No Trunks, Plenty of Baggage
Warning: There are no talking elephants in Tusk Tusk, Piven Theatre Workshop’s season-opening production, slated Sept. 12-Oct. 7 at the Chicago theatre. No, the play by twentysomething British writer Polly Stenham is about three middle-class children holed up in their London flat. Its playful title notwithstanding, the play broaches a host of gritty themes and story elements unusual in a work whose central characters have yet to reach adulthood: abandonment, mental illness, alcohol, sexuality and violence.
“It’s theatre about children, but it’s certainly not ‘children’s theatre,’” avows Piven artistic director Jennifer Green, who’s staging Tusk Tusk. In the play, which premiered at London’s Royal Court in 2009, 15-year-old Eliot, 14-year-old Maggie and 7-year-old Finn (played at Piven by Bryce Lunsky, Olivia Cygan and Gabriel Stern, who range in age from 18 to 9) wait for their bipolar, intermittently suicidal and regularly wayward mother to return home. They suspect she isn’t coming back this time—she’s been gone for a week—but they refuse to reach out to the authorities because they’re afraid they’ll be taken into the care of the state and separated. “They’re really trapped in that apartment, coming of age without an adult model to guide them,” Green says. “You see them struggling, in real time, without a safety net.”
Given the gravity of the material—leavened as much as possible with humor, but that goes only so far—the company went to considerable lengths to ensure that actors and their parents understood what they were getting themselves into. Before selecting the play, Piven held readings for area teachers and parents; later, parents of all the actors who auditioned were required to sign a form certifying that they’d read the script.
“You kind of shudder as a director, because you’re taking incredible risk,” Green says. “We’re not dealing with extremely experienced actors here, and so we didn’t want to put them in a situation where they were dealing with these issues and didn’t have their own support system. At the same time, the play seemed appropriate for Piven, because we’re both a theatre and a training center with a strong commitment to incubating young artists. The play is challenging, but it’s also really well written and puts
young performers front and center.”
Cygan, who appeared as the young Estella in Piven’s earlier production of Great Expectations, agrees. “Yes, our characters are in extreme circumstances, but the play is also pretty realistic,” she points out. “A lot of young people are facing things like this in real life.”
—Kevin Nance
The Bright Light of Loss
“Each of Athol’s plays is getting more deeply personal, revealing the soul of the writer,” says Stephen Sachs, co-artistic director of the 78-seat Fountain Theatre, situated in a ramshackle residential district on Hollywood’s eastern edge. He’s talking, of course, about South African playwright Athol Fugard, with whom Sachs has enjoyed a 12-year rapport. Sachs is directing the U.S. premiere of Fugard’s latest work, The Blue Iris.
According to Sachs, the three-character drama is at least partly inspired by 13 Thomas Hardy poems, composed after the death of the poet’s estranged yet beloved wife. The play tells the story of a Karoo farmer whose house has been struck by lightning. “He’s sifting through the ashes and the memories of his marriage with his ‘colored’ housekeeper,” Sachs explains.
Blue Iris, which runs through Sept. 16 at the Fountain, premiered at South Africa’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in June, then continued its debut run at Cape Town’s Fugard Theatre in July.
If anyone has a handle on the evolution of Fugard’s works, it would be Sachs. It was back in 2000 that Fugard dropped by the Fountain unannounced to see Sachs’s production of his Road to Mecca. Fugard later told L.A. Weekly that he had wanted to show up without fanfare, in case he was disappointed—but instead, the playwright was so impressed that he came to regard the Fountain as his West Coast home in the U.S. “I prefer the smaller venues,” he said in an interview. “I speak to individuals, not crowds.”
These are among the reasons that Fugard permitted Sachs to direct the premiere of his memory play about the theatre, Exits and Entrances, in 2004. In fact, with the exception of the drama Coming Home, the Fountain has since presented the U.S. premieres of all of Fugard’s plays: Victory (2008), The Train Driver (2010) and now Iris.
Fugard turned 80 in June. As Sachs points out, his purpose, now more than ever, is to tell the truth—and the deeper, more personal truths of his latest plays are also the most universal.
—Steven Leigh Morris
Linking Hands
James Still, the longtime writer-in-residence at Indiana Repertory Theatre, started out as a struggling young actor in Chicago. Yet in a nearly three-decade career that has seen his work produced throughout the U.S. and worldwide, Still’s work has never found its way to a Chicago theatre—until now.
“I’m completing a very big circle,” Still opines of his new play Illegal Use of Hands, which is kicking off the 27th season of American Blues Theater, where Still is an artistic affiliate. In Hands, a high school football trophy links three men in a “kind of Jacobean revenge play.” ABT’s work focuses on the struggle of the working class, and Hands is no exception. “The guys in my play are barely getting by,” Still says. But ultimately, he thinks of Hands as a human story, adding, “They’re just hoping to get through the night without kissing or killing each other.”
—Joseph Sims
Hangin’ With the French Queen
At first glance, the world of an 18th-century French court may seem like a diversion for David Adjmi, whose offerings usually center on modern existential crises.
That’s why the impetus to write Marie Antoinette, about the infamous French queen, came as such a surprise—especially to the playwright himself. During a residency at the MacDowell Colony, “I was working on a piece about Henry James, which I didn’t finish,” Adjmi begins. “I was relaxing, reading some books and suddenly, I thought—it was like a bolt of lightning, it was the weirdest thing—‘I should write a play about Marie Antoinette.’”
The “preternatural intuition” set off a flurry of research, and Adjmi soon discovered a Marie who was “incredibly sympathetic. She was locked in the machinery of a very difficult culture,” he elaborates. “She was not smart, and here she was as the queen of France, not having any kind of moral rectitude and being forced to examine her life.”
That character trait sounds familiar. “I tend to be attracted to people who are struggling to understand the authentic circumstances of their lives, but lack the tools to do so,” Adjmi admits.
Marie is a co-production of Massachusetts’s American Repertory Theater, where it plays Sept. 1-29, and Connecticut’s Yale Repertory Theatre, where it will run Oct. 26-Nov. 17. The play spans 15 years, to the end of Marie’s ill-fated reign, and promises sumptuous costumes and gravity-defying hairstyles.
“When it starts, there’s all this pageantry,” Adjmi notes. “As the play goes on, Marie’s optics
start to change and everything gets darker. My plays are, tonally, always a bit unstable.”
—Diep Tran
A Pledge to Remember
In September 2008, composer/lyricist Jay Kuo (Insignificant Others, Worlds Apart) and his writing and producing partner Lorenzo Thione were at a performance of Forbidden Broadway in New York when they realized, starstruck, that George Takei (of “Star Trek” fame) and his husband Brad were sitting behind them. The four exchanged pleasantries. Serendipitously, the next night, the four were again seated near each other at the musical In the Heights. During the first act, Takei was visibly touched by the song “Inutil” (“Useless”) and when intermission came, Kuo asked him why. The song (about a father’s inability to help his daughter), Takei explained, reminded him of his own father. After Pearl Harbor, five-year-old Takei and his family were forced out of their East Los Angeles home and interned at an Arkansas relocation camp. In Takei’s words, “Two soldiers with bayonets stomped onto our front porch. My mother came downstairs with tears in her eyes, holding my newborn sister. That image will forever be seared into my memory.”
“His story gave me chills,” muses Kuo, “and I said, ‘This might sound crazy, but I’d like to write a musical about your experience.’”
A few weeks later, Kuo and Thione e-mailed Takei a song. “I found myself weeping at the computer,” recalls Takei, who immediately signed onto the project. Four years after their chance encounter, Allegiance is premiering at San Diego’s Old Globe (Sept. 7–Oct. 21), directed by Stafford Arima, with music and lyrics by Kuo and a book by Kuo, Thione and Marc Acito. A transfer to Broadway is planned later this season.
Allegiance chronicles the World War II experiences of the Kimura family at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. Telly Leung (Godspell, Rent) and Lea Salonga (Miss Saigon) play siblings Sammy and Kei, who represent the rift within the Japanese-American community. While Sammy is desperately committed to proving his loyalty and patriotism, Kei supports the draft resisters, who refuse to serve a country that put them in concentration camps. Takei plays Sam as an older man looking back on his family’s history.
“It’s vitally important for Americans to know about those moments where we fail our national ideals,” Takei asserts, adding, “We have enough chapters about the glory of our democracy, but we learn more from the chapters where we made mistakes.”
—Lily Tung Crystal
You’ve Got to Be Kidding
Amidst the hanging chads and partisan venom of the 2000 presidential election, Julia Flood saw an opportunity. As artistic director of the Clearwater, Fla.-based Eckerd Theater Company, she issued a 2003 commission to playwright Eric Coble for a piece that would inspire new generations of young people to make their voices heard at the ballot box.
The result, Vote?, celebrates the travails and triumphs of the disenfranchised throughout U.S. history. The play follows disaffected teenager Nicole, who finds herself mysteriously transported across time and space, dropping in on such pivotal moments as the American Revolution, the struggle for women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement.
“It’s about the moments when the costs for outsiders were the highest—not just turning points, but when people were paying the greatest price for voting and taking control of government,” Coble says.
The playwright recalls how bracing it was, while researching the play, to see virulent arguments against various groups gaining voting rights, often printed in reputable publications. One New York Times editorial from the early 20th century labeled female suffragettes “cigar-chomping vixens.”
Young audience members have had similar moments of disbelief when watching Vote?—some have asked afterward if the events in the play are actually part of history. (ETC has toured the show up and down the U.S. in the months before the 2004, 2006 and 2008 elections, and will do so again beginning this month.)
Such a reaction delights Coble. “It’s gratifying to watch their eyes get big,” Coble says. “It’s gratifying to assure people that these things really happened.”
—Matt Connolly
