9-14-07
Timeline Doesn't Take Flight with Odets
Sitting at Timeline, waiting to see their latest production—Clifford Odets’ Paradise Lost—I shamelessly eavesdropped on two women sitting behind me as they complained about Steppenwolf and its acclaimed production of August: Osage County. “No playwright should need that long to say whatever he has to say,” one asserted. “I left at intermission,” agreed the other.
Well, fair enough. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. And I didn’t hear what they thought of Timeline’s latest effort. But Clifford Odets certainly doesn’t take three and a half hours to say what he has to say. While TimeLine’s production runs about two hours, 20 minutes, Odets lays out his ideas early, often and without much subtlety.
At its center, this is the story of the Gordon family. Leo, the patriarch, holds to his principles despite all misfortune, like a modern-day Job. Yet despite his high ideals, he has raised three very flawed children. His son Julie is slowly wasting away from an illness. Daughter Pearl is socially awkward, and, despite her talent as a pianist, she cannot make a living playing. Ben, the prodigal son, left his career as an Olympic level runner due to a bad heart and can’t find his way in the world.
Odets succeeds and fails on a production’s ability to marry his heightened language to his naturalistic storylines. Director Lou Contey fails to navigate this delicate balance. His cast contains several veteran Chicago actors, but all too often Odets’ language gets buried beneath excessive emoting. Either that or the actors fall into the cadences of naturalism, not acknowledging Odets’ heightened text. In general, the women fare better than the men, particularly Janet Ulrich Brooks as the matriarch of the family, but unfortunately the women are also pretty underwritten. As Leo, Michael Kingston avoids more of the textual traps than most of the cast, but he lacks a presence to help ground the center of this play.
And part of the problem lies in Odets’ script. It’s never totally clear where the center of this play lies. Events meander along, and, with the exception of Brian McCartney’s continuously desperate Sam Katz, there’s no sense of the uncertain times. Contey and his cast fail to keep the stakes raised, so when terrible events arrive in the second act, the actors appear to be pushing to try to give weight to events that could have been foreshadowed earlier. Contey’s staging lacks a certain crispness, and generally feels uninspired. Karen Hoffman’s set has its interesting touches, but, as it’s mainly dominated by a huge beige wall, only feels appropriate in the final act as the furniture is removed and the house lost.
TimeLine generally presents high quality work, and there’s a baseline level of craft here that doesn’t fail them. But the whole production just feels uninspired, and given the difficulties of Odets’ text, a little inspiration is necessary to make this story take flight.
Paradise Lost, TimeLine Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune—“Contey’s honorable show is one of those only-possible-in-Chicago attractions in which 14 juicy character actors of all shapes and ages are crammed on a tiny stage, willing to act their guts out for the sheer love of the fight. When these shows really cook, you’re reminded never to live anywhere else. But while it has some stellar individual moments, this production doesn’t rise to the collective boil achieved by other recent Chicago productions of drama from this great era. Why? Mostly because the show is insufficiently certain of its own identity.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Director Louis Contey has an uncanny gift for tapping into this writer’s searing, heart-baring style with its mix of deep poetic realism and near-operatic emotions. And not only has he orchestrated fine ensemble playing by his 14 actors, but he has made sure they each supply just the right musical voice to bring this story of volatile times and volatile people to life.”
Barbara Vitello, Daily Herald—“But TimeLine’s fine production has much more going for it than good timing. It has a sure-handed director in Louis Contey, whose vital, well-paced revival unfolds on Karen Hoffman’s inventively conceived, comfortably middle class set dominated by baby grand piano. Paradise Lost is an impassioned play infused with uncertainty and tension which Contey does a fine job of sustaining. Gritty and unflinching, it features characters whose quaint colloquialisms and lyrical slang reflect the eloquence of the common man.”
Kerry Reid, Reader—“Clifford Odets’s follow-up to Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! is this ‘fuzzy piece of a wool-gathering quiet,’ as its original director, Harold Clurman, put it. In Louis Contey’s finely honed staging, the struggling Depression-era middle-class Gordon family face their disintegrating dreams with a mix of stoicism and bitterness. Janet Ulrich Brooks is compelling as matriarch Clara in a play that still resonates in these days of rampant foreclosures.”
Nina Metz, New City—“Something about the Timeline Theatre production doesn’t feel lived-in (Louis Contey is the director), but individually the performances are excellent. Janet Ulrich Brooks is especially good as Clara Gordon, the no-nonsense mother who signals her disinterest by saying, ‘Take a piece of fruit.’ Anything to change the subject. Scott Aiello is all coiled rage and Marxist zeal as Pike, the furnace man not easily bullied by his circumstances. And as the hoodlum who has found a profitable (read: criminal) line of work, Jeremy Glickstein’s Kewpie is the most complex character of the lot—a young man who simultaneously idolizes and dishonors his closest friend.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Though the cast of Contey’s revival works awfully hard to convince us that the chips are down, the converse irony is that the moxie often feels fabricated and self-aware. As the dreams get dashed and the kids get sicker and the family piano gets sold, Contey’s actors appear to be fiercely performing the year 1935 rather than living in it.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“Contey’s command of this Depression-era tapestry is as awesome as the author’s. TimeLine, a troupe who can do no theatrical wrong, assembles an ensemble so right for their parts and each other that 1932 is tomorrow. Scott Aiello is a force of nature as the firebrand who most speaks for the author. As the beleaguered patriarch, Michael Kingston offers an electric look at a man fighting to stay decent while forestalling bankruptcy. As his wife, battered by life but not her husband, Janice Ulrich Brooks looks equally weighed down by worry and lifted by love. Though clearly the eternally down-on-his luck father-in-law, Whit Spurgeon’s Gus is as vital and worthy as Cervantes’ Sancho Panza or Mark Twain’s Jim.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City—“Odets uses his characters more to make his political points than to further the plot; several speechifying types show up briefly and then are never seen again, leaving a thread of a subplot dangling. Each member of Gordon’s family represents an iconic element of the middle class, something that works well if it’s didacticism you’re going after but not so well if your aim is a full, flesh-and-blood storyline. Even so, the cast here—directed with great intelligence and heart by Louis Contey—is so good that it’s easy to over look the fact that for Odets has created a piece that’s propagandist teaching tool first and entertainment second.”
The Fool (Returns to his Chair), The Neo-Futurists
Laura Molzahn, Reader—“This noisy, confused 90-minute show about the history of the fool has no discernible themes and rarely any humor. Conceived by John Pierson and written by him and the other six performers, it consists of many vignettes apparently unified only by the plastic milk crates the performers wear on their heads, obscuring their faces and muffling their words. Gloomy lighting makes the piece even more inaccessible. The Neo-Futurists can do better—this feels like an assault.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“I don’t have to love a work of art in order to appreciate it. Hell, I don’t even have to like it as long as I can make some sense of what it’s trying to say intellectually or accomplish artistically. I try to remember this each time I encounter something that could be termed ‘experimental.’ But here the storytelling is muddled, the imagery is not memorable, and the overall execution so sloppy that all I could gather from The Fool, even with the added benefit of a press release to explain it all for me, was that it was one of the most pointless, self-indulgent, in-your-face and gross-for-gross-sake ‘experiments’ that I have ever had the displeasure of sitting through.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“Let’s talk about those milk crates, actually, as they illustrate the one big problem with The Fool. They are the major design element of the show: Milk crates function as set, props, masks, even light fixtures (Maggie Fullilove-Nugent’s outside-the-box lighting design uses no traditional stage instruments, only ‘practicals’ controlled largely by the actors). It’s a striking visual, but we’re still wondering: Why? What about the history of fools through the ages—this show’s purported subject—made Pierson think ‘milk crates’? And that’s where things fall flat. As enjoyable as the cast’s clowning is, it—and the show itself—doesn’t show us any connections or insight.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City—“With The Fool (Returns to His Chair), the Neo-Futurists do everything in their power to drive the audience from the theater before the roughly hour-and-40-minute, intermission-free performance ends. Conceived by John Pierson, this is a show with no plot performed in a theater so dark you can’t see what’s going on much of the time. And when you can see, the actors are wearing crates on their heads, thereby ensuring that nothing they do makes any connection whatsoever with their audience.”
Web Behrens, Free Press—“Ultimately, The Fool provides a pleasant diversion, if you can hang with the chaos. A few sequences try your patience, and the stunts don’t necessarily translate into substantive food for thought, but overall it’s surely an entertaining diversion. (And who knew you could create such striking visuals with plastic cubes?) As the Diogenes quote displayed in the lobby sagely proclaims: ‘Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you’ve got an audience.’”
Venus Zarris Gay Chicago—“The ensemble is extremely talented, engaged and enthusiastic. There are brilliant moments delivered by the idiosyncratically delightful Eliza Burmester, the oddly wonderful Dean Evans and the childishly charming Ryan Walters. It is not that the concepts are so complex or abstract that they fail to have impact, but rather they are simply too loose and slipshod to deliver the goods.”
Three Sisters, The Gift Theatre Company
Nina Metz, Tribune—“In the current revival, a straightforward effort from The Gift Theatre in Jefferson Park, the play’s inherent woe takes on numbing proportions. There is much talk of boredom in this translation by Paul Schmidt. ‘I’m bored,’ declares Masha. Winter is a bore. Life itself is a bore. Unfortunately, so is this production in many spots. The Gift’s long, narrow space presents a challenge, especially with a cast numbering in the double digits. As directed by Michael Patrick Thornton, the actors are shuffled around in clunky groupings. There is no sense of time or place. And the staging lacks a consistent theatrical universe—some props exist; others are mimed. Frankly, it’s weird.”
Kerry Reid, Reader—“Three mottled columns onstage serve as apt metaphors for the title characters, marked but not entirely broken at the end of what might be the saddest of Chekhov’s plays. Director Michael Patrick Thornton’s minimalist approach—and a five-month rehearsal process—should mean the acting is the focus. But though the blocking is smooth, and a couple of the performances are very good, several others don’t vary the overall tone of emotional aridity, denying us the wrenching climax Chekhov sets up.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“Set designer Dan Conley’s backdrop to the proceedings—a sinister and oppressive black wall—is a constant physical reminder of the melancholy that underscores the mirth. And Thornton’s inventive yet tedious minimalist staging suggests a clinical and intellectual examination of the proceedings instead of a spontaneous and humorous celebration of them. The end result is a Three Sisters that emphasizes a suffocating fatalism over gradual resignation, and a curious revival that fascinates yet rarely moves.”
Novid Parsi, Time Out—“In the Gift’s subtext-free zone, these three actors’ talk of Moscow merely suggests a town up the street, so one’s response becomes, Why not just hitch a ride? Where Chekhov’s densely populated play has multiple foci at any one moment, Thornton’s cast, at best, manages one. His actors telegraph (and so reduce) their emotions: Vacant-eyed stares signal longing; tears, sadness; shouts, anger. Subtlety, meanwhile, never makes it onto the stage. Skipping the unspoken beats between the words, the Gift actors paradoxically seem at once extremely hurried and horribly slow.”
Emily Lee, Gay Chicago—“Director Michael Patrick Thornton has put much effort into this work, rehearsing his ensemble for an unheard of five months. It is a shame that all that work is lost in something as simple as focusing on heartbreak in lieu of hope. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the performances of Jenny Connell as Olga and Paul D’Addario as Andrey, her defeated brother. We need to see these characters fight through their despair, never mind that it is impossible to do so. Alas, we only see them wallow in sadness and fatigue for the better part of three hours.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City—“Directing Chekhov’s drama of dreams forever deferred, Gift Theatre artistic director Michael Patrick Thornton shows a keen eye for illuminating the stark, yearning poetry of melancholia. This is solid if not sublime Chekhov, and it is astutely leavened by Thornton’s grasp of the gallows comedy that makes Three Sisters such a daunting challenge to bring to life and such an accurate portrayal of the absurd ache that largely defines the human condition.
The Odd Couple, Drury Lane Oakbrook
Kerry Reid, Tribune—“Of course, it would be a mistake to approach the play as a sociological dissertation, and Greg Kolack’s staging for Drury Lane Oakbrook is thoroughly smart and crowd-pleasing entertainment. The chemistry between Norm Boucher’s slovenly sportswriter, Oscar, and Dan Rodden’s Felix, the obsessive-compulsive news writer, takes a while to click in, but the actors understand that the key to both men is their need for an audience.”
Quote of the Fortnight:
“Call it a clever confluence of Jungian collective cadavers.”—Scott C. Morgan reviewing Annoyance Theatre’s production of Love is Dead: A NecroMantic Musical Comedy in Windy City.