New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on June 28, 2011 by lisafindley

First, a short rant. I had two loads of laundry in the washer this evening, and I went down to change them over to the dryers. The dryers were full of dry clothes already, so I took them out and folded the many, many towels in nice piles and put my laundry in the other two. I came back down later to bring it all up, and someone had taken my clothes out of one dryer and piled them on top of it in one wet mass. Whoever did it thoughtfully placed two quarters on top of the pile, as if that would make it okay to dry their clothes while mine moldered away for an hour. Where are we, college? Who does that?

Anyway.

Last week I reviewed The Artistic Home’s production of Marisol for Centerstage. The Artistic Home is an Equity company, so the production values were high (especially the sound) and the performances were solid. Here’s an excerpt:

In Jose Rivera’s “Marisol,” “time is crippled, geography’s deformed, you’re permanently lost,” and John Mossman’s staging is relentless in driving that point home from the opening scene. The New York City of the play is a disorienting, near-futuristic one in which coffee is extinct and the entire state of Ohio is on fire and drifting eastward in a cloud of smoke, but our protagonist still commutes from her Bronx apartment to her Manhattan publishing job in an attempt at normalcy.

You can read the rest of the review here.

Mamet: Overrated and Half-Baked

Posted on May 17, 2011 by lisafindley

I’ve more than once found myself in arguments at bars that start out as civilized discussions of theater and What It Means To Us Today, and quickly devolve into screaming matches like this:

Argument Partner: MAMET
Lisa: OVERRATED
AP: INCISIVE
L: BORING AND REPETITIVE
AP: GLENGARRRRRRRRY
L: UGH SAD MEN BEING SAD ABOUT BEING MEN

And then some cussing, to stay true to the playwright.

That pretty much sums up my feelings on Mamet, but in sentence form, here it is: David Mamet has a solid grasp of craft, and very often a witty turn of phrase or bitter monologue, but he doesn’t seem to like people very much, he has yet to conceive of a woman as a fully realized character, and his work leaves me exhausted and despondent. The message of his plays or movies generally seems to be, “Being a man is hard but instead of investigating why that might be or the different ways I might be a man and interact with others, I’m going to fuck up a lot and be angry about it.” Looking at it that way, he’s apparently Judd Apatow’s muse.

And now he’s come out as a cheerleader for Free Enterprise and an enemy of Higher Education. As Tom Scocca notes, Mamet’s new book on his conversion from indifferent Democrat to passionate Republican isn’t saying anything new that conservatives haven’t been saying for years, including the part where he doesn’t seem to have done much critical thinking (such as not recognizing that participating in a capitalist society doesn’t automatically preclude you from being able to oppose capitalism). His attacks on American universities are the same tripe you can hear on any conservative talk radio station–they make our children hate America! they actually prevent independent thinking!–and reveal a similarly disappointing investment in research, reflection, or dialogue with others.

Of course his liberal fans are going to be all torn up about this, because he’s a GENIUS who went to the OTHER SIDE, but it seems like a natural progression for me. Here’s a guy who saw that the world is very often fucked up, and that people do fucked up things to each other, but instead of investigating why this was so, or finding a solution, he just ranted and sulked. “Converting” to Republicanism just puts a political label on that kind of thinking.

Go See This Play!

Posted on April 28, 2011 by lisafindley

Go see this play! “Orpheus featuring DJ Puzzle as Fate” by Filament Theatre Ensemble. Go see it with a friend, and go in a joyous mood. It’s a fringe theater experience that’s actually really well done and won’t take up your whole night:

A nearly wordless but never silent fifty minutes pass in the warehouse space of Lacuna Artist Lofts, converted simply and convincingly into Club Dionysus, where the audience is encouraged to let their hair down, grab a glass of wine, and dance with the three nymphs who start the play off on an energetic high that never abates.

You can read the rest of the review here.

The director’s note is all about how he wants to recreate the Dionysian impulse to give over completely to ecstasy and theater, and while that sounds sorta silly on paper, the dedication of the performers combined with a willingness on the part of the audience makes it a real possibility, and a tantalizing one at that.

TWO New Centerstage Reviews Up!

Posted on April 19, 2011 by lisafindley

Hello all! I would wish you a happy spring, but it’s far too cold and damp out there to merit any mudluscious frolicking. Instead, why don’t you bundle up and head out to the theater? I have two new reviews up at Centerstage; one is recommended with reservations, and one is totally worth your time (and also only $10!).

The first play I saw last week was One Flea Spare by Naomi Wallace. Now this is an award-winning play, but it left me a bit cold. Still, most of the performances are solid and it is a topic you don’t see addressed too often (the plague in 17th century London). (For some reason, the editors attached the tagline “What could be funnier than the plague?” to the review, which makes no sense, as it’s not a comedy, but maybe it’s an in-joke that some will get.) Here’s a snippet:

Naturally, four people in cramped quarters for a month come into conflict, but unfortunately, too much of the conflict here feels staged merely as a political mouthpiece for Wallace’s views on class and gender.

You can read the rest of the review here.

I went to Before and After as an experiment, since the theater company’s motto is “theatre that happens to be improvised.” But it turned out to be pretty great!

Impressively, the narrative holds, and the actors do a wonderful job establishing themes early on and carrying them through to the end. On the night I saw the show, the play was concerned with the faith we have in people and in technology.

You can read the rest of the review here. Sessily and I talked after the show about the benefits (for both performers and audience members) of improvising a play as opposed to working with a written script, and, well, I’ll just quote her here: “For the participants, I think the benefit is of the give and take that’s inherent in improv (like you said, the first rule is don’t say no). There’s no real option to reject what’s been done, so it forces you to react and build off of other people, which leads to creating something that you couldn’t have created on your own. There’s also something about creating it in the moment…it’s more alive, sort of, than a written play. For the audience, I think there’s a certain pleasurable tension in the ‘will it work or won’t it’ part of improv, which makes seeing it come together slightly more enjoyable than in a written play.” If that doesn’t intrigue you, I don’t know what will. Enjoy!

TWO New Centerstage Reviews Up

Posted on March 24, 2011 by lisafindley

Double feature comin’ at ya, dearest fellow travelers, and one of them is even a bona fide recommendation!

First up, God of Carnage at the Goodman. This is a smash hit show in Europe and New York, but it made my skin crawl. You can’t tear yourself away from it, sure, like the car crash other reviewers are comparing it to, but that doesn’t meant you don’t feel ill about it. Here’s an excerpt of the review:

Although American audiences view Yasmina Reza’s plays as non-stop comedies, Reza herself sees the plays as “tragedies that happen to be funny.” After seeing the Goodman Theatre production of her Tony Award-winning “God of Carnage,” I have to agree with her. This is no farce or comedy of manners; this is a tragedy of the human spirit, a cynical portrayal of people at their worst with the implication that they don’t even have a best to aspire to.

You can read the rest here.

I only get 300 words for my Centerstage reviews, so I didn’t get to flesh this out, but Sessily and I had a beer after the show and hashed over just why we found it so upsetting and unsatisfying. After we fumbled around with how to articulate what was so upsetting about the gender relations in the play, Sessily got to the heart of it: “The women were criticized for being a negative, while the men were criticized for not being a positive, which allowed the men to prove through their actions that they were, in fact, that positive.” That is, the men were allowed to be the neutral, from which they could prove they had characteristics that the women had suggested they didn’t have (like self-sufficiency), whereas the women were pre-defined as hysterical, controlling, flighty, flawed, etc., and so all they could do was operate within those limited definitions. This is true in the world at large, of course, as men are the default and women just get shoved into the well-known categories of whores, virgins, nags, seductresses, etc. But it was troubling to see Reza play into it, and it made the whole play harder to watch.

Next up, MilkMilkLemonade at Chicago Dramatists. I do recommend this play! So if you have a spare $20 and hour and a half, head on over. (It’s right off the Chicago blue line stop, which is convenient, and next to several low-key bars, which is also convenient.) The excerpt:

Pavement Group’s “MilkMilkLemonade” is all about bodies; whether our bodies define who we are, the secrets our bodies keep, the terrible way our bodies turn on us in illness. Fittingly, it’s a very physical production, with a grandma who walks like a sick chicken and a chicken who walks like The Fonz, and two boys punching, kissing and jumping their way through early adolescence.

You can read the rest of the review here.

It took me a few minutes to get into some of the wackier aspects of the show (the narrator translating the chicken’s quacks, the “ding” of the triangle when someone dropped a pun), but once I realized that this is how Emory sees the world, through a showbiz filter that makes the sadness of his life bearable, I dug it.

New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on March 15, 2011 by lisafindley

I had a marathon theater day a couple weeks ago, during which I saw three plays by three different theater companies, all at the Garage Theatre at Steppenwolf. The theater is literally a space carved out of the parking garage, and it’s a decent attempt by an established theater company to lay claim to some of the edginess of fringe theater groups and spaces. The plays themselves varied widely, though they were all meant to focus on “an inquiry into the divide between the public/private self,” according to the program. They succeed to varying degrees. My favorite by far was the first one I saw, “The Three Faces of Doctor Crippen,” with “Heddatron” coming in an uneven second and “Sonnets for an Old Century” a distant third. Here’s a snippet of the review:

The humorous rhythm of the play is badly interrupted by the Ibsen scenes, which play far too sitcom-ready (“Take my wife! Please!”). The best part is the surreal scene just before Jane’s kidnapping, when all three timelines bleed into one another and humans and robots dance across the stage to the undeniable “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Read the rest of the review here. The shows run through April 24, so you have plenty of time to head on over and spend $20 on an hour or two of quality entertainment. Enjoy!

New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on January 19, 2011 by lisafindley

Normally, I’m happy to report that I have a great theatrical production to recommend you go out and see. But this month, I saw a great premise ruined in the execution at Annoyance:

“American Lit,” the latest production from Annoyance Theatre takes a wonderful premise, a collection of comedy sketches riffing on great works of American literature, and chooses to make a lot of dick jokes.

So take a gander at the review here but probably take a pass on the show.

New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on December 6, 2010 by lisafindley

I’ve recommended plays in this space with varying degrees of enthusiasm before, but here’s one that I recommend wholeheartedly — “Robin Hood: The Panto!” at the Piccolo Theatre in Evanston. (I have no idea what happened to my paragraph breaks in the review, by the way.) A snippet:

The panto is a British holiday tradition as tasty as mince pie and as important as the Queen’s speech (although luckily for the audience, it’s much funnier). Piccolo Theatre of Evanston carries on this grand tradition with the uproarious “Robin Hood: The Panto!” British pantomimes have nothing to do with Marcel Marceau and everything to do with broad characters, bad puns, and audience participation.

Read the whole review here and get tickets here. I sent my parents and aunt & uncle this past weekend, and they agreed that it was well worth it. You will laugh throughout, and if you’re lucky enough to have kids in the audience with you, it’ll be even better. Enjoy!

New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on November 11, 2010 by lisafindley

I really enjoyed “The War Plays” at The Athenaeum. It’s fun without being irrelevant or irreverent. Here’s an excerpt of my review:

“The War Plays” believes in the power of “a verifiable romance of wartime,” and it presents us with not one but three marvelous examples. Emily Schwartz’s funny and touching script is deftly handled by director Kate Nawrocki. They present a play within a play, framed by the actors welcoming the audience to a World War II London playhouse and then moving the show “underground” to the theater proper as shelter during an “air raid.” This device immediately draws the audience into the world of performers who passionately believe that no matter the outside circumstances, the show really must go on.

Interestingly, the reviewer at the Chicago Reader absolutely HATED it. I like a lot of what the Reader puts out, but this reviewer’s main complaint seemed to be that some of the songs were written after the play was set and that the play within a play concept is unrealistic if it’s set during the Blitz. These are insufficient reasons to pan a play, and ridiculously insufficient to hate it so vehemently.

But go see the play and decide for yourself!

New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on October 19, 2010 by lisafindley

I recommend this play: Too Much Memory by the SiNNERMAN collective.

Parts of it are really hard to watch, but in a good way. Parts of the script are really infuriating, which I addressed in the review. But overall, it’s an intense experience well worth the trip to Rogers Park.

SiNNERMAN’s production of Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson’s “Too Much Memory” adapts and updates the tragedy of Antigone with a sharp cast and taut direction. We learn right away what we’re going to see here: It is political and difficult, and it is all the more important for being both of those things.

Read the rest of the review here. Get ticket info here.