12-22-06
The Lost Art of Listening: Can You Hear Me?
Bailiwick's Kiss of the Spider Woman
All year I write for audiences but not about them. But looking back at 2006 means you get to rise above deadlines to find patterns. I can see one developing in the darkness. Even discounting the pesky claques on opening night, audiences seem to be a lot quicker to laugh than to listen, though guffaws can lower the tension that drama demands. They’ll react to a sight gag faster than to a verbal joke. They’re increasingly reluctant to stop chuckling when characters grow more complex and ambiguous and less ridiculous and stereotypical.
Call it the Letterman syndrome, but they’re a bit too eager to show how hip they are at “getting” something, which means tittering at the absurdity of a situation or character, instantly implying that “I’m too smart to fall for such silliness or sentiment – it could never trap me.” In short, a few too many Oprah moments have crept into Chicago theatres. If learning requires listening, we’ve learned the wrong thing: how to tune out when threatened.
Of course, it’s neither smart nor safe to generalize, but then there’s nothing scientific about theatre. It’s not surprising. An attention-deficit disorder, this need to speed fuels computer multitasking, downloading ring tones while driving, preferring instant messages over e-mail and both over snail mail, and speed dating. Of course it would mutate with our passion for interacting. For active audiences, live theatre means that they’re part of the experience, visibly sighing, gasping and giggling like a talk show audience on meth. Silence is for sleep. Applause means affirmation.
Some theatres resolved to join what they couldn’t beat. More and more plays like Christopher Durang’s Miss Witherspoon seem to feature narrators who function like tour guides, holding our hands as they take us through the action and let us know where to pay our limited attention. Some productions this year just didn’t trust the material to be funny, so they threw in sight gags, rubber-faced mugging and pratfalls, and sped through the slow stuff that used to provide such old-fashioned concepts as texture, ambiguity and context. Uncertain of what to do with one of Shakespeare’s stupidest stories, Mary Zimmerman, with Pericles at Goodman Theatre, resorted to eclectic and anachronistic set and costumes, pointless processions and maddeningly stylized and inconsistent performances. The distractions only proved the hollowness at the core.
Ventures like The Pirate Queen and Lookingglass’ Sita Ram left nothing to the imagination, spelling out what used to be subtext while failing to earn the emotions the music simulated over and over. Wrongly assuming that The Glass Menagerie is only a memory play, Court Theatre’s less-is-less condensation eliminated any sense that there was ever a reality behind Tom’s recollections; Amanda and Laura were so much smoke and mirrors; the dialogue was suddenly dispensable.
Then there were the plays that punished any attention we wasted on them. Goodman Theatre’s earnest local premiere of David Mamet’s Romance succumbed to the manic imbecility of the plot and the reckless humor-cide of the purported jokes. Among the year’s least rewarding hearing tests were the awful comic duo of Slotnick and Katz whose Wants and Needs at Lookingglass made self-indulgence look bad. Victory Gardens opened a beautiful new home at the old Biograph Theatre with the sadly underfelt Denmark. (Why must a theatre’s first play be like the proverbial first pancake, an experiment that’s rapidly discarded?) About Face Theatre’s Say You Love Satan and Goodman’s newly discovered Vigils were half-baked offerings that substituted cliches and metaphors for anything approaching real-life love and loss.
But for every play that punished consciousness there were two that deserved – and rewarded – the kind of self-effacing listening that today’s audiences find so dicey. By my count, 14 productions atoned for much of the mediocrity or half-heartedness of 2006’s hundreds of other well-intentioned offerings.
An antidote to her Pericles, Mary Zimmerman’s Argonautika gradually transformed a Greek adventure story about boys becoming men into a surprisingly feminist recounting of Medea’s first betrayal by Jason, and the perils of cultures that clash and power that’s pursued. Focused to ferocity, Shattered Globe’s revival of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves cut through the silly characters to deliver the non-negotiable longings behind the whimsical eccentricities. Almost painfully ambitious, Backstage Theatre’s exuberant revival of The Skin of Our Teeth rearranged the house to suit the sets, monumental changeovers that were mirrored in go-for-broke performances that never sacrificed Wilder’s sentiment to his satire. Pursuing the opposite approach, less lavish, Bailiwick Repertory’s Kiss of the Spider Woman cleanly depicted a truth that has been overwhelmed by elaborate touring productions: Far from escapist, the prisoners’ fantasies mirror the frustrations that brought them there.
Then there were shows so life-like that audiences could feel they were eavesdropping, that the slightest noise might give them away (the you-could-hear-a-pin-drop standard that should be aimed at more often). Seanachai Theatre’s revival of A Whistle in the Dark was combustibly authentic in its depiction of an Irish family where manly means mean. Remy Bumppo’s The Best Man gave Gore Vidal’s very well-made play as articulate a revival as this thrilling thinkfest deserved. Shattered Globe Theatre’s riveting Dealer’s Choice raised the stakes in every scene, driving home how individual desperation feeds group panic. Providing proof that they can grow up whenever they want to, the House Theatre of Chicago’s The Boy Detective Fails acknowledged the limits to American can-do know-how and the sacrifices required to move from Hardy Boy fantasies to real-life compromise.
Despite The Pirate Queen, it was a good year for musicals. Light Opera Works’ too-brief 110 in the Shade eloquently restored Jones’ and Schmidt’s heartfelt treatment of The Rainmaker to abundant life and love. About Face Theatre’s Loving Repeating, a stunningly evocative retrospective on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, was an intoxicating tribute to the power of words to entrance rather than express and of notes to lift them into dance. Dance was the key to Dorian, Bailiwick Repertory’s inventive retelling of Oscar Wilde’s cautionary morality play. Meticulously drenched in the vocabulary of expressionism, Vitalist Theatre’s Mother Courage and Her Children gave new urgency to Brecht’s anti-war parable, while Pegasus Players’ Tick, Tick Boom registered every seismic thrill in Jonathan Larson’s early work. Finally, TimeLine Theatre’s triumph, Fiorello, a perfect election-year delight, was unstoppably fun as it regaled us with one perfect Harnick and Bock showstopper after another.
Well worth the listen, these productions were all greater than our laughs and tears. What they really earned was our silence.
Lawrence Bommer reviews regularly for Chicago Free Press, The Reader, Curtains Up and writes monthly for Chicago Footlights and Plays International.
Off the Screen and In Your Face
The Lost Art of Listening: Can You Hear Me?