Displaying items by tag: Silk Road Theatre Project

A new company, Heart of Gold Theatre, is presenting the Chicago premiere of Mike Barlett’s An Intervention. Bartlett is a noted British playwright, whose future-conjectural work Charles III received five Tony nominations in 2016, including Best New Play. Bartlett’s Cock (2009) and its companion work Bull (2013) played to accolades off-Broadway in New York. 

Directed by Aaron Henrickson and just 75 minutes long in five acts, An Intervention is played against a velvet curtain with no set, intended by Bartlett to resemble a vaudeville comedy act. There we see two 30-something friends: character A is played by a sparkling Amanda Egle and B is played more circumspectly by Taylor Adams. They are caught in the middle of an energized, fast-paced repartee that when we first see them has been reduced to single-word declamations and terse phrases (“Oh.” “Yeah.” ‘You - “ “Yup.”) 

Their tone conveys a dispute of some kind, but the audience doesn’t yet know what it’s about. “I don’t believe it,” says A; “Well it’s true,” B retorts. Context soon reveals it is over the matter of a military intervention in a Middle East war. 

First performed in 2014, it was a period that saw the rise of ISIS, the Gaza War by Israel against Palestine, and the entry of the U.S.-led coalition into Iraq, among other conflicts. But the timeliness (and unfortunate timelessness) of the setting makes An Intervention very much of-the-moment. 

The character A, we learn, has just come back from a protest against the intervention, only to learn that B, whom she counts as a trusted friend, supports it. He even encourages it to happen. She is crestfallen, and the argument moves on to the nature of their friendship.

Stepping down from the stage with one foot, B gives us his take on A in a lengthy aside. Later A will do likewise about  B. So the argument is no longer centered on the politics or justice of the impending military action, but about how these two feel about each other. 

What we see are two friends whose friendship is based on loving to argue. Well, actually, it’s a bit more than that. Because they love to argue about politics, for example, their regular argumentative battlegrounds form a vehicle for intimacy. 

Subsequent acts—here are five in this tightly wound show—reveal more about their lives at large. Periodically the two reach through the curtains for props - a harmonica, wine glasses, and lots of liquor. The two also take issue with each other's personal lives. B charges A with being an alcoholic (another type of intervention), while A argues against B’s romance with a “harridan” and soon their friendship reaches a breaking point.

Many months later, in the last act, the threads are tied together in such a satisfying resolution that the continuously puzzling nature of that opening scene is successfully explained. 

Adams, the founder and artistic director of Heart of Gold and (full disclosure) a personal friend, has brought us a play for the moment. When we argue, as Adams tells us in the program, aren’t we asking, “Why aren’t you the person I want you to be? Why can’t you be … less like that?” 

Bartlett has written a “thinking” play in An Intervention, in which the dramatic tensions are equally “characters” in the work. So producer and co-star Adams has given us a deft bit of dramaturgy in bringing it to  Chicago audiences. 

The play examines the timely matter of how human beings can engage each other while bearing deeply held convictions that conflict. Nothing could be more important to our civic life than to seek guidance and clarity on this issue, which vexes us continuously. This is what theater is for. 

The production also resurrects to the Chicago theater scene Pierce Hall in the landmark Chicago Temple Building. Pierce, fittingly, was home for the Silk Road Theatre Project, formed after 9/11 to address the challenges of backlash facing Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African communities. 

Finally, because I know this producer and actor well, I have watched most of the steps along the way in development of the performance you will see. The passion a single individual must muster to licence a worthy script from a noted author, to secure a stage, to field a corps of able actors, director, lighting, costumes, and then to publicize and market ticket sales - well as the thousands working in this field in Chicago well know - it’s not an enterprise for the faint of heart. The inevitable rise and fall of the fortunes of a single production are familiar territory for this city’s theater producers. We in the audience are spared the sturm und drang. The lights come up and a polished presentation appears, as if by magic.Though magical, a stage show takes hard hard work. 

Recommended, An Intervention runs through August 9, 2026 at 7:30 pm at Pierce Hall, the lower level theater in the Temple Building, 77 W. Washington Blvd., Chicago.