For many people, the big theater news in 2010 was in real estate: The former Bailiwick Arts Center and Theatre Building Chicago continued to anchor the 2500 block of Belmont Avenue as, respectively, Theater Wit and Stage 773. Black Ensemble broke ground for a new theater at Clark and Montrose, its vacated space in the Beacon Street community center offering shelter for Uptown's Pegasus Players. Drury Lane Water Tower Place got a sleek new makeover (and steadier use) under the title of Broadway Playhouse, bestowed by new managers Broadway In Chicago. Signal Ensemble moved into the likewise rehabbed fka Breadline warehouse at Ravenswood and Berenice, while the suburban Oak Park Festival Theater and Circle Theatre now share the quarters recently occupied by Oak Park Village Players. Oh, and storefronts Profiles and National Pastime got fancy new restrooms, making the Heartland Studio the last theater in town with no in-house plumbing.
For other theatergoers, the 2009-2010 season should be declared the year of the vocal coaches. Since the days of Stanislavski, actors in pursuit of their craft have undergone extensive physical training, carefully delving "sense memory" enabling them to instantaneously express every impulse fluttering in their consciousness. But with the advent of electronically amplified visual spectacle like cinema and television, the aural element at the roots of drama (which began as poetry, remember) fell into neglect.
Notable in these last 12 months, however, was the resurrection of words uttered with a euphony of phrasing and clarity of enunciation to render each narrative element immediately comprehended. And so, leading my roster of oft-ignored technicians deserving recognition for their expertise are Christine Adair, Eva Breneman, Elise Kauzlaric, Belinda Bremner, Cecilie O'Reilly, Philip Timberlake and Claudia Anderson as well as the uncredited voice and dialect consultants for The Brother/Sister Plays, Living Quarters, Aftermath, The Island, Night and Day and many, many more.
Speaking of cinematic dazzle brings up the age-old debate between literal and evocative approaches to stage environment. Walt Spangler and Richard Woodbury's sense-surround cataclysm for the Goodman's True History of the Johnstown Flood tops the list for the former, closely followed by Alan Donahue's sumptuous rococo furnishings for Remy Bumppo's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Todd Rosenthal's live-in Victorian rooms for Steppenwolf's Fake, with the Gritty Realism award going to James Leaming's ramshackle squalor for American Blues' Tobacco Road (though for gritty urban realism, a big shout-out is due Rahmann Barnes and Cesar Luna's tagger-art for Welcome To Arroyo's). But there were also stage pictures designed to evoke mood over location, like those by Donahue for Lifeline's Wuthering Heights or Jorge Felix for Urban Theater's Brainpeople (which also introduced Marilyn Camacho into the wet-dream goddess pantheon, right alongside Brenda Barrie) and the perennial boat-in-bottle challenges, the prize once again going to Theo Ubique for its up-close-and-cozy productions of Chess and Cats.
The season boasted a number of fully realized, high-quality productions of classic scripts—Seanachai's The Weir, Raven's Twelve Angry Men and the aforementioned Tobacco Road come to mind—but also intriguing were the shows built from text with an eye to overturning expectations forged over generations. Foremost among these were the Goodman's stripped-down production of The Seagull, Writers Theatre's in-your-lap Streetcar Named Desire (we always knew Robert Falls and David Cromer were fearless, but they surpassed even themselves with these) and Steppenwolf's surprisingly cerebral Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And how about The Hypocrites' laugh-a-minute No Exit, National Pastime's ghostly Street Scene and the Commedia Beauregard's—uh, foreign-language Klingon Christmas Carol. Finally, there were the brilliantly conceived and lovingly executed shows doomed to be seen only by a lucky few: Teresa Veramendi's sensuously poetic, intensely personal Vincent's Yellow, The Journeymen's poignantly intimate Shakespeare's R & J, Greenetree Productions' Blues For an Alabama Sky.
This doesn't mean you can dispense with actors. Some plays whose personnel drew accolades were Red Orchid's Louis Slotin Sonata, starring Steve Schine as the tragic egghead of Los Alamos, and Black Elephant's Gross Indecency with villain Danne E. Taylor lending gravity to Oscar Wilde's martyrdom. Goodman's The Long Red Road dared to cast an amputee, Katy Sullivan, in the role of an amputee (ironically, the most active figure onstage), and Wuthering Heights elevated Gregory Isaac to the ranks of sexy historical heroes (currently led by Nick Sandys and Peter Greenberg, but don't ignore AARP pin-up Mike Nussbaum wearing tights for Chicago Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew). And while Teatro Vista's 26 Miles and the ubiquitous Tobacco Road employed stellar ensembles, Sandra Marquez and Carmen Roman were the faces we remember six months later.
Ultimately, however, you gotta have a script—preferably one that doesn't copy a reliable formula (unless it copies extremely well, like William Brown and Doug Frew's hollywood-bio To Master The Art). This year was not without its disappointments: We have yet to see the play that discusses private gun ownership fairly, or permits a pregnant woman to choose abortion—they're legal now, remember?—or a Caucasian playwright who doesn't objectify Asians. (Rollin Jones' The Artificial Intelligence of Jenny Chow is alone in not doing so.) But Terry Abrahamson's Doo Lister's Blues compressed an entire era into the microcosm of one south side block, Ronan Marra's Aftermath recounted rock history as tragedy and Julia Cho's The Piano Teacher never shrank from its shocking revelations.
Even such minuscule contributions as the dog (identified as "Queequeg" in the playbill) in Oak Park's Of Mice and Men or the foliage in Artistic Home's The Tallest Man played their part in making this job a pleasure. Here's to another year of artistic discovery and experiences to treasure away.
