Displaying items by tag: Writers Theatre

We first meet Clea as she traipses into the great room of a sky-high Manhattan penthouse, enraptured by the “surreal” view. Looking on disdainfully are Charlie (Mark Montgomery), an actor who has been struggling to get cast lately, and his wing-man Lewis (La Shawn Banks).

In the world of theater, a gushing ingénue making a breathless entrance is something that has been seen before, to put it mildly. Charlie for one is not impressed. 

In short order, though, we sense there may be more to this young woman, and these men, than first appears. As it happens, the party is in the home of an actor-writer on the rise, and his older, wealthy patron. Charlie is there hoping to rub shoulders with him, and maybe get a role in his new production.

Clea (Deanna Myers blazes in the role) is on a similar mission – though at this point in her career she is less certain about how things will play out. She is also a font of inanity – “Food is, like, disgusting to me,” she avers, claiming never to eat. “Most things people put in their mouths, it is totally just like eating death. Someone proved that eating is killing people." 

Charlie and Lewis are agape at Clea. Charlie clearly finds her exaggerated pronouncements aversive, while Lewis nods and puts on about the phoniest show of interest imaginable - miming that attraction men sometimes feel despite (or perhaps because of) knowing better.  

Poured into snug-fitting couture and clearly master of her heels, Clea reads, accurately, the mocking tone in Charlie’s desultory conversation. When he asks her how the view can be “surreal,” sparks begin to fly in what turns out to be a harbinger of later romance.   

This is also the first inkling we have that Clea is more femme fatale than ingénue.  She vacillates from helpless to heated. In due course, she reveals a grab-bag of information about herself, and observations on life in general. Her mother is an alcoholic, so she doesn’t drink. People are just not "awake" to life.  

She has recently arrived from Ohio hoping to make her break in New York. She eventually asks for that vodka – just this one time – and becomes even more voluble. Clea reveals she has applied for a position on a television production team – and does a send-up of the woman who interviewed her, describing a “Nazi priestess” of talent bookings, by the name of Stella. As it turns out, Stella is Charlie’s wife - and fatefully, the unrequited love of Lewis.

Clea came there intent on making an impression. And oh she does in Meyers’s super-charged performance. In later scenes, after she has vanquished Lewis, she moves on to seduce Charlie, ultimately triggering his downfall by overstaying a tryst - so the two get caught by Stella.

Charlie eventually ends up on the street, having cast aside his stable life with Stella. (The story line draws on Waugh's of Human Bondage, according to playwright Therese Rebeck.)

The couple was about to adopt a child. Perhaps the prospect of parenthood was too great a strain on Charlie. Fear of parenthood is a classic romance killer, but under Kimberly Seniors direction we are witness to Charlie's action, but not his motivation. Stella also is a bit of a caricature, slipping into Spanish when her blood gets boiling.  Lewis, meanwhile, has played this marriage's third wheel from the opening scene, defending Stella against critiques. The trio has a reasonable chemistry in scenes, but Stella seems overplayed, and Lewis underplayed when they are alone together. 

As to Clea: Viper? Seductress? Ingénue? Trollop? Those old-fashioned words don’t quite apply, as Clea owns her sexuality, and is aware of where she is heading. She seems at once incisive, and empty-headed.

“How can you know so much and so little at the same time?” as Charlie asks.

Waugh’s classic, Of Human Bondage, was filmed three times. And The Scene was also made into a movie - Seducing Charlie Barker. 

In The Scene, the eventual affair with Clea leads to Charlie’s downfall, and his wife Stella’s departure, among other things. While the performance by Myers is captivating, and the chemistry between Stella (Charin Alvarez), Lewis and Charlie is convincing, I struggled to find empathy with anyone other than Clea – a rather villainous protagonist.

The glass and steel set is striking, and works really well through all the scenes. The furnishings were dead on, very Blue Dot Catalog. Likewise the costumes, down to the men's shoes.  Brian Sidney Bembridge did sets;  Nan Zabriskie costume; Sarah Hughey, lighting; Richard Woodbury, original music and sound design; and Scott Dickens handled props. 

Running through April 2 at the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, The Scene comes recommended, especially to see Deanna Myers.

In an interview in the program, playwright Eugene Lee says that East Texas Hot Links is like a combination of an August Wilson play and the Twilight Zone. But fantasy was a common feature of Wilson’s plays. The new production of Lee’s 1991 play at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, which is slated to run through January, is more like watching Wilson’s Two Trains Running transform into John Carpenter’s Halloween. Under the direction of Chicago theatre treasure Ron OJ Parson, who directed the same play in 1995 and a revival in 1998, a cast of eight delves into the horror lurking just below the surface normalcy of African-American life in Jim Crow Texas. It’s not just the specter of physical violence which haunts these characters, it’s also the psychological effect of living in a society built on terrorizing them.

In 1955 in the rural vicinity of Houston, Charlesetta Simpkins (Tyla Abercrombie) runs a bar she inherited from her father. She has a strict policy of only serving drink and prepackaged food—the men who are her regulars delight in razzing her and each other, and if she cooked better than their wives, they’d likely never leave, but ridicule her all the same. Hanging around as usual is the soft-hearted local landlord, Columbus (Alfred H. Wilson), his brooding much younger brother-in-law, XL (Namir Smallwood), and XL’s boisterous frenemy, Roy Moore (Kelvin Roston, Jr.), who also has a crush on Charlesetta. The big news is that the local plutocrat, Prescott Ebert, is building a highway to Dallas. Columbus has been screwed by the use of eminent domain, but XL has worked for Ebert as a middle manager several times, and he sneeringly declares that he’ll hold out for another foreman job instead of wasting himself on manual labor.

This attitude does not exactly make him popular, particularly as Prescott Ebert is, by reputation, a Klan leader and a serial killer of black people. XL dismisses this as irrelevant; he’s always been paid on time, and that’s what matters. In fact, he’s hooked up Delmus Green (Luce Metrius), a kid with big dreams, with Ebert for some secret work that will be done late tonight. That explains why Delmus is hanging around, attempting to reach Ebert by phone. He’s unsuccessful for the moment, and the other patrons’ conversation meanders over a wide range of subjects. However, those conversations have a way of taking a strange turn due to the presence of Adolph (Willie B.), an elderly blind man whom the others call “Professor” due to his half semester of college education and ability to improvise free-verse. Having taught himself the vampiric psychological and sociological theories that were all the rage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Adolph links everything to parasitism, death, decay, and consumption in both senses of the word. He’s more fun to have around than you might think.

Rounding out the cast are Buckshot (Antoine Pierre Whitfield), a man who claims to have been much-improved since he was sent to prison for trying to kill a man who called him “Titty-baby,” and Uncle Boochie (A.C. Smith), a mystical gambler who can foretell death. When they all put their heads together they come to the conclusion that there is something extremely wrong with whatever it is XL has offered Delmus to Ebert for. All the actors are fascinating, and Lee’s dense script provides all of them with memorable dialogue, but Smallwood’s XL stands out for the intensity of his greed and fear, and the effort he puts into his compartmentalization. Though deeply loathsome, the character is impossible to look away from. The world these characters inhabit, with scenic design by Jack Magaw, costumes by Christine Pascual, and lights by Kathy A. Perkins, feels full, yet isolated, and a great deal of credit for that has to go to sound designer Joshua Horvath. The sound of animals and wind in the surrounding woods is vaguely unsettling, and reinforces how much of a refuge this building is, as well as its vulnerability. Long before the characters realize their immediate danger, we know there’s something evil out there.

Adolph proclaims that we feed on those who hate us. But in the food chain of east Texas, it’s all too clear to the African-American characters how far down they are. Even literal eating is something that has become psychologically poisonous—Roy defensively announces at one point that he only eats the front feet of a pig. Lee has said that he sees the play as hopeful because of the context that it takes place just a few months before the Civil Rights movement revived, and because the characters unite in an effort to save Delmus. Upon reflection, that’s true, but the hair-raising ending, along with the expertly crafted rising tension which proceeded it, are more likely to dominate the audience’s reaction immediately after viewing than the more implicit themes of awakening to collective action and survival. It is nice, though, that, upon digestion, the audience finds something nourishing in East Texas Hot Links other than human misery. Adolph says we feed on those who love us, as well.

East Texas Hot Links will play in The Gillian Theatre at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, through January 22, 2017. Running time is ninety minutes with no intermission. Parking is available, and the theatre is within walking distance of the Metra. Audience members who post a Facebook or Twitter photos of themselves with the tags @WritersTheatre and #EastTexasHotLinks will receive $5 cash if ticket was bought in advance. Tickets are $35-80. Showtimes are Tuesdays-Fridays at 7:30 pm, Saturdays at 3:00 pm and 7:30 pm, and Sundays at 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm, with some exceptions. To order, call 847-242-6000 or visit writerstheatre.org. The actors eat peanuts onstage during this show.

Imagine a 70s-era Woody Allen movie set to music. That's basically "Company" by Stephen Sondheim. It premiered in a time when many Broadway musicals were just collections of songs loosely connected by a simple plot. In 1970, Sondheim's "Company" challenged that formula by presenting a musical that was more book than music. The story is even less clear than a classic Broadway show. It's the story of Bobby, a bachelor living in New York City with mixed-up ideas about marriage. 

Though Bobby (Thom Miller) is the main character, "Company" is about the women in his life. Writers Theatre director William Brown has assembled a stellar cast of Chicago actresses. Each scene is a vignette in which Bobby learns about his friends' marriages. Blair Robertson as uptight Jenny is charmingly neurotic. Tiffany Scott playing urban Southern bell, Susan, and with costumes by Rachel Anne Healy, looks like a young Cybil Shepard. With distinct performances from the female ensemble, it's hard to pick out a favorite scene from the show, however Allison Hendrix singing "Getting Married Today" is a highlight. For Sondheim groupies, this is one of the show's most popular numbers but also its most challenging with a unique staccato rhyming scheme. Hendrix pulls it off, and makes the comedy relatable. Jess Godwin as April, is the show's last stop. Her portrayal of an awkward bachelorette is sure to make everyone laugh. 

"Company" concludes on the bittersweet song "Being Alive" and while Thom Miller's performance as Bobby is a little uneven throughout, he brings a lot to the cathartic final number. In one song, the musical goes from odd-ball romantic comedy to a philosophical question about the nature of long term love.

Writers Theatre in Glencoe is rightfully proud of their new space designed by Jeanne Gang. "Company" is presented as part of their Inaugural Season. The show, like the space is sleek, stylish and sexy. William Brown's production will likely be remembered as a definitive presentation of this not-often produced Sondheim classic. With more space, it’s nice to see a show at Writers with some breathing room. 

Through July 31st at Writers Theatre. 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe. 847-242-6011.