Displaying items by tag: Facility Theatre

Curious Theatre Branch, launches its 38th Season, with the revival of Talking About Godard, written by Beau O’Reilly and directed by Beau O’Reilly with Briavael O’Reilly, May 29 - June 28, at Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California Ave. The opening night is Friday, May 29 at 8 p.m. The performance takes place Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. The running time is currently 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are priced on a “pay what you can” scale, with a suggested price of $25. For more information about Talking About Godard visit CuriousTheatreBranch.com.

In Talking About Godard, three restless artists live awkwardly together. Helen chain smokes, has sex with whomever and talks straight. Mary Barnes is obsessed with the films of Jean Luc Godard and is determined to make her own Godard film in Super 8. A neighborhood thug named Leon helps Chrissy by stealing suitcases from O’Hare and adds to the spoils of the household. Then a French caller comes looking for love. The play examines female friendship and cohabitation in the 90s, the artistic process and how groups do and don’t satisfy our needs.  

Talking About Godard was originally produced by The Curious Theatre Branch in 1996 and its cast included Jenny Magnus (Helen), Vicki Walden (Mary Barnes) and Paul Leisen (Leon), who repeat their original roles in this revival. New cast members include Kristin Garrison (Chrissy) and Jayita Bhattacharya (Leon). Directed with Briavael O'Reilly, and using a production committee of Paul Brennan and Jeffrey Bivens on video and images, Julia Williams on tickets and set design, David Isaacson on script for the video, Andy Soma on art consultation, Vesna Grbovic and Graciella Garcia on production assistance and Beau O’Reilly on outside eye.  

ABOUT BEAU O’REILLY, PLAYWRIGHT and DIRECTOR

Beau O’Reilly is a founding member and co-artistic director of the Curious Theatre Branch and the bands Maestro Subgum and the Whole and The Crooked Mouth, as well as a curator of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival for 30 years. His work has appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Poetry Foundation and on “This American Life.” The author of more than 80 original plays, O’Reilly is also a working actor who teaches playwriting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His latest solo album, “Thrifty,” was released on Uvulittle Records in 2021.

ABOUT BRIAVAEL O'REILLY, DIRECTOR

Briavael O'Reilly has been a theater kid her whole life, at least since her dad got her into shows at the Woodstock Opera House as an elementary schooler. She was a member of Theater @ First and PMRP in Boston in the late aughts. In Chicago, she's been in the booth for Rhinofests, BeauTowns, This is Not a Churchill; Evanston, Which is Over There; To End to Seem to End and many a Crooked Mouth show. Onstage appearances include Rung, March!, The Skriker and Hit Me Like a Flower. This marks O’Reilly’s directorial debut.

ABOUT CURIOUS THEATRE BRANCH

Curious has been holding up their end of the Chicago theater scene since 1988, creating new works of the imagination, works focused on language and creatively expressing the difficulties of being human. Curious Theatre Branch is dedicated to the creation of new plays and performances and to the production of its annualRhinoceros Theater Festival. Curious aims to promote innovative works of the imagination in the performing arts from a broad and inclusive spectrum of artists and are also devoted to mentoring programs that engage emerging artists as a way to enrich and expand our artistic community. Curious is committed to creating and producing new plays and performances in a collaborative manner, encouraging our members as artists to share decision making and responsibilities, while expanding their skills as writers, actors, designers, directors and arts administrators. Curious also is committed to the idea that a pay what you can pricing policy is sustainable and will suffice over the long term as an economic model.

Curious Theatre Branch, launches its 38th Season, with the revival of Talking About Godard, written by Beau O’Reilly and directed by Beau O’Reilly with Briavael O’Reilly, May 29 - June 28, at Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California Ave. The opening night is Friday, May 29 at 8 p.m. The performance takes place Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. The running time is currently 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are priced on a “pay what you can” scale, with a suggested price of $25. For more information about Talking About Godard visit CuriousTheatreBranch.com.

Santa Fe-based Theater Grottesco's new show, produced with Fay|Glassman Duo of Urbana, IL, is having its Chicago premiere at the Facility Theater on California near Division, brings a new approach to the performance and script design. The one-hour “Action at a Distance. . .in 2025” consists of six different plays, all performed simultaneously by the troupe of four actors. Devised by Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman, “Action at a Distance” is probably unlike anything you will have experienced; it was for me.

The plays involved are these:
1. A family with a crying child frantically prepares to evacuate their home in advance of a hurricane.
2. An international human rights lawyer flees her international arms-dealing partner.
3. A filmmaker interviews a doctor who volunteered at the Occupy Wall Street tent camp in 2011.
4. A union local hosts an address by a revolutionary Venezuelan union leader.
5. An artist prepares a gallery installation of the UN negotiator's office for the 1948 Palestine Mandate, just before the negotiator’s assassination by the Stern Gang.
6. A financial mogul is unnerved by a rock, with a photo attached, smashing his window.

Each of these descriptors, provided by Fay|Glassman, suggest provocative and even enticing drama. They are not, however, played in a sequence of say, six 10-minute plays performed consecutively. Instead, all six are performed at once. Perhaps to ease the audience into what is without question a jarring experience, the performance begins with a clearly identifiable scene from the fifth play in the series.

In this one, the Artist (Apollo Garcia Orellana) is arranging the installation of the UN negotiator’s desk. A kaffiyeh scarf on a coat rack cues us to the scene as the Artist types words that would have appeared in the typewriter moments before the negotiator was assassinated. The Artist is carefully arranging the negotiator's books, sets his chair at the angle it occupied, while another character, perhaps his spouse (Elizabeth Glass), nibbling on a sandwich, nitpicks at his work and intimates the futility of the project as a whole.

“You’re doing a whole installation about Palestine and you’ll never get another grant,” the spouse declares, to which the Artist retorts, “It’s genocide.” He encourages her to find something to occupy herself, as she devilishly rearranges the gloves on the desk each time the Artist places them just so - a subtle skirmish between the two.

Soon enough two new actors enter the scene, and we can determine we are witnessing play number three, the camera-toting Documentarian (Danielle Louise Reddick) interviewing the Volunteer Doctor (John Flax) about his time in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The characters offer exposition by self-description. If I recall accurately, the Artist is still upstage, doing some stage business from his scene, while the Documentarian and Doctor deliver their lines stage front. “When did you first get involved in Occupy Wall Street,” the Documentarian queries. The Doctor later reveals, “My mother told me that racism was the best way to control white people.”

That scene dissolves as Reddick now becomes an adult trying to comfort and distract an unseen child as her family prepares to evacuate before a hurricane. A suitcase is rolled into the action and the rest of the company joins a flurry of angst-ridden preparation flavored with recrimination and peremptory orders as they all prepare to flee.

Soon Reddick introduces an unseen speaker to an unseen audience. “Everyone, this is Dr. Lenzo, from Venezuela,” and we know the address by a revolutionary Venezuelan union leader has commenced - the fourth of the plays. And so on until all six plays are in motion on stage.

Striking lines jump out from the individual plays, and at times all the players are involved in a scene in which the dialog has meaning for all of them. “Would you take that out in the hall please?” On the whole, “Action at a Distance. . .in 2025” has no obvious meaning, and seems like a jumble of vaguely related utterances that finally give way to a single, diminishing spotlight on a one actor, and then darkness.

It was only in the discussion with the cast and the co-creator of the script, Jeff Glassman, that some light was shed on what the viewers had witnessed We learned that half the play is partly unscripted, and that the occasions in which an actor is playing to an invisible person are called “manifested absences.” Glassman declares that never happens in theater, though that is patently incorrect, and the one-sided phone conversation is a familiar example.

The six plays run largely independent of each other, except for two occasions when the action of all of them converge. Garcia Orellana holds up a color coded timeline, explaining, “There are two places where we all land on the same page.” This timeline reflects the acting and directorial planning to keep the action straight. 

The effect, regardless of the intellectual construct behind it, seems Dada-esque. Though in some respects the show is engaging, it wasn’t particularly enjoyable or satisfying for me.
An over-arching theme for the stories is one of failure, Glassman says.“It points at the fact that there are many failures around us that are compounded. There’s no excuse for it.” Viewing “Action at a Distance . . .in 2025” requires real effort from an audience member, and certainly the activation of their imagination. “In order to get out of that [failure],” Glassman says, “we have to use imagination.”

As to the style and structure of the show, Glassman poses a question. “Why is theater about one person going through life?” In other words, why is it about a protagonist encountering obstacles and reaching some kind of resolution, along a linear timeline? Why not dispense with timeline, and allow multiple themes to be expressed simultaneously on stage in a play?
“Dance, music, have done that,” Glassman says. Why not theater?

Here's why. Music is purely aural, dance is visual and aural. Humans can hear and see multiple themes running simultaneously and register them in a wide panorama of experience that affects us non-verbally. Plays use words. The words don’t have meaning when they aren’t delivered in a reasonably sequential manner. They just become a word salad. We come away with very little.
Theater Grottesco describes this as “immersing audiences in a constantly shifting mosaic of interactions and emotions,” and “much like the bustle of a crowded airport, ‘Action at a Distance’ captures the unpredictability within human connections.” Somehow, I think sitting in the concourse of Terminal 1 is more enjoyable than this Facility Theater show.

Perhaps Glassman’s approach would have validity if it were used for a single play, not six of them at once. For me, it was an interesting thought experiment, and it will be intriguing to see if anything comes from any quarter of the theater world, in the development of this approach. “Action at a Distance” runs through November 16, 2025 with performances at 3 pm and 8 pm.