12-19-08
What Doesn't Kill Theatre May Make It Matter
Critics are pretty unanimous that Goodman’s Turn of the Century was one of the worst plays of the year.
Unlike a good play, 2008 did not go according to script. Our performing arts organizations, never more necessary than when materialism is not, have taken hits from an economy that heedlessly lurched from greed to fear. (Apparently capitalism never spares time for enlightened self-interest.) Until a new Federal Theatre Project can be put in place, the market will decide more than ever what shows–and playhouses–live and die. From now on no theatre need ever ask that crucial question, “What’s my motivation?” It’s called survival.
As nothing concentrates the mind like an execution, many Chicago theatres will be forced to pick every play carefully—so that it won’t be their last. “You’re only as good as your last show” has a whole new meaning to fickle audiences who overreact to a toxic mix of a credit crunch, job insecurity, contagious foreclosures, stock losses, and pandemic economic insecurity.
If you examine the best works of this terrible year (excluding Nov. 4’s glorious explosion of hope) through the magnifying glass of a global recession, you wonder how well they’d do in 2009–much as the hits of 1929 were far different from those of 1933. (Think of Flo Ziegfeld compared to Clifford Odets.)
An immediate question arises: Are silly plays exactly the escapism that people want during hard times, or does adversity encourage serious drama? An argument can be made for both. And, of course, theatre is too rich for one kind of entertainment to rule out another.
To take the sobering stuff first, look at Steppenwolf’s Dublin Carol, a casebook study of an alcoholic teetering between failure and a second chance. For many this drama, ironically set at Christmastide, is a depressing downer, a wallow in misfortune too close for comfort. Contrariwise, you could contend that this depiction of one man’s “narrow miss” successfully exploits the Schadenfreud in an audience. We feel better about our life because it’s not as wasted as Bill Petersen’s morose and maudlin John. McPherson’s drama has the value of not being frivolous when flippancy and irony suddenly seem especially superficial and of being sad enough to make us strangely happy by not seeing ourselves in it. Of course, his Shining City, done earlier this year by Goodman Theatre, delivered the perverse pleasure of feeling good by feeling bad. Sometimes it backfires: The one redeeming thing about Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, Steppenwolf’s depressingly unsympathetic look at the stupidity of failure, was the relief of leaving these losers as we fled the theatre.
Or, by luck as much as skill, a winner like Remy Bumppo’s The Voysey Inheritance turns out to be a parable to put our times in perspective as much as it was a cautionary take a century ago. This blast from the past showed how a father’s guiltless greed infected several generations. You couldn’t wish for a more bracing metaphor for Wall Street’s short-sighted, ends-justify-the-means, corner-cutting mayfly mentality. Suddenly, thanks to David Mamet channeling Granville-Barker, something old was very new. (Kudos to James Bohnen’s every-minute-matters staging.)
If there’s comfort food, there are comfort plays, like Goodman’s Trip to Bountiful or Artistic Home’s Look Homeward, Angel—classic American family fare where God is in the details and the personal becomes the elemental.
But fluffy stuff may do well too, providing delightful distractions from an imploding 401-K or a melted mortgage. Take a tonic like Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s sublimely giddy Funk It About Nothing, as charming in its rap insouciance as Shakespeare’s original fol-der-rol—a mismating comedy for all ages but particularly for an era in flux. Nothing is more reliable or reassuring than the constancy of laughter. Goodman’s Ain’t Misbehavin’ reminded us, though one critic completely missed it, how downright adult a seemingly innocuous revue can be. Amid Fats Waller’s jitterbugging, Lindy-hopping, industrially nostalgic rousers comes a ballad like “Black and Blue” to remind us the price paid for the pleasures savored.
So, if tomfoolery and gravity are by no means mutually exclusive during the Bush recession, what then is unnecessary if not unforgivable?
Two shows spring to mind—from big theatres that should know better. A Steppenwolf setback, Frank Galati’s mishmash Kafka on the Shore is a play that bad times cannot afford, neither imaginative enough for distraction or coherent enough for reflection. Where other scripts slowly add up, scene by scene, this one subtracted, in effect punishing you for paying attention by going nowhere with an infuriating lack of discipline. Goodman’s Turn of the Century, easily the worst new show of 2008, was an unaffordable insult to Broadway aficionados, a know-nothing musical that assumed that all songs were born in a jukebox—without causation or consequence, interchangeable, ripe for pillage.
More so than 2008 ever did, 2009 will say no to shows that lower the bar as you watch them, make themselves up as they go along, or erase themselves after every scene. Good riddance in advance!
Larry Bommer is the theatre editor of the Free Press and a critic for the ReadeR.
Town and Country by Christopher Piatt
The Good, the Bad and the Uncertain by Kerry Reid
Space: The final frontier? by Kris Vire