Displaying items by tag: James Vincent Meredith

“Describe the Night” at Steppenwolf is serious theater that is seriously entertaining. Intellectually challenging yet side-splittingly funny, it has sat with me for days after as I’ve puzzled over what it is telling us.

Written by celebrated playwright Rajiv Joseph, whose sly wit enthralled audiences in Steppenwolf’s “Guards at the Taj,” the somewhat enigmatic script is also a captivating mystery story. It follows the emergence of famed Russian Jewish author Isaac Babel’s wartime journal, an uncensored record of his war time impressions.

Depicting real and fictional characters, Joseph spins a possible recount of how Babel’s journal survived while much of his writing was banned and destroyed. The title of the play was taken from that journal kept while Babel served as a war correspondent and propagandist for the Soviets in their 1920 war against Poland. Babel was a rising fiction writer when he signed into the military, and soon after the war wrote Red Cavalry, drawn from his personal impressions of the war, quite at odds with the positive spin he delivered in the news.

Eventually, under increasingly oppressive censorship, much of Babel’s fiction writing was banned by Russian authorities, the author imprisoned in 1939, and executed in 1940, with his working manuscripts, notes, and the journal offered in evidence at his trial. In the play's portrayal of the search for the surviving journal, we see two fictional connections to Babel—the grandmotherly babushka Yevgenia (Sally Murphy) and her granddaughter Urzula (Charence Higgins)—tailed by KGB operative Vova (Glenn Davis is pitch perfect).

The KGB wanted not just the writer dead, and his manuscripts and books destroyed, but his source material too. Hence the ongoing search for Babel’s journal. Vova's menacing presence is palpable, but his efforts are thwarted by the ditzy Yevgenia who charms him and all of us with an earnest insistence that he join them for soup. Vova acquiesces, and the playwright gives as a surreal dinner scene—foreshadowed deftly in Act 1—that is one for the ages, the laugh until you cry type.

It also encapsulates one powerful truth in “Describe the Night,” that a great antidote to disinformation and oppression is to laugh at it, buttressed with “alternative facts” as "truth" in our own age of disinformation and “the big lie” is in danger of becoming. In other words, we live in a time when truth and lies are harder to distinguish. And this evolving dynamic of confusion within society is at the core of "Describe the Night."

Written in 2014 and produced in 2017, “Describe the Night” predates our own unfortunate circumstances, with libraries censored, school curricula bowderlized, and news content cued to television ratings rather than impartiality. Reviews of other stagings have recognized the importance of this play, but it seems in Steppenwolf's production under the direction of Austin Pendleton, the actors have nailed the comic timing that makes the show so effective.

Kudos too, for scenic design by Collette Pollard, whose representation of the extensive KGB files on parties of interest is another high point of the show, played also to great comic effect. On Steppenwolf’s newest in-the-round theater space is a blank tablet with minimalist sets introduced only when required. Sound design by Pornchanak Kanchanabanca is noteworthy, from light touches of evocative music to dramatic sound effects such the roaring inferno where many of Babel’s writings are destroyed.

In some ways “Describe the Night” is an absurdist style play, the characters not naturalistic. But Joseph, who also won a Tony for his "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," leavens this with his signature style of natural contemporary speech. We see this particularly as two real life characters, Isaac Babel (James Vincent Merredith) and his military minder and friend Nikolai (Yasen Peyankov) who joust about the nature of truth. Likewise with two fictional characters from scenes in post-Soviet times, airport car rental agent Feliks (Jack Cain) and reporter Marikya (Caroline Neff, who I never can get enough of on stage). Mariyka also comes under questioning Vova in the search for the missing journal, making a connection to contemporary times.

This show flies by in two hours and forty-five minutes, and the first act is engaging and promising, on which the second act delivers in spades. I had no idea how much time had passed when the lights came up. “Describe the Night” runs through April 9, 2023 at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. It’s a great production of what is proving to be a seminal play.

Common sense dictates doing the right thing. On the surface, that seems obvious, but in August Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf, which premiered in 2005 and is receiving a timely and propulsive revival at Court Theatre, this is not at all clear. Though the characters are archetypal, and the situations contrived, it is precisely these extremes that cast the arguments of the play into sharp relief. What makes sense? No matter which side you choose in this examination of urban redevelopment, there is no outcome that benefits the residents of the Hill District or the protagonists of Wilson’s play, because no matter how far they have come, no matter what their ideals, it is 1997 and they are black and living in a racist America. Unfortunately, Wilson’s play has aged well—though broadly drawn, the events of the play are no less a reflection of American realities than they were two decades ago.

According to the program, director Ron OJ Parson has directed 25 productions of August Wilson’s plays. This is evident in his assured, lyrical work on this production. The characters are detailed, and the poetry of Wilson’s language emerges from the physical language of the blocking, so that the cracks in the sometimes conventional structure do not emerge until long after the final blackout. Though he allows Wilson’s humor to suffuse the evening, Parson has created a powerful and engrossing dialectic that offers much food for thought and few answers. Parson’s interpretation creates a sense of community and warm comradery among the characters, which accentuates the fact that the real threat lies beyond the action onstage. Given the surging poetry of Wilson’s script, it seems that this is the production that Wilson was writing to receive. Parson’s vision is complemented by a design team that is equally meticulous, setting the scene with unobtrusive but finely tuned details. Scenic designer Jack Magaw has created a grimy but well-appointed ground floor office for the Bedford Hills Development, Inc., jammed between neighboring buildings and accessed by a concrete stairwell. There are hints of the grandeur of the past in the tin ceiling and bay window, but the green-painted walls are stained, and the linoleum floor is more practical than elegant. Claire Chrzan lights most of the interior scenes in harsh, bright light, occasionally softened by practicals. She subtly shifts between moods and time, extending the magical realism to the windows of neighboring residences. Costume designer Rachel Anne Healy creates a period-perfect uniform for each character that allows each to evolve according to their fortunes, without veering into caricature. Sound designer Christopher M. LaPorte uses a funk-injected jazz score to set the tone, as well as contributing cool radio tracks and jarring sounds that invade the relative sanctuary of the office from the outside.

The cast of Radio Golf is uniformly excellent. As Harmond Wilks, the real estate developer hoping to bring back Pittsburgh’s Hill District while launching his bid to be mayor of both black and white citizens of the city, Allen Gilmore lends an Obama-esque, unruffled cool to his idealistic character, which gives way to almost petulant panic when he finds himself fighting for a future that seemed more secure than it turns out to be. As his golf-playing partner and newly-minted bank vice president Roosevelt Hicks, James Vincent Meredith is smoothly overbearing and casually abusive, while maintaining a boyish charm and ambition—he goes far enough in his self-serving tirades to draw derision but retains enough humanity to elicit sympathy. As Wilks’ wife, Mame Wilks, Ann Joseph is warm, no-nonsense and imperious; her attempt to open her husband’s eyes to the consequences of his choices for them both is heart-wrenching and powerful. Alfred H. Wilson plays Elder Joseph Barlow with a kinetic physicality that mirrors his scattershot philosophizing, rarely pausing as he reveals a strong gravitational center to his wandering thoughts. James T. Alfred brings comic timing and a self-aware physicality to the almost excessively forthright ex-con Sterling Johnson, who, while he has stopped punching everyone in the mouth to make himself feel good, still seems perfectly capable of doing so if he sees a need. As Wilks finds himself entangled in bonds that he thought had dissolved long ago, and Hicks finds himself presented with ways to turn his race into an asset, the battle lines are drawn, and it becomes clear that all the characters are casualties of a war that is being waged for profit by others, but there are promotions to be had if they join the winning side. As an ensemble, all the actors find the humor and good will in their characters, without allowing them to become bathetic or cartoonish. Though sometimes broadly drawn, each character finds his or her dignity in the sensitive and emotionally grounded portrayals onstage at Court.

Radio Golf alternates between laugh-out-loud (though at times decidedly un-PC) humor and incisive social commentary, spot-on examinations of familial and geographic loyalties and nearly stereotypical portraits of the members of a community and the different paths they take, and director Ron OJ Parsons and his expert cast, supported by a perfectly tuned design team, weave the tonal shifts into powerful, perfectly modulated quintet. On the surface, August Wilson’s final work may seem less haunting and lyrical than the previous plays of the ten-play Century Cycle that it completed, but this production belies that impression. Though some elements may seem facile, when the curtain comes down, one realizes that Wilson left behind a complex and uncompromising challenge for his audience. Wilson was an American who wrote about his country with awe, humor, rigor and compassion. In Radio Golf, he took on the issue of gentrification and redevelopment, and what happens when revitalization becomes disenfranchisement. In Court Theatre’s production, the play is an entertaining, empathetic and unyielding plea for doing the right thing, especially for those who wield the power to do so.

Radio Golf runs through September 30 at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago. Tickets, priced $50 - $74, are available at the Court Theatre Box Office, but calling (773)753-4472, or online at www.CourtTheatre.org.

Steppenwolf Theatre’s latest production is going to generate much buzz – quickly - and with good reason. In fact, it’s already been extended through June 2nd. Playwright Matthew-Lee Erlbach’s The Doppelganger (an international farce) is a riotous comedy that doesn’t skip a beat, boasting a cast that is as good as it gets in a script that barely allows the audience to breathe between laughter. Reminiscent of the absurdity Hollywood so often would place the likes of Mel Brooks, Peter Sellers or the Marx Brothers smack-dab in the middle, The Doppelganger successfully takes farce to the stage where an uncontained series of events that are highly exaggerated, excessive, and consequently implausible are successfully translated. Erlbach’s vision is effectively met thanks to Tina Landau’s finely-tuned direction through the use of deliberate ludicrousness and gobbledygook, broadly stylized presentations along with a whole lot of physical humor.

Rainn Wilson, who is best known for his role as “Dwight Shrute”, the competitive, over-the-top, social-skill-lacking paper salesman on NBC’s award-winning The Office, takes charge of the leading roles as the wealthy British businessman Thomas Irdley and his doppelganger Jimmy Peterson, an American seemingly fascinated with everything in life and someone you wouldn’t be surprised to find at a Phish concert. One would be hard-pressed to find a more ideal actor for the dual roles. Wilson’s transition from TV/film back to live stage is flawless.

In a whirlwind of mishaps that take place throughout mistaken identity, misunderstandings, partial eavesdropping and, “Whoops! Wrong door!”, we get an engaging story of international politics. Taking place in Bangui, the Francophone capital of the Central African Republic, the fun begins when Irdley is to host a weekend-long meeting to discuss a copper deal, inviting the likes of an American General (Michael Accardo), a Saudi Arabian prince (Andy Nagraj), and a handful of other players, including former African leader, Michel Masaragba (James Vincent Meredith) and his wife Lolade Masaragba (Ora Jones). But prior to the mini-summit, Irdley and his housekeeper Rosie Guerokoyame (Celeste M. Cooper) are preparing for another guest, Irdey’s doppelganger Jimmy Peterson, a kindergarten teacher from Quincy, Illinois. When Irdley mistakenly takes an elephant tranquilizer instead of his blood pressure medication, he is rendered unconscious, unable to participate in the weekend talks that will undoubtedly have an international effect. It is then that his housekeeper Rosie presses Peterson into action to take the place of Irdley in order to push her own agenda – that being the fair treatment of African workers. From there Rosie and Peterson become unlikely co-conspirators, the two hysterically finding themselves deeper and deeper into what can only be described as a hot mess of bargaining and back channel politics, every partaker conniving for their own selfish needs.

The humor is rapid fire and the play’s running time of nearly two hours and thirty minutes flies by. It is a quick-moving theatrical experience that is well-acted, offers one hilarious exchange after another while sprinkling in a seamless amount of intrigue to keep its audience guessing. The Doppelganger is a perfect tribute to the great farce comedies yet comes with its own unique flavor. Steppenwolf smartly provides Wilson with an airtight supporting cast of premium talent so that each character gets a serious amount of appreciation. Audrey Francis as the IBS-stricken Beatrix Geddes-Renwick is a comedic playwright’s godsend while Whit K. Lee as businessman Wen Xiaoping and Karen Rodriguez as the prince’s girlfriend, Marina, can do no wrong, also piercingly funny in several scenes.

                                                (left to right) Rainn Wilson and Karen Rodriguez in The Doppelganger (an international farce) - Photo by Michael Brosilow

If it takes the creation of a war to make everyone benefit from a copper deal, then so be it. While a comedy that supplies a laugh per minute, Erlbach also gives his audience a behind the scenes look at the perils of choreographed war not only showing the greed by its benefactors and lack of care for humanity but, in doing so, strengthens the premise that the rich will always become richer while the people who want to make a difference to better the world are often stifled and so easily dismissed. With plans to create self-induced atrocities in Africa knowing that certain countries will intervene, and certain products will increase in manufacturing (i.e. weapons), the elite group plans to meet their own agenda with the use of fake news to generate an international outpouring of sympathy and support. Though guised in an outrageous comedy, the point is made clear - political corruption exists and, unfortunately, often triumphs over good.

Brilliantly hilarious and vastly entertaining, Rainn Wilson’s superb performance certainly highlight’s The Doppelganger, though this play has so much more to offer from its sensational script to its commanding supporting cast - and a set that is a whole lot of fun in itself. But the play is also a breath of fresh air in an age where no one wants to offend or be offended. Says Chicago playwright Matthew-Lee Erlbach in an interview found in Steppenwolf’s playbill on the challenges of writing a traditional farce in today's climate, “We are provoked by reality, offended by the radical truths that shape our world. I am taking that farce and putting it on stage. I am writing the world as it has been recycled back to me, igniting those inherited devices, throwing them back at those oppressive power structures, and blowing them up on stage. Unchecked power is exploiting the human species, other species and the planet as a whole. I will use all rhetorical devices available to me to expose and disable those who are dangerous to society.”

“Also,” Erlbrach continues, “we have to be able to laugh at ourselves. If we lose the ability to find ourselves ridiculous and see the humor in those things that are painful, sensitive, nuanced, dear, we will become constipated, humorless and depleted of objectivity.”

The Doppelganger is not only a fitting homage to farce comedy, it is an eye-opening satire of today’s world-wide political happenings. This nearly immaculate, exceedingly humorous international adventure certainly falls in the “must see” category of Chicago stage works.

The Doppelganger (an international farce) is being performed at Steppenwolf Theatre through June 2nd. For tickets and/or more show information visit www.steppenwolf.org.

Trying to explain what Black Harlem's Renaissance was like is hard. The period was so rich in creative verve, you really have to show it while you tell it. It took me awhile to grasp what playwright Pearl Cleage has achieved - and director Ron OJ Parson has brought carefully to life -  in Court Theatre's Blues for an Alabama Sky.

In this beautifully polished production, we become familiar with the lives and aspirations of five denizens of the abundant cultural life enveloping New York's burgeoning black district in the 1920s and 1930s, driven by waves of aspiring new arrivals during the Great Migration from the South to the North. The period gives rise to the first jazz concert, to international musical superstars like Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller; to writers and thinkers like Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, who wrote the first bestseller by a black author. 

Cleage has fleshed out each of her characters - a doctor, a singer, a fashion designer, a social worker, and a carpenter - who are much more than archetypes. These are real people, each contributing a seminal thread to this tale. She has also set the timeline toward the end of that golden era, in 1930 after the market crash, as the Great Depression rolled in. 

The storyline seems surprisingly fresh, but it is true to its time: the protagonists here seem a mismatched couple - a flamboyant gay fashion designer Guy (Sean Parris), and his platonic love, Angel (Toya Turner), a gangsters' moll who tries but fails to make a living as a night club singer.  

Abandonedly outré, Guy has worked his way up from stitching gowns for cross dressers, to designing clothes on spec for Josephine Baker. The pair love and support each other as they pursue their dreams, but have no future as a couple; Angel is set on finding herself a big strong man who will take care of her, and pay the rent. Guy wants to make it in Paris.

Across the hall dwells the scholarly Delia (Celeste Cooper), who is launching the first family planning clinic in Harlem. A history lesson makes its way into the plot as the clinic is burned down. Some in the black community suspected efforts at setting up such clinics - led by Margaret Sanger - were really just part of a plot to reduce the black population. Carrying the torch for Delia is Sam, a medical doctor. James Vincent Meredith's performance gives Sam a steady, even temperament - abiding patience, and someone who is tolerant and nurturant. 

Conflict arises as Leland (Geno Walker) a widowed carpenter recently arrived from Alabama, falls for Angel. His ardor cools as he discovers he is not in Alabama anymore. In this Black Harlem, homosexuals are accepted; family planning is a matter of choice.

Each of these characters engenders our sympathy. And in the course of the action they live, die, move on - or remain stuck in place. Though Cleage wrote this work in 1995, it is completely fresh. And it has been given its due in Parson's production. Costumes and set are beautifully period, and lighting brings added dimensions to the staging. Blues for an Alabama Sky now extended through February 19th at Court Theatre.