawn into the battle of wills between her husband and sister.”

Spoon River Anthology—Theo Ubique Theatre Company

Kerry Reid, Reader—“I can’t think of a better way to meditate on our “national values” this election season than by seeing this stark, intimate production by Theo Ubique Theatre Company. Under Fred Anzevino’s skillful direction and backed by musical director Michael Miller on piano and Richard Veras on fiddle, the six ensemble members use their clear, soaring singing voices to find the aching pathos, humor, and hunger in Masters’ timeless tales. When a dead Civil War soldier asks about the words on his tomb—“‘Pro Patria.’ What do they mean, anyway?”—the piece feels numbingly contemporary.”

Quote of the Fortnight:
“That old maxim that proclaims ‘the show must go on’ does have its limits.”—Hedy Weiss reviewing Forever Tango at the Athenaeum in the Sun-Times.