"As You Like It" at Writers Theatre on April 11 in Glencoe, IL

In a way, there's a very typical experience I have at almost all productions of Shakespeare and they were evident at this production. The woman behind me kept examining silly things trying to sound learned and impressive. She commented endlessly on the fact that the actors were wearing contemporary rather than period costume. She explained to her date that despite the attempt at updating the play, it still felt old to her. When the "all the world's a stage" speech began, the very nice and jovial man next me nodded with furious recognition when the character says "all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players." He seemed to have such recognition, as if he'd heard and learned something so new. But the meaning of that speech unfolds in the ensuing lines. In my opinion, when most lay people (including me) see Shakespeare, they have a very difficult time with the language and thus lose much of the play. They expect to be bored and claim to love the production if they're entertained for twenty percent of the show. No one wants to admit that they didn't like a play that everyone knows is brilliant and that you'd have to be an idiot to say you didn't like. However, the language is so difficult and the plays so tough that it's hard to understand the plays in a meaningful way upon first seeing them. But, people don't want to feel dumb so they pretend to get a lot out of it. Plus, with so many snippets of Shakespeare's dialogue so familiar, we pretend to be moved by their meaning when we hear them. Thus, this woman going on about the silliness of the choice of costume and the man who nods in furious recognition at hearing the opening of that speech. I, for one, am usually bored off my ass in most productions of Shakespeare and get much more meaning out of reading them than watching them.

This production, however, was completely different. There were still audience members trying to convince themselves that it was deep and that they really understood it. What was different is that this production was neither distancing nor dull. In fact, I found myself incredibly moved a number of times. I often get the sense that directors of Shakespeare rarely understand each line of dialogue and, thus, can't get their actors to do more than speak them as sentences that sound right even if they don't convey meaning. Most actors seem so clearly to be acting when they speak their dialogue. Consequently, the lines are rarely convincing and the themes rarely coherent. In this production, Larry Yando delivers the famous lines "all the world's a stage" speech. What comes after those lines is so clear in its delivery that Yando has you enraptured as you listen to him talk about the inevitability for aging. At the end of the first act (as the play is staged), the lovers and other gentle folk who are in hiding in the Forest of Arden scatter as spotlights search the forest from a threatening helicopter. Once they've all scurried away, Yando remains alone, sitting in the open and apparently not caring if he is harmed. He's angry about aging and being closer to death and seems to want to combat death by daring it. While everyone else around him is silly in love, he alone experiences this melancholy and thus is even more isolated. This final image in the first act serves as a continuation of the earlier speech. When Orlando comes upon the gang of nice people in the Forest of Arden, he has left his elderly servant to find food and bring it back. Having left his job with the evil brother to look after Orlando, the servant has difficulty in the forest and is nearly dead from starvation. Orlando comes upon the band of merry men in the woods and savagely robs them at gunpoint. When they ask why he is robbing them, he explains. The good uncle in the play, who has been banished, tells him he has no need to steal the food. If he needs it, he can have it. I wish I could recall the lines because they were delivered with such compassion. Orlando is completely disarmed by this and collapses. It's the first time in a long, long time that he's received such generosity and when he does it's as if he feels the pain of the past the moment he's relieved of it. The lines are well delivered and the acting true.

What was so wonderful about this production was the care of thought was evident in every decision, from the bar used in the first few scenes to the delivery of dialogue. Most productions of Shakespeare done on this scale tend to be over the top with costumes and sets and most people find entertainment with those things rather than in the action. This production used simple costumes and a not-so-flashy set and instead focused on wringing emotion and meaning out of the play. It was a treat to see.

Having said the production wrung meaning out of the play, I will say that I think this is a damn silly play. I've never read "As You Like It" and this was my first time seeing a production of it. Maybe there's more to it than met my eye but if there's any philosophy in it, I missed it. The love connections aren't terribly interesting and the reversals are stunningly ridiculous, especially the evil uncle who finds God and gives his kingdom over to his foes. Still, it's a joy, and a rare one, to see what this director and these actors have done with it.

"Monument" by The Seldoms on April 11 in Chicago, IL

I don't usually include dance in this blog because, although I love it, I can't analyze it and have no vocabulary for discussing it. The Seldoms' pieces, though, can verge toward dance theater.

Carrie Hanson and Doug Stapleton are the choreographer and dramaturg of The Seldoms. Hanson is a beautiful dancer, an ambitious choreographer, and a consummate collaborator (with wonderful taste). As artistic director of The Seldoms, Hanson's pieces typically involve collaborations with visual artists, costume artists, and musicians. In fact, her relationship with Stapleton is a testament to her collaborative nature. It's also a testament to her ambition. As a choreographer and artistic director, she wants to create innovative movement but she also wants to create and convey meaning beyond the physical. Their collaborations, however, don't always work and I've seen some spectacular failures. The Seldoms is also a small and poor dance company that can't afford to hire great dancers. They try to make do.

"Monument" is one of Hansen's most ambitious pieces to date. It looks at the amount of waste Americans consume and waste. Monument refers to a a trash heap in NY that is so large that it is visible from space. Apparently, it's larger than the Statue of Liberty. This trash heap is a monument to our consumerism and tendency to waste. The show's set includes beautiful video and its music adds effectively to its mood. The composer has rearranged "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" and made it slower -- sad and reflective. It lends the piece a beautiful tension.

With all the wonderful artistic collaboration, the treat in seeing this piece is still the choreography and dancing. Hansen has found a team of strong dancers who make her choreography seem light and effortless, a luxury she's always lacked in the past. The partnering is complex, unexpected, and sometimes breathtaking. The choreography's vocabulary is tight. We see certain movements repeated and with each repetition they seem more poetic. The movement also frequently approaches literal meaning, or recognizable gestures.

I hope we see move of this from The Seldoms. This is the most exciting piece of dance I've seen by a small, local company in years. It gives me hope that something meaningful might develop in Chicago.

"White White Black Stork" by The Ilkholm Theatre on April 5th in Seattle, WA

The Ilkholm Theatre was founded in the mid 1970's in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. It was a non-state sponsored theater (and a political one) ten or a dozen years before Gorbachev. In his notes, the founder explains that in Uzbekistan's history the arts, especially theater, were highly prized as a tool for examining political situations. Under Soviet rule, this freedom disappeared. With this history and under these conditions he founded The Ilkholm Theatre.

"White White Black Crane" is set in the late 1900's. A boy in his late teen falls for a poor boy who is in school. The poor boy seems largely to spend time with the protagonist out of economic self interest. Forgetting his economic reason for his participation for a moment, he gets caught up by the exuberance of the other boy's attraction and they frolic and are caught by the father. The father and townspeople interpret the frolicking as sexual play. The poor boy is kicked out of school and the protagonist is forced to marry. The girl he marries has fallen in love with her own pauper, a boy who seels cloth for a living and wanders into her family's garden. With her headdress off, she tries to flirt with the boy but he's afraid and dashes off. he returns for meals but never tells her his name. Her father marries her off to the other boy for and insists on a larger than normal dowry.

The boy is heartbroken and can't bring himself to have sex with his new wife. She knows that he's reputed to be gay and shuns him. Over time, however, they come to understand each other's pain and they forge an emotional bond. Knowing that they still haven't consecrated the marriage, her father sues the boy's family and wins. The play culminates in murder and everyone's miserable.

The themes are clear. The boy and girl do not follow social conventions and are cast out as result. The only relationship allowed any power is the economic relationship between the fathers. Their children are things they trade with no consideration of their uniqueness. While arranged marriages might be typical, the impetus for the marriage were homophobia and greed. One father forces his son to be with a woman and the other didn't care that he was marrying his daughter off to a gay man -- he just wanted the money. The treatment of the theme is more nuanced than my statement of it, however. We're not really certain if the boy is gay or if, as he insists, he's just deeply connected to the other boy in neither a sexual or romantic way. There's also a play on "Romeo and Juliet," with some homoeroticism brought to the surface, an investigation of how families harm their children, and, most interestingly, how young people come to love each other in ways that adults can't seem to recognize.

The play is lyrical, with much of it reading like poetry (well, it's in Russian and I read supertitles but the supertitles were lyrical so I think the original script must also be). Even the set and the blocking were sparse and lovely.

I very much enjoyed the play, partly because it was a pleasure to watch but mostly because I was interested to be seeing a play by an Uzbeki theater company. The supertitles weren't always synched up correctly with the dialogue on stage, which pulled one out of the play.

"Throwing Bones" by Sojourn Theatre on April 3rd in Portland, OR

"Throwing Bones" is a remarkably humane story about three ill women and the personal and medical care they recieve. One is a black South African whose cheating partner passes on the HIV virus to her, another is a white South African whose illness is undiagnosable by Western doctors, and the third is a young woman in Portland with cystic fibrosis whose mother who is devastated upon learning of it. Each story illuminates another in a symbiotic way that I've rarely seen in theater. From the moment of learning about her daughter's cystic fibrosis, the mother thinks constantly about it. In a way, she begins to experience her daughter's death at that moment of learning about the diagnosis. (There is a wonderfully moving scene -- maybe to say it is a vignette is more accurate --when she finds out about this illness at the dinner table. The news is whispered to her and not a word is spoken. We witness her devastation through the way she handles the dishes. Ther's another stand out scene where, in the daughter's hospital bed, the two play a game of re-enacting a movie deathbed scene. We see them try to control what is inevitable by playing it out with humor. The mother, of course, becomes the grieved person she's mimicking and breaks down sobbing while the daughter laughs uncotrollably.) She never lives another day, when her daughter is both alive and after her death, that she doesn't miss her daughter. Death comes early, even before the daughter dies. In contrast, the black South African has decided not to tell her mother of her illness. She explains that once she does die, her mother will suffer unmentionable pain. She knows that, like the other mother, her mother will begin to experience her death upon learning the news. The play is filled with unspoken comparisons like this. Another I'll mention just briefly is between the two doctors - one an ivy league educated physician and the other a South African faith healer. We get glimpses into why both do the work they do and their relationship to each other as healers (or rather, as someone who tries to stave off the inevitable).

The structure of the play, in the way that it tells these stories, is impressive enough. However, there are dance sequences and moments in which the characters speak directly to the audience. The movement is choreographed by a member of Urban Bush Women. Rather than being silly or cheesy, it is moving, conveying sadness, joy, pain, and even ideas. At one stand out moment in the piece, the American doctor instructs the audience on how to feel for the pulse of the person to the left. He carefully walked us through that and after a few seconds I slowly began to feel the pulse of the person to my left, feeling it get stronger and stronger. We continued to feel the pulse for a while and, with our finger on that wrist, he tells us that that pulse will enevitably stop beat and that person will surely die. Then, he continues, there are people across the world (causing us to envision South Africa) whose pulses are ceasing to beat. In doing this, he creates an immediate and intimate moment with our neighbor (many of whom were strangers to the person next to us) and extends that intimacy to someone we've never laid eyes on but summon as a result of this very bodily experience. Interestingly, we pay more attention to the pulse we're feeling and imagine that person's death. However, the person to our right is feeling our pulse and our death is also being alluded to. In keeping with the concentration of the play, though, it is the otehr person's death we consider.

Two things strike me about this company: their ambition and their care. This is one of those plays where so many decisions could have gone bad and seemed cheesy but none do because every artistic decision has been carefully considered and shaped. The ambition is to humanely examine our experience of illness and death and the way we create meaning out of them. Creating a play about death and dying is, of course, huge. Yet they do so in an extremely intimate scale. The play is performed in what I think is the examining room of a nurse's college. In a way, doing it on such a small scale makes the largeness of the impact possbile.

"Boneyard Prayers" by Redmoon Theater on April 1st in Chicago, IL

Puppet theater by nature has certain limits. The best puppet theater turns those limits into strengths. I'm always amazed by scenes in which you see three puppeteers manipulating a puppet in a sad or tender moment. The fact that a puppet is standing in for a human and that three people are visibly manipulating it would likely prevent the viewer from being drawn into the scene emotionally. Yet, sometimes this display of artifice actually heightens the emotional punch of the scene. Puppet theater also cannot move at the pace of a conventional show and, as a result, not as much can happen. Thus, puppeteers tend to condense stories to a series of emotionally heightened scenes, operating almost with the economy of poetry.

Redmoon Theater has mastered the spectacle, large scale performances that tend to eschew narrative for the joy of endlessly unfolding visual (and often musical) surprises. They've also done excellent plays more on the scale of traditional theater. These tend to be adaptations of literature. One of the reasons these adaptations have been successful is because the artists have managed to surprise us with an unexpected series of delightful images, whether puppets of various sizes and forms or drawings.

"Boneyard Stories" is not a literary adaptation but an original story with original songs. It's about an alcoholic who decides to go home after having fled 23 years prior. The set is largely piles of dirt and everything and everyone is always covered in dirt. This are constantly being unearthed, or dug up. Having fled home because he couldn't face something he's done, the protagonist has tried to bury his guilt and, consequently, has become an alcoholic. Thus, the point of the story: we harm ourselves by sublimating painful events and can recover our health only by facing, or digging up, the past.

The problem with this production is that the narrative is severely underdeveloped. Characterization doesn't work and we care little for the characters. As always, much of the puppetry is wonderful. In one of my favorite scenes, the protagonist and his former wife have a bitter argument. The puppeteers/actors manipulating them drop the puppets and retreat. The puppets they drop fall crumpled unto the dirt in positions that express their pain. The duality of puppet and actor conveying the same emotion is fun to watch and the placement of the puppets manage to reflect the pain even more than the actors and their doubles. In the way that a story can seem especially ridiculous when it tries to be moving but doesn't achieve its goal, this story gets there. And once it does, the wonderful set, music, and puppetry can't save it. In fact, it's the other way around. The weak plot infects lessens our appreciation of the puppetry.

"The Brig" at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble on March 19th in Los Angeles, CA

"The Brig" is unlike anything I can remember ever having seen on stage. Set in a Marines jail, there is little plot, character development, or dialogue in this fascinating play. There is, however, intense theatrical poetry.

The first act, which is probably nearly an hour long, is a carefully choreographed acting out of the prisoner's day. We see them change their clothes, make their beds, march off to the bathroom, and read their marines manuals. The prisoners are sometimes barked at by the wardens but the soundtrack of this play is provided by the heavy panting of the actors as they march/stomp and run across the stage and as they scream their request for permission to cross the various white lines laid out across the brig. Once the ten prisoners are awakened by the wardens, the play is a flurry of activity, all highly coordinated, all intensely physical, and all terribly impersonal. It's like a fucked up version of watching a marching band up close. The sense of the lives of the men in the marines is conveyed through a highly intense bodily experience and the drama of the play is the acting out of the demands and difficulty of these lives.

I was fascinated to watch a play without dialogue communicate a deep sense of the experience of being a soldier. Still, at the end of act one, I was praying for some dialogue and a plot in the second act. I didn't get any such thing but what I got was masterful. Having set the scene of the ordinary day for these soldiers in act one, act two provides scenes that act as relief against the first act. For example, there's a scene in which the men clean the brig. If they clean it well enough, they are told, they will get a half hour to write letters. As an audience member, you pray that they receive this half hour because you sense they desperately need the break from this awful physical routine to survive with their sanity intact and because you need a break from the choreography of loud sound and repetitive action. This is where the drama lies in the show. A very different kind than we typically experience in theater. Its story is boiled down to emotion and conveyed in a unique way. As the men frantically wash the brig, things become frantic, almost slapstick, and one gets the sense of the chaos that lives just beneath the surface of this military routine. At any moment, it seems, these men could fall out of marching step and pandemonium could ensue. Or, perhaps more accurately, just beneath of the surface of the gloss and physical order of military life each soldier experiences a personal chaos and is part of a larger one.

Set against the order witnessed in the first act, the second act is remarkable. Among the things we witness is a prisoner leaving and a prisoner arriving. The prisoner leaving, we learn, is getting out five days early for good behavior. This is a serious disruption of the audience's assumptions. It means that in a world where one has no choice about how to behave, one can actually be deemed to have behaved well. Furthermore, and more to the point, it means that the wardens recognize the difficulty of these mens' lives and feel sympathy for them. This is jarring because it seriously disrupts our understanding of them as cold, mean, machines. Finally, we witness a prisoner's arrival, seeing how he learns all of these seemingly arbitrary rules (one can't ever have one's bare feet touch the ground, for example). After about five minutes of the soldier learning by making mistakes and being punished, a warden tells the new prisoner that another prisoner will explain the rules to him. This is the only time he will ever be engaged in a conversation, he is told. Once the explanation of the rules is complete, he will never speak to another human being, he will only receive and ask for orders. Having just witnessed two hours of this kind of life, this short bit of relief, or counterpoint, leaves us devastated. We feel what they have missed largely being seeing it happen for 30 seconds.

I have given away a lot about this play but there's so much more. And it's something to see. After the show, an actor friend of mine said he can't imagine why any actor would want to be in that show. He pointed out how hard they work in the production, both physically and emotionally, and guessed that they were all backstage feeling isolated and angry with each other. I replied that this was Los Angeles and that maybe they're willing to be in any play to get noticed. He pointed out that it's impossible to get noticed in that play -- everyone does everything the same way at the same time and emotion isn't conveyed in such a way that one recognizes the work of an individual actor. As in the world of the marines that this play reflects, there is no individuality and the bits of humanity present are rarely witnessed.

"Carousel" at the Court Theatre on March 16th in Chicago, IL.

"Carousel," by Rogers and Hammerstein, has among its songs one called "A Real Nice Clambake" and another called "What's the Use of Wond'rin?" The first is about what a nice clambake the characters have just had, how many dozens of clams they've just eaten, and how full and jovial they are. The other asks what's the use of wondering if your man is good or bad when he's bound to hurt you in either case and you're bound to stay with him even then. The first is a frivolous and silly song and the second a dark and painful song. This production could have chosen the path of either song for its tone but chose to go with the clambake.

About a dozen years or so ago, Gary Griffin began to direct musicals on a small scale at Pegasus Theater. By necessity, they didn't have large orchestras or fancy sets. As a director, Griffin focused on wringing the meaning out of the songs and coached his singers into fine emotional performances. I guess Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and the Court Theatre caught wind of this and invited Griffin to direct musicals at both theaters. About six years ago, Griffin directed "My Fair Lady" at the Court, a musical I'd had no interest in at first. Griffin produced it with two pianos as the only instruments and great direction. The extremely talented Kate Fry played the lead with deep emotional intelligence and the show was a sensation. Ever since, the Court has been "exploring the American musical."

If one is going to conduct such an exploration, then doing Rogers and Hammerstein seems essential. As one sits through this production and wonders why the hell they did this show, one might remember that Rogers and Hammerstein were important pioneers of the American musical and instead ask yourself why the hell did they decided to do this show this way. The story, about a couple who loved each other but would never say "I love you," seems stunted and flat and much of the action seem to make no sense.

This show tries to have more integrity than a typical splashy musical but in the end doesn't. The young actors are all very fine singers but none of them are good actors -- of the caliber of Kate Fry. They act and move like actors in splashy musicals act and move. Whereas Griffin seemed to carefully consider each and every decision about what happened on stage, mining the script for meaning, this production seemed to take all of its cues from one's memories of musicals. There's a scene in which a wife finds her husband of just a few months dead -- he's killed himself rather than land himself in jail. In that moment, she says "I love you" to him for the first time. This scene could have been nicely done, especially since this thread of not saying "I love you" but wanting desperately to hear it is sewn throughout the play. Instead of dealing with the meaning of that scene, the director stages it so that all the actors turn their heads away from the mourning wife -- gestures that are hackneyed. Had "What's the Use of Wond'rin?" been treated intelligently, we would have felt the bitterness of the divorced woman who opens the number. One gets the sense, however, that the director never studied the scene with his actors.

The Court Theatre is one of the most consistently good theaters in town. Charlie Newell, the artistic director, always puts together an intelligent and unexpected season. I can see why he would choose this show but I'm sorry about this production.

As an aside, I will mention the race blind casting. This is something that the Court has done for some time. The theater has also consistently chosen plays that call for a majority of black actors. A few years ago it did a mixed cast production of "Desire Under the Elms" that was fantastic and made the story even more complicated. The mixed cast in this show is more straightforward. A number of actors of color, and not just black, have work on this production and that is a good thing. One choice seems unfortunate to me, though, and that is of Nettie, the matriarch among the young women. She is a surrogate mother to what appear to be motherless young women. Played by an African American woman, Nettie seems like a mammey character in this production, the selfless black woman who historically has cared for the white children of her owners/employers. In American history, mammies mothered the children of white women, even breast feeding them, until they grew into adolescence and were then torn away from the children. The southerner Lillian Smith has written about what a painful separation this is for the black woman and for the child. In popular culture, the mammey is usually depicted as jovial and selfless when the truth of the matter was that she had no choice. On the one hand, the fact that a talented African American has a well-paying role at one of Chicago's best theaters is great. On the other hand, they might have tried to play her differently to avoid this stereotype.