Playwright: Michel Marc Bouchard
At: Journeymen Theater Company at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church, 925 W. Diversey
Phone: 773-857-5395, Tickets: $12
Runs through: June 10
by Mary Shen Barnidge
There was, in fact, a revival of romanticism in French literature just previous to 1912, when most of Lilies takes place. But author Michel Marc Bouchard's play is less interested in theatrical history than in fashioning an homage to the sensual spirituality of the fin-de-siècle. To that end, he has forged a theoerotic fantasy populated by an all-male tribe uniformly beautiful, sensitive and queer as chocolate-chip communion wafers.
The action opens in 1952, when His Excellency Bishop Jean Bilodeau, on a visit to a prison inmate, finds himself taken hostage by a flock of jailbirds who proceed to—put on a show! Their text accuses the priest of wronging two of his chums 40 years earlier—the expatriate Count Vallier de Tilly, long dead, and his lover, Simon Doucet, the prisoner now serving a life sentence for the former's murder. Other personalities portrayed by the company of convicts include Doucet's abusive father and Vallier's daffy mother, along with a demimondaine who offers to provide Doucet with het assurance, and a drama coach whose voluptuous depictions of the saints earn the censure of his charges' parents.
Since the saint in question is—who else?—Sebastian, it is only logical that the adolescent Vallier and Doucet court one another in the language of martyr and executioner to fabricate an ethos in which homicide at the hands of one's beloved is ultimate proof of love and mercy, a devastating expression of scorn.
Only a romantic could take this drivel seriously. But under Frank Pullen's disciplined direction, the Journeymen commit themselves so wholly to Bouchard's world of sweaty gazes, passionate lip-locks and wet-eyed farewells that we never ask where the guards are in this prison, or by what favors the incarcerated Doucet enlisted the aid of his fellow stir-buddies in this dangerous charade.
As the young Vallier and Doucet, Ben Zolno and Daniel Rangel are required to do little beyond pose prettily and keep their faces impassive. Jean Paul Menou does a sharp Sal Mineo impression as the envious young Bilodeau, while Mark Douglas-Jones and Lawrence Garner share some suitably somber scenery-chewing as the adult Doucet and Bilodeau. But James Eldrenkamp steals the show as the nostalgic Countess de Tilly, delicately suspending our disbelief with a conviction as bare of camp mockery as a baptismal gown.
Arms And
The Man
Playwright: George Bernard Shaw
At: ShawChicago at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph Street
Phone: 312-409-5605
Tickets: free, reserv. recommended
Runs through: May 18
by Mary Shen Barnidge
Essayists frequently expound their ideas in form of a dialogue—Plato, for example—but dialogue alone is not a play, which requires a story. And so one often finds dazzling eloquence conscripted in service of plots pulled straight from farce (Cf. Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest). But George Bernard Shaw was articulate as well as witty, his satirical observations on the society of his time steeped in serious purpose and shrewd insight. And in Arms And The Man, the flimsiest of premises supplies the foundation for the author's insightful comments on the economics of war and peace.
It is 1885, the Serbs and Bulgarians are—yawn—fighting, and Miss Raina Petkoff, daughter of the Bulgarian army's commander, thrills to news of martial glory—in particular the heroic deeds of her fiancé, Major Sergius Saranoff. Her romantic fantasies are shaken, however, when a Swiss mercenary fleeing the enemy takes refuge on her balcony, during which he apprises her of some facts—that death is no honor and survival no disgrace, that war may be hell but is more often simply absurd, and that her champion's courageous cavalry charge and regiment's subsequent victory was purely accidental. Her education continues after the war, with the idealized love she shares with Sergius likewise exposed as a sham and Captain Bluntschli, the former fugitive, proving himself a man of singular acumen.
The conventions of chamber reading—in which actors in contemporary dress read from stationary scripts—are perfectly suited to this War of Words. Relieved of the stage business mandated by a full production, the ShawChicago ensemble is free to savor such Shavianisms as "It is [a soldier's] duty to live for as long as he can" and "If pity is akin to love, then gratitude is akin to the other thing."
And savor them they do—in particular, Steve Cardamone's urbane Bluntschli and Amanda Pajer's impetuous Raina, who, even facing front at all times, generate a chemistry that fairly crackles in the air. Karen Woditsch as Louka, the servant bent on marrying up, and Terence Gallagher as Sergius, the nobleman bent on marrying down, have their moments, as do Jacqueline Renee Jones and Tony Dobrowolski as Raina's befuddled parents, with Matthew Penn bringing up the rear as Nicola, the phlegmatic butler. Under Robert Scogin's' able direction, they paint a vivid picture of courtship, both national and domestic, no less affectionate for being based in candor and not charade.
Daniel Rangel and Ben Zolno in Lilies.
