8-31-07
Well... The Fountain Works
Contrary to popular opinion, critics most always want the shows they review to be good. After all, we give up our two plus hours, just like everyone else, and if we have to sit through the production, we’d much rather be entertained at the least. And even when a show doesn’t succeed for one reason or another, it’s important to respect the work the artists involved have put in.
But sometimes you see a show when some of the artists don’t appear to be respecting the work. And that’s offensive to the audience, the critic and to other artists. Unfortunately Mom and Dad Productions’ attempt at Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real fails on a number of levels, and also features a couple of performers who appear to be taking liberties with Williams’ text. Presumably Williams doesn’t mention Walgreens in his 1953 fantasy. And there are some improvisatory moments that appear to have been added that might amuse the actor doing them, but don’t contribute anything to the production and seemed to derail other cast members trying to hold to Williams’ words.
Camino Real is what theatre companies like to market as a “rarely produced classic.” This generally is code for a minor play from the author’s canon. In this case Williams, who tended to err on the side of metaphor anyway, really went crazy, gathering a collection of historic and mythical personages together in a sort of existential Casablanca. The Gutman, helped by armed guards, rules the road that runs through town and separates the hotel from the slums. Into this world, Kilroy, a one-time boxer with a heart of gold—literally—wanders, briefly shaking things up.
This is a show that needs guidance from the director, but Joe Feliciano, who also performs as Lord Byron and The Baron, among other roles, appears to have not offered much assistance to his cast. Many of the actors fall into the trap of declaiming Williams’ somewhat overwritten poetry and failing to connect with their partners. As a result, every path through this difficult play is denied the audience. Many of the actors don’t seem to fully understand their role, and fall to playing stereotypes rather than characters. There are a few exceptions. Sean Ewert as Casanova doesn’t find the full depth of his character, but he does at least reach out for a connection with Petrucia Finkler as Marguerite. She, in turn, sometimes errs on the side of whining, but does find some of her character’s pathos.
On the technical side, either Steve Monk’s light design makes no sense, or stage manager Lena Pittman wasn’t sure how to run the light board. Or perhaps a stand-in was serving as stage manager, though no announcement was made. Lights came up randomly and in inappropriate places, jarringly shifting from scene to scene. However, Frank Walters’ set is serviceable enough and a working fountain on stage is always an achievement.
Still, there’s a palpable lack of attention to detail pervading this production. The truly unfortunate effect will be seen in those patrons who decide to take a chance on a little-known theatre. Unfortunately, they will not see work that truly represents Chicago’s impressive non-Equity scene.
Camino Real, Mom and Dad Productions
Justin Hayford, Reader—“[T]he script’s avalanche of metaphors and tableaux proves too much for Mom and Dad Productions (and contrary to their assertion, this is not the play’s Chicago premiere—Center Theater staged it in 1986). Director Joe Feliciano’s unlyrical production proceeds in fits and starts: the acting is uneven, the design rudimentary, the pacing pedestrian. Rather than pageantry it offers, to quote Williams, a procession of little events.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“The New Republic’s Eric Bentley at least noted that the fluid literature Williams offers up ‘has meaning only as created by actor and director.’ Given that criterion, the five-decade–late Chicago premiere of Camino Real has next to no meaning at all. On a two-dimensional set whose paint splotches suggest the most amateur community-theater ambitions, and featuring a host of surface-level performances that don’t lag far behind, Feliciano’s production is surreal only in that it’s happening at all.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“Williams pays a price for creating such a sweeping menagerie: No character lingers long enough to hold our interest, let alone our hearts. The jerky pace and clumsy transitions in this revival by Mom and Dad Productions only makes the action seem all the more arbitrary. Our supposedly poetic tour guide, Bato Prostran’s matter-of-fact performance as Gutman robs his narration of any lyrical urgency. Casey Freund’s Kilroy, Williams’ Alice in this wonderland, is accessibly ordinary but can’t convey a sense of astonishment at the singular events around him. But there’s a limit to what director Joe Feliciano can do with this perversely precious play.”
Envoy, Echo Theatre Company
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“The students are a mix of the naive, the angry, the out of touch. They include the wise, maternal Simone (Caitlin McGlone), who cradles her badly wounded friend Matt (Mark Minton, who will alternate with Stephen Louis Grush); Jacob (Steve Peebles), the smartest, most sardonic of the bunch; the enigmatic Pippa (Jenn Spain); the volatile Seanna (Lucy Carr); the pop culture moron Bat (Ben Carr); the born-again Christian Judith (Jessica Thigpen); the pallid Tom (Mathew Sherbach); Andre (Darrin Meyers), the black student who never planned to be part of the trip, and Peter (Brandon Van Lear) and Jamie (Alexandra Goodman), who get roughed up. That is all there is here. As for the prognosis for freedom: Doesn’t look promising.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Reader—“The actors playing the diverse characters in this Echo Theatre Company debut production are given several interpretive options, and at each show a different performer makes an unscripted choice that determines the ending. But the many earlier dramas in this genre can’t help but make the characters’ responses and the artificial crises here predictable. This play’s more useful for promoting discussion than illuminating facts.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Performed mostly by newcomers, Envoy isn’t without impressive turns. Brandon Van Lear is natural and convincing as the group’s street-smart rationalist; Caitlin McGlone does empathic work as the child of former hippies; and the excellent Stephen Grush makes you wish his injured character didn’t spend most of the play unconscious. But it would take more than diplomatic acting to soften this imperialist effort.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“[Carin] Silkaitis’ staging is so accurate you want to keep a literal exit strategy in mind… But the play is too wise to blame the victims. It’s enough to capture the crisis as it unwinds even if it remains unresolved. Unlike these characters, however, we’re not here against our will. We’re trapped as any good play traps its audience, releasing us only when the spell is unbound. Here we can only wonder what we would have done, which character embodies our coping strategy. The young ensemble are too tightly taut to single out any particular performance. It’s praise enough just to say how much they deserve each other and how much they’ve earned the play.”
Evolution, MOB Productions
Albert Williams, Reader—“In Jonathan Marc Sherman’s witty but contrived comedy, a Harvard grad student illiterate in pop culture becomes an ‘untainted’ Hollywood talent. After pitching a TV series about Darwin and evolution, he ends up writing a hit sitcom about Adam and Eve. Sherman’s dialogue is clever, as is MOB Productions’ staging. But the play’s shallow satiric premise (commercial TV is dumb—duh!) would be better suited to a short sketch than a 90-minute one-act.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Director [Casey] Van Wormer’s stripped-down production has plenty of assets, including [Dan] Carroll as the lead dweeb-gone-Hollywood, but slightly more distractions. And, as if encouraged by Sherman’s metatheatrical tactics, she puts her actors in MOB Productions T-shirts whenever they step out of the action to speak directly to us. If the production were a little bit stronger, [Mark] Matthews’ wiry, kinetic performance as a pop culture–guzzling speed freak would be considered a breakout. But as it stands, it just makes you wish that everything else were as good as he is. And that he could be in a real play instead of a play that apologizes for being one.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“But MOB Productions is not content to simply preach this tired sermon, instead proceeding to demonstrate it with a score of incidental music referencing such familiar audial cues as the bridge from Law & Order and slickly-produced video clips viewed on an increasing number of monitor screens to provide a running backdrop of iconic pop-culture images. Is this distracting? You bet it is! Again and again, the recognition sparked by the pre-packaged elements pulls attention from the drab live-action scenario with its classroom-ambient actors… It’s a clever concept, but ultimately shoots the show in its own foot—another martyr to technology. Only in this case, the fatal wound is self-inflicted.”
Red Light Winter, Thunder & Lightning Ensemble
Kerry Reid, Tribune—“Thunder & Lightning Ensemble’s production features one fine performance, one pretty good one, and one that just doesn’t ring true at all. On the page, Christina is a gold-hearted hooker with an improbable backstory. But Sadie Rogers nails the character’s shifting emotional terrain with affecting ?lan. As Matt, Andy Hagar is a rumpled mensch with some creepy tendencies of his own, though Hagar occasionally lapses into mannered tics. But Andy Carl’s Davis can’t project the allegedly mesmerizing charm that sucked Christina into his orbit and that allows Matt to tolerate being bullied by him years after their college days. With that weak leg, the entire dramatic table in Chris Arnold’s bare-bones staging teeters on the edge of implausibility too often to claim our full allegiance.”
Tony Adler, Reader—“Life in Adam Rapp’s play is nasty, LaBute-ish, and short. Like Neil LaBute, who made his reputation with In the Company of Men, Rapp focuses on the vicious pastimes of a charming narcissist. Upwardly mobile Davis, traveling with his suicidal college pal, prescribes sex for his depression and brings him Christina from Amsterdam’s red-light district—but not before cynically creating the circumstances for deep awfulness. Chris Arnold’s Thunder & Lightning Ensemble production is serviceable.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“But whether or not you saw Red Light Winter the first time around, and especially if you didn’t, director Chris Arnold’s brutally funny and genuinely affecting revival for T&L is certainly worth checking out… [T]he casting couldn’t be better. Andy Hagar is the play’s emotional anchor playing the sweetly sardonic and self-deprecating intellectual uncomfortable in his own skin. The striking Sadie Rogers, with gorgeous lips that would make Mick Jagger green with envy, is equal parts sexy and sympathetic. And Andrew Carl draws upon his natural boisterousness to make his character appropriately irritating.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Yet encountering the play here for the first time (its non-Equity Chicago premiere gets the most skeletal staging imaginable), I was struck by the unexpected lengths to which Rapp has gone to make his characters into idiosyncratic people we care about before he smashes them. (Even his most indulgent device—a character writing a play about his experience abroad—is less irritating than you’d anticipate.) Two of the three performances in Arnold’s production bring you inside of the most mature play Rapp has written.”
Venus Zarris, Gay Chicago—“Perhaps the most remarkable element to this production is director Chris Arnold’s incredible transformation from the sophomoric and sloppy Earl The Vampire, his last play with Thunder and Lightning, to this impressive and exigent dramatic achievement. I have seen companies go from success to failure and vice-versa but seldom have I seen one make such a positive transformation. This is a prime example of ‘you can’t judge a theatre company by its last play’ and of the extraordinary dramatic and professional growth that can be witnessed on the stages of Chicago theatre. Despite the shortcuts and shortcomings of the script, Red Light Winter is a cleverly captivating and powerfully poignant dramatic prize.”
Quote of the Fortnight
“They don’t write shows like Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet anymore, and depending on your taste you can either mourn that fact or celebrate it.”—Hedy Weiss reviewing Light Opera Works’ production of Bitter Sweet in the Sun Times.