Copenhagen
Playwright: Michael Frayn
At: Lifeline Theatre, 615 W. Wellington
Phone: ( 773 ) 281-8463; $25
Runs through: Oct. 9
BY RICK REED
Copenhagen revolves around an historical mystery. We'll get to that in a minute. The more immediate mystery is why a play whose elements, to the casual observer, might add up to the label, 'intellectual snooze' can, in fact, prove to be gripping, entertaining, and commanding of the respect of international audiences and even the committee who hands out the Tony awards ( which Copenhagen won in 2000 ) . I mean, the play is essentially talking on a bare stage ( even though scenic designer Brian Sidney Bembridge enhances that bare stage with an inspired, crumbling artifice, all dripping paint and realistic-looking pigeon droppings ) ; the talkers are none other than two of history's more famed physicists, the Danish Niels Bohr ( Terry Hamilton ) and his German student and subsequent scientific-force-in-his-own-right, Werner Heisenberg ( PJ Powers ) and Bohr's wife, Margrethe ( Isabel Liss ) ; and its subject matter—mathematics and physics—is dry and academic. When you arrive at the theater and see that the press materials include web links to study guides, you might think you're in for evening of theater better taken with a healthy dose of whatever amphetamine you can find.
But you'd be wrong. Michael Frayn's play somehow manages to draw you in and hold you for nearly two and a half hours that you hardly even notice slip by. Essentially, Frayn is imagining a real-life 1941 meeting between the two physicists when Heisenberg visited his old mentor at his home in Copenhagen. Historically, little is known about why the two men came together after years apart, especially when one considers what was going on in the world at the time, with the rise of the Nazis and Denmark being an occupied state. Therein lies the mystery. What did the men talk about? Why did Bohr agree to see his protégé again, when it seems they were on opposite sides of the fence politically and morally? Unless you're a historian, or a physicist, you might be saying, who gives a flying function? But in Frayn's hands ( and under Louis Contey's understated, yet charged, direction ) you're drawn into the mystery, particularly since it's shadowed over by the dark specter of the yet-to-be-born atomic bomb. Credit Frayn's way with dialogue, which is always crisp, witty, and natural. Frayn makes his characters real people and doesn't forget to give them back stories which make them unique and accessible.
Although it may appear on the surface that Copenhagen would have little to offer in the way of entertainment ( albeit a lot to offer in terms of thought provocation and historical significance ) , it manages to captivate and make you want more, putting you, perhaps, in Frayn's shoes when he first became interested in the mysterious meeting between the two men and what they said and became inspired to write his play.
It doesn't hurt that Contey works with an unmatched thespian trio, who know how to make these historical figures not only captivating, but sympathetic.
The Crazy Locomotive
Playwright: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland
Phone: ( 773 ) 384-0494; $20
Runs through: Sept. 24
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
The locomotive prop in Trap Door Theatre's revival of The Crazy Locomotive looks like one of two things: an enormous brain or a huge intestinal tract ready to dump its load.
These bodily interpretations coincide with what a conflicted audience might think about Trap Door's production and the play itself: either as a mind-bending work that deeply prods one's thought processes or a convoluted and pretentious piece of crap.
Written by Polish painter, playwright and drug enthusiast Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz in 1923, The Crazy Locomotive plays like a Dadaist deconstruction. Love triangle plotting is mocked, heroes turn into super villains and the presumed ingénue become a raging nymphomanic. Even a character transplanted into the audience criticizes the play.
In terms of plot, The Crazy Locomotive feels like an expressionistic ancestor to David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash ( the one where people got off on doing it during car crashes ) . Here, the thrill of possibly crashing a speeding locomotive becomes overanalyzed and contorted by the changeling characters.
Under the direction of Beata Pilch ( who also acts in the piece ) , everything is deliberately audience-distancing in The Crazy Locomotive's checklist: white-face Kabuki makeup, check, Creepy green-tinted lighting design by Richard Norwood, check, Nazi-era-esque costumes by Pilch, check, Extremely slick and gorgeous film epilogue by Carrie Holt de Lama that easily shows up the rest of the preceding live-action play, check.
What might have made The Crazy Locomotive a more enjoyable exercise would have been better modulation in the delivery instead of everything being pushed to high-pitched and screeching levels. After a while, it's easy to just tune out because there's just too much ranting and wailing by the hard-working cast of Carl Wisniewski, John Gray, Nicole Wiesner, Carolyn Shoemaker, John Kahara and the aforementioned Pilch.
At the very least, the one-hour running time of Crazy Locomotive makes the enterprise more bearable than if it droned on and on.
Still, it is definitely not to everyone's taste.
This Trap Door revival marks the company's recent return from the New York International Fringe Festival and highlights the company's commendable dedication to doing works by challenging modern and near-forgotten playwrights. So interpret The Crazy Locomotive as you choose: food for thought or a brief laxative. Either view is valid here.
Safe
Playwright: Anthony Ruivivar, Tony Glazer
At: The International Theater of Chicago in conjunction with Scott Dray Productions at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 935-6860; $18-$20
Runs through: Oct. 8
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Keeping characters in each other's faces when the going gets tough may present problems for some playwrights, but not Anthony Ruivivar and Tony Glazer. Their play opens with five citizens shut into a vault during—we are told—the course of a bank robbery. Capable Feliz advises everyone to stay calm and attempts to help Oakley, the wounded security guard, while preppy Ryan settles himself to patiently await the situation's outcome. The truculent Truss promptly goes into Rambo mode, however, exhorting his fellow captives to prepare for combat, and the hysterical Sabina—don't think too much about these names, by the way—immediately envisions herself raped by terrorists, whereupon she proceeds to remove her clothes.
Since it becomes quickly apparent that we are to focus on the scenario's encounter-therapy dynamic, the mysterious oppressors—whom we never see—engender no suspense for us, however swiftly they spur the prisoners to ignore simple logic and instead bully each other with lurid speculations, climaxing with the noncommittal Ryan becoming so fed up that he breaks into a rant steeped in RATIONALITY—at gunpoint, of course.
The authors' backgrounds in series-television—Ruivivar is an actor and Glazer, a writer—may account for their story's resemblance to a 25-minute telescript stretched to feature-length. The members of their microcosmic American society must be alternately terrified and resigned without a hint of subtext to drive their progress. And under Dale Goulding's usually capable direction, the young actors plunge headlong into their roles with a noisy enthusiasm that leaves them no recourse after the first five minutes but to tread water until the authors spring their punch line.
Ruivivar and Glazer's point—that blind fear is our worst enemy—is a valid, if hardly original, one. Their error lies in the conviction that only by forcing us to endure unpardonable amounts of patent idiocy can they guarantee that we will recognize the wisdom of their caveat on jumping to conclusions based on false assumptions. As if Rod Serling and Reginald Rose hadn't taught us THAT lesson a half-century ago.
