2-29-08
Cast Breathes Life Into So-So Corpses
Steep Theatre Company, like many of Chicago’s small professional theatres, manages to do impressive work despite the challenges of a less-than-ideal space. Unfortunately, it seems on top of everything else, they have a band practicing upstairs, so the last half-hour of their current production, Breathing Corpses, had to compete with music loud enough to shake my seat.
Fortunately, the first half of this Chicago premiere is the stronger part of Laura Wade’s play. These five loosely connected scenes rotate around three violent events—two murders and a suicide. And Wade has managed a structural in-joke. Each of the events appears to have caused another, but none of them apparently happened first. This circular structure only seems to be there for cleverness’ sake, but it does create a dynamic connecting otherwise unrelated material.
The scenes vary in strength, starting with a meek hotel employee (Julia Siple) discovering a suicide victim and opening up to him. The suicide (Peter Moore) runs a self-storage facility with a strange scent emerging from one of the units. His wife (a nicely scattered Franette Liebow) and employee (the very funny Brad Akin) urge him to open the unit where he discovers the corpse of a woman. We then meet the woman (Lucy Carapetyan) and her abused boyfriend (Jonathan Edwards) who finally snaps when he discovers she’s abusing his dog. Of course she’s under stress because she discovered a body while walking his dog. Then we snap back to the self-storage owner who’s in depression since discovering the body, before returning to the hotel employee—who also seems to become the discovered body—as she meets a slightly creepy guest (Alex Gilmour).
The mutually abusive couple proves to be the most difficult scene to endure. Director Robin Witt allows Carapetyan and Edwards to play the emotional state so strongly that it really becomes a scene of shouts and it’s difficult to decide who you’d prefer to see dead. However, the rest of the performances are quite solid. The play works best when Wade’s situations allow an absurd and original humor to emerge. Witt wisely doesn’t allow her actors to push that humor too strongly. But later in the play that humor falters in the face of a couple ready to kill each other and a man ready to kill himself. Grim subjects, to be sure, and perhaps Witt and her cast could have found better opposites to play, but most of the problems here fall to the script.
Of course those more difficult scenes were also about the time the band started rehearsing, so my reaction might be skewed. But still, Breathing Corpses is clever and somewhat entertaining. And Steep is launching a $30,000 capital campaign to help it build out a new space—hopefully one with better sound-proofing.
Breathing Corpses, Steep Theatre Co.
Albert Williams, Reader—“By turns darkly comic and harrowing, the one-act nails the anguish of dysfunctional relationships in which trust and passion have turned into tedium and rage. Robin Witt’s Midwest-premiere staging does well by the younger characters, but Moore and Liebow come up short as the marrieds whose lives are destroyed by their inability to connect.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“[I]n this brisk Steep production, director Robin Witt handles the material by young British scribe Wade the way British mysteries are best delivered: tart and lively, even with all the dead bodies lying about… With nary an underqualified actor, and a creepily impersonal wrap-around aluminum-siding set from Marcus Stephens, Steep takes us on a journey that’s also something of a trip.”
Jonathan Abarbanel, Windy City—“Breathing Corpses is grim—although sprinkled with quirky humor—but it’s never tragic, and that’s the limitation. The characters lack gravitas; they are silly people. Wade is a young author not yet of weight and depth, although her crisp dialogue technique shines. Wade provides fine opportunities for actors and a clearly focused director in a series of two-character and three-character scenes, most of which could be little one-act plays all by themselves. Fortunately, Steep is deep in talented actors guided by the experienced director Robin Witt.”
Othello, Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Chris Jones, Tribune—“Derrick Lee Weeden, the imposing actor in the title role, is an international tragedian in traditional mode… Yet Weeden is no cold classic craftsman—his eyes constantly appear moist, as if his Othello constantly teeters on some catastrophic brink of his own creation. I enjoyed Weeden’s striking performance very much. You rarely see classical acting in that mode. The problem with the show—and it’s a very serious one—is that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the context of the rest of Maraden’s visually elegant and smoothly staged, but stylistically scattered, production.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Director Marti Maraden has shrewdly set her production in the Victorian era, adding a smart but apt whiff of colonialism and paternalism to the mix… Working with composer Marc Desromeaux, Maraden also has given the play an operatic quality, tapping Derrick Lee Weeden, a veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for the title role. Weeden, a dynamic actor, is different from everyone else on stage—with his mellifluous baritone, strongly punctuated diction and a larger-than-life acting style that harks back to Paul Robeson. Here, truly, is the outsider, and the man Shakespeare so often writes about—one with little knowledge of himself or others.”
Kerry Reid, Reader—“Derrick Lee Weeden’s performance recalls a time when classical actors wanted us to know just how hard they were working. Full-throated, physically imposing, emotionally outsized, but never cartoonish, Weeden imbues Othello with fearsome dignity if not wisdom. Unfortunately, he’s ill-matched with Paul Niebanck’s understated-to-a-fault Iago, who tells us, ‘I am not what I am’ but never what he is: ordinary man undone by envy, or soulless monster bent on destruction for the hell of it? …Marti Maraden’s staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy lacks sufficient insight into the characters’ interior mechanisms.”
Monica Westin, New City—“A well-paced, stylish production that focuses attention on the latitude of Shakespeare’s language while adding artfully to the play’s meaning, Marti Maraden’s Othello focuses on the political of the personal, with subtle messages about imperialism, colonization and their microcosms in the domestic sphere. The brilliant set design and costumes tastefully reflect themes of colonialism, from white suits to North African lamps, while simultaneously bringing to mind a kind of surrealist, distilled Magritte painting.”
Brian Nemusak, Time Out—“Weeden has an amazing baritone, but his performance is two-note: first blanket stolidity, then paranoid bluster. The abruptness of his transformation constitutes the principal challenge of the script, requiring strenuous modulation—much of which relies exactly upon Othello’s intelligence and dignity. To be tragic, his possession by jealousy must contrast with baseline sensitivity and beleaguered nobility, nuances Weeden doesn’t quite convey. As Iago, bright-toned tenor Niebanck is better, but he plays the surface too single-mindedly. His cons are all goal-oriented performance, rarely emphasizing the double-entendre lines that comprise much of the play’s linguistic, philosophical and penny-dreadful appeal.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Thus, director Marti Maraden reveals just how close Shakespeare’s gloomy fable of vengeful deception comes to Wodehousian farce. Her transposition of the story to late-Victorian period makes for an ambience of straitlaced artifice recalling the comedies of Oscar Wilde, or even Gilbert & Sullivan. And the casting of fresh-faced Paul Niebanck as the duplicitous Iago, as contrasted with Derrick Lee Weeden’s rustic-accented Othello, renders us immediately aware of the cultural dissimilarities between the two.”
Pitching Penguins, Flaxen Theater
Brian Nemtusak, Reader—“Based on authors Michael Rosenbaum and David Brimm’s experiences inside the industry, this unremarkable look at the everyday farce of marketing/advertising boasts a handful of chuckleworthy lines and sight gags amid a lot of watchable stuff that’d probably be funnier if you’d worked in the office that inspired it. Only Thom Goodwin possesses the smooth Newhartian touch necessary to consistently pull the comedy off, but the cast all have their moments and the play’s two hours fly right by.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Director Karin Shook keeps hijinks forthcoming and the pace brisk. The characterizations vary in their degree of exaggeration (though Thom Goodwin’s poker-faced delivery of the line, ‘I’ve never seen anybody with so many hidden talents’ should be taped for instructional purposes), but each persona displays the irrevocable conviction we recognize from our own experiences amid similar eccentrics to be found in every community. Once the performers fine-tune the rhythms inherent in their material, its documentary value should become evident.”
Talking in Over, Lifeline Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune—“On the one hand, the piece is smart, sensual and intriguing… Furthermore, the acting is quite solid… On the other hand, the work doesn’t easily transfer to the dramatic because there are virtually no actual scenes… But given the absence of the dramatic, on the harsh stage these characters find it tougher to maintain their charm than on the page. By the end of a show that needs some judicious cuts and a clearer sense of focus, you’ll likely find yourself thinking that all three of these overanalyzing whiners deserve each other in some complex combination of their own choosing.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Julian Barnes, the contemporary British writer (and Francophile), is a master stylist who knows precisely how to construct (and deconstruct) the classic triangle. And in Talking It Over, his razor-sharp adaptation for Lifeline Theatre, Peter Greenberg proves he is in perfect sync with Barnes’ 1991 novel of the same name. So is director Dorothy Milne, her ideal cast and gifted set designer Andre LaSalle… The three principal actors are impeccable in every way, but so is the supporting cast—the delicious Ann Wakefield as Gillian’s worldly wise French mother and Katie McLean, briefly stealing the show, as a brashly comic former girlfriend. Bloody good all around.”
Kerry Reid, Reader—“It’s always a pleasure to see a Chicago company tackle writing that crackles with multiple layers of consciousness and linguistic complexity, and Lifeline usually has a better handle on this sort of material than most. But though Peter Greenberg’s adaptation of a 1992 Julian Barnes novel about a British love triangle is faithful to the essentials and the broad outlines of its characters, too much of the excruciating confusion about how much control we have over whom we choose to love and how we hurt others is left on the cutting room floor. Too often while the characters are talking it over, I was wondering why I should care.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“Adaptor/writer Greenberg deserves most of the praise: I’m usually suspect of literary adaptations…but I was deeply impressed with Greenberg’s decision to fold in much of Barnes’ original rhetoric into direct address monologues for the first act, setting up the foundation to these characters’ personalities and narrative arcs, and then abandoning much of this in the second half for a more traditional dramaturgical structure incorporating dramatized exchanges. Certainly the piece still has its dense passages and feels a bit overlong, but a balance between the discussed and the dramatized has been found and rewards are to be had for the audience member with an attention span.”
Craig Keller, Time Out—“Part of the problem is Greenberg’s script, which retains plenty of Barnes’s clever repartee but fails to build any sort of tension among manipulative lovers. But the bigger hitch is Milne’s static staging, which separates the leads onto three pie-shaped tiers beneath three large scaffolds draped with rotating paintings, and intermittently spotlights each actor, Disney World Hall of Presidents–style, as they piece the story together mainly with soliloquies. There are a few affecting vignettes strewn throughout, when the lines blur and the three reenact scenes from their past, but not enough.”
Scott C. Morgan, Windy City—“Greenberg’s dramatization draws you in and grasps your attention, painting a nuance-filled picture of the difficulty of maintaining a relationship that gets glossed over in many romantic dramas. If there are any quibbles to be had, some character motivations aren’t fully convincing when spoken aloud vs. the way they might be internalized in a novel… To be sure, Talking It Over isn’t everyone’s idea of date-night material. Yet the play’s intelligent and unflinching look at love is a welcome splash of cold water to counter the simplified lovey-dovey depictions of romance we’re typically force-fed this time of year.”
Quote of the Fortnight:
“Perhaps after three of four rewrites, editing the script down to a one-act and asking some fresh questions of the subject matter, this could become a strong play.”—Venus Zarris reviewing Victory Gardens’ production of A Big Blue Nail in Gay Chicago.