Weber in Thyestes. Photo by Michael Brosilow. Playwright: Lucius Annaeus Seneca. At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis. Phone: 773-753-4472; $38-$54
Runs through: Oct. 21
May Zeus send me down the river Styx on a one-way Princess Cruise if it doesn't sometimes seem like the Court Theatre is intent on doing everything in its power to alienate its audience.
Take, for instance, the scene in Thyestes wherein Atreus, sporting David Gest eyebrows, Xtina Aguilera-red lipstick and a garishly clanking metal breastplate, opens up the plastic cooler he's been toting about and pulls out a hook from which dangles the dripping faces of his two young nephews. He's skinned the poor lads. As their uncle playfully smears their small, squishy faces over a table with a built-in Scrabble board, the boys' father noshes on their non-facial parts, giving slo-mo, full-tongue licks to the damp chunks of meat. Even the most liberal-minded among us will surely find such gratuitous use of a board game wholly offensive.
Thyestes is performed without an intermission, and I'd hazard a guess that the scant 70-minute running time isn't the only reason it's break-free. Given the chance, I'm thinking most of the audience would bail on a second act.
There's no denying the reality of the world's eternal brutality from Genesis through Sweeney Todd and beyond—the Greek tragedians knew as well as anybody that the history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat. But when the context for the slaughter is naught but overwrought histrionics ( excuse the redundancy ) and pretentious affectations, the truth of the tale, the stunning heartbreak of a world ripped by violence without end amen, becomes lost in a heap of meaningless entrails.
Directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, Caryl Churchill's translation of Lucius Seneca's stark tragedy is as inaccessible as it is gory. If you don't know the story of Thyestes going in, you won't be any more knowledgeable about it heading out.
From the moment the Ghost of Tantalus starts his stylized crawling behind the partition high above the Scrabble table, all is sound and fury signifying nothing. On occasion, the characters accompa ifying with what looks like sign language. Sometimes, a mask comes into play. Every so often, a grainy video of what appears to be Thyestes and his children —only living in contemporary times rather than ancient ones—unspools, and we watch the kids and their dad playing on a swing set, romping in a meadow and so forth. What drives the outbreaks of gesturing, making and home movies? I know not. Verily, it was Greek to me.
As for the bloody, brutal story of Thyestes and the brother he could not share power with, we learn little of that legend other than that the genre of torture porn didn't start with the Saw franchise. Maybe Darren Lynn Bousman ( who helmed the last three Saw films ) can direct the Thyestes sequel.
THEATER REVIEW
Noir
Playwright: Blake Montgomery and cast
At: Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter
Phone: 312-491-1369; $20
Runs through: Nov. 3
BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL
As its name suggests, Noir is a tribute to the shadowy tales of greed, lust, murder, cross and double-cross honored in an entire genre of detective fiction in print and, most notably, on film. Cinema noir doesn't have to be a detective story—The Sweet Smell of Success isn't, for example—but dick and noir are four-letter words that frequently go together.
As rendered here, Noir is iconic and generic. It's iconic in that situations, scenes and dialogue—about 90 percent of the show—are taken directly from noir classics including The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and a few more. It's generic in that the characters, for the most part, are not named or distinguished. There's the private eye, his Girl Friday and various femmes fatales. Two men play the gumshoe, and it's impossible to say if they are aspects of the same person or uneasy partners the likes of Miles Archer and Sam Spade. Whichever, they encounter numerous blind alleys, dark shadows, rainy nights ( real rain in the Building Stage production ) and dames ( played by four actresses ) . Like a bad dream that won't go away, it's always the same but different: murders, Mickey Finns and women with more curves than a roller coaster and more twists than a bowl of spaghetti.
Despite the familiar scenes and dialogue, Noir is a dreamlike abstraction of moments rather than a literal story; a performance piece played out with monochromatic set, lighting, costumes and pale makeup as close to movie black-and-white as possible. After all, Technicolor is one of the things that killed Cinema Noir. However, beyond the beautiful physical production—its lithe cast choreographed as much as directed—Noir doesn't offer much. It lacks the intellectual and emotional heft of earlier Building Stage achievements, such as Dustbowl Gothic and Moby Dick. Perhaps it's less fulfilling precisely because the Cinema Noir repertoire is so well known. This production doesn't interpret or comment on the genre, but only calls attention to its standard devices, the repeated patterns of storytelling that recur film after film.
Noir is a beautiful and stylish objet d'art, an elegant living shadowbox with costumes by Meghan Raham, all-important lighting by Lee Keenan ( assisted by Ryan Williams ) and scenic design by Raham, Keenan and director Blake Montgomery ( the founder/artistic director of Building Stage ) . The ubiquitous Kevin O'Donnell provides the smoky sound design, which compliments the smoke, fog and rain that surround the players. This show would be perfectly at home presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art rather than at a River West warehouse. At 75 minutes, it's a good prelude to a River West dinner; however, it's an amuse-bouche, not an entree.