You can tell this was put together by the best in the business.
Executive Producer Don Foster knew what he was doing when he came back home from California to present reality as only Chicagoland can provide. Rantoul & Die was a major hit, and it was beyond expectations when it showcased in Victory Garden's perfect theater space.
They call it Victory Gardens for all the right reasons. It is absolutely an amazing place to see a play, both of this size, and of it's caliber of casting. You leave feeling so fullfilled and relieved. This was definitely a victory for the whole team.
There's those Broadway shows ( big, a little spaced out, a little untouchable and disneyesque, tinny, distant ) and then there's that Biograph Theater magic that Victory Gardens brings to life that makes Chicagoland and the American Blues Ensemble the best there could possibly be. This juicy ensemble is not only filled with people who, as you're sitting in the audience and don't realize, are all over the place, on television, just unbelievable caches of performances, and you get to sit right there, like a casting director yourself, so close, and just eat them up.
This is not a pitch by the way. Rantoul and Die was excellent!
Chicago theater does not get any more physical and stimulating than this. It actually got so real several times I felt like I was in my own family's kitchen in the 70's when all sorts of shit hit the fan.
( Francis Guinan )
All of the performances in Rantoul and Die were perfect for their scripting. According to that real dark comedy aesthetic that opitimizes Chicago and what's really going on inside our deep seeded mentalities of disappointment on any front, Francis Guinan had the part that really made you connect with the overall frustration of the story, the rah rah let's get down to business "bullshit", and setting itself. He said it; not me.
Don Foster is the Executive Producer of this great and sad poetic look at the unrequitted demise of many people in life. Don is also a Producer of Two and a Half Men. His witness of living in the far end of Illinois, along with passionate story-telling talent, led to this sordid muse of what a strange fk'd up group of losing souls might be going through in those otherwise left for ill standalone middle of nowhere scenes, of which Illinois most definitely has. I have witnessed such realities. Illinois is quite a world.
Francis plays a dragged down, bottled up, sexually enraged, lonely and ready for destruction man, and boy did he do it right. Throughout the play his physical and vocal projections couldn't really get any more real without somebody actually getting hurt. That's what we like to call a serious Chicago play.
Plays are supposed to make you feel and become part of the whirlwinds and dimensions it's stories aim to penetrate you with. Televisions can only produce a shy, one-dimensional cringe only for the weak and anti-social.......but the likes of Victory Gardens Theater and Francis' energy in Rantoul and Die make you want to eat your own teeth and chew off your fingers. Lucky enough to catch it at the end of it's run; I could've seen it several times. It just makes me want to see everything at Victory Gardens.
( Cheryl Graeff )
Now we get to the retention of this whole story. The muse. There are tones in this play; then, there are resonnant energies that serve to remind you just how active the whole story is. What level of quiet mad insanity is bubbling under the complete need to scream holy hell. Cheryl happens to represent one of the most perverted reminders of what sex can do to violate the innocense of a far-removed culture that otherwise should never be affected by or represent the adulterated images of money and sex, and in this case also a lack there of. When you start reading into Cheryl's character a little bit you discover that she plays both sides of the coin wonderfully. This is how you begin to appreciate the creative casting, amazing talent, and true genius of both play and player alike, not to mention the creators who had the genius to pull it all together at a level as strong as this.
When it's revealed that she has gone through something a lot of women happen to suffer, and her explosion of over-positive and endearing closeness starts falling into the darkness that is Rantoul and Die, you understand so much more about human nature, and just how fragile the balance is. Her performance was over-the-top fantastic on all fronts and charming beyond repair.
( Kate Buddeke )
This woman gives another meaning to the phrase "kiss me kate". She really portrayed what was at the center of Foster's topic of "behind closed doors" problems. Kate plays a woman who tries to make right by following her lost dream of a realtionship. She little tries to "settle down" with someone from her immediate surroundings, and only after being pitted between both of her dark sides does she have a revelation, that lasts all of about 20 minutes. If you don't know somebody like Kate's character, then you don't live in good old America, as it was, as it passed, as it was lost, you just don't know the human condition.
Kate did an exceptional job of portraying a woman who uses adversity to fight herself out of a dead end that never ends. Tantamount to what I would imagine is a lifetime cocaine habit full of Saturn height highs that knows when the gravity drops the hell is going to melt your eyes out, so the carnage must go on...unfortunately is appears as if Kate's character has taken too many bumpy rides and the options are running out. She actually consoles herself against her angry trails by clinging to a vegetable, in this case her husband, who just so happens to shoot himself in the head after his insecurity becomes all too real.
( Alan Wilder )
Now here's the poor guy that gets to suck up all the carnage offered by Rantoul and Die. Meet the man who shoots himself in the head. Why? Well...he's the person in the middle of nowhere that would possibly never have a female companion in his world, and really you wonder if any talking bag of sympathetic flesh would do to satisfy his motivated need to sit around with doritos on the carpet, all the while recalling bizarre memberances of dead animals parts in the refrigerator.
When he is dumped on and left for trash he decides to end it all, but, as his character might as well have been, he ends up a bandage wrapped vegetable anyway, consciously or unconsciously witnessing the unraveling of a bunch of eventual truths that reveal the true grit of the story that is Rantoul and Die as a depiciton of such other lost distant small towns with dimming existences and dirty nail devilish circumstances.
The only thing he is really lucky about in the story is the otherworldly and oddly sexual connection Cheryl's character gives him as the mutilated innocense she is forced to carry under her rimmed glasses and insane happiness forces her to connect with the simplicity of his mortal injury.
Amercian Blues Theater Ensemble and Victory Gardens Theater in association with Don Foster really hit this one of the head. The casting of this idea was superb. And the room was beyond appropriate.
There are very few places you can embrace such an intimate and impactful setting as at Victory Gardens. And...you might find yourself sitting in the audience with television producers as this is the perfect way to digest, absorb, and enjoy any and every play.
This is where the serious people play.
For more information visit
http://www.americanbluestheater.com
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When it comes to theaters in Chicagoland, there are the big, and the small, but there are very few that hold the magic that is the historic Biograph theater, and they all know it.
"Congratulations to Don Foster and this exceptional cast for what is certainly one of the most genuine pieces of human theater I have ever seen. Extraordinary!"
Excellent!
Bravo.
