We (Heart) LaBute
Like many companies, Chicago’s Profiles Theatre loves to be the first out of the gate with either a brand new show or a local premiere. And since its inception in 1988, the company has given Chicagoans their first look at a number of works, earning critical kudos for the Midwest premieres of Julie Jensen’s Stray Dogs, Adam Rapp’s Blackbird and Lee Blessing’s Great Falls, among others. In 2006, it mounted Neil LaBute’s autobahn and Fat Pig and has offered one of the playwright’s works nearly every season since. This month, the company inaugurates an additional performance space with the U.S. premiere of LaBute’s sibling smackdown, In a Forest, Dark and Deep, running through June 3.
With two venues steps from each other in the uptown neighborhood, Profiles is enjoying the kind of visibility and creative opportunities many off-Loop outfits can only dream of. “I love the idea that we can have two things playing at a time,” says founding artistic director Joe Jahraus. “In the past, when we’d have something successful that played for five or six months, our fans would be hungry for what was next, and we’d have nothing to offer. Now we can keep more of our work out there.” (Second Stage, a venue Profiles debuted 18 months ago in Wrigleyville, will now be used as a rehearsal and rental space.)
Remarking on Profiles’ dedication to LaBute, Jahraus observes, “I think we see theatre very much in line with the way he sees theatre—to be tough, edgy, pull no punches. To be truthful. Things that seem obvious, but that you can lose sight of.”
As for LaBute, he admires the company’s daring and determination, noting, “You hand these things over to people and it’s important that you feel you’re in good hands. I appreciate that they continue to want to do my work, and that they want the audience to feel less than completely secure. They understand each play and love each play and give it a production that the play is deserving of.” —Thomas Connors
Bloom and Bust
Long before the downfall of Lehman Brothers—before “mortgage-backed securities” became a U.S. household term—a vogue for tulips rampaged through 17th-century Holland. Prices for the flower climbed: Around the height of the craze, a single bulb could cost as much as an Amsterdam townhouse. Speculators began to dabble in the blooms, leading to the establishment of what has been called the world’s first futures market. Then, in the late 1630s, the tulip bubble burst. Financial havoc ensued.
Tulipomania: The Musical, in a world premiere run at Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company May 24–July 1, takes a fresh look at this notorious episode. It’s a tale that may seem all too familiar, given the recent housing bust and recession, observes Michael Ogborn, the show’s writer-composer. “We make the same mistakes over and again; they just take a different form,” he points out. “It’s the folly of man.”
Ogborn knows a thing or two about trans-historical folly: In 2001, he made a splash with Baby Case, a musical that, while ostensibly dealing with the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s son, reflected on 21st-century journalism’s obsession with scandal and celebrity. Having mounted that show, as well as Café Puttanesca, a 1940s-themed cabaret that Ogborn co-wrote and scored, the Arden commissioned the composer to collaborate with playwright Michael Hollinger on a new musical. Hollinger came up with the tulip-craze idea, Ogborn says; when the playwright decided to concentrate on other projects, Ogborn gladly accepted book- and lyric-writing duties on a show he considers a “wonderful prism” for a look at modern greed.
Framed by a tale set in a modern Amsterdam bar, Ogborn’s book for Tulipomania bridges past and present. The score, too, spans two eras, Ogborn says, sometimes aiming for a “rainy-day Bach string-quartet feel,” but also showcasing an electric guitar.
Arden producing artistic director Terrence J. Nolen, who is staging Tulipomania, believes that the show pulls off another balancing act: It stays upbeat, while exploring a troubling chapter in economic and sociological history. The musical “definitely touches on the despair and ruin that obsession can lead to,” Nolen says, “but it’s also very funny.” —Celia Wren
Growing, Growing, Grown?
San Francisco playwright Lauren Yee ’s Crevice is a quintessentially Bay Area play. It’s peppered with witty badinage, and it’s timely, given that it’s centered on the quandaries of a generation overly preoccupied with and (paralyzed by) creature comforts.
Crevice won a grant back in 2008 from San Francisco’s PlayGround, which produces original 10-minute plays that go on to compete for the opportunity to be transformed into full-lengths. Yee’s expanded version premieres at Berkeley’s Impact Theatre May 3–June 9.
The dark comedy features a pair of twentysomething siblings—Rob, a lackadaisical slacker, and overachiever Liz, whose penchant for analysis paradoxically hinders her from taking decisive action. When Liz and Rob’s mother begins a new relationship, it jolts them out of their complacency—literally. An earthquake reveals a fantastical underground realm that mimics Liz and Rob’s whimsical musings on their own future prospects.
Yee notes that traditional milestones marking passage to adulthood—marriage, home ownership—are often delayed or skipped altogether by the current generation. She explains, “I wanted to comment on the idea that the previous generation hasn’t necessarily set up its children for success. In that sense, Liz and Rob haven’t been able to progress in the world and are stuck in their own story.”
The play is directed by Desdemona Chiang, who worked closely with Yee on her critically acclaimed Ching Chong Chinaman. Returning to Crevice after four years challenged Yee’s changing sensibilities and complicated the script’s originally light tone. “When I wrote the play, it reflected the ongoing interest I have in sibling relationships and in infusing my work with emotionally true metaphors,” the playwright ventures. “Now I’m interested in exploring the deeper emotional landscapes beneath the banter and fun dialogue.” —Nirmala Nataraj
Dancing Lions
When Bethesda, Md.’s Imagination Stage and the Washington Ballet partnered for The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe, Janet Stanford made one request: “No tights for Aslan.”
Thrilled by the idea of the unprecedented collaboration, Stanford, Imagination’s artistic director, challenged Minneapolis-based designer Eric J. Van Wyk to craft a life-size puppet to portray the beloved lion. This puppet adds yet another layer of magic to the show’s unique blend of dance, music and theatre.
The C.S. Lewis classic has been adapted and directed by Stanford and runs June 20–Aug. 12.
Washington Ballet’s Septime Webre and David Palmer approached the choreography with an emphasis on storytelling, allowing an actor and a dancer to transition in and out of the roles of the four children.
“There is a seamless transition that takes place when the music and dancing begins,” Stanford says. “I don’t think the children in the audience will even realize they’re watching ballet.”
The Necessity of Invention
An organ powered by fire…dangling glass orbs clacking together above performers’ heads…a wheel projecting glimpses of stations from a train window… These are the elements that German-born, Seattle-based artist Trimpin has chosen to tell a story of the Holocaust. The MacArthur “Genius” grantee, whose kinetic sculptures have long straddled the categories of visual art, music and eccentric engineering, sets foot into the theatrical sphere with The Gurs Zyklus, developed in residence at Stanford University and directed and narrated by Obie winner Rinde Eckert.
Stanford Lively Arts premiered Zyklus (which means “cycle”) in May 2011; a year later, Seattle’s On the Boards is restaging it (May 17–20). The subject matter is personal for Trimpin, who grew up within walking distance of the Gurs internment camp, where Jews from his town had been sent by the Nazis, many ultimately bound for Auschwitz. As a boy, he could sense the mystery and shame shadowing the place. In the 1980s, the memory resurfaced when he collaborated with U.S. composer Conlon Nancarrow, who’d been held at Gurs during the Spanish Civil War. After mentioning Gurs in a New Yorker profile, Trimpin received an unexpected shoebox of old letters from a man whose father had been among Gurs’s imprisoned Jews.
That correspondence, along with the notes and drawings of a 10-year-old camp prisoner, provide much of Eckert’s narrative material and the text sung by the show’s four vocalists. But there are other narratives to be found, buried in Trimpin’s curious contraptions. For example, in homage to Nancarrow’s famous player-piano rolls, Trimpin lets loose his own mechanized instrument, but its notes are extrapolated from the bark patterns of trees at the Gurs site—giving voice to nature’s silent witnesses. —Nicole Estvanik Taylor
Digging Up the Dirt
Reporter John Conroy is new to playwriting. But he’s an expert on the subject of his first play—the police torture of suspects that occurred in Chicago during the 1970s and ’80s, much of it under the watch of Commander Jon Burge. (Burge was removed from the force in 1993 and is now serving a sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice related to the torture accusations.) In My Kind of Town, opening this month at Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company under Nick Bowling’s direction, Conroy fictionalizes the case he covered for some 20 years at the Chicago Reader, starting with an article entitled “House of Screams” in 1990.
“Shedding the journalism has been one of the hardest things for me,” says Conroy, who lost his Reader staff writer’s position because of budget cuts in 2007 and now works as an investigator for the nonprofit Better Government Association. But he’s found that many of the changes suggested by Bowling and the TimeLine team have strengthened the script, which got its first public airing at Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s developmental First Look Repertory of New Work in 2009.
The character of John Gunther, the commander, no longer appears on stage. Instead, says Conroy, “There is the charming South Side Irish torturer who refers to his boss, but the boss is not there.” Conroy also pivoted away from his initial impulse to establish the innocence of his character Otha Jeffries, the fictionalized Death Row inmate whose torture accusations set off the plot (which covers events from 1982 to 1998). “TimeLine said, ‘For our audiences, this is too easy. We want the bad guy,’” Conroy notes.
“What I love about this play and this story,” volunteers director Bowling, “is that all nine characters end up with some dirt on their hands—even Jeffries’s mother. You end up realizing that it’s because we’ve allowed this dirt—we’ll allow a little torture as long as we don’t see it. And as long as it’s there, we all get dirty.” —Kerry Reid
Almanac
110 years ago (1902) Richard Rodgers is born. He will go on to become one of the most prolific and successful Broadway composers, partnering first with Lorenz Hart and later with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II on Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music, to name a few.
55 years ago (1947) Margo Jones, at age 34, opens Theater 47 on June 3, 1947, on the grounds of the State Fair of Texas in Dallas with a performance of William Inge’s new play Farther Off From Heaven. The theatre-in-the-round will change its name each New Year’s Eve and will go on to produce 85 plays, 57 of them from new scripts, before Jones’s accidental death in 1955.
40 years ago (1972) Playwright Tennessee Williams makes his stage debut in the Off-Broadway production of his own play, Small Craft Warnings. His appearance is both unexpected and short-lived—Williams only appears on stage for three performances, as he is simply filling in for an indisposed actor.
30 years ago (1982) On May 3, playwright William Inge’s birthday, the first Inge Festival is held in Independence, Kans., at the William Inge Center for the Arts, and called “A Birthday Celebration.” The festival will go on to welcome theatre greats such as Arthur Miller, Neil Simon and Stephen Sondheim.
