Displaying items by tag: rajiv joseph

“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.

Guards at the Taj, now playing at Steppenwolf Theatre, is certainly among the best shows ever to play in Chicago.

Set in 1648, Guards at the Taj recounts a gruesome legend that surrounds the construction of the renowned masterpiece, the Taj Majal in Agra, India. That apocryphal story holds that Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who commissioned the Taj, decreed that the architect and 20,000 artisans involved in its construction should be behanded – lest anyone ever again equal its magnificent design.

Playwright Rajiv Joseph works with this fable as fact and explores the behanding from the point of view of the two Hindustan Army Guards who will carry it out. We first see them stationed at a wall that we learn is shielding the construction site from view. As the play opens, we meet the dutiful and rational Humayan (Omar Metwally), at his post since dawn, eyes forward, posture erect. A few moments later, in scurries Babur (Arian Moayed), a dreamer whose uniform is askew and who is late for his post and struggles to stay focused and hold his sword properly.

The two, who have known each other since childhood, are closely bonded – but with the tensions and friction that inhabit any long-term relationship. Humayan aspires to a rise in rank, and wants to bring Babur along with him, even though he knows Babur's quirky personality could present risks.

Joseph, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, gives us a sophisticated work, with banter by Humayan and Babur adeptly foreshadowing what is to transpire. 

From the historical record, we know that the Taj Mahal was surrounded by a brick scaffold during construction, which was demolished to reveal the architectural wonder when it was completed. This moment in time becomes a turning point in the play, as Babur turns away from his position to be among the first in history to gaze upon the magnificent Taj Mahal. He soon convinces Humayan to do likewise. And through their expressions, we see the Taj Mahal as if for the first time as well.

From that moment at the wall, we soon shift scenes to find the two in the aftermath of carrying out the behanding, which is not at all as off-putting as it sounds. Director Amy Morton has carefully metered the presentation of horror so we recognize it without experiencing it too directly.

Joseph also faces us with a perennial question asked by civilized society – when should our personal moral compass override external authority? And subtly, perhaps, Joseph may be asking how such a heinous event could so readily be accepted as likely to be true - is it because it happened in the Far East?

The dialog in Guards at the Taj is enthrallingly naturalistic and contemporary, giving it an immediacy that penetrates any distance from the characters on stage. It is no wonder the script won a 2016 Obie Award for Best New Play.

The production of this work is nothing short of perfect, and the play itself is extraordinarily good. Written by Joseph expressly for its co-stars, Omar Metwally and Arian Moayed, this production feels more like a slightly delayed move from Broadway, where it received a highly regarded run in 2015. Amy Morton, a Steppenwolf ensemble member, directed both shows.

Likewise, the set, designed by Tim Mackabee for the original show and this one, ingeniously transforms from a blank stone wall outside the Taj Mahal, into a subterranean cell. Costumes by Bobby Frederick Tilley are outstanding, as the guards move through various degrees of formal military attire, to layered garb for their nefarious job.

The show runs through July 22 at Steppenwolf Theatre, and is very highly recommended.