Playwright: Various. At: Merle Reskin Garage Theatre, 1624 N. Halsted. Tickets: 312-335-1650; www.steppenwolf.org; $20; 3-play pass $45. Runs through: April 24
For its second annual Garage Rep series, Steppenwolf Theatre Company has tapped three adventurous, small theater troupes to explore Steppenwolf's season theme, the public/private self. All three troupes are young (none is more than six years old), they probably are not yet on your theatrical radar and they offer highly presentational styles of production, at least for this series. Playing in rotating repertory, all three shows are physical, visual and non-realistic, and none runs more than 90 minutes.
Strange Tree Group blends elements of vaudeville, Grand Guignol horror and Edward Gorey-like design to offer The Three Faces of Doctor Crippen, an exploration of a horrific 1911 London murder and the trans-Atlantic chase to apprehend the perp and his female lover (disguised as his son). Written by Strange Tree Group house playwright and artistic director, Emily Schwartz, the play (with music and rhymed verse) splits Crippen into three warring factions: his public self, private self and fantasy self. The play also heralds the use of new technology, the Marconi wireless, to apprehend the villainous Crippen on an ocean liner. Equal to its best past efforts, Strange Tree strikes the right balance of whimsy, horror and clever theatrical device in a show with the fussy precision of an elaborate Edwardian valentine.
The Urban Theatre Company offers the most stark of the three productions: 19 actors who stand-and-deliver directly to the audience a series of short, poetic monologues penned by Jose Rivera, each representing some recognition of life—good or bad but always sacred—at the moment of death. A non-stop flow of colorful, semi-abstract projections on large screens backs the actors for visual effect. Is this heaven or hell? Is it the cosmos? Is it a close-up of a batik tee-shirt? The projections are hypnotic as are the voices. This is the most purely literary of the productions, a poetry slam of sorts rather than a play, and the one which requires the most attention from the audience.
The oddest of the three shows is Heddatron, presented by Sideshow Theatre Company, which takes place in 1890 and the present in Europe, Michigan and Ecuador. Heddatron offers technical dazzle with seven speaking robots (from a robot TV to a seven-foot-tall monster) performing with the real actors in scenes from Henrik Ibsen's drama, Hedda Gabler. Alas, this show will be meaningless (although amusing) if you're not familiar with Hedda Gabler, Ibsen and his disputes with rival playwright August Strindberg. Even if you know all that, Heddatron still is a stretch. Parallels between Ibsen's Europe and present-day America are clear enough, especially focusing on a heroine whose actions are circumscribed by limited expectations. But how do the robots fit? Is author Elizabeth Meriwether suggesting that even sentient robots will so limit a woman that her only independent action is to blow her brains out like Hedda? That's a really bizarre premise for a play, although Sideshow carries it through with aplomb.
Certainly, theatrical ambitions and entertainment values are high in the Garage Rep, which leaves psychological realism on the Steppenwolf mainstage where it belongs!
