The Primate Press

What kind of man pins his hopes and dreams on a lawn chair made to fly by tying dozens of weather balloons to it? With milk jugs for ballast?

Someone sort of crazy, someone who’s a dreamer, someone “quirky”. Yeah. In the current Steppenwolf production of Up by Bridget Carpenter, Ian Barford’s Walter Griffin has all of those qualities. But still, something is missing. Somehow, it was still not this man that would do that. This production (and possibly the play) have a class issue.

There were many lovely things about the production, especially the sweet portrayal of the two teens, the staging of Phillipe Petit on his highwire, and the best moment of the play when 16 year old ** Griffin joins him up there on a high of love.

But always in the scenes between Walter and his wife, the actors seemed uncertain about how to proceed. That’s because the imagery doesn’t make sense without a certain indication of class. Who pins his dreams on something like that? Someone quirky, crazy, that’s  true — but also someone of the lower middle class. The shear futility of the dream, which is the beauty of it, is a characteristic curse of a certain class. The lawn chair, the desperation that drives such a need for escape, the fatal touch of one’s 15 minutes arriving too soon — on David Letterman — these are all images that make sense only in the context of a redneck.

Ian Barford just seems and looks too yuppy-ish for this role. In the role of his wife, Rachel Brosnahan is too North Shore, and Martha Lavey, as spectacularly refined as she is, is far too aristocratic for the role of a tarot card reading con artist. That down and dirty sense of class, something along the lines of what Mickey Rourke would do, is not only essential to the aesthetic, it’s essential to understanding the play. My favorite part about Superior Donuts was how Michael McKean was in such perfect register as far as class, ethnicity and age. I wish the characterizations in this play could have had that subtly of class register, not because they need to be faithful to the “true life” story, but because it’s essential to the expression.

This might be a problem with the writing too, I’m not sure. Perhaps Carpenter shied away from writing the truck driver that inspired her because it was not something she knew well enough. Certainly the Steppenwolf crew shied away from it, either because they missed that element, or because they couldn’t relate to it.

With that piece of the puzzle, I can see what inspired the writer to write about it. It’s a beautiful and poignant image of the futility of all of our hopes. It’s a sad and moving play, and, thank goodness, not bittersweet or quirky in the least.

Only with the element of class do we understand the desperation of the need, and the peculiar object of a flying lawn chair that is at once low tech, cheap and wildly independent. Only with that specificity does the image stir our own feelings of ultimate futility.

The Art Institute’s thesis that “the Edvard Munch of popular imagination—a tortured, bohemian rebel who seemed almost a living version of the famous figure in The Scream—was in fact a myth, carefully constructed during Munch’s lifetime by critics, historians, and the artist himself” would be much more interesting if the real Munch was actually a good painter.

Abundantly evident from this show is the fact that the reason these myths are the focus of audiences, critics and popular imagination is because to fixate on the work for its own sake is totally boring. I surmise also that Munch himself invited the myths for certain similar reasons.

The main deficiency in Munch’s work is that the entire canvas is not treated with the same amount of interest and care. The galleries are filled with large paintings in which almost the entire acreage is ignored; one moment of intense interest is repeatedly contained within miles of wasted canvas. Invariably you could cut out nearly the entire painting and be left with the only interesting part. Often you can cut out the entire painting.

The faces are the thing he was interested in; the faces are exquisite and alive — the faces contain the entire expression. But the “backgrounds” and the rest of the scenes are dead and ignored, and different. The paintings aren’t integrated.

A prime example is his Sick Child paintings, of which there were two versions in the show. The dying child’s face is filled with pathos, and a peculiar existentialist sense of the futility of everything (for that’s what this motif is surely about) — everything that these paintings are reputed to say, and uniquely in Munch’s voice. But the rest of the painting — bed, room, parent — don’t contribute. The more famous Anxiety is another. And if the faces are covered, as in Kiss by the Window, there is nothing whatsoever to look at of interest. What we have is just a bad painting.

Similarly, the idea in the show’s thesis that he had other, here-to-fore under-acknowledged influences, such as Monet, would have been more interesting if his unique genius had transformed these influences into something entirely his own. For example, it is fascinating to consider how Van Gogh was impressed with the “scientific” dots of Seurat, and how dutifully he went about incorporating the idea into his own language — and to behold how expressive and unlike Seurat is the product. But Munch never improved on or made his influences his own. “Summer Night: Inger on the Beach” is a derivative corpse compared to the sparkling Monet in the same room, “On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt”.

But it is inaccurate to think Munch had nothing original to say. He was just unable to say it simply, directly, and without apology or extraneous baggage. Munch never really found himself as a painter, in other words. If he had he would have cropped every painting to the face alone and confined himself to portrait painting. He would have left us a body of work as painfully lovely as Kathë Kollwitz if he’d been brave enough to trim off all the empty fat and composed his paintings to be the expression, not contain the expression. He never had the courage to say exactly what he wanted to say, however, through painting and nothing more; in life and in his art there was always the protective veil of extraneous stories to dilute and diffuse. It was like his soul was given over too much to the dread and darkness that he was trying to convey to achieve the alchemical magic of turning darkness into beauty.

Like a Munch painting, the show itself contains isolated wonderful moments, making it worth the trip — Rodin’s Kiss, Van Gogh’s lemon yellow street scene. There is a striking difference when a painter who is actually interested in and who has complete, deft control of perspective as a draftsman tackles the subject of a riverside walkway in Paris with radical perspective. It might have been that the Art Institute was coyly trying to say as much with this show, because invariably the paintings of his “influences” were excellent choices and far outshown the Munchs they hung next to. But this might be giving them too much credit.

This is a thesis that would have been more enlightening if it had been applied to Van Gogh. With him it’s a sad fact that the myths of the popular imagination and the marketing world often overshadow and distract from a truly great painter. The uninitiated often are prevented from enjoying his truly imaginative and spiritual vision for thinking about how it was that he cut off his ear.

Not so with Munch. Myths about insanity and loneliness are much more fun than the paintings themselves.

This is such a fine play and a good production – and on top of it redtwist manages to make an innovative, truthful statement about what women are. I liked it, I was cheering them on. Too bad David Mamet himself had to reach out from his parapet and slap the only real blemish on it.

Even though it was a unique experience to hear a woman utter the line “my balls feel like concrete,” I was sorry that certain impossible lines distracted from Jacqueline Grandt’s complete and genuine Ricky Roma. I don’t mean the sentiments of the lines were impossible for a woman to feel or say. That’s exactly the refreshing statement that this production makes, that a hardboiled and supposedly male character such as Ricky Roma is thoroughly convincing and recognizable as a woman. The distracting lines are more a problem of… mechanics. Certain lines took you out of the play, only because of, well, anatomy.

redtwist was smart enough to publish the statement Mamet’s agent, through his publisher, made giving them permission to cast women in the play. Okay, cool, he said. Just so long as you don’t change a single word. (I wondered if this wasn’t his way stopping them from doing it.)

As a playwright, I agree in principal with David Mamet’s position. In fact, I would have been altogether skeptical of their motives if the company had felt it necessary to rewrite major portions of the play just to have women play the roles. But the fact of that matter is, it would have only come down to about seven words, perhaps, that needed to be changed. “Balls” would have become “clit.” In about two places, when Ricky was describing a personal memory of a love scene, “woman” would have become “man.” That’s practically it. (It is obvious to me that this Ricky is not gay; saying “woman” in this context simply did not make sense.) What would I ask the playwright to do in this case? Well, I wish he could have somehow authorized simple gender-switching of the language. Not wholesale revisions, just the innocent pronoun-switching that closeted gays do. That is a kind of white lie that is harmless to meaning.

On the other hand, I didn’t have a problem at all with the women constantly calling each other “man,” or with Roma’s fine, despairing line, “It’s not a world of men” being spoken by Grandt. I didn’t have a problem with any number of other male-talk examples. These fit under the flexible umbrella of artistic interpretation; they were metaphor. They were expressive of the characters. They were also a wonderful way of talking about the workplace today, and the strange transformations society has gone through; and about stereotypes as opposed to truth – in addition to what the play always says about human nature.

The second act was wonderful; I loved Grandt’s performance; and Brian Parry, that portrayer of business losers par excellance, was great as Shelley Levene. It’s a Glengarry Glen Ross worth seeing… David Mamet notwithstanding.

There is something about this play that deletes my ability to be objective, and so I’ll keep it brief.

All of the actors were visually perfect, even though two twenty-somethings were playing Grandma and Grandpa. Peck hit Vogel’s requisition for someone that might play Atticus Finch just perfectly, and the woman in the combination role of the mother/Aunt Mary was fantastic. ‘Lil Bit was quite effective, but I wish she had somehow seemed more cerebral/ironic than breathless. Her inner sadness and young appearance would have been enough to elicit the required sympathy. Also, I wish the “You and the Reverse Gear” voice overs were more automated sounding — actually piped in over a loudspeaker. But that is definitely a taste issue. A wonderful set out of a Kentucky junkyard, with two folding chairs for the car.

All in all, too sad for words — from beginning to end.

Cadillac is a tight and lovely little play by Network Playwright Bill Jepsen, set in a car dealership and populated by salespeople combating various moral dilemmas. Is it absolutely necessary to compare it to Glengarry Glen Ross?

Well, yes. One, because the first act has some obvious similarities, or homages. It has a set of salespeople with varying styles and degrees of success, the older generation vs. the younger generation, and a competition for the best leads, in the form of a stack of pending credit approvals on the desk of Finance Manager Howard, the play’s hero. Two, like Mamet’s great play, Cadillac finds beauty in a scene that is not only thoroughly mundane, but also typically seedy and cutthroat.

And no. In every other way, Cadillac is not like Glengarry Glen Ross. In the real estate drama, the characters struggle with a world stripped of any meaning outside of making the sale. Even though it’s a world they bought into, when things go wrong it is painful to face the sword they have lived by. The successful specimen whom they all look up to, Roma, is successful by virtue of being cutthroat but also by being smart and diligent. They live in an inhuman land where their survival skills are in direct contradiction to what they sense is good for human beings, but they persevere anyway.

In Cadillac, meaninglessness is concentrated in the villain, the young Gary. He is on the verge of breaking the record for monthly sales, but unlike Roma, his success is based on cheating and self-interest, not a mastery of sales skills, which he entirely lacks himself and doubts exists in others. Outside of being cutthroat in interest of his commission, he is lazy, naive and hopelessly arrogant.

The rest of the salespeople, two men of the older generation and a younger woman, have a code. It may only be the code of a car salesman, but it is a code nonetheless. It is built on techniques of selling that are demonstrated and philosophized about in fascinating tidbits; the techniques are not necessarily in conflict with being good to other people and to yourself. These characters may not have the wildly inflated expectations of the younger, Internet generation, but at least they see meaning in human life.

This meaning is wonderfully articulated and symbolized by the customer who appears in the first and last scene only, like a middle class chorus. He wants to buy a Cadillac, because all of his life he has worked hard while driving lesser cars and finally, yesterday, has paid off the 30 year mortgage on his house. In his own words, he deserves it.

The rest of the drama revolves around what that sale will mean to the various players on the last night of the sales month. Gary stands to break the record, the woman stands to lose her job, Howard stands to either be ruined by Gary’s manipulation or thwart his unfair ascent. The noose is knotted and looped around the neck of the hero Howard so subtly that you have no idea where it’s going till the last scene, and it is a superb last scene.

The characters look and act as realistic and familiar as the highly detailed and wonderful set, which is complete with wood veneer paneling, plastic plants and bowling trophies. But are these the actions of real car salesmen? Is this whole exchange plausible? No. But Jepsen didn’t make them car salesmen because he wanted to say something journalistic about that line of work. The play’s poetry resides in the symbol of the middle-aged car salesman as noble human. It is so central to the expression that it does not matter if the storyline is plausible for real salesmen; the nobility Howard exhibits by doing the right thing is about what regular people are capable of, no matter how mundane and insignificant they may seem in a seedy Lindy Motors universe. I can’t say enough about the wonderful irony in Howard’s line, “You’d be happier in the Cadillac” in the final scene. He’s a car salesman upselling for all the right reasons, and effectively sacrificing himself in place of the usual unsuspecting customer.

Issue plays are not my cup of tea, but reports of the inventive staging and choreography of Columbinus at the Raven Theatre got me interested. It also struck me as being in this new vein of high school epic play, along with The Sparrow and High School Musical, but with the one, serious, real-life subject high school epics were obligated to visit — Columbine. That combination intrigued me.

The play vividly accomplishes everything it set out to do. I spent the first act, which recreates a traumatic high school world of identity dilemmas, elder incompetence and peer-on-peer injustice, asking whether they would make me see how it could be that Dylan and Eric got to the point of the inevitable disaster. That’s what you expect of the first act, to show how the characters arrive at the second act. Since we all knew what the second act would be, it was disconcerting to feel at intermission that I just didn’t get it. I just didn’t see why they and not someone else actually carried out their fantasy. I was also dimly aware that no one’s name had been used in the first act; I was assuming the archetypal other characters were perhaps their victims, but no one was identified specifically.

As it turns out, all of this was evidence that the play was working. At the beginning of Act Two, Dylan and Eric are identified by name for the first time, and in the run up to the actual execution of the plan, you realize it is simply incomprehensible. Why them? All sorts of influences have been shown to be at work, but it’s a high school world with high school characters that could exist anywhere. The outcome is plausible, but not inevitable — and so why them? Why did THEY choose? That is the unanswerable and terrible reality the play brings home.

I call the play epic because it uses all sorts of wonderful devices — voice overs (mostly for ridiculous teachers and guidance counselors), antiphonal narration, choreographed scene changing that included lots of unison table and chair banging, a lighting change that signaled the inner world of the various characters (I especially liked when the voice over, as a teacher, went into this inner world with a flurry of curses), and a combination chalkboard/projection screen — all interspersed with natural dialogue. The first act culminated with each of the kids alone in their rooms, singing along — badly — to Bittersweet Symphony, exactly the way kids do when they’re alone and upset. It was a brilliant premise to bring in the song, whose words and music perfectly summarized the angst and alienation the act was about. There was something slightly wrong with it, because it seemed to go on too long; halfway through the treatment needed to change somehow. But this was the only time something like that called attention to itself. In every other case, the devices were never used the same way twice, and they worked their double duty of expression and plausibility just right.

As a friend had reported, the opening and the ending were indeed entirely unexpected. The closing, especially, I felt, was magnificently successful. Without giving too much away, though I was CRINGING at once again seeing a tragedy memorialized with a list of names of the dead (please stop it, that is hackneyed now), the effect of leaving the screen lit even after the actors had straggled away worked wonderfully. It couldn’t have been otherwise. It wasn’t time to stop watching, there was still something up there to look at. Everyone clapped for a long time, but there was to be no curtain call. “Is it over?” the audience wondered. “It’s over but doesn’t seem over.” Everyone just sat in their seats for a long time, and that’s an accomplishment in Chicago theatre. It was the end, but closure was impossible.

The thing that made me leary of any show about Columbine was the fear that it was, especially if done on stage, an act of giving the killer Eric Harris exactly what he wanted. I was afraid it would glamorize their act, and it did. I was afraid it would make them sexy, and it did, especially Dylan, in part because of the actor. This was Eric Harris’ stated objective: to be remembered as the instigator of the worst school shooting in history. It was a bit of wish-fulfillment theatre he was after, in which he was the only star, and this show gives him exactly that. There is something hard to stomach in that fact.

It would have been superior if Karam and Paparelli could have found a way to avoid this. But perhaps this validation is an inherent side-effect of telling the story at all. The only way to deprive Eric of what he wanted would have been to never talk about it, in the press or elsewhere. It’s not better never to talk about it. I guess the telling is important enough for society to warrant this unintended consequence. And Columbinus did the best job it could at telling the story.

January 22 – March 15, 2008
COLUMBINUS
by the United States Theatre Project
Written by Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli
Conceived by PJ Paparelli
Directed by Greg Kolack
The Raven Theatre
6157 North Clark Street, on the corner of Clark and Granville in Edgewater
(It’s so nice, they have a big parking lot and a huge lounge-lobby. Come up to my neighborhood!)

I thought it was a really good Instant Theater. Too bad it was so cold out.

First, I really liked the little play about the two young people who met on the Internet (written by Trina). I loved how they went down the list of computer communication and imbued all of it with this double meaning — “I love your attachments!” — and how they finally discovered certain things that were really nice about face to face contact as well. And then, it was a magic moment of theatre, or maybe even an accident, when the cell phone music played while they hugged.

I also loved how Keely was able to pack plot twists into her short play about the unfaithful/blackmailing/non-hetero husband. It was very complete for five minutes, I’m trying to figure out how she did that.

Great dialogue in the twin sisters scene by Tyla, two people having a completely opposite experience of the exact same thing is my cup of tea. A five minute play that might be allegorical.

One other thing, I just loved the performances of Will and Linda as reptiles in my play, I was totally entertained. I’m still feeling the end doesn’t work, unfortunately, but they did a good job carrying it through. I’m rewriting the end today.

Thanks to Chris and Aaron for running this thing.

Ah, the Hypocrites.

For a play distinguished by its naturalism, and set on an estate in the 19th century, it might seem a betrayal of August Strindberg’s intentions to stage Miss Julie in a series of kitschy fold-out sets furnished like the 1950’s. Or to allow the audience to roam freely through them. Or to compel them to follow Miss Julie and poor Jean on foot as they move from kitchen to bar to – chaos.

But that is a distinguishing feature of Sean Graney and the Hypocrites. When they treat a classic of Modernism like Miss Julie, they might skip the faithful reproduction, but they succeed in capturing the spirit of the play for a contemporary audience.

Miss Julie was shocking, animal, violent and certainly invasive of the audience’ comfort zone in 1889. Graney has recreated this feeling through the unconventional set that erases any zone between the audience and the actors. Social divisions between landed gentry and farm help may not be in the fabric of common experience today, but he was able to express the inherent conflict through other means. Graney rewrote some of the dialogue to bring it up to date, generally to good effect. It helped to put the servants in mechanic jumpsuits and name tags. And of course, the acting is always exceptional. Stacey Stoltz’ Julie was domineering, teasing, slightly crazed – and tragically messed up.

I loved the device of the piles of trash pouring out of the walls, and then Julie and Jean piling out after them in their underwear, in the immediate aftermath of the fateful act. It was a great visual metaphor for the utter chaos they’d landed in. It also worked that that was the only scene that was not representational at all. The device of incorporating items in the trash into the action went on just a little too long, though. This was one of just a couple moments when the staging became distracting. The conversation here is crucial for revealing what drove these characters to what they are – the actors reached just the right pitch of emotion as well – and I wish the compelling thing of the scene could have been just that.

The staging of the final scene, conversely, was perfect. It was just the right kind of shock to the audience, who was forced to step up to an even more intimate level. I also thought Graney used violence and the intimation of violence to great effect throughout the whole thing. He seems aware that the reason this play is still good is because, while surface forms change, sadly, these class conflicts and limitations still dog us. And a new kind of theatre is necessary to express that today.

Miss Julie • The Hypocrites
The Chopin Theatre Studio
1543 W Division St, Chicago
Thurs– Sun., through March 9th.