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Transcript of Chicago Arts Journal
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CHICAGO
ARTS
JOURNALWINTER 2015
FREE TO A GOOD HOME
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Chicago Arts Journal ! Winter 2015
Dear Readers,
Have you ever had the sort of postal correspondence with a
faraway loved one in which long stretches of time pass
during which notes are taken on various subjects, with the
intent to convey the texture of ones life and time but the
card itself languishes in a drawer unsent? Thats something of
how we feel lately. In the past few months, weve seen a bunch
of shows, weve had a bunch of ideas, weve laughed and
thought of you and now were at a backlog. Its been too
long, readers. But what better time, then, than this horrendous
cold snap to send you our fondly-scribbled notes in the form of
a new issue? Do you have a fireplace to sit by? If not, put somebeans on the stove and pull up a chair. We need to catch up.
In looking over the various reviews, stories, arguments and
conversations in this issue, we have gotten to thinking about
tradition and continuity. In the theater reports department, we
find several local stagings of Samuel Becketts works, providing
fruitful thoughts on the man and his current interpreters,
stretching or ignoring the canon; we recall Carl Sandburgs
Rootabaga style of folk tales and their mythologizedMidwestern landscapes, a form riffed upon in these pages by
Mark Leach; we ponder the long-running festival atmosphere
encountered for one weekend each summer at Mary-Arrchies
Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins; and we steep in the
communal, semi-fictional theatrical neighborhoods of Beau
OReilly, co-author of Curious Theatre BranchsMarch!, here
observed by Ira Murfin. Contributor Margaret Murray
furnishes us with a quietly thoughtful personal essay on a long
and sporadic friendship with a friend now gone to live in New
Orleans, a city that can feel both ever-changing and eternal. To
conclude the issue, we conducted interviews with local art-
makers Sherry Antonini and Robert Metrick, who told us
about their past projects and also their future works, hopes,
and ideas which include, for each, a show in the Rhinoceros
Theater Festival, an event now nipping at our heels. On that
subject, keep your eyes peeled for our Rhino Fest Flash Issue,
in which we recap and reflect on various events from the
venerable fringe fest put up by Curious each winter. Were glad
to be back in touch, and we hope this letter finds you well. Iftheres anything youd like to say to us, please dont hesitate to
write.
Johann Blumer
for the Editors
johann.art sjournal@gmail .com
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Table of Contents
Page 3 Endgame
By Right Brain Theatre Project
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
6 Happy Days
By Theatre Y
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
9 Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins XXVII
By Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. et al.
Reviewed by Carine Loewi
11 In the Absence of a Road, You Could Float Up
Essay by Margaret Murray
14 March!
By Curious Theatre Branch
Reviewed by Ira S. Murfin
18 How Tweezle Seed Prompted the Three-D Sistersand the Beefalo Brothers to Do as the Rootabaga Lizards Do
Story by Mark Leach
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EndgameBy Right Brain Theatre Project
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
Confession: I am not a Beckett-head. I hold nothing against theman, on a personal or an artistic level, but I havent seen much of his
work, even while it seems to darken doorways all over town lately.
When my benevolent editor friend Johann asked a few months ago if
Id watch Right Brain Projects treatment of Endgame by most
estimations, one of the Beckett Big Three and write down my
thoughts, I had never seen the play before, nor did I have any idea of
the plot. The endgame is the last part of a chess match, right? How
it all plays out in the last moves?, I asked him. He looked at me
with a bald-faced glee and said, Perfect. Dont change a thing.
The building at 4001 North Ravenswood is where Right Brain
works, and also Zoo Studios, and in that neighborhood are several
other theater spaces in other refurbished industrial lofts. Mostly this
results in performances staged in long, windowless rooms that make
you feel like youre watching a play inside a shipping container.
(Remember how in Top of the Lake, the women on the commune
spent their days hanging out and meditating on an expansive plain,
each in her own private shipping container? This is the opposite ofthat shipping container experience.) Ive been to a handful of shows
in these spaces lately, and have marveled at both the depth of field
made possible by the dimensions of the rooms, and at the
claustrophobia that comes with these dimensions. This Endgamewas
the first production I saw that used the space in the round (or
round, more like), with audience seats creeping from one short end
of the room down the long walls, making it about halfway toward
the character Hamm, seated on an armchair atop a dolly at center
stage. (Had there been seats all the way around, I think nobody
would have wanted to get much closer.)
The antechamber of the Right Brain performance space is a close
and dimly lit hallway, offering no escape for the lone theatergoerinto a cushy chair or a hidden corner. I was glad to take a break from
leaning on the wall and re-reading my program to observe a man
shuffling oddly between the theater and the hallway, gesturing
invitingly with a wine bottle to those of us waiting for the show.
Initially, the meaning of this apparition was lost on me I
wondered if he were an eccentric concessions man but it turned
out to be Clov, played by Bries Vannon, loosening the boundaries of
the Beckett world by asking us in for a drink before the show.
Eventually, Clov got us all to come into the space, whether we
wanted wine or not, so that we could better observe his puttering
about and eventual entrance into the room proper, revealed behind
hanging slabs of thick, fogged plastic sheeting. Here was the start of
the play, unbeknownst to me: Clov setting the scene, looking out
high windows, following his set paths with a pained meticulousness.
I liked all this, and found myself rapt by the progress from space to
space and the characters manner, but as stagecraft it had a notable
flaw: with all the audience crowding around, looking through thebreak in the plastic to observe where Clov was going, what he was
doing some twenty feet away inside the room, it was not possible for
most of us to really see anything. Those few who elbowed to the
front might have been edified, but I had to make some guesses and
ask others later for a recapitulation of what Beckett clearly wanted
his audience to view unhindered.
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Not knowing the play, I took Vannons Clov to be a compulsive
savant. His gait, tipped forward in constant, poking steps, looked
like a controlled fall. No use of his joints whatsoever. This was
interesting and unsettling, as was his attire: loose pants and a short-
sleeved shirt buttoned full up, all in wheat-colored linens, and wornover a long, gaunt body, the same blonde color of his clothes (except
for in moments of intensity, when his face became very red). Because
of Clovs silent entrance into the plays world as he offered us wine
in the hall, I was genuinely surprised when he finally started to
speak, and proved to be quite articulate.
I think Right Brains conceit in this staging was that this day was
the day Hamm would finally die, and that Clov knew it, and had
invited us all in to watch. The set was done up in apocalyptic
hoarder fashion: dingy newspapers covering the walls, sacks of
something mysterious populating the corners, and crude chalk
drawings here and there depicting bombs falling, the devastated
landscape alluded to sketchily in Becketts text. I thought, Why
didnt anybody tell me this was an apocalypse play? And the answer
is probably that its not, not explicitly, but thats a valid reading of it,
and one Im still considering. Do I need the world to have ended
outside to feel the desolation of living endlessly with the one person I
cant escape? Not necessarily, but its an approach.
I had a lot of questions when the play was over. Such as, Who
were those puppets? Is the actor supposed to be looking right at me
like that? Why wouldnt a name spelled Clov be pronounced
Clahv? I asked around. It turns out that my friends, even the
engineers, read a surprising amount of Beckett, and a number of
them filled in some mysteries for me.
Most of the people I talked to about the show told me things
about other productions, different choices that could have been
taken. I got to thinking: do I have to have seen the show already to
see the show the right way? I hope not. I want the thing I encounter
in the shipping container to be a self-contained thing, a version thatdoes not need references to other versions in order to exist.
But my conversations with these friends did point out a few odd or
interesting (depending on your mood) moves Right Brain made in
this staging. Let me tell you about a rather large one: puppets.
Puppets! Nell and Nagg, Hamms elderly parents in their ash bins off
to the side, were not two elderly or even middle-aged actors but two
flour-sack puppets in emptied tomato cans. Clov would make soft
footsteps to fool Hamm that he was leaving the room, and then play
out the parental dialogues on his own, in different voices; Hamm
was none the wiser, or at least he pretended so. I am guessing that
this strays pretty far from Becketts intentions, but it did favorably
add to the sense of complete isolation in the play, the post-
civilization nothingness that stretches on forever. The two men, in
this rendering, are so desperately alone that one of them spends long
stretches of the day doing voices, recounting the anecdotes of people
who are now long dead, if they ever were alive. (I look back at my
program to discover that the Right Brain production sneakily hid
this device by listing red-herring actor names for the parts of Nell
and Nagg: Lena Bloom and Ralph Knowlson, who on further
inspection seem to be noms de thtre referring coyly to James Joyce
and a Beckett biographer, respectively. Ha ha, Right Brain.)
The other thing that made my learned friends go Huh? What?
was when I described the very end of the play, which I puzzled over.
Let me remember it for you, if I can. It looks like Clov is leaving, has
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decided to leave. Hamm asks him to say something, some parting
words, and he does, describing a prison-like past that seemed like
eternal captivity, from which he one day discovers he can simply
walk away. Listening to them talk of endings, of the absolute
nothing to be found out of doors, I wondered if Clov was going tosmother Hamm or what. Then Clov went behind Hamm and
opened a door in the wall, which seemed to be a closet but wait!
Inside the door in the wall were garlands of flowers, leis, tiki
decorations, warm-colored lights. I think it said something, in those
party-decoration letters that hang in a string over doorways, but I
cant remember now what the words were. Happy Birthday?Never
mind. A glow came from that strange corner, and from a hook Clov
took a flowered shirt, which he put on over the one he was wearing,
and then a straw hat, which he placed on his head. All this happenedwhile the scene continued, Hamm thinking Clov was gone from the
room (a theme established by those puppets). Clov picked up his
bag, a few more words went back and forth, and he walked from the
room. Hamm finished his patchy soliloquy, replaced the
handkerchief over his sightless eyes, and fell silent. End of play.
Enough people made screwed-up faces when I asked them about
this Hawaiian shirt scene that I realized something might be very
different from the stage picture as usually interpreted. I consulted the
text.
Of Clovs preparation before the plays close, Becketts stage
instruction says: Enter Clov, dressed for the road. Panama hat,
tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag. He halts by the
door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on
Hamm, till the end. I find here evidence of the Hawaiian shirt as a
stylistic choice not original to the work (and perhaps a broad
interpretation of Panama hat), but more significantly I notice that
Clov is never intended to actually leave. Its the final moment, the
break-up of whatever this is, and in Becketts play, even when the
moment of ending seems to arrive, it doesnt end. What a striking
choice, then, to have an exit actually occur. I leave the Right Brainscene with questions and peccadilloes but more fruitfully, I think,
with a blooming interest in Becketts texts and his intentions, which
I hope are still of importance to makers of theater today.
In revisiting the show in my mind, I am reminded too of the
subtle power of Vincent Lonergan as Hamm, the blind man on the
wheeled chair. I have said much about the design and direction
around Clov, but Lonergans Hamm felt like the plays root, not
only because he was physically stuck in the room but because his
character felt so fully conceived, even in the more elusive dialogues
of the play. Hamm is obviously a grandiose shut-in and a bossy
father figure to Clov, but here he is also revealed as a man of vivid
lyrical recall and strange humor. To hear Becketts words cast so ably
into the room by these actors, even amidst some strange turns in the
plays staging, put me in a mood to investigate more of the writers
work, a mood gladly received.
Endgameby Samuel Beckett ran at the Right Brain Project (4001 N. Ravenswood)from September 4 October 4, 2014. It was directed by Aaron Snook, andperformed by Bries Vannon and Vincent Lonergan.
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Happy Days
By Theatre YReviewed by Arlene Engel
It was only a few weeks after I saw Endgamethat Johann rang up
again and asked if I wouldnt mind accompanying him to a
production of Becketts Happy Days, put on by Theatre Y in the loft
of St. Lukes Church in Logan Square. Sure, I said. Whats this
one about? He laughed but wouldnt say, so I asked the Internet,
who told me its about a lady buried up to the waist in the ground,
going about her daily business. Well, of course it is.
I asked my friend Paul (not an engineer, but a Beckett fan) to tell
me something about Happy Days ahead of my seeing it, and he toldme, Only women with beautiful teeth ever play Winnie. This was
a strange enough utterance, just on the dividing line between sexism
and straight-talk, that I didnt speak to Paul again for several weeks.
When I saw the play, I understood what he meant. Becketts Winnie
smiles as punctuation, color, thesis, and declarative statement; an
effortless, capacious mouth of white teeth seems imperative to the
project. Nobody I know has that kind of equipment to her credit,
but Theatre Ys Melissa Lorraine sure does, and her Winnie was
stunningly capable.
I think and Im sometimes wrong about these things on the
face of it, heres a play about a woman going about her mundane life
in what is clearly a less than ideal circumstance. The stuff shes
buried in is dirt and grass in Becketts instruction, I later learned; in
Theatre Ys set, designed by Peter Szabo, its a vast mound of
television and computer parts, screens blinkering static as the
audience enters and then dead by the time the play begins. (Im
guessing the technology junk heap styling is a thing people do to
this play with some regularity now? Highly relevant, yes. Although
now I think of it the dirt seems a less obvious and maybe more
interesting choice in this day and age. Technological refuse is a literal
thing were all aware of, as our phones break and become obsoleteand we send them on a barge to China to corrode peoples lungs as
their contents degrade; but what would it really signify to be buried
in earth halfway, and still alive? I digress.)
Winnie is not quite a society lady, but she has airs: routines and
mannerisms that feel very middle-class British, and also very of-a-
time. Hearing her phrases, I remembered how Id laugh whenever
Clov in Endgame said It wont act, speaking of Hamms
medication. It was a funny little way to put it I knew what he
meant, but probably nobodys said it that way for eighty years. Much
of the Beckett Ive heard so far feels purposefully antiquated, as if
nobody really used these phrases even when Beckett was writing
them, but he was choosing the older language for effect. Is that true?
Im speculating wildly.
Johann wanted me to tell you that he was very taken with the
space in which the play was performed (and so was I). My mother
used to do contra dancing in the basement of St. Lukes, but the play
took place in a part of the building Id somehow never noticedbefore. Rather than industrial concrete hallways and small gathering
rooms, the alley door of Theatre Y opened onto a foyer of old wood,
painted in various peeling shades of blue, with high ceilings and a
winding staircase leading up to the performance space. Beautiful,
crusty, and somehow completely eerie. At the top of the stairs, a
bank of audience risers faced the junk pile in a massive room under a
gently-pitched gable roof, all black inside except for a striking red
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stripe off-center on the upstage wall. Here Winnie rested, head on
outstretched milk-white arms, as the crowd shuffled in.
Lorraines performance as Winnie was truly impressive: careful,
well-paced, virtuosic. Clearly, this was not her first time at the rodeo.
I hear this is one of the more stage direction-heavy Beckett pieces (orare they all like that?), with highly specific motions at exact times in
relation to the lines, and where that precision might feel mechanical,
Lorraine found a natural rhythm in it. The graceful swoops and
flicks of her arms were as important to my grasp of the character as
were her immaculately sculpted eyebrows. I understood Winnie as a
woman very invested in keeping up appearances and in keeping tabs
on her environment, though certain salient facts and objects she
chose not to investigate further. (I think of the handgun that
appeared from her shopping bag, and rested heavy in myimagination for the remainder of the play.)
An arresting choice, and one I found very effective, was Winnies
entry into the plays second act. The horrible buzzer which
demarcated the characters sleeping and waking hours went off, and
as the lights went up Lorraine was revealed to be now neck-deep in
the pile. From this position, unable to move anything but eyes and
mouth, she delivered a large portion of Act Two in a rapid
monotone, with only cursory pauses to indicate shifts of grammarand intent. This flat speech was punctuated by increasingly desperate
cries of Willie! when Winnie beseeched her husband to appear and
comfort her. I cant say if this delivery was true to Becketts initial
intention, but to me as audience it was alarming in a way that
tightened my throat. Because, Im thinking, Winnie might become a
joke about middle-class mores, right? A ridiculous, shallow woman
focusing on ridiculous things? Like Endgames Hamm and Clov
worrying over the minutiae of their shared space, Winnie spends an
awful lot of time trying to read the inscription on her toothbrush.
But the simultaneous resoluteness and terror evident in Winnies
disposition, especially in the second act, gripped me with an
impossible worry over the character.Similarly harrowing was Evan Hills performance as Willie, only
half-visible for most of the play, his back to us as he investigated a
tall, stiff newspaper. From time to time hed gingerly remove his
straw hat, and then a bloody handkerchief laid under it, to reveal
some kind of nasty head wound among his voluminous white hair.
(Bloody handkerchiefs are a theme in Beckett, eh? I guess they were
a much more common sight in the time when people still walked
around in tubercular states, and perhaps theyre still a common sight
in some parts of the world today. I wonder if people perform Beckettin those places.) Willies is a rather small part in the plays action,
but it must be big work for an actor the stiffness, the gravity, the
timing, not to mention good vocal projection while facing upstage!
As with the production of Endgame I saw,my consultation of the
source text turned little questions into large ones. Toward the end of
the first act, the umbrella Winnie holds aloft (and seems unable to
put down) is intended, in Becketts rendering, to catch fire; in
Theatre Ys staging, the interior of the umbrella is filled with LEDlights on strips, which produced a cold, mysterious glow, almost like
a bioluminescent sea creature floating in the massive room. As I
looked into the plays instructions, what had been a wondrous,
buoyant image when I saw it onstage now felt like a diversion of
meaning. Were beauty and wonder the intended resonances of the
umbrella as a prop, or something more like the hidden (and magical)
malice of the mundane? Im not sure. (How anybody ever gets
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anything to catch on fire onstage with accuracy is beyond me, but
thats another question.)
And this brings me to the only part of the play that really baffled
me. (This is to the productions credit, since in different hands it
might be a baffling work throughout.) All this time in the second actWinnie has been going on, periodically calling for Willie, and now
he appears. Hes got on some version of finery, but its old and
dusty, too small. He stands up full behind Winnie, and now we see
his face, which is a good face but punctures the feeling of eeriness its
long absence gave before; and now he takes a waltz pose and sort of
gently spirals from his side of the stage to the other side. Winnie
speaks to him throughout this movement, seeming comforted and
pleased that he has finally got up and wants to be near her. Only: is
he? Is this a dream sequence?, I wondered. In the performances finaltableau, Winnie finishes speaking and the lights go down; the actress
silently dismounts her pile and comes to upstage left to stand with
the actor against the wall; they join hands and she takes up the long
hem of her skirt in her free hand; the two pause in this position,
smiling, as if they are posing for a wedding portrait; then, lights
down. The end.
I didnt know what to make of this as a final gesture, and as I
examine Becketts script I find that its not there, that it signifiessomething to this production but not to the play originally. Is it
perhaps a visual representation of the music-box song Winnie plays,
I love you so? The two in their frozen position under the spotlight
looked like a picture in a locket. Several of my Beckett-loving friends
opined that they wished people (usually of an academic disposition)
wouldnt mess with the works so much, that they would just do
them, whatever that means. I think thats a fair plea, and yet even
given Theatre Ys liberties, I find myself still haunted by their version
of the play. Maybe this is a case in which repeat viewings, seeing
multiple takes and versions of these works new to me, but
canonical in our time will enrich my understanding of them.
Okay, engineers, you were right.
Happy Days by Samuel Beckett ran at Theatre Y (2649 N. Francisco) fromOctober 17 November 23, 2014. It was directed by Andrs Visky, andperformed by Melissa Lorraine and Evan Hill.
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Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins XXVIIReviewed by Carine Loewi
Ten bucks, I am thinking, is pretty cheap for a night of theater in
this day and age, and that is what I paid to get into a single evening
of the Abbie Hoffman Fest, or however were abbreviating it. Not to
mention, night of theater is a pretty nebulous concept in this case:
youd pay twice that much for regular admission to a ninety-minute
show among the local fringes, and here for your ten you can stay and
watch various acts drift past until 4 a.m., if you so choose. Even with
a big evening coffee in hand from the next-door Starbucks
(convenient!), I was not prepared to linger until dawn with the
carousingest of the Abbie Festers, but I put in a solid effort untilaround midnight, and saw some things of interest in the process.
I climbed the tall, tall steps to the Mary-Arrchie space and sat
down among a crown of forty or fifty people not a bad draw for a
fringe festival something scattered to various corners of the room
for the in-the-round setup. After a momentous darkness, during
which we all listened to Hendrix playing the Star-Spangleds at full
blast for several beats too long, if you ask me (did you?), there
appeared Mary-Arrchie lifer Richard Cotovsky on a crate at center
stage, doing his Abbie Hoffman bit. Which, institution though itmay be, is not all that exciting, really: free-associative politico-rant
and a little strung out and thats the thing of it. Then the first piece
that really happened as part of the formal theater of the night was
Lets Sleep, an audio work written and recited by Brian Nemtusak
and produced (whatever that means; what does that mean?) by
Found Objects, whose stuff I have enjoyed at times. It was a loooong
monologue, played overhead while the audience sat in the dark and
listened, and for the first few minutes wondered, Is something else
going to happen? Are people going to come out in scary masks?But no.
Even so, it was well-written, in that particular Found Objects way:
knowing how to find the crevice in an idea and slip inside it, to keep
descending until the vessel is miles below the surface and no oneremembers how to get out, but everybody has a good vocabulary for
telling you about the desolation. But also I think, This is an odd way
to begin an all-night theater fest, with a thing that literally instructs us
to sleep, and then sits us in the dark, looking either at our inner eyelids
or the bare room Its something of an energy drop, but the virtue
and the vice of these things, the Abbie Fest things, is that nothing
among them is very long, so be it a soporific or a splendor, itll go by
in a relative blink. And so it is: twenty minutes of sleep or not-sleep,
and heres the next.And then, in perhaps more canny programming sense, came
Wild Dogs, a Mary-Arrchie production. It was a two-hander by
Matt Borczon about a strait-laced guy who hits the rocks with his
lady and goes to stay with his buddy whos a real tough-and-tumbler,
a wildman kind of dude. And it was mostly an exercise in odd-
coupledom: the guy in the tie and the guy in the undershirt.
Probably the best thing about the whole piece was the opening,
when the wild guy (played by Cotovsky, natch) ran circles around
the onstage furniture, scratching and baying Like a wild dog,youmight say, and youd be right and then shook a Twinkie from the
wrapper with his teeth and knelt down on all fours to eat it off the
floor. That one bit was so simultaneously gross and deeply erotic
that I hardly needed the rest of the play.
After these and a few further acts I went out to feed the meter and
take a solitude break in the lobby, and so I missed or partly missed a
few things, and I feel fine about that. One of them, heard from a
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short distance away, seemed to be short scenes of arch-cringey absurd
comedy, mostly depending on punchlines with the word pussy for
uproarious laughs, and boy was it getting them. That kind of thing
really brings out the shut the fuck up in me, but luckily I was in the
lobby with the wine bottles, looking out the nice second-floorwindow down at the lively intersection, and the pussy jokes were in
the next room, getting just the reception they had hoped for.
A funny thing that happened in this festival dynamic was the
massive crowd shifts. Youd think as happens at, say, Rhino Fest,
or Chicago Fringe Fest; take your pick that an audience might
show up from across town to see their friends perform a twenty-
minute piece, and then hang around, drink a beer, see what else is
going on. Theater? Oh, great as long as Im here, why not more
theater! Oddly, in this case, a few acts had a giant influx of bodiesbottlenecking through the single, steep entrance point, and then saw
those very same bodies shuffle back out as soon as their pals did. I
found this in slightly poor taste, audience people, but okay. Its not
my planet.
This phenomenon happened around 11 p.m. with the Factory
Theater show, Thirty Days in the Rabbit Hole, which was among
the most entertaining things I saw in my night of Abbie Festering.
The sudden, big crowd and its accompanying big laughs did help the
piece to wheel along, as is usually the case with Factory work but
what a piece it was! It portrayed a spate of girl fairy-tale characters
Cinderella, Little Red, et al. wrenched from their cuddlesome
Disney worlds and tossed into a psychedelic-Tarantino-rave-prison
kind of universe. The end devolved into a jokey fight sequence, as
also happens in Factory work more often than not, but the cast of
mostly women lead by the fantastic Robyn Coffin as an
incarcerated Alice in Wonderland and supported, among others, by
Sara Sevigny as a mute, pyromanic Cinderella made such an odd
and hilarious lot I wouldve watched them do just about anything.
Where are these women of the Factory hiding? In plain sight, really.
You get to see one or two at a time in any given regular-season
production, as the sassy secretary or the sassy pregnant friend, butwhen they get together en masse onstage and play out scenes among
themselves ahem, Bechdel-testing out of the park it is a thing
of wonder. More of this, please.
I saw two other really interesting things during that fateful night
at the Abbie Hoffman Variety Special. One of them was The Good
Glitter by Jessica Wright Buha. It was a dystopic science fiction
kind of thing, two young women panning for gold in a sewer,
referring conversationally to a strictly segregated above-ground
society and bickering. The piece was dark and smartly written, nevergiving too much away, never looking for too much flash in the pan,
and featured two actors Id happily watch again. (If, that is, I could
figure out who they were from any sort of program.)
The other interesting late-night thing was a long one-guy-on-stage
piece, a monologue by somebody credited as King Berry. (Who are
you, King Berry?) The piece was a long meditation on relationships
and isolation, delivered in multiple voices but by one essential
character: a handsome, broad-shouldered and white-tee-shirted
young man, just slightly too tired to come off as slick. It was called
Cure My Melancholy, and indeed, it left a deep shiver of sadness,
even though I suppose it might have been a comic piece. That was
around 11:30, just before I tapped out for the night, and it was a
quiet wonder to end on, exemplary of what the festival format can
do: lure you in for your friends early-evening tap dance, and let you
stick around, milling the lobby as needed, until you see something
surprising, something you might never have stepped in on otherwise.
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In the Absence of a Road, You Could Float Up
By Margaret Murray
If you come correct.
If, when you enter the conversation, youve read all that camebeforehand and you keep your piece on exactly what youre sure of,then you will. Honor the rules. I didnt know that then but therewas something in the sound of it.
We in the mud now.
I want to talk about New Orleans. I was there before Katrina a fewtimes, and have been post-Katrina a few times. I almost moved therebecause I thought Id learn a thing or two in the humidity. Its a citywhere everything that lives or moves is caught in a partial state ofdecay. There isnt a clear line between being hard, solid, in thepresent, and faded, a step behind. Life in New Orleans could be, ormight have happened, and did not happen all at the same time.
When I was last there, I saw Jake again. I try to see him every fiveyears or so since the first time I met him. That could have been
twenty-five years ago. He was fifteen? Or sixteen? Or a hundred. Iwasnt much older. His own parents didnt know his age, they forgotit and he had to be sixteen for two years in a row. I remembered himwhen I met him at fifteen, or no, I committed him to memory. Idropped a marker at that moment to rest on, to come back to. Ididnt see him again for years.
Ay happy birthday. You are a year closer to death, beloved.
That next time I saw Jake was at a party on a hot summer night inChicago, after his second sixteenth year. Time spread both forwardand backward as I talked to him, I knew him before I met him andwould know him well after Id forgotten him, I am sure. What I amtrying to say is that there wasnt a structure to knowing him, we
worked in dream time. If I took a step toward him, Id break theskin barrier like it was mist and my arm or leg would blend part waythrough his like overlapping shadows, looking like one but doubledin opacity where it was both of us. I could breathe the breath out ofhis lungs, we were partially melted against each other. He could havebeen my brother, he could have been the voice in my head. If Idbeen older, confusion might have overruled my awe at thestrangeness and I might have turned away. My full adult mind mighthave let this first note fade slowly to silence.
I feel some type of way.
I can, to this day, remember looking at him when I left that party. Iwas in a friends car and wanted him to leave with me. He stoodoutside the car while I hung over the opened car door window. Theparty rustled like rain in the background, the air was wet with spilleddrinks.
I cant go, my Dads getting married tomorrow and I have to be
there. He told me this and as those words settled, I looked awayfrom him and toward a massive muscled man who appeared at hisside. The mans arms were folded and he was completely silent,powerful and precise.
Dad hired Andre and Junk to make sure I get there. And Jakewalked away with the silent, astonishing man. I took the last swallowof his face and sent it straight to sky, threw it up and out to store itbeyond reason. Watching his smooth back get smaller carried on the
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slow roll of his walk, I could feel his presence stretch and break pieceby piece. First the flutes and clarinets, high and crisp, dropped away,leaving me lower, blurred notes of warm brass. I closed my moutharound one lone strand of oboe.
Now Jake lives in New Orleans and years have passed. Hes older.When I see him, I have to look at him for ten minutes in silence tosee everything thats gone by since Ive known him. I watch his blueeyes go to green, then gray and then crescent moons when he smiles.New Orleans is a city version of him, Im half sunk every time I setfoot in that place.
I had reason to go there recently and we arranged to see each other.
I walked around the block when I first arrived, to reacquaint myselfwith the citys stooped grace. A doorman at a nearby hotel watchedme try to tie up my hair in a hairband, gathering courage.
Just let it go, baby. Youre in New Orleans.
New Orleans compresses the time to intimacy like this, in a half-conscious way. Its not thoughtless, its an invitation forsubconscious thought to rise up. New Orleans time runs on its ownsolipsistic path and now Im going to spend some length of it with
someone who I dont consciously know from day to day interaction.Ive never washed dishes with him, I dont exactly know how he payshis bills. I dont have an understanding of him that doesnt feel like adream.
Ive been stupid since day one, get familiar.
Jake and I walked around his neighborhood. The air was rich withsmells of human existence; barbecued meat, garbage, beer,
excrement, layered with green, green leaves and grass. People yelledacross the street at each other. Car doors banged. Sound carriesbetter in the humid air, with something to hang on to. Images carrybetter too, and the whole feel of it is closer to blood level.Absorption. In that walk, in every rich inhaled breath, heavy with
life ripened to the point of corruption, I knew Jake couldnt surviveNew Orleans.
He told me this, what I already knew, after wed walked some timeto get with the rhythm of the streets.
I cant stay here.Why not?Cant you see them, sitting on the porches? All the ghosts? I cant
be somewhere like this with the temptation.
All the houses as you pass have friendly front stoops and porcheswith chairs that must have been owned and sat on forever. You cansmell them like ice broken out of trays, dropped into tea offered to aguest, layered with the after breath of a refrigerator door closed.Ghost smells.
I understood perfectly. The humidity makes New Orleans slidebetween past and present because it holds the echoes of people who
may have passed by five minutes ago or fifty years ago. Crescendosfollowed by decrescendos make it liquid, and as liquid it submergesand rises to a slow beat And takes its people with it.
If you naturally go to dreams in your blood and youre in rhythmwith a sympathetic city, it can be impossible to stay. The yearningfor a cool iced drink offered can be too hard to fight.
A drug hold can be broken, not forgotten. Jake knows this.
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Its one price to pay.
For dispensing with the standard structure of time and letting thescore of unrelated conversations be absorbed into lapping waves.
But on second thought, Im low-key interested.
The humidity conjures a hands caress. Austere air slops over intodroplets of touch to awaken skin. The slow rise and fall of a cityschest lulls me into stepping off and spreading into nothing, into sky.Why would you want to leave here for a life of linear twitching, onestep following the next? I would rather follow these unrelated soundsspun up into a music more vast than the original, individually
contained intent. So every time I hear a sound or see a movementwith no context, the porch ghosts will appear and I can live innothing for a moment, because there are voices with no knownlanguage and the understanding of them passes through eachphysical sense like electrical current carried on mist. It tastes roundand acidic, smells like hot metal or sidewalks in the first minutes ofrain.
I want to, I always search for this, New Orleans, Jake, the formdoesnt matter. Maybe Ill walk sideways some and stay awhile. I
dont know if Ill see Jake again but at the same time I can see himeverywhere.
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March!By Curious Theatre BranchReviewed by Ira S. Murfin
A taxonomy of Beau OReilly plays, such as might be found in
some invitingly idiosyncratic museum of experimental oeuvres,
would surely include, alongside the rooms devoted to various sub-
categories of dramatic and autobiographical monologue and post-
Beckettian vaudevilles, a whole wing dedicated to the community
play. Not community theatre, that is, but community astheatre and
vice versa. In these works, the fictional reality of the dramatic world
is laid palimpsestically atop histories, relationships, and geographies
shared amongst collaborators. In recent years these notional,emergent communities have included the sprawling theatrical family
of The Madelyn Trilogy and the eclectic, eccentric residents of a
fictionalized Rogers Park in Evanston, Which Is Over There. That
some critical mass of the audience no doubt knows that OReilly
himself comes from a sprawling theatrical family and has long made
his home in the environs of Rogers Park is less a signal that some
slippage might reveal real life facts onstage than it is about the ways
in which theatrical reality is perpetually adjunct to a deeply felt and
shared lived experience.
The cast of what I am calling a community play is frequently large
enough for the contours of its collective concerns and negotiations,
in and beyond the space of the theatre, to be felt if not actually
articulated; and the duration of the play is usually long enough for a
brief shared history to be forged right there in the small room where
the act of collective theatre is taking place. These plays, in other
words, make real the co-presence so frequently touted as theatres
most distinctive element, but which proves elusive in work that does
not at least threaten to overflow its spatial, temporal, and narrative
containers. The cast lives together, in some sense, there onstage, and
for a little while the audience lives with them, too. The audiences,
then, who know the work and often know the people in the work,must fit these communal configurations and the dynamic worlds
they fragmentarily imply, of which the plays themselves are but a
sliver, into the multi-chambered spaces of a sprawling, unlikely, but
nonetheless coherent whole, made up, by turns, of fictional, meta-
fictional, and apparently real imaginaries.
To the idiosyncratic and fantastic architectures brought into being
by these plays we can now add the labyrinthine edifice at the center
ofMarch! an impossibly extensive small-town museum devoted to
cataloguing the ordinary and the extraordinary alike. For those who
know OReilly, the plays co-author, the fact that his day job has him
teaching writing in a school adjacent to a real museum once again
weaves in and out of our consciousness as we acquaint ourselves with
a new and as yet unfamiliar place with real world corollaries.
However, connections aside, this is not a Beau OReilly play, but a
play co-authored by OReilly and Curious regular Julia Williams.
From the very start, then, March! springs from a shared process,
from the collective rather than the individual mind, and from thesorts of tensions, disjunctures, and patchworks that come of making
something large and complicated from an eclectic and disparate
range of sources.
Just as the museums many fictional spaces and displays exceed the
practical or topographical arrangement such an institution would
require or be able to sustain, the plays script exceeds the narrative
functions of a single dramatic work or a single authorial
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consciousness, heading in many directions at once and finding ways
to fit things together, whether or not they match or make sense. I am
not familiar enough with Williams dramatic output to fit March!
into a cross-career retrospective alongside OReilly, but the very fact
of their co-authorship is yet more evidence of the interlockingsignificance of community as generative process and thematic topic.
It is at once a communal exercise and a collective statement about
community.
Indeed, the dual authorship may even be visible in the two
enigmatic characters at the center of the play, the museums
proprietors, both named Charlie, and played by Lynn Marie and
Brook Celeste. Bound together by a single purple scarf, the two
Charlies run the museum in tandem, asserting some quasi-
authoritative sway over the profuse and illogical goings on there.
They are either inseparable business and life partners or they are two
aspects of a single Charlie, playing out internal divisions externally.
Either way, their story provides one of the more traceable and
emotionally effecting through-lines of the play. Charlie #1 is
dying of cancer, or so she says, Charlie #2 is having a hard time
believing her, and it remains unclear if #2 is in denial or if #1 is
simply employing a self-mythologizing excuse for her coming
departure. In any event, she expects to be leaving the differencebetween mortality and some place outside of the museum becomes
somewhat arbitrary in this context, anyhow and she is filling a
sack with things she wants to bring with her.
Other storylines include frequent museum visitor Warren
Casablanca and his friend Katrin (Matt Rieger and Briavael
OReilly), who tries to help Warren get over the sense of obligation
he claims to feel toward the women in his life, though the evidence
of this amounts only to Warrens own claims one suspects he may
simply be a garden-variety misanthrope. And there is Marya
(Williams), who has recently transferred to the caf, where she seems
to be an object of desire for many of the museums denizens,
including both Warren and Katrin, as well as the maintenance man,Peet (Ryan Wright), who quietly permeates every nook of the
building. Maryas rebuke of Peet toward the end of the play for
projecting his unwelcome romantic ideas onto her effectively scolds
the oft-idealized quotidian male gaze, along with a raft of
longstanding romantic tropes in which mis-delivered letters drive
apart and then bring together young lovers. Strangely, though,
Marya follows up her principled stand with the offhand suggestion
that Peet turn his attention to Alma in the gift shop (also played by
Williams), leaving it unclear whether Williams is nailing mopeyromantic male ideals about unrequited love or poking at the
artificiality inherent in understanding one actor as two characters,
with distinct agencies, on the same stage. Or maybe, probably, both.
The celebration of community that defines this play is always cast
into contrast with that other most familiar brand of interpersonal co-
presence, couplehood. Communal belonging trumps coupling every
time in this universe. The shows view of romantic entanglements
ranges from philosophically resigned to quite dim (though the happyfirst blush of love does crop up around the edges). For the most part
romantic interest is either unwanted or over-wanted, and established
partnerships are bound to end, the only question seems to be
whether or not they are bound to end elegantly. What is left is the
structure of the museum, the locus of imagination and belonging, a
place where it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to be single
without ever being alone. Unlike the world outside the museum,
where the communal is eyed with suspicion and the couple
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venerated, here the couple finds itself out of synch with the
environment, exposed and interrupted. The museum itself
discomfits coupledom. Meanwhile Jenny Magnus and Vicki
Walden, having the most fun of anyone in the show as a pair of
candy eating, fluidly gendered, vaudevillian clowns, remain asharmonious and uncomplicated a pair as any imaginable in their
mischievous creative partnership.
Most of the rest of March! is taken up with the museums living,
and lifelike, exhibits. These constitute a series of robots embodying
different professions concerned with collecting and interpreting data
a census taker, a Jungian therapist, a naturalist and live
performers giving public interpretations of historical figures who, it
became clear in discussion with the playwrights after the show, each
have some significant intersection with the date March the first,
otherwise obscurely foregrounded by the title. The performers put
on their shows within the show at the impetus of a coin deposited
into a slot outside a small theatrical closet labeled Archive of
Feelings. The figures on display include Charlie Chaplin, Joseph
Stalin, Johnny Cash, and Tallulah Bankhead (mostly Brian Collins,
with Lynn Maries Charlie stepping in for Bankhead). Each opens
up about their inner feelings in context of outer dramas in ways that
mirror, and eventually bleed into, the emotional lives of the
museums patrons and workers, much in the way that we imagine
theatre to both reflect and transform our emotional states.
These characters, human and otherwise, all seem to not so much
work at the museum as inhabit it, receiving mail and bedding down
in its various warrens, of which there are always more, unseen and
unknown. The far reaches of the museum are spoken of as vaguely
and as wistfully as continents to which one will probably never
travel. Little seems to be known about the limits of the museum
except that there is an edge out there, somewhere. The museum goes
on forever, yet it is finite, and enclosed. Structured on the
networked, contingent logic of the internet, or of dreams, everything
locks together into a tautologically absurd chain of places and spaceswith no end, and no outside, but one paradoxically characterized by
its enclosure. The museum posits no division between public and
private life and no narrative or interpersonal hierarchies
everything is equally meaningful and equally connected to
everything else.
I am not sure that I can make sense ofMarch!or its museum, but I
am not so sure there is sense there to be made beyond what one can
glean by just being there. A convivial co-presence, like a night spent
voluntarily locked in a vast museum or castle or shopping mall with
a dozen or so of your best friends, pervades the atmosphere, as does
the sense of exuberance that comes of the license that attends such
situations to sing, to be silly, to be honest, to hook up, to confess,
and so on. Where we might expect a tightly structured dramatic arc,
we find instead a community engaged in play with a sense of
freedom and mutual agreement. Whether that community consists
of the fictional denizens of the museum or the real theatre artists of
Curious Theatre Branch actually seems somewhat beside the point.
From this perspective it is not individual narratives that matter,
but the ecologies of interdependence and contingency within which
all meaning is suspended. So long as we, the audience, or we, the
museums visitors, are engaged with the interplay between the
possibly infinite chambers of this imaginary structure, everything
that happens there will be deeply meaningful and richly layered; but
once outside of the fictional museums physical spaces (or the
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fictional space of the museum), that swelling sense of co-presence, of
love, dissipates to incomprehensibility. Try to index it, or evaluate it,
from a historical or critical position and you will find that the
museum, and the materialized life of the community which
constitutes it, evaporates and disappears.Like other enclosed infinities dream worlds, theatrical
representations, the internet, all of which the play explicitly or
implicitly evokes March! is at every moment highly meaningful
and yet still ultimately ambiguous, even ambivalent, about meaning.
Not, I would suggest, just about particular meanings, but about the
very purpose of meaning itself, apart from experience, that is. The
processes of sensation, mutuality, and collectivity are immersive and
ongoing; meaning implies something has ended, that you have
stepped outside and are now looking back at what you have
separated yourself from. Which is why I feel like I can hardly
interpret March! here, beyond recalling having been there to see it
for myself.
In Los Angeles there is a place called the Museum of Jurassic
Technology, which is in many respects a museum about what it
means to be a museum. Its chief purpose and pleasure lie in
provoking curiosity and wonder while at the same time causing the
visitor to doubt their own experience and ask if the knowledge theyhave acquired is real, and if it matters. Something similar is
happening withMarch! and its museum, but rather than encounters
with truth, it is the slippery nature of the communal that is both
evoked and scrutinized. It is difficult not to imagine something of
Curiouss enviable and long-standing community ethos more
directly represented a few years back by Jenny Magnuss Still in Play
in the museums ongoing shenanigans. And indeed, it is
worthwhile to wonder if it matters whether it is a real or a fictional
community we have made contact with, and if it could possibly be
both. But at the same time there is some mournful sense that
community is something felt singly, something that requires exit and
separation to best be appreciated. An experience of community is tonotice that you are a part of one while in the midst of others, to go
away from the place you are in to look back at it. It is felt in its most
all-encompassing state in some private dream world where divisions
between individuals, between work and leisure, between the lived
experience of the present and the remembered traces of the past are
all erased, and everything is equally intertwined and imminent,
uncomplicated by the need for separation or privacy. This is a
subjective and individual experience of community, one felt alone. It
is only from the vantage of OReilly and Williams play, and its ilk,that the imagined and the lived community can encounter, crowd
one another and, fleetingly, converge.
March! ran at the side project (1439 W. Jarvis) from November 7 December 7,2014. It was written and directed by Beau OReilly and Julia Williams, andperformed by Brook Celeste, Brian Collins, Jenny Magnus, Lynn Marie, BeauOReilly, Briavael OReilly, Matt Rieger, Vicki Walden, Julia Williams, and RyanWright.
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How Tweezle Seed Prompted the Three-D Sistersand the Beefalo Brothers to Do as the RootabagaLizards Do
A story in the Rootabaga style by Mark Leach
Trip, Triang, and Delt walked and sang, delighted that their
mother had sent her three daughters to the co-op store to buy a sack
of tweezle seed.
Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight walked and shouted,
all mixed up inside because they knew they should be angry that
their mother was dispatching her three sons to the co-op store to buy
a sack of tweezle seed, but it was too fine a spring morning to be
angry.
As they walked, Trip, Triang, and Delt sang about Pee-Baby birds
and laughed, holding hands.
As they walked, Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight
shouted at worms, shouted at frogs, and shouted at nothing-at-all.
Trip, Triang, and Delt and Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-
Tight arrived at the same moment at the stores shelf of tweezle seed.
The girls stopped singing. The boys stopped shouting, all mixed up
inside because they wanted to shout at the girls so really bad that
they had no air in them to shout with.
Each group took a sack of tweezle seed, paid the cashier, and went
outside. Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight started shouting
at nothing-at-all. Trip, Triang, and Delt looked at the boys and
began laughing a pure, happy, case-of-the-giggles laugh.
Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight looked at the girls and
started laughing too, honest as a dewy morning haw-haw-haws. All
were laughing so hard that Delt and Pants-Too-Tight lost their grips
on the sacks of tweezle seed.
The sacks hit the concrete sidewalk and split their sides. Two
clouds arose, dusting everyone with tweezle seeds. They each lookedaround at all the others, and laughed harder. Each time they laughed
they ungrew a little shorter, until they were no larger than Pee-Baby
birds.
On previous occasions, it had been difficult enough to stop
laughing, even with their parents telling them to Stop that this
instant! Stopping now was much more difficult. Triang deplored,
Stop laughing right now! And they all laughed harder. Flimsy said
in a grownup voice, Dis aint dat funny. Which started them
laughing harder. All the time they were getting smaller. Thinking
quickly, Burgerbreath shouted, Hold your breath and count to ten!
That did it. They stopped laughing and stopped ungrowing, which
was fortunate, because they were now the size of Pee-Baby eggs.
What are we going to do? they all asked at once. Flimsy said,
My Uncle Hansom Ransom always said, If youre the size of a Pee-
Baby egg, youve got to do as the rootabaga lizards do. The nearest
rootabaga field was just behind the store, so thats where they went.
Each young rootabaga plant proudly held a few tender leaves,
forming long rows curving down the slope and curving up the next
slope. Trip, Triang, and Delt walked hand-in-hand, singing the Pee-
Baby Song. Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight were
walking down the next row over, shouting at spiders, shouting at
baby grasshoppers, shouting at nothing-at-all. They hadnt gone far
when a lizard appeared, saying, Goodness gracious. I was worried
youd be late. We must hurry. The lizard added more politely as he
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turned and scrambled ahead, And of course all of us in Rootabaga
Country are over-the-moon with gratitude that you are here to
help.
The children, still the size of Pee-Baby eggs, struggled to keep pace
with the lizard. Fortunately, they hadnt far to go. The race of thepillbox beetles has already started, said the lizard. But theres still
plenty of time to stop them. They all watched as thousands of
pillbox beetles sped around and around a great sinuous course that
wound among the rootabagas. The racing beetles thundered past,
filling the air with stinky farts, which Pants-Too-Tight later
described as, Like when you go in the fridge and open a yogurt
container and find last months tacos which nobody ate because they
were made with smelly socks, fish guts, and nail polish salsa.
Flimsy explained, Uncle Hansom Ransom told me about this.
Every spring an urge overcomes the pillbox beetles to race around
and around, roaring and farting. Once they get the urge, they wont
stop. Every one of them would die of tired-outness. Not one would
be left to eat the rootabaga mites, and the mites would eat all the
rootabaga, and the rootabaga lizards would have to move.
Just then, a particularly large lizard blew a whistle. Soon the lizards
and the children were grabbing pillbox beetles as they raced past.
When they seized one, they wrestled it over on its back, its six legsstill racing in the air.
The sun was directly overhead when Delt rolled over the last
racing pillbox beetle. Excellent job! and Superlative! shouted the
lizards, obviously much pleased, and catching their breaths. A lizard
with a clipboard said, Not bad. A few beetles broke their necks
running off the track. There was a huge pileup on curve three, but
not as many fatalities as two years ago. Only a few raced to death
before we could flip them. Not bad at all. The racing fever should
break by sunset. We can start putting them feet-side down after
supper.
The large lizard with the whistle still around her neck said to the
children, It is our tradition to provide gifts to our helpers. Sheproduced two tiny sacks of tweezle seeds, handing one to Triang and
one to Pants-Too-Tight. The children quickly grew to their normal
height, perhaps a wee bit taller. The sacks of tweezle seeds enlarged
too.
On their way home, Trip, Triang, and Delt sang about Pee-Baby
birds and laughed about creatures that would race themselves to
death. On their way home, Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-
Tight shouted at trees, shouted at cars, and shouted at nothing-at-all,
but mostly they thought silently about creatures so mixed up inside
that they race themselves to death.
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Hellish Half-Light: Shorter Plays of Samuel BeckettBy Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.
Reviewed by Edmund St. Bury and Carine Loewi
For this issues conversation feature between our two intrepidtheatergoers, we had hoped to send Edmund and Carine to seeMary-Arrchies production of six short works by SamuelBeckett and record their attending talk over late-night dinerfare, as usual. But, as it happens, the two couldnt see the showtogether, and so they took their rehash to the annals of email,in fits and starts over the weeks that followed. Here are theirreflections.
One thing, to begin: I enjoyed the in-the-round setup they used,with three main banks of seats around the room and a few single-
seater perches scattered between. The stage manager told me that a
crate against the back wall was the best place to be, so I sat there for
a while and boy, was it weird! In Rough for Theatre II, which
was probably my favorite piece in the show, I kept looking up at the
poor young man (Rudy Galvan) who had to stand there in that
tremulous posture canted slightly forward at the waist, head
down and contemplate jumping from a bricked-up window for
20 minutes! But this vantage exemplifies something I like aboutMary-Arrchie's ethos: the acting and the stage business are polished
and sorted out, but there's still a little shagginess to the audience
experience. It felt strange, improper to be over there, but there I was.
Carine
Playing these works in the round felt bold to me, but at some
serious points it was really a problem concerning Becketts intention.
Play and Come and Go are both so much about communication
between three people: Come and Go as gossip; Play as rueful,
post-coital bitterness told and retold through eternity. I needed a
proscenium setup to follow the back and forth. I moved to sit on one
of the trunks on the left side of the room, and that solved Comeand Go for me, but there was no solving Play. In the first part, I
could see the faces of the man and one of the women; in part two,
they rotated and I saw the two women. One wants to see all the faces
at once, and that is what Beckett wanted as well. These frustrations
reminded me of the power of the proscenium. Play is a massive
short piece, half an hour at its full length, and dense with text.
Really, it should be done alone in a program. The breakneck pace of
this performance, coming at the end of the evening, felt like
gibberish, and wrong. Its a good acting exercise emotionally raw,but also English and cold, less about aging than about failing at
sexual gambits. Come and Go I found to be the most satisfying
piece of the evening. But more on that later. I also note that I saw
the show late in the run, by which time the actor Steve Walker had
been replaced by Bob Fisher, so you and I may have witnessed
different evenings altogether. More later. Edmund
I agree about the problem inherent in this staging of Play. Being
in the round didnt help it (I never got to see one performers face at
all), and neither did the speed with which the actors were instructed
to deliver the text, which made it seem to be a grueling vocal warm-
up rather than a theater work with something to communicate to an
audience. I did find the set piece of the three adjoining urns
attractive; it was obviously not a grand and expensive thing, but it
had a good, Victorian curve on it, and was painted in ordinary matte
grey, just distressed enough to look drab and vaguely funerary. (All
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of which sent me into a daydream in which Edward Gorey forgot
about Eliot and illustrated Becketts work instead, to everyones
delight and artistic betterment.)
The staging choice for Come and Goalso felt difficult to me. I
could see fine from my vantage, but it would be a different pieceentirely if one were sitting right next to it, in that bank of seats near
to the entrance. Youre right about the proscenium. On a different
note: the hand-holding choreography at the end of that piece made
such a lovely shape. I admit Ive never seen nor read Come and Go
before, but I imagine Beckett wrote instructions for that movement?
As with the urns in Play, the dark and vaguely historical dress of
the three women in Come and Go (Molly Fisher, Lauren
Guglielmello, and Kathrynne Wolf)did some of the work of creating
a setting, giving the characters a milieu and a gravity before theyeven did anything. I often get a sometime in recent history feeling
from Becketts works, a feeling of catenary suspension between 1880
and 1945. By contrast, was What Where in some kind of science
fiction universe, with the jumpsuits? A space station? Waste
processing plant? An apocalypse? I didnt track that one well, but I
did enjoy all the door-slamming.
And then I perhaps shouldnt say this in our final version, but
Im revisiting some of these texts now, after having seen them staged
and I find so many directorial changes! Why do people futz with
Becketts highly specific stage directions so much? Gestures,
placements, costumes... There is a difference between not being able
to do something (the author calls for a prohibitively expensive
costume piece, say) and just not wanting to do it (No, I prefer him
to stand). I can understand it when companies make dress updates
to Shakespeare they put Lear in a business suit, give Tybalt a gun
instead of a sword because that guy did not insist on exactitudes
of dress and movement in his texts; they were written and performed
in the style of their time, and so the styles of other times dont tend
to rankle too much (unless they do; and theres another kettle!).
Beckett, on the other hand, is more or less referring to our own time,
and hes precise. About everything! In Catastrophe, the director
asks for a light and the assistant lights his cigar she does not bring
him a pen light so he can look at his notes! The fact that he is
holding notes at all the fact that he is standing, even changes
the action and the character. (The Mamet film version does this as
well, annoyingly, though Pinter is still a marvel as the Director.)
Why do they do it? My kingdom for some Germans! (Who do what
theyre told, as Beckett once joked, instead of giving a text their own
spin. The man spun plenty there to begin with.) But forgive me;
Im on a tear. Carine
I often think age has something to do with Beckett being done
well. Burgess Meredith, Burt Lahr, Pinter, Buster Keaton these
are people who got Becketts ancient-old-man humor and sensibility.
The aches of the body, the angst of the mind. Edmund
I think youre right experience, in life and onstage, helps but
lets not confuse a grumpy-old-man stereotype with a careful,
thoughtful actor. I think Beckett gets reductively read as dour too
much. (My college roommate was once reading a collected works
and one morning burst out of the bathroom, towel only, and
exclaimed, What is this? Everybody acts like Beckett is so dark, but
theres a fucking banana peel joke here! She must have just then
gotten to Krapps Last Tape.) Sure, hes not always cheerful, but what
I think is important in doing his work is not a deep sense of ennui or
of suffering but an ordinary patience. And maybe young actors, and
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some over-eager older ones, dont always have that. Becketts
characters pause, a lot,in thought or because they are mistrustful or
flummoxed by something. And maybe some actors get eager to show
they can say all the words and say them right, the result being that
they roadrunner through pieces that need a lot of pause. But I feel
like Ive drifted off course. What else? Carine
[A stretch of time passes. They revisit the subject.]
Its been a while now since I saw this production, and lately Ive
realized that the best of Becketts short works really hang around in
my consciousness. Play, which I mentioned before, is huge, as are
the Rough for Theatre works. I contend that Rough for Theatre
II is the miniature version of Godot, which means its great, like acupcake that tastes as good at the original pie. What Where is
really difficult. Mary-Arrchie didnt pull it off, but Ive rarely seen it
pulled off well. Catastrophe is small and slight, and needs to be
played with a lightness of touch.
So what does all this mean for this production were talking about?
I think I can say what it means to me. Becketts work currently
hangs in an in-between place: of blue-collar, working-class, fringe-y
theaters; and academics having a lark. And when it works best astheater, its because simplicity meets deep thought. When it falls
apart, its usually because of the schtick of acting too much
posturing, loud voices, big staging moves when small ones are called
for, misunderstanding of the language of comedy steps all over
the intention of the play. Beckett was always very cautious about
leaving directors room to interpret his work, and the more time Ive
spent watching his work, the more I share that caution as an
audience member. If its going to be rough, make sure you know
what youre talking about. The Mary-Arrchies got about half of it
right. And with Beckett, thats not a very good percentage.
Ouch, Edmund! I agree about schtick getting in the way ofintention. Too much bigness, too much look-at-me gets in the way
of subtlety. On the other hand, Stephen Walker was big in a certain
theatrical way, but he was excellent in this work. I think his
grandiosity big voice, big body, big walk was a careful one,
very controlled and with intent. And, where small moves and voices
are called for in other places, I think a space like Mary-Arrchie is
great for this work. Its a small room. I dont want to see Come and
Go, a work about telling secrets or lies or theories while sitting
quietly together, in a giant auditorium where I cant see faces andhand gestures and the details of someones fringed sleeve. Im
interested in your theory about Beckett as a blue-collar act, and I
might want to see more in this vein, but what I am really enjoying in
town lately is Beckett on the fringe circuit in general. The relative
lack of cash most of these groups have to produce plays works into
Becketts scenic austerity. I think the point were arriving at, if we
are arriving at one at all, is: do less. Follow the script, see what
happens, and, as they say on the job-interview coaching circuit, stop
talking once youve answered the question.
Hellish Half-Light: Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett ran at Angel Island (735 W.Sheridan) from July 24 through August 30, 2014. It was directed by JenniferMarkowitz and performed by Molly Fisher, Rudy Galvan, Lauren Guglielmello,Adam Soule, Stephen Walker, Kathrynne Wolf, and Bob Fisher.
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Questions for Sherry Antonini
We have lately admired Sherry Antoninis work in musicalperformance, writing, and visual art, and also her influence as a
teaching artist in Chicago. Sherry kindly took some time frompreparations for her upcoming Rhino Fest show to answersome of our questions about forms, definitions, intersections,the past, and the future.
Chicago Arts Journal: We understand that your performance
history includes composing and performing with several rock n roll
bands. Does this music influence your current performance and
installation art?
Sherry Antonini:Most definitely. I have worked with rock players
and classically trained symphonic musicians in bands and other
performance projects for more than two decades. The first
opportunities I had to bring my words and voice into a public,
performance-based realm were supported by being in Fate Saved Us,
a rock band that I co-founded when my two children were just
babies. From the start I considered myself fortunate as a writer to
have support and enthusiasm from some truly excellent andinventive players as I composed melody and sang lead in our
songwriting collaborations. To date, Ive been a part of five bands,
overall, including a country rock band where I had a blast singing
backup. More recently, Ive been working to write, compose music
and sound, sing and perform live, and record as part of finite
collaborative projects involving a wider range of artists, including
choreographers, dancers, video artists, musicians, and a sculptor.
Words, music and sound have been consistently at the center of my
arts practice. So even the newer work that Im making fiber-
based sculptural pieces for installation often incorporate text and
sound. When you add all that to the fact that Im from Ohio, where
they still rock out heavily to early seventies anthems, it means that
those roots run deep, and there will probably always be a current of
rock running through me and the work I make.
CAJ:You teach courses at Columbia College and SAIC. How does
your teaching life interact with your personal artistic practice?
SA: Ive been an adjunct professor at both schools for seventeen
years. I sincerely love being in the classroom and working with both
undergraduate and graduate-level students. I work hard to bethorough, current, prepared and engaged with my students. I spend
a good amount of time prepping for each class, as well as providing
extensive written feedback on papers. The majority of classes that I
teach, as much as they vary, are writing-centered. So, in an average
semester, where I am teaching 4-5 classes, you can imagine the
amount of reading and out-of-classroom work hours that are
required. Thats where the time pinch can really be felt but the
payoff is tremendous in so many ways, ranging from watching
inexperienced, unsure writers and artists find their artistic voices andbuild confidence, to working with an MFA student as she moves
through final edits on a poetry manuscript or novel for publication.
On my side of it, working with motivated, young, hungry minds
keeps my own level of energy and art-making passion up, alive and
renewed. Former students often become art-making comrades
beyond graduation, and the potential for art-community interaction
and possible collaboration with them is rich.
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The trick is in establishing a balance between all the teaching-
related hours and making time for a consistent art-making
conversation a flow of ideas and the manifestation of those ideas
within my own mind, and then from my own studio. In some
semesters thats easier to do than others. Lately, Ive been being
especially watchful of preserving my own time for writing and
making as Ive got some larger, more long-range projects and plans
in the works.
CAJ: We hear you (and other artists) referred to as both a
multimedia performer and an interdisciplinary artist. Do you
draw a distinction between these terms, and if so, what does that
distinction mean to you?
SA:The terms are often used interchangeably in a more vernacular
way. The distinction between them, as I think of it, is that work that
is interdisciplinary is composed of more than one course of study or
discipline and results in a synthesis of them to create one work a
piece composed of poetry and sound and movement is a good
example. The term multimedia implies a use of several kinds of
digital media and/or mixed art mediums the stuff of those
different disciplines to make a piece come into being, or facilitate
expression from within the work. So I would say that I am both andthat I am both at the same time which seems a right and true
interdisciplinary, multimedia kind of answer.
CAJ:Under the aegis of Creative Push Collective, you and Jenny
Magnus offer intensive art courses outside of an institutional
academic setting. Can you tell us about the origins of this program,
and what you hope to offer in it?
SA:Creative Push Collective is the result of many years of teaching
and many conversations about that on-going experience as shared
between Jenny Magnus and me. Weve co-taught classes each year
for most of our respective teaching careers, and have established a
fine-tuned balance of preparing and giving instruction and feedback
relating to interdisciplinary curriculum. Were different in our
teaching approaches and yet, ultimately, share the same passion and
vision for how to facilitate artistic progress. So students, in working
with us, receive dual aspects and approaches, all in service to
generating ideas, working through them, and final revisions toward
complete projects. In our experience as teaching artists, we came to
see that there are artists who dont choose to be part of an academic
program, but who are looking for a way to continue to work andgrow. We have some participants in CPC who are new to making
work, and so our focus is then to help them find ways to generate
and trust their new ideas, and to recognize their artistic voices. We
also work with former graduate students and artists who have well-
established professional practices. They come to us beyond
graduation or mid-career to realize a particular project, often
bringing in very raw, new ideas and working with us through to a
point of public performance or exhibition or publication.
The work we do in Creative Push Collective is very much parallelto the way we each teach in school. But, then again, the boundaries
can sometimes be pushed even further as we can offer more or
different opportunities for learning experiences inside of a space of
our own policies and practices. Further info on what we offer as
Creative Push Collective can be found on our website,
creativepushcollective.com. Well have new course and workshop
offerings up and scheduled for later this Spring/Summer 2015.
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CAJ:What are you reading or watching or thinking about lately?
Should we be reading or watching or thinking about it too?
SA:Im doing as much research-reading as possible, related to the
book project Im working on so that includes a combination of
Western European medieval history, early American settlement
history, and mid-19thcentury urban American history, with a focus
on the lives of what we now call pioneering feminists. I also am
going back to poetry by some of my all-time faves: Plath, Olds,
Simic, Glck very different poets from one another, but, as a
writer, reading inside of meter, rhythm, structure, and exquisite
word choice keeps me in step with thinking that way as I work
toward lyrical sensibility, which is especially important to me withinthis current project.
Otherwise, Im watching a lot of nature documentaries
especially those having to do with harsh climates and environments
as further research regarding modes of survival. And learning
about methods of psychic meditation from some excellent,
practicing psychics as I investigate religion and spirituality, energy
work and the occult. The list sounds like a real mash-up and it is
although it all is intrinsically linked to what Im up to inside of
my writing project. In a general sense, Im thinking about aspects ofnature and our place as humans in the bigger picture. Aspects of
ecospirituality are interesting me and probably point the way
toward our progression as a worldwide populace. So that would be
my suggestion for something we might all be considering lately.
CAJ:We hear you have a show coming in this years Rhinoceros
Theater Festival. Can you tell us something about it the forms,
themes, ideas it explores?
SA: Im happy and excited to bring ALLEARS, a sonicgatheringto
Rhinofest this year. Ive invited a group of artists and musicians who
make fine-tuned recordings of their work with text, voice, sound,
and song composition in dramatically different ways from one
another. This will be a listening event, with the focus of energy and
audience participation on attentively hearing pieces that each
artist/musician has chosen to present. I have a plan for twisting up
the format of the theater space, taking away the row formation,
among other things, to approximate the experience of hanging at a
friends house, slouching on the sofa, and listening to a completealbum or a particular radio program. Enjoyable, deep listening will
be the central experience ofALL EARS, which is what carefully made
recordings deserve and require for a full sonic ride. Soundscape,
spoken word, art music, and rock songs by Mark Booth, Lucas
Guariglia, Jenny Magnus, Beau OReilly, Valentina Vella, and
myself in collaboration with Basil Abbott will make up the program.
The inspiration for proposing this event was, indeed, looking back to
my earlier days of rock when you arent rehearsing or playing out,
youre listening to the recording sessions with your band. Its thislaid-back, but focused, time that Im looking to create, and Im
excited to see who is there and what they take from the experience.
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Questions for Robert Metrick
For many years, we have been enchanted and piqued by theproductions of Robert Metrick, whose multi-genre, multi-
formal works have variously appeared as opera, text, film,installation, and collaborative visual art projects. Here we askthe artist, preparing for an upcoming Rhino Fest performance,about influences, processes, and what hes up to now.
Chicago Arts Journal:
Can you describe the generative process of
your work? Does it change, from one project to another?
Robert Metrick: My work generates differently from project to
project, although it sometimes feels that I am re-generating the sameproject, using different titles.
Actually, I often begin with a title that comes out of nowhere at
unexpected moments, a state of delirium while riding the train with
a high fever, or while parallel parking, swimming. The titles for
many performances (When I Regain My Foliage, The Secret Life
of Dust, O Klahoma) probably emerged out of those kinds of
moments. I dont know where I would be without them.
Once a title is born, I will collect things fragments of mywriting in journals, texts from whatever I happen to be reading,
melodies playing in my head, pieces of conversation, the news
jigsaw puzzle pieces that I try to connect, within the frame of the
title. I know they are somehow related, but sometimes I do not have
a sense of meaning until long after the performance has been
staged.
As I respond to this question, Ive had this very simple fragment of
a melody playing on an endless loop inside my head all day, and I
cant get rid of it. I know Ill have to use it for something.
I guess if I were to idealize my process, I would say that the essence
of my creative activity is really about being in the right place at theright time, being present enough to allow accidents to happenand
transcribe them into some sort of form. I would be completely happy
as a court transcriptionist.
CAJ: You have made work in Chicago performance circles for
decades now. What changes have you observed in the dynamics and
discourses around art in this town?
RM:My work emerged when the nonprofit