THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

By Catey Sullivan

Lanford Wilson's The Rimers of Eldritch is an understated symphony, a piece for a chamber orchestra performing in a haunting, minor key.

Instead of standard exposition and linear scenes, we get gorgeously overlapping, waves of dialogue that echo and repeat like the themes of a fugue. It isn't a structure to be undertaken by theatrical dilettantes. No worries here: Directed by Steven Fedoruk for the increasingly prominent Eclipse Theatre, Rimers pierces like a midnight train whistle.

And although not uninhabited, Eldritch is indeed a ghost town, a place where people live to leave or stay put as they slowly die.

The rhythms of a town abandoned by the thriving coal industry that used it up and moved on are deceptively sleepy. This is a place where farmers talk for hours about the weather, where the nearest movie theater is 20 miles away and where the biggest ruckus of any given week comes from voices raised in good, old Gospel hymns.

It's telling that this fading Bible Belt hamlet was once a place of explosions.

'You shoulda seen it when the mines were running,' one character sighs, and continues to describe the industry that once made the town thrive even as explosions made windows tremble and dogs run for cover.

Given the fiery, destructive history of Eldritch, it doesn't come as a surprise that beneath the calm veneer of daily life, the town festers with ferocious cruelties and violence. Schoolgirls are beaten bloody behind closed doors. Dogs turn up poisoned. Vagrants leer through bedroom windows, sophomores leave high school to get married and shotguns are kept loaded.

To be sure, there's nothing new with the idea about small town dysfunction. It's a topic that's been all but driven into the territory of cliché. What is revelatory here is the way in which Wilson's words, delivered with lyricism and clarity by the 17-member cast, unveil the trouble in this small town.

Threaded through Rimers is a courtroom drama. The mystery behind a murder and a sexual assault is revealed and through the eyes and minds of Eldritch's inhabitants, as the good townsfolk pass judgment and rumors like the collection basket at church.

Working a spare, small space, an ensemble of terrific prowess create clucking gossips; damaged dreamers; teens hurtling toward nowhere; taciturn farmers; ancient, bruised seers and many others with depth and humanity.

With The Rimers of Eldritch, Wilson penned a southern gothic evocative of the harsh, difficult and wondrous intricacies of William Faulkner's iconic Yoknatapawpha County.

Eldritch is a town cloaked in rime, the layer of frost that can cover everything in winter and can make even a blood-soaked body sparkle like spun glass. It's also a place realized with vivid, haunting vision by Eclipse.

Travesties

Playwright: Tom Stoppard

At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.

Phone: ( 773 ) 753-4472; $26-$50

Runs through: April 24

BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE

A legacy of the radical Dadaist movement in art was a brand of word-association poetry created by, literally, dividing a piece of prose into fragments and rearranging them at random. In Travesties, playwright Tom Stoppard has taken three essays, which could have been titled, respectively, the Meaning Of Art, The Roots Of The Russian Revolution, and Lives Of Famous Expatriates Dwelling In Switzerland During The Year 1918, and repacked them into the configurations of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with a couple of music-hall acts thrown in for good measure. Our host, you see, is a long-retired civil servant, and that's how HE remembers it.

Nowadays everyone knows that Stoppard is a genius, but in 1974, we didn't yet, and so he had to try much harder to show us just how brilliant a genius he was. Writing an entire scene in limericks, for example, and another to the tune of 'Mister Gallagher And Mister Shean'. For that matter, crafting his text from paraphrased Wildeisms inserted into the mouths of renowned historical figures, factual and fictional, while still conveying a coherent discussion of its lofty topics.

Not that we pay much attention to the discussion. Not when the men figuring in our befuddled raconteur's reminiscence are antiestablishment leaders James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Nikolai Lenin. Not when the women are Earnest's Gwendolen and Cecily. Not when scenes are repeated two or more times with variations just jarring enough to throw us off whatever track we were trying to lock onto. Better to sit back and enjoy the dazzling wordplay with which Stoppard—a brilliant genius, did I mention?—keeps his ideas flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

These verbal fireworks would leave us dizzy in short order were it not for director Charles Newell's characteristic restraint, which imposes discipline on actors in danger of skidding off on sheer adrenaline. And if this ( along with John Culbert's obstacle-course of a set ) stretches the playing time to two hours and 45 minutes, it also makes for a comfortable pace, nimble but never vertigo-inducing.

Treat yourself to some brain exercise before the summer renders us as intellectually sluggish as our cheerfully dotty narrator.

The Subject

Was Roses

Playwright: Frank Gilroy

At: Writers' Theatre, 664 Vernon, Glencoe

Phone: ( 847 ) 242-6000; $45-$50

Runs through: July 10

BY RICK REED

A young man returning home from war should always be a celebration, especially for the loved ones who have missed his presence while he was overseas, fighting the good fight for the United States during WWII. But when Timmy Cleary returns to the small Bronx apartment he once called home, he is forced to confront a new battlefield. This battlefield's lines are broken and never drawn clearly and winners and losers relentlessly change. Being caught in this marital crossfire is harder for this young man to deal with than the more regimental lines of battle from which he has just returned.

The Subject Was Roses, Frank Gilroy's sensitively layered and emotional domestic drama is now on heart rending display in the tiny Books on Vernon space that was the original home of Glencoe's polished and professional Writers' Theatre. The play, a Tony-award-winner in 1965, harkens back to a time when simple elements—plot, characterization, and commentary on the human condition—really meant something and larger lessons were told through emotion and character interaction, in what was said, and more importantly not said. Under Shade Murray's sensitive direction, this Subject Was Roses comes to astonishing life and a deft ensemble melts away the outside world and puts us squarely down in their little claustrophobic universe, making us forget that we are in a small theater, watching actors play roles.

The small space, with its detailed 1940s set design by Jack Magaw, is perfect for the story, which really revolves around being trapped and breaking free. Timmy Cleary returns home with a more mature eye and witnesses the long-simmering resentments which underscore his parents' union: infidelity, finances, religion, and the proper way to raise their son. One of the wonderful things about this solid piece of theatrical craftsmanship and artistry is its ability to take this small story about an unhappy family and make it universal. If you can't find something here to identify with in your own personal relationship history, you're not looking hard enough.

If you're tired of the avant garde, bored with surrealism, yawning at the absurd, do yourself a favor and buy a ticket to the realism on display at Writers' Theatre. The Subject was Roses is a good old-fashioned play, with real characters you can care about and even a beginning, middle, and an end. The performances are understated, subtle, amusing, and real.

You'll laugh; you'll cry, but most of all you'll come away thinking about your own life, your own family, and realize that this theatrical journey into the dark heart of the dysfunctional is more about what you didn't see than what you did.

Toast of the Town

Playwright: Scott Oken and Ernest Deak

At: Factory Theater at Prop Thtr, 3504 N. Elston Ave.

Phone: ( 312 ) 409-3247; $18

Runs through: May 8

BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE

For a major part of the 20th century, we got our stage comedies from New York City, and so the people in them lived in Manhattan, strolled Fifth Avenue, dined at Sardi's and laughed at the hicks in Queens. Our film comedies came from Hollywood, and ITS denizens lived in Beverly Hills, cruised Sunset Boulevard, ate at the Brown Derby and jeered at the bumpkins in Fresno. Thus, like armchair tourists, we came to feel as one with these faraway realms.

Scott Oken and Ernest Deak expose their provincial status by taking the plot and personnel of a 1930s-styled movie comedy and relocating them to the world of live-performance theater—CHICAGO live-performance theatre, to be specific. Our hero is a writer named Goldie McJohn, which explains why his pregnant wife is named Kay and the theater company he hopes will produce his play is called Lawdy Mama ( but NOT the actress named Yvonne Elliman ) . The producers, Floyd Rose and Thurston DeBladderhorn, hire a director—Arabella C. Doyle, turned out in full Cecil B. DeMille drag, complete with beret, scarf, jodhpurs, cigarette holder, megaphone and a team of lackeys. Her cast includes the bubbly Lorraine Sweet, the urbane Wallington Smithington Silverston ( who reminds Doyle of Ronald Colman ) , the shrill Melinda Comaway and the mysterious Jake Stone—in reality, himself a rival playwright named Roy ( pronounced 'Rwah' ) bent on sabotaging McJohn's show.

Even within this ambiguous universe, Toast Of The Town's collection of rat-a-tat repartee, one-two gags, walk-on gags, walk-through gags, cartoon-chase gags, funny voices, funny dialects, funny noises, slap-stick ( literally ) flourishes and general mayhem features some genuinely humorous material. We could only guess at most of it on opening night, however, since the actors for this Factory Theatre production have been instructed to deliver their dialogue at a volume threatening severe vocal damage and a speed rendering the unintelligible punchlines identifiable only by their timing.

Everyone onstage appears to have had a jolly time assembling this hodgepodge of obscure references, but only Laura McKenzie and Manny Tamayo seem to have anchored their antics in something like characters. Were they expecting an audience, maybe?

Birds

Playwright: adapted by Hurt McDermott, from the play by Aristophanes

At: Utopian Theatre Asylum at the Viaduct, 3111 N. Western Ave.

Phone: ( 847 ) 217-0691; $20

Runs through: April 30

BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE

A pair of slackers set out in search of the easy life ( 'Not a BETTER country,' shrugs one, 'just a less ambitious one' ) and when they find it, they promptly transform it into a replica of what they vowed to escape. Sound familiar? Even more disturbing than Aristophanes' observations on the follies of his own society is their applicability to our own. Have we learned NOTHING since 400 BC?

Our two dropouts are Ready and Happy. Their destination, the skies where Tereus the bird-king dwells. To allay the mistrust of the avian citizenry, Ready proposes a plan to demand a fee on traffic between the earth and the heavens. Their nation is dubbed 'Cloudcukopolis', a wall is constructed at the expense of many lives, and a military force drafted ( mostly comprised of barnyard fowl, whom Ready declares unfit for 'higher things' ) . Immigration is restricted, dissenting opinions are suppressed, and 'Committees of Vigilant Patriots' sniff out traitors, who are executed and eaten. The gods protest, but soon are brought to heel by the ruthlessly empowered Cloudcukopolitans.

Hurt McDermott's adaptation of Aristophanes' text is a delight, its breezily contemporary tone easily comprehended by academics and ignorami alike. Literary allusions ( 'You don't expect me to believe that someone could write an interesting play about The Clouds, do you?' ) abound, side-by-side with casual colloquialisms—'Trying to kill a bird with two stones, huh?'—and flat-out puns ( 'I'd forget my head if it weren't attached to the body politic.' ) . Whoever knew that so much of our language borrowed from our forefeathers?

It's not just clever words, however: For this world premiere production, The Utopian Theatre Asylum has assembled a technical team of Olympian imagination. Natasha Bogojevich's musical score ranges from delta blues to African-jazz fusion, Ann Davis and Natasha Vuchurovich Djukic's skeletal-metal scenery simultaneously suggests clouds and cages, while the latter's fanciful costumes are a shimmering rainbow of brilliant hues. The spectacle never eclipses the performances, however, and a cast led by Matthew Van Colton's innocent-faced Ready and anchored by Jennifer Byers' eloquent scarlet-plumed Chorus more than redeemed any opening night—well, flightiness—to promise this world premiere a soaring future.