An Affair of Honor
By: Byron Hatfield for Mrs. Dire's House of Crumpets & Solutions; Tony Wolf for Satisfaction
At: Babes with Blades at The Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western
Phone: ( 773 ) 275-0440; $15-$18
Through May 14
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
There aren't too many plays around where women get to be swashbuckling swordfighters. So what's a women-based stage combat theater troupe like Babes With Blades to do?
The simple answer is to cultivate your own drama, which is what Babes With Blades has done with its international playwriting competition called 'Joining Sword & Pen.' The fruits of this labor can be seen in Babes With Blades' double bill of An Affair of Honor.
As the inspiration for the competition, Babes With Blades sought playwrights to build a one-act play from a Victorian-era print called 'Une Affaire d'Honneur' by French artist Emile Bayard ( 1837-1891 ) . Best known for illustrating Victor Hugo's Cosette ( the iconic weepy waif whose mug is plastered around the world on the poster of the musical Les Miserables ) , Bayard also intrigues with 'Affaire' since it happens upon two topless women locked in combat on a country road as four other women look on.
Why are these women sword fighting? The mind boggles at the dramatic scenarios that could be cooked up by dramatists.
Unfortunately, the prize-winning results in An Affair of Honor are decidedly mixed. Sometimes the playwright doesn't live up to the mystery of Bayard's print, while other times the Babes With Blades cast doesn't live up to the acting demands of the script.
This paradox plays out in Byron Hatfield's Mrs. Dire's House of Crumpets & Solutions, a preachy play reminding us of the gross inequities Victorian British women faced in terms of property rights, inheritance and child custody.
Hatfield slashes away at the importance of women standing up for themselves by showing an abused mother who trains with an eccentric group of vigilante murderesses who specialize in bumping off abusive husbands. Alas, the cast's dodgy British accents and tardy comic timing spoil Hatfield's whimsically dotty and defiant characters. A cast with better acting chops and fighting dexterity would have made Hatfield's drama much more meaningful.
The cast fits much better into Satisfaction, Tony Wolf's deliciously malicious New Orleans-set revenge drama. Southern and French dialects spill easier from the cast's tongues, allowing their manipulative machinations to be much more believable.
Here we see a backbiting gossip get slashed down as a payback for spreading a deadly rumor about an adulterous dalliance. David Woolley directs and choreographs the unequal sword fight between Dawn Alden as Miss Kelly with Amy E. Harmon as Sarah with plenty of anger and bitterness to make you squirm. Mary Anne Bowman relishes playing the malevolent Mme. Leboucher, especially in the final moments when her shocking motivations are revealed.
Performances like these are great in An Affair of Honor, plus Joshua D. Allard's lovely ( if sometimes ill-fitting ) period costumes that the cast sports ( and un-sports to be nakedly faithful to Bayard's topless print ) .
Despite its minor failings on An Affair of Honor, Babes With Blades deserves to be commended for taking the initiative to build up repertory to suit their specialized company. After all, if they don't do it for themselves, who will?
Electra
Playwright: Sophocles, adap. by Lara Tibble
At: Bohemian Theatre Ensemble
Phone: ( 773 ) 791-2393; $20
Runs through: May 14
By Jonathan Abarbanel
The intent of this Electra is remarkably faithful to Sophocles' original, written in 409 B.C., when he was nearly 90. As directed and adapted by Lara Tibble ( whose sources are unspecified—did she work from a literal translation? ) , the focus remains firmly on the character and suffering of Electra herself, and the context remains thoroughly domestic ( rather than, say, political ) .
Some 20 years before the curtain rises, Queen Clytemnestra of Mycenae and her lover, Aegisthus, murdered her husband, the returning Trojan War general Agamemnon. Aegisthus then assumed the throne, placing at risk Agamemnon's son and heir, Orestes, who was still a boy. Orestes older sister, Electra, engineered his escape to safety in exile. Ever since, Electra has endured—and returned—the hatred and suspicion of her mother and Aegisthus. Electra has lived for Orestes' return to claim his throne and avenge his father by slaughtering Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. As the curtain rises, Orestes has come. The play's rhythms rise and fall with passions of Electra herself within the brittle confines of the royal household: longing, hatred, hopes dashed, hope restored and triumph.
While the intent of the production is faithful to Sophocles, the execution is far more interpretive and a decidedly mixed achievement. Sophocles wrote for three principal actors wearing masks and a chorus of 16, performing on a grand scale in a large open-air amphitheater. The verse, and the passions supporting it, were not realistic in any current theatrical sense. The Bohemian version uses seven principal actors and a chorus of three whose function has been drastically curtailed. But ancient and contemporary don't mesh perfectly, especially since Tibble retains the non-realistic—certainly non-conversational—literary style of the genre, although not the Sophoclean verse structure or odes.
The production has a masterful performer in the title role—Elizabeth Christine Tanner—whose genuinely tear-stained performance is a wonder of sustained and controlled emotion, and is especially challenging in the claustrophobic, 35-seat Heartland Studio. Deanna Boyd as Clytemnestra and Jose Antonio Garcia, seen and heard only briefly as Aegisthus, also have the right stuff. However, other cast members are far less competent with the play's declamatory rhetoric and non-realistic style, lacking the technique and emotional commitment to deliver the language convincingly.
The production certainly is well thought out, as all Bohemian shows have been. Tibble brings a simple but well-executed and sustained visual style to Electra that's sculptural in effect. Emily Brungardt has provided quite wonderful costumes rich in fabric textures ( homespun, dobby, satin-finish, diaphanous ) and reflective of ancient Greece, especially in the women's high-waisted, ribbon-bound gowns. Original music by Paul Auksztulewicz and Matthew Dunn is more effective than the pop-tribal tunes mixed in from other sources.
Although not entirely successful, Electra is another worthy attempt by an apparently fearless group of young artists.
The Tooth Of Crime ( Second Dance )
Playwright: Sam Shepard, with music by T-Bone Burnett
At: Strawdog Theatre Company
Phone: ( 773 ) 528-9696; $20
Runs through: May 27
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
If Jim Morrison hadn't chosen to take the Forever Young career path, he might have wound up starring in a show something like this one. John Hiatt or Bob Seger might do it yet. So what if the analogy between popular musicians and outlaw heroes has been exploited ever since Paganini and his fiddle sparked rumors of satanic sponsorship at the turn of the 18th century? Who cares if the phallo-ballistic imagery of electric guitars and hand mikes continues to be a staple of music-video choreography? What does it matter that nowadays we're all too jaded—or so we say—to succumb to the lure of an amplified bass?
Sam Shepard's surrealistic 1973 tragedy is based on the classical rite of the old god slain by the new—in this case, a Top 40 rockabilly shouter toppled by a British Invasion glitterboy sporting a mouthful of Clockwork Orange-styled argot. Flash forward to 1996, when a score composed by T-Bone Burnett made a stripped-down version of the original text, now subtitled 'Second Dance,' a bona fide musical ( starring Vincent D'Onofrio, for you trivia buffs ) . And now, in 2006, Strawdog Theatre proposes to resurrect this much-maligned ersatz epic in a loft space barely big enough for a chamber concert.
But the intimate quarters, ironically, prove exactly right for this brand of ecstatic spectacle, its dimensions reducing both the literal AND psychological distance to facilitate its unified concept's eclipse of intellectual detachment through sheer performance. Robert Moore's tagger-scumbled walls, Sean Mallary's psychedelic lights, Aly Greaves' Mad Max-meets-Roy Orbison costumes and the band ( led by Misha Fiksel ) chicken-wired into the corners locate us in an audiodome ruled by a Jovian patriarch from an amplifier-case throne. Assisted by Amanda Delheimer's korybantic movement design, Carmine Grisolia projects a saurian charisma as the doomed incumbent, while John Henry Roberts grows into his role as the upstart ( if underweight ) challenger. By the time these two champions square off like Jackie Chan poetry slammers, they generate enough flash and dazzle to win over even the most ennui-encumbered postmodern pedant.
Back of the Throat
Playwright: Yussef El Guindi
At: Silk Road Theatre,
The Chicago Temple Building
Contact: www.srtp.org; 312-236-6881
Runs through: May 28
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Initially, you think you're in a comedy—an oddly, tension-fraught comedy to be sure, in which shadow of uncoiling vipers seem to be slithering just behind the text. Then the shadows vanish, and Yussef El Guindi's 'Back of the Throat' becomes audaciously, mordantly humorous again.
Homeland security investigators Bartlett and Carl are bumbling idiots. Khalid, the man they're questioning, is happy to cooperate with them just as an intelligent adult sometimes indulges the whims of a slow child. But somewhere between Khalid's patient explanations ( 'That's the Koran,' he says when Bartlett off-handedly picks up a book and asks, 'What's this one about?' ) and the exotic dance segment, 'Back of the Throat' turns harrowing.
It's harrowing to the point where it's difficult to watch, and not because the performances are anything less than excellent or because Stuart Carden's direction never misses a step.
'Torture' is just an arrangement of letters—a concept at worst—until you have a visual to accompany it.
The piece is set entirely Khalid's ( Kareem Bandealy ) , disheveled studio apartment. He's a writer, and the place is a magpie's nest of books, papers, porn magazines and computer paraphernalia. ( Credit set designer Lee Keenan for capturing both claustrophobia and the creativity of the place. ) As for Bandealy, he delivers a performance that is utterly believable as he moves through an exhausting emotional spectrum. In the penultimate scene, his eyes are so dead, so utterly vacant and flat, that it's almost surprising when he speaks again.
Just as powerful are Sean Sinitski as Bartlett and Tom Hickey as Carl. In a brief scene when the two quietly discuss how to best correct the 'imbalance of power in the room,' the subtext suddenly seems to echo with a million strangled screams.
Guindi is canny in his structure here: At the exact moment 'Back of the Throat' becomes unbearable, he brings in a pole dancer with a penchant for pink pistol and teeny-weeny cowgirl outfits. She fits right into the story, and the scene is one of ebullient triumph for Elaine Robinson. She's a curvaceous marvel in fringe and cowboy boots who lights up the stage and brings down the house with her honky-tonky charms.
Guindi's play is not without flaws. He ends with a problematic coda, that while beautifully written and rich with meaning, isn't fully connected to the whole of the play, and thus dilutes from all that precedes it.
Even so, with a cast capable of moving in a blink from hilarious absurdity to horrifying intensity and a story that is tragically timely, 'Back of the Throat' deserves a place on the must-see lists.
Love Song
Playwright: John Kolvenbach
At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted
Phone: ( 312 ) 335-1650; $42-$60
Runs through: June 4
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
It's 2006 and author John Kolvenbach is here to tell us that we've got to turn on, tune in and drop out, because love is all we need. The kind of love where you revel in the scent of your lover's hair. The kind of love where you wear each other's clothes and compose collaborative fantasies of the magical day you met, worded in the kind of apocalyptic hyperbole only those besotted by cupid's elixir can stomach without extra insulin. The kind of love that spurs otherwise responsible adults to phone in sick at the office so they can spend the day in bed together.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with silly love songs of the sort the 40-year-old playwright probably recalls from HIS giddy youth, but it contributes an undertone of déjà vu in this gospel of erotic liberation ( which even includes a SO-sixties scene of middle-class squares hesitantly learning to let it all hang out—with the aid of make-believe intoxicants, of course ) . Our parent figures are Joan and Harry, an uptight corporate kvetch and her mild-mannered hubby. Our adolescent hero is the former's certifiably-adult brother, Beane, a toll booth collector whose isolation has rendered him almost autistic. One night, a free-spirited street waif appears to thrust her affection upon him, making everything go Technicolor.
Well, DOESN'T love still conquer all? Beneath its sugary surface, Kolvenbach's championing of emotion over intellect is a rallying cry for human values stifled by soul-starving convention. Director Austin Pendleton and his actors grasp this subtext as only the wise and experienced can, and thus never allow themselves to succumb to their play's euphoric manifesto, but instead keep their subtext firmly grounded as designated messengers must. If this sounds like your cup of ambrosia, however, be warned that Love Song is certain to enjoy a long life as a screwball domestic comedy on the dinner-theater circuit, and that you are unlikely to ever again see a production of it as intelligent as this one at Steppenwolf. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
