Displaying items by tag: Keith Surney

An exceptionally good show is now on stage at Chicago’s Trap Door Theatre. This wonder—The Man Who Fell with the Rain— has been translated through three languages on its way to the footlights in its U.S. premiere, right here on the tiny stage on Cortland Ave.

Originating in Spanish as a children’s tale by Columbian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it was turned into a script by Andrei Kureichik, a Belorussian playwright, then translated to English by John Freedman. All that before being adapted and directed by Kay Martinovich for a perfect and very cogent rendering by the Trap Door players in its U.S. premiere.

The Man Who Fell with the Rain hews closely to Marquez’s original short work, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children,” while playwright Kureichik has unpacked the important details touched only lightly in the original. It becomes truly theatrical as we watch the story unfold that Marquez charted.

The script brings us an Old Man With Enormous Wings (Richard Cotovsky) who is discovered unconscious in the backyard of the Husband (Dan Cobbler) and the Wife (Laura Nelson). The couple also happen to have a two-week-old baby in their house, and a nosy know-it-all Neighbor Woman (Emily Lotspeich) is certain the winged creature is an aging angel who was intending on taking the baby. Her advice: beat him to death with a cudgel.

The cast of The Man Who Fell with the Rain at Trap Door Theatre through September 26, 20206

The couple take pity on the Old Man, and instead place him in their chicken coop, intending to keep his presence a secret. But word gets out and neighbors, and then spectators descend on their abode. The Old Man has regained consciousness and the couple try communicating—but he speaks only his own unknown tongue. Neighbors speculate on what to do with him, suggesting vriously to put him over the military and end wars; or make him a governmental magistrate; perhaps put him out to stud to generate a winged human master race.

The local Priest (Keith Surney) is called in, since the Old Man seems perhaps to be an angel, but there is nothing in the doctrinal books that explains the possibility of an aged, injured angel. So he writes his bishop, who writes his primate, who will then write the Pope for guidance. As this lengthy process continues, and the crowds grow, the couple decides to charge admission for a look at the Old Man.

Laura Nelson, Dan Cobbler, Emily Lotspeich, and (foreground) Richard Cotovsky in The Man Who Fell with the Rain. 

Marquez and the playwright Kureichik provide us a scenic display of society, and the human comedy that so readily arises in its waters. The convoluted religious hierarchical pronouncements delivered by the Priest extend the fun of this strange state of affairs. Other characters arrive, including a girl who has become a Spider Woman (Gracie Wallace), all natural to the magical realism that is Marquez’s stock in trade.

Yet this show is not played for broad comedy. The story line and gradual revelations unfold with restraint. And it is the performances that director Martinovich has drawn from these performers that make this show stratospherically good.

Most memorable for me are two performances: Richard Cotovsky’s Old Man, whose mostly silent acting is magnetic as he quietly gets his bearings and increasingly engages the neighbors and spectators. And Emily Lotspeich’s Neighbor Woman, who is so perfectly recognizable from life. She moves from one certainty to another and always speaks authoritatively, even as her previous pronouncements have proven false. She knows, for example, that this Old Man should be fed a dangerous chemical which she supplies for $50—”Angel food is not cheap!” she declares.

When the Old Man goes dormant and the couple thinks he has died, she advises on his burial: cut off his wings, fold them over him, place a ring of 49 candles around him, then burn him. Despite her certitude, they decide to use a hot branding iron on the Old Man, and he immediately rises and flaps his wings. For his part, the Priest brings only questions, not answers, from the church. They are adsked if the Old Man has a navel, for example, to determine if he is human rather than angelic.

Yes it is a rather dark children’s tale. The Brothers Grimm are also dark, in the original text. What a fairy tale can do is describe to children (and grown-ups) the inexplicable behavior of adults. And the resolution of the play is positive and very satisfying. The townspeople are left as the Old Man found them, and we expect nothing changes, no one learns anything—just like real life.

Highly recommended, advanced ticket sales had driven an extension of the run of The Man Who Fell with the Rain even before opening night, but make haste. The extended run ends September 26, 2026 at Trap Door Theatre at 1655 W. Corland in Chicago.

Trapdoor Theatre’s “The Cuttlefish” ought to be confounding, but somehow this 1920’s surrealist play from Poland is clear as a bell. Though ostensibly about the philosophical struggle between art and politics, the audience easily recognized echoes of the present-day overall fix in which society finds itself.

Before any dialog, even before house lights go down, “The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview” (its full title) opens somewhat bewilderingly on a stage with four characters: a masked, gold-clad Statue of Alice D’Or (Keith Surney), whose postures beside a short classic stone column suggest a Greek sculpture. Further backstage is a high ranking church cleric in mitre and liturgical robes, gesturing spiritually—Pope Julius II (Emily Lotspeich), patron of Raphael and Michelangelo. Stage left, a figure in a suit slouches and periodically collapses against a wall, the artist Pavel Rockhoffer (Nicole Wiesner). And a woman wanders, hands outspread—the Mother (Venice Averyheart) of Rockhoffer, who settles into a seat and manages percussion.

What is going on? The audience puzzles through these characters, trying to make sense of the silent tableau, and the lights go down and dialog begins. Rockhoffer has become pessimistic about his creative works, which we learn have been condemned by a government council. “My art is a lie, a carefully planned hoax,” says Rockhoffer.

“Even prisoners serving a life sentence still want to live,” the Statue offers. Along the way Julius remarks, “A man without a worthy adversary is like God without Satan,” and leaving, offers “I wish you a short and unexpected death.” With very little naturalism or conventional exposition, these snippets reveal the conflict that is to be resolved by the end of “The Cuttlefish.”

But it is with the arrival of King Hyrcan IV (David Lovejoy) when the story comes alive. A villainous despot, he smooth-talks Rockhoffer, coaxing him to abandon his dedication to absolute artistic ideals, and come on over to pragmatic freedom of Hyrcania, the land he rules.

Lovejoy is an energetic force on stage, and brings the play to life. “I am a superman, or ‘an uber mensch’” King Hyrcan declares, convincingly. He offers to unchain the artist from historic patronage of entities like Julius, and to have full freedom.
“What do you believe in?” queries Rockhoffer.

“In myself,” King Hyrcan shoots back, and as inexorably as the manosphere today sucks in its lost, wandering adherents, Rockhoffer, after a bit of resistance, falls under his spell. He obeys when Hyrcan tells him to jettison his fiance Ella (Gus Thomas), as unfitting for the new Hyrcanian order. King Hyrcan works his wiles on a weakened Julius, who admits to doubt and crumbles too.

As the action unfolds and the plot thickens, it becomes clearer that the times prophesied by “The Cuttlefish,” which unfolded in the rise of fascist Germany, offer parallels to today —when cultural centers are being expropriated and renamed, arts funding cancelled, and freedom of expression curtailed.

The magic of Trap Door is its penchant for mining an obscure work of 1920s playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz (translated by Daniel Gerould) to find a work that is regarded as a precursor to later absurdist and expressionist stage works in the 1930s. Under the direction of Nicole Wiesner, what might have been an inscrutable drama instead is intuitively understandable. As we laugh with relief at the line, “One can only hope” (the Mother’s interjection about the end of such terrible times), we may be reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s advice: “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”

“The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview” runs through April 25 at Chicago’s Trap Door Theatre and comes recommended.

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com. 

Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman remains one of the most incisive allegories in American drama—a modern tale in which seduction, power, and racial history collide in the confined space of a subway car. Trap Door Theatre’s production, directed with precision and calculated risk by Keith Surney, resurrects the play’s mythic and political undercurrents, deepening its resonance as both ritual and warning.

Baraka titled his 1964 play after the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship doomed to sail the seas forever, unable to find port. In Baraka’s interpretation, a subway car becomes that ship—an eternal vessel circling the underworld of American consciousness. The passengers are ghosts of history; the cycle of desire and destruction never ends. Surney underscores the play’s endless cycle of seduction and destruction by dividing Lula among three actresses—Carolyn Benjamin (white dress), Genevieve Corkery (red dress), and Ali Foley (blue dress)—each embodying a different facet of America’s recurring racial performance. Together, they form a chorus of seduction and menace, representing the shifting faces of white America—erotic, violent, and self-possessed. Their presence before the play begins, prowling the stage like sirens holding apples, transforms the theatre into a space of temptation and foreboding.

Surney himself plays Clay, the young Black intellectual aboard this spectral train unaware of his fate. His Clay is both composed and vulnerable—buttoned suit, tie, but no shirt—an image that literalizes the illusion of assimilation stripped of safety. Lula, one at a time, approaches him with the ferocity of predators, their sexuality exaggerated to the edge of discomfort. Surney embraces that discomfort deliberately, making it clear that the erotic tension in Baraka’s play is not merely physical—it is historical, rooted in the dangerous seductions of American liberalism and white desire.

The production’s design reinforces the tension between abstraction and reality. Viscaya Wilson’s bare stage of metal poles offers a skeletal suggestion of a subway car, though it lacks the oppressive grit that defines the New York underground. For a native New Yorker, the environment may not fully convince, yet its sparseness allows the actors’ physical and emotional choreography to dominate the space. Gary Damico’s lighting cuts through the minimalism - isolating bodies in sharp contrast.  The uncredited sound design fills in what the set omits. The deep metallic rumbles immerse the audience in a world both real and hallucinatory, the jazz soundscape itself becoming the heartbeat of Baraka’s infernal train.

At moments, Surney allows erotic interplay to linger past its breaking point, delaying the eruption of Clay’s righteous fury. Yet when that fury finally arrives, the scene ignites with the same volatility that scandalized audiences in 1964. The words still wound; the violence still feels inevitable.

One critic described Baraka’s original Dutchman as “an explosion of hatred,” a reflection of a truth white America could barely confront. Trap Door Theatre’s version does not soften that explosion—it contextualizes it. Baraka’s play is a parable of historical repetition. The subway, like the ghost ship, circles endlessly, carrying the same sins and the same souls. In this staging, Dutchman becomes a ritual exorcism—a reminder that America’s voyage through its own darkness is far from over.

Baraka would soon transform from LeRoi Jones, the bohemian poet of downtown New York, into Amiri Baraka, the militant architect of the Black Arts Movement. Dutchman marks that turning point—a theatrical bridge between personal identity and collective consciousness. Surney’s production captures this moment of awakening, reminding us that Baraka’s rage was never chaos but clarity: a demand that America look into its mirror and recognize the ghost at its shoulder. Trap Door Theatre’s Dutchman sails that ghost ship again, not to escape the curse, but to make us hear, once more, the hum of its unending voyage beneath our feet.

That clarity also defines Keith Surney’s directorial debut, a bold and fearless entry that takes genuine risks—some raw, some revelatory— announcing a director unafraid to challenge both text and audience. If Dutchman is a voyage into the heart of America’s contradictions, Surney steers it with both daring and intellect. I’ll be looking to see more of him in the future.

Highly Recommended

When: Through October 25

Where: Trapdoor Theatre, 1655 W Cortland St, Chicago

Running time: 50 minutes

Tickets: $22

773-384-0494

https://www.trapdoortheatre.com