Chicago Theater Round-Up P1- Timeline Theater and Victory Gardens

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I’ve been extremely lax in putting up reviews of my most recent and not so recent theater and opera experiences. So for the sake of actually getting something up in the same season they were performed in, I’m going to do a couple performance round-ups with just a few thoughts about each performance.

This round-up includes Timeline Theater's Master Harold & the Boy and She Danced, as well as Victory Garden's The Blue Door.

 

Timeline Theater – “Yesterday’s Stories/Today’s Issues

 Master Harold & the Boys – Just saw this yesterday and it was a masterful performance. One of the nicest things about Timeline is that it is a tiny intimate theater where you really are up close and personal. The actors can’t hide here – if they aren’t fully in character you can see it and feel it. This most personal of plays by Fugard was deeply moving and very painful to watch. The interaction between the three characters – a young man whose family own a tea shop and the two employees in that shop was acted and directed with sensitivity and grace.

 Several audience members commented that they had seen this play in the mid seventies (with James Earl Jones in the leading role, no less), and found this a much more moving performance due to the proximity of the audience to the actors.

Another element that makes Timeline so special is that they often have discussions after the play – either a discussion about the issues of the play (in this case, race, apartheid and family dynamics) or about the making of the play with actors or director or ensemble members. We got in on the later – the members of the company (none of which appeared in the play, and the director held a discussion with the audience about why they chose this play, how it was cast, what the director wanted to emphasize.

The discussion was lively and the company and director were quite open to being asked why they made certain creative choices and very appreciative of the feedback. (Unlike some folks who take the ‘I’m the creative genius, I don’t have to explain myself’ approach to their work). And the audience always appreciates the opportunity to better understand the work and Timeline’s interpretation.

Check out some video from rehearsals here: http://www.timelinetheatre.com/master_harold/index.htm

*****

When she Danced – I’m so behind that I never wrote a review of this though I saw this play months ago. Everyone knows how Isadora Duncan died. But what do you know about how she lived? This funny, sad, poignant look at her life leaves you wanting to know more about this extraordinary woman. Set toward the end of her career, it shows her still struggling to be taken seriously by many while some of her many admirers have transformed her dance concepts into hideous parody.

Jennifer Engstrom, a company member played the lead role, and she has a rare ability to transform herself completely into the character she plays. Her supporting cast was superb, from the young Alejandro Cordoba who had to learn Greek and to play the piano well (which we learned from the post-production cast discussion) to Patrick Mulvey who played Isadora’s often drunk Russian husband. (Yes, he did have to learn Russian for the part).

They and the other supporting cast members worked flawlessly together in several very difficult and convoluted comic scenes where timing is everything. An especially difficult task when several different languages are being spoken at once.

As an added note to the UK folks: While Patrick Mulvey is an American (from Joliet, IL no less) he received his BA degree in acting at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, Scotland. While in Britain, he starred in the BBC drama River City and appeared in the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Anyone recognize him?

 ***

Victory Garden’s Theater – The Playwright’s Theater

The Blue Door – This astounding piece of work about race and racial history written several years prior to Barak Obama’s election to President, examines whether racial history becomes irrelevant in a supposedly post-racial era. The story revolves around a black university professor and his disdain for his heritage and identity. The professor (played by Bruce A. Young a founder of The Chicago Shakespeare company), married to white women, is surprised that his spouse wants him to attend the Million Man March in 1995. He refuses to go because he believes he beyond the need to affirm himself as a black man. He’s fully accepted by his white peers and sees no reason to dwell on race.

Not surprisingly, when the story begins to scratch below the surface, the professor’s place in white society is not so perfect nor so easy. And when he’s visited by the spirits of his several great-grandfathers (a slave, a man killed for trying to vote during reconstruction, his frustrated father) he begins to understand how their experiences and the memory of those experiences passed through the generations have informed the man he has become.

Lindsay Smiling played the roles of the various ancestors. He was amazing. Each one of the professor’s forefathers was a fully formed individual in his own right, but as we moved forward in time Mr. Smiling carried something subtle from each preceding ancestor into the following generations of men. I look forward to seeing more from this remarkable talent.

Video from The Blue Door:

http://victorygardens.org/content/node/1241