Out playwright and performer Aaron Holland's world premiere play Princess Mary Demands Your Attention includes a mystical drag queen, pot-smoking and shade-throwing teenagers and an agoraphobic protagonist who feels trapped by an overwhelming duty to stay in Richmond, Va, and watch over his widowed mother. Oh yeah, the play was also inspired by Tolstoy's epic 1869 novel War and Peace.
If that sounds in any way incongruous, Bailiwick Chicago artistic director Lili-Anne Brown will argue otherwise.
"I've always appreciated Aaron's artistic voice, and combined and juxtaposed with War and Peace I found that particularly interesting," said Brown about Holland, who is a resident playwright for Bailiwick Chicago. "His understanding of the story and how that filtered through his experience I thought was something that I had not seen on a stage before."
Brown also found Holland's characters so eminently familiar in her own personal world, but who haven't been properly represented on stage that often. These were some big reasons why Brown fast-tracked Princess Mary Demands Your Attention for Bailiwick Chicago to produce this season and why she chose to direct it.
The germ of the play developed when Holland finally got around to reading War and Peace after multiple stalled attempts. What actually helped Holland succeed starting in late 2012 is when he downloaded the novel to his smartphone via a Kindle app so he could read it on public transit.
Little did Holland know at the time that the Tolstoy's epic novel about five Russian families caught up in the Napoleonic Wars would speak to him so deeply and artistically—particularly the character of Princess Mary.
"In the middle of the story there's this little woman who is stuck in her house, taking care of her father, and as I was reading the book, I kept feeling at home in her place," Holland said. "In her story, whenever you came back to her, I would feel connected and kind of like that she was telling my story through her emotions and through her prayers."
At the same time Holland was reading War and Peach, he was also playing a drag queen in Profiles Theatre's 2012 revival of Hellcab. Holland attributes this in part to his inclusion of a defiantly forceful drag persona named Princess Mary who appears in his play to serve as an apparition for the main character named Amari Bolkonski.
"I never played drag before on stage, and [my character] was giving me this freedom on the inside that I was finding that Princess Mary was searching for in the book," Holland said. "The drag queen sort of entered the Princess Mary story as a spiritual guide—a representation of freedom and self-fulfillment."
In casting the show, Brown said that it was vital to find performers who could believably deliver the dialogue, which she says at times is very reminiscent of so many beloved sitcoms focused around a quartet of close friends including Sex and the City, The Golden Girls or Living Single.
"I think we feel really vindicated in during the casting process to go for a 'heart' feeling as opposed to this person should look like this, and this person should be like that. We went with our guts and heart on who just felt like the characters and we're seeing that pay off now," Brown said. "It's comforting and wonderful because the cast is doing it by tackling this strange and wonderful script that is written in almost dialect, and when you look at it on the page, you have to be ready for that."
During the preview process for Princess Mary Demands Your Attention, Brown was slightly taken aback by an individual audience member who commented on how "very gay" the play was.
"I thought, oh yeah, I guess the play is very gay, but we had not really thought of it," Brown said. "When I program, I'm thinking of it, but I haven't thought about it really that much since then because first of all it comes from Aaron, who is like a brother to me, and it's semi-autobiographical and it's these people that I'm so familiar with by living with this story for so long, that I wasn't particularly thinking like, 'Hey everybody, Gay Play!' I was more like, don't we love these characters and don't you know these people?"
Brown is wary about programing in diversity into a theater season and just making it into an issue about numbers or demographics.
"Unless you're making the characters more than two-dimensional, sprinkling them in like sprinkles on ice cream, it does not represent much of anything when I talk about capital "D" diversity," said Brown, adding that it's really "actually being interested in someone's point of view besides your own and wanting to represent that in a really respectful way."
Princess Mary Demands Your Attention continues through Saturday, Feb. 21, at the Victory Gardens Richard Christiansen Theater at the Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Remaining performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, with 3 p.m. matinees on Sundays. Extra performances are at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 28 and Feb. 10.
Tickets are $30 with discounts available for groups of 10 or more. Call 773-871-3000 or visit www.bailiwickchicago.com or www.victorygardens.org .
