Playwright: George Bernard Shaw
& James M. Barrie
At: ShawChicago at the Ruth Page
Auditorium, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 409-5605; no admission
Runs through: May 30
On the surface, a chamber reading may look easy compared to a fully staged production, but in reality, the absence of spectacle—movement, scenery, costumes, music—requires its performers to work much harder. Dressed in contemporary fashions, ranged in formation behind a row of music-stands holding their scripts, armed only with their faces and voices, the ShawChicago players must animate the vivid characters and elaborate vistas envisioned by two authors writing in the novelistic mode of the Victorian age.
The first play in this double-bill is George Bernard Shaw's The Man Of Destiny. Its scenario proposes Napoleon Bonaparte confronting a woman who may be a spy. She has already gulled his lieutenant into surrendering his gun, horse and the dispatches from the battlefront, but the Corsican general is smarter—or so he thinks, until he finds himself concurring with her that the wisest course is to destroy the secret documents without reading them first. Martin Yurek and Adrienne Cury swap repartee with operatic agility, relieved by Christopher McLinden as a befuddled officer reminiscent of the young Michael Crawford.
Rounding out the program is James M. Barrie's The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, which recounts the story of an elderly cleaning-lady during World War I. Having no male relative in uniform, she adopts—in absentia—a young soldier. When he arrives in London on a five-day pass, he is surprised and perplexed to discover that he has a whole clan of kinswomen seeing to his care. The actors display the impeccable accents one would expect when the cast includes Belinda Bremner, possibly THE best British-dialect coach in town, as well as vocal ranges far exceeding those indigenous to our midwestern regions. Led by Kate Young as the lonely spinster and McLinden as her foster son, their speaking voices blend together like a Bach concerto to conjure in our imaginations a rich and vivid picture of wartime expedience.
The company's new quarters in the Ruth Page heralds ShawChicago's plans to present more wholly-realized productions in the future—and to charge admission thereto. Go now to see why they deserve every bit of it.