Displaying items by tag: Micah Figueroa

Recent Chicago-area winters have been relatively easy ones. Lest we forget howling blizzards or subzero temperatures, Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing serves as a reminder. Director Micah Figueroa stages First Floor Theater’s production of this idiosyncratic play in a way that creates a deep freeze – visually, aurally and metaphorically.

By chance, the Bookspan space in The Den Theatre complex was so cold over Memorial Day weekend that most people watched the performance with their coats on. But that synced well with a story of two salt truck drivers, a public works director and her daughter in Evanston, Illinois, during the tough winters of 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Spencer Donovan’s set creates an eerie authenticity with just a few elements. Behind the lumbering salt truck – indicated by nothing more than two rolling office chairs hitched to a table – is a slowly moving projection of the streets that the truck travels along. Sound designer Matt Reich fills the show with noise that goes beyond a winter storm and suggests a sinister underworld.

A fine quartet of actors take on Arbery’s dialogue with the up close and personal style that defines the best of Chicago’s small stages. Drinking coffee in the warehouse before hitting the slick roads, Basil (Dano Duran), a lonely Greek immigrant, shares his fiction and his dreams with Peter (Jelani West), an African American with a wife and six-year-old daughter and far too many suicidal thoughts.  Basil and Peter exchange the moody banter of unhappy men until their boss Maiworm (Ashley Neal) enters with a local newspaper in hand.

Maiworm gleefully reads aloud an article headlined “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing” which includes her quotes on the public works department’s escalating tab for de-icing city streets. That her comments are as dry as they are depressing do not detract from her pleasure in getting name recognition. Maiworm’s two staffers, noting the absence of their own names, just want to get through their day.

A fan of Jane Jacobs and her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Maiworm does her mundane job with a sense of mission and eye to the future. She speaks of installing permeable road surfaces that would reduce the need for environmentally-damaging salt, but also would eliminate jobs. Fortunately for Basil and Peter, permeable streets are way beyond Evanston’s budget.

Back home, Maiworm secretly shares her bed with Basil and manages her adult stepdaughter Jane Jr. (Jacinda Ratcliffe) who works in a nursing home. Jane Jr. is paralyzed by anxiety and struggles to accomplish even simple tasks. Maiworm’s husband died when Jane Jr. was 16, a loss intensely felt by both of them.

Death impacts each character, one way or another. Something dark and unknowable, not to mention loud, has all four in its grip. Blending absurdism with hyper-realism and humor, Arbery’s script is often confusing. But it also has enough humanity to keep everyone, characters and audience alike, from total despair.

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, a First Floor Theater production at The Den Theatre, is playing now through June 14th. For tickets, go to https://www.firstfloortheater.com/evanston-salt-costs-climbing

“Don Quixote of La Mancha” is considered the oldest European novel, but it gets a fresh and exciting new treatment in “Circus Quixote." This is Lookingglass Theatre’s inaugural reopening after a year off while it retooled its much loved Water Tower Pumping Station location at Michigan and Pearson in Chicago.

In “Circus Quixote,” Cervantes’ beloved novel and it’s timeless characters—the delusional knight errant Don Quixote; the farmer turned squire Sancho Panza; the target of Quixote's courtly services Dulcinea (Laura Murillo Hart); his niece Antonia (Andrea San Miguel) who burns the books on chivalry that led to his madness—all spring to life.

The script by David Catlin and Kerry Catlin, who share director credits, brings in Spanish and latin-inflected English, but holds to the core of the tale—updated with added visions of quests that are now ever more familiar in our age of the revitalized renderings of Lord of the Rings.

Unlike Broadway’s 1965 musical “Man of La Mancha,” this version incorporates acrobatics, courtesy Evanton’s Actors Gymnasium—circus and movement choreography by Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi— along with stunning puppetry (remarkable creatures large and small designed by Grace Neediman) and dashes of slapstick. The show includes sword fights aloft on ropes (kudos to Micah Figueroa as 
Quixote's frequent adversary Sansón Carrasco), members of the troupe "jousting" with windmills by climbing the blades in arial feats, and riding Don Quixote's famed Rocinante, an engineered baroque steam punk rocking chair which at one point holds seven of the troupe in motion.  

Eddie Martinez as Sancho Panza

The newly coined English word “quixotic” (for impractical or foolish causes) was drawn from the novel soon after its publication in 1605. And the cogent notes of this tale of the hopeless aspirations maintains the poignancy as eventually even taking those he loves on a fool's errand, jousting at windmills and battling an imaginary giant.
Eddie Martinez as the faithful but questioning Sancho Panza (and a stand-in for Cervantes) is remarkable.

But the highest accolades must be given to Laura Murillo Hart, an absolutely stunning performer on multiple levels. As Dulcinea, in whose service Quixote launches his quest, Hart casts a spell on the theater whenever she appears, vocalizing in haunting melodic strains (composer Kevin O’Donnell’s music is arresting), sometimes accompanying herself on guitar.

In Act II Hart is transformed into a mustachioed, hoop-skirted clergyman, her clerical garb becomes an elaborate puppet showcase, a half-dozen or more characters appearing variously in a mini stage at the skirt front, and from her billowing sleeves. It’s an endlessly entrancing performance, and Hart demonstrates an incredible range in her many roles. At Lookingglass, a star is born with Hart’s performance.

Laura Murillo Hart

The relaunch of Lookinglass Theatre has provided "Circus Quixote" a generous run through March 30, 2025 at 163 E. Pearson at Michigan Avenue. 

Founded in 1988, Lookingglass has been on hiatus for a year while it reset its business model. Founding member David Schimmer of “Friends” fame has joined the board, and appeared last month along with Governor JB Pritzger to dedicate the rejuvenated space, with a redesigned lobby, bar and cafe open for business at 163 N. Pearson. Funding by the Illinois Arts Council and Joan and Paul Rubschlager made possible the return of Chicago’s dreamiest theater that has years of memorable shows under its belt, including (to site just one) director Mary Zimmerman’s 1988 “Metamorphoses” which went on to win her a Tony in its 2002 Broadway transfer, and returned to Lookingglass multiple times.

Lookingglass has over the years offered a balance between inventively staged serious drama such as the 2009 Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” the Jackie Robinson story “Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting” (2012) or “Death Tax” (2014); and more energized spectacles like “The Little Prince” (2013)  and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (2018)  Lookingglass also develops an in-between type of show embodied in 2016’s “Thaddeus and Slocum” (2016), and like all its work, presented with verve, powerful dramatics, and incisive illumination of our condition as humans.

(Updated Feb. 17, 2025.)