Piano
Playwright: Trevor Griffiths, adapted from the screenplay by A. Adabashyan and N. Mikhalkov, based on the play by Anton Chekhov
At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Christian Kohn in Piano
Phone: (773) 753-4472
Tickets: $28-$38
Runs through: June 17
If there is a lesson to be learned from this three-times-removed adaptation of Chekhov's Platonov, it is that a playwright declaring that he wants one of his plays destroyed usually has good reason for his request. The text should be preserved for scholarly purposes, of course, but potential producers may consider themselves warned nevertheless.
Piano introduces a number of personalities we will re-encounter in the author's later plays: a coddled son stifled by his female relatives, a heavy-drinking doctor, a landowner nostalgic for the good old days of unfettered autocracy, an old dotard singing "Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay," and a taciturn curmudgeon more absorbed in his reading than his immediate surroundings. There are also three sex-starved women—one of them a coquettish widow scornful of the suitor who adores her, but kindly disposed toward a wealthy social-climber seeking her title—and the former roué who dallied with the three frustrated damsels, but is now approaching middle age and bored with the whole game. Dominant symbolic motifs include a player-piano and a Victrola spewing forth—you guessed it—artificial passion.
A common stratagem employed by dramatists bereft of a story is to simply gather their personnel into a single room and hope something happens. Given the company assembled by Charles Newell for this Court Theatre production—most of them portraying characters they have played many times before (with Christian Kohn, as the weary Platonov, once again working harder than his material warrants)—Piano might have emerged as a passable index to Chekhov's Greatest Scenes. But set designer John Culbert sabotages whatever empathy the play generates with a sprawling, multi-leveled, constructivist environment more suggestive of Brechtian Epic Theater than of pièce-bien-faite realism.
Not only does this warehouse ambiance fragment the audience's focus by requiring them to simultaneously reconnoiter several corners of the auditorium from their individual vantage points. It also forces the actors to convey intimate emotional connections with one another across vast distances—a feat not unlike shouting from separate El platforms. But in order to understand what motivates Chekhov's sorry lot in their futile struggle to escape the status quo, we must recognize at all times the claustrophobic social restrictions that encourage their spiritual inbreeding, as well as the debilitating ennui engendered by this inertia—a concept alien enough to American audiences in 2001, but rendered even more inconceivable when realized in so physically spacious a universe.
The Drawer Boy
Playwright: Michael Healey
At: Steppenwolf Theatre,
1650 N. Halsted Street
Phone: (312) 335-1650
Tickets: $35-$45
Runs through: June 10
When you have two actors who could probably sell out the run with a recitation of "The Walrus And The Carpenter," witnessing them do their stuff on an intelligent and well-crafted script is a bonus. And when that script could, in clumsier hands, emerge as cartoonishly facile as the aforementioned poem, a sweet, sensitive (but never soppily sentimental) interpretation by seasoned professionals is serendipity, indeed.
Certainly there is plenty in Michael Healey's play to push audience buttons. Its premise: A callow young actor proposes to observe a pair of farmers in their everyday activities, pursuant to participating in a group artistic project honoring the bucolic life ("We take your history, and we give it back to you"). In the first act, we guffaw at greenhorn Miles' attempts to learn farm work, instructed by gruff old Morgan, and chuckle over the childlike behavior of the latter's brain-damaged partner, Angus. In the second act, we soften to the fraternal affection at the roots of their symbiotic relationship (think George and Lennie in Of Mice And Men) and watch with joy and apprehension the reawakening of Angus' cognitive powers (think The Miracle Worker), anticipating the inevitable catharsis when painful secrets will be revealed and the healing will be complete.
It would be easy to play this material sitcom-style, but Anna D. Shapiro's delicate directorial touch checks any tendency on the part of the actors to coast on cuteness. Not that John Mahoney or Frank Galati, veteran performers steeped in the ensemble-based Steppenwolf ethos, are likely to succumb to grandstanding (this early in the run, anyway). Both are obviously enjoying themselves, but never do they put their pleasure before ours. Nor does Johnny Galecki, as the ingenuous Miles, resign himself to playing straight man, but carries his full share of the dramatic narrative.
At several points in the play, characters accuse one another of disturbing the status quo, saying, "You did this to me." What Healey does to us is to remind us of the artist's power to "draw out" the truth when and where it lies buried, thus freeing those imprisoned by artifice born of despair—a parable of rebirth and resurrection rendered even more timely in an exquisite production endowed with all the warmth and humor of a spring rain after a hard winter.