Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
Page 16 of 36 pages « First < 14 15 16 17 18 > Last »
March 24, 2010
Fathers and their Actors I
In The Illusion, an old man visits a magician in the hope that he will help him locate his estranged son, the son he disowned fifteen years earlier. I asked members of the cast of Illusion to talk about their own fathers, and how they felt about their chosen profession. Here’s just a peek at some of their responses:
“My father is an international businessman. He was not too keen on the idea of me studying theatre in college so he made it quite clear that if he was going to be footing the bill, I would have a double major of some kind. I chose Communication with a focus on journalism and that worked for him. As my third year was coming to a close I was finding myself struggling to carry two majors that required a great deal of out-of-classroom work and projects. Luckily, my parents, who came and supported all my acting endeavors in school and beyond, saw a show my third year that really had an impact on my father. As my mother recalls it: they returned to their hotel room that night and he looked at her and said, “I think she can really do this….did you see how she was affecting everyone around us?” Within a month he was escorting me to the dean to change communication from a major to a minor. He has been an advocate of my vocation ever since.”
“My father is an accountant. He is also an amateur actor, singer, poet, drummer, and part-time Santa Claus. He gave me my first guitar and taught me to play “Stairway to Heaven.” My earliest memories are of sitting in the crying room of a darkened church, listening to my mom and dad practice with the schola. At three I could recite all of “The Music Man” after repeated viewings of a local production starring my mom as Marion and my dad as the quartet tenor.
“In high school, my dad was an all-star football and baseball player. He always loved to throw a ball around with me on a summer day, and I thought it would break his heart when I quit the team, but he never showed a hint of disappointment. He sold popcorn at every performance of every high school play I ever did. He and my mom still make the drive from Minnesota to see me in everything I do. He never stops letting me know he’s proud of me.
“Because more than being an accountant, expert griller, and Monty Python fanatic, my dad is an amazing dad.
“And every performance is dedicated to him.”
“My father was a small-town businessman. He owned a clothing store. But he also had a creative side. He wrote stories and had a long-standing, unfulfilled dream to own a circus. He loved animals, clowns, sawdust and show people. In fact, my parents met and fell in love doing a Ripon College production of “Death Takes a Holiday.” He was very proud that his acting professor once told him that he was just as good as Spencer Tracy (another Ripon alum). So my interest in acting was always encouraged. He was very supportive when I was accepted to Northwestern and majored in theatre. Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer while I was still in college, so he never saw me act professionally.”
The Illusion runs Wednesday through Sundays at Court Theatre until April 11.
(Make sure to visit this blog next week, where we’ll post even more anecdotes from the cast!)
March 22, 2010
Is The Illusion a Classic?
Is The Illusion a classic? Is Tony Kushner’s “free translation” of L’Illusion Comique too unfaithful?
One audience member, via their audience feedback form, thinks so:
Fed up with your adaptations. Please do more classic stuff like in the old days.
Our commenter Andrew agrees:
The way the play itself butchered Corneille’s in its pretentiousness was very disappointing. In the hands of Newell and Kushner Corneille became some kind of sitcom. Especially disappointing was the ending…just read Corneille’s ending and you will understand. I hope the Court will get back at doing Classic theater and stop serving us adaptations and musicals. As it is the Court has lost its true identity!!!
Another audience member liked the play, but thought less of our other shows this season:
First play of the season worth coming to. Classic theater. Be true to your audience. If we want au courant stuff, we’ll go elsewhere.
Yet another audience member put it most succinctly:
NO MORE IRMA VEP.
These remarks come from a small but fiercely loyal section of our audience who sees The Illusion as a return to our core values (or, in Andrew’s case, a disappointing missed opportunity). There’s certainly no arguing that Court’s programming has evolved over our fifty-six year history. Just compare three different seasons across time:
1975:
The Doctor in Spite of Himself by Moliere
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
1997/98:
Tartuffe by Molière
The Philadelphia Story by Philip Barry
Carmen by Prosper Mérimée, adapted by James Robinson
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene & Giles Havergal
Old Times by Harold Pinter
2009/10:
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson
The Mystery of Irma Vep by Charles Ludlam
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Illusion by Pierre Corneille, Freely Translated by Tony Kushner
Sizwe Banzi is Dead by Athol Fugard
These seasons speak to our evolving definition of “classic.” If you compare them to thirty years of syllabi in University of Chicago core humanities classes, you’d likely witness the same evolution. Am I disappointed that we don’t do more Greek Tragedy, more Jacobin Drama, more Shakespeare? Absolutely. However, I’m also grateful that we’ve adopted a more inclusive definition of “classic” that allows us to explore “modern” classics (Sizwe Banzi is Dead), plays that are in dialogue with the classics (The Illusion), and plays we believe should be counted as classics (The Mystery of Irma Vep, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom). The plays in this season have expanded my own opinion about what makes a dramatic text really exceptional, testing my own narrow vision of what I consider to be a classic play.
Occasionally, however, Court will take on a play that cannot by any definition be deemed a classic. Caroline, or Change was one of those plays; so, too, is every play we produce by Tom Stoppard (often mistaken for a Dead White Man). This season, that show was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a recent adaptation of a recent bestselling memoir, and an astonishingly powerful piece of text that nevertheless has stood no test of time, no proof of its cultural endurance: it is simply too young of a play. However, while I maintain that The Year of Magical Thinking is not a classic, I also maintain that it was chosen and produced in the spirit of Court Theatre’s mission: it is a play rich in language, timeless in theme, and perfectly suited to our intimate space. Moreover, it was a text that powerfully affected its director, haunted him on a personal level, and proved for him a formidable artistic challenge. Quite often, we are suspected of having cynical or purely commercial reasons for producing non-classic shows, but in fact, it is those shows that often represent the greatest risks for us.
I believe our production of The Illusion is doing what Court Theatre does best: the production of a classic text that interrogates and doesn’t assume, that engages and doesn’t embalm. Even though Kushner hasn’t translated directly any lines of Corneille’s, his adaptation is in close dialogue with the original—and I maintain that his reading of Corneille is playful, insightful, and sheds new light on the original text.
What did you think of The Illusion? And what do you think of our recently announced 2010-11 Season? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
March 12, 2010
Big Love
For those of you in the Hyde Park neighborhood (and beyond!), Court Theatre would like to put in a last-minute recommendation for you to go see Chuck Mee’s play Big Love at University Theater at the University of Chicago. The show is directed by Sean Graney, director of They Mystery of Irma Vep and What the Butler Saw at Court, and a lecturer in the Theater and Performance Studies department at the UofC. Not only is it one of the best student productions I’ve seen at UT, it’s also one of the best theater productions I’ve seen this year, hands down.
Big Love has three more shows: Friday 3/12 at 8:00, and Saturday 3/13 at 2:00 and 8:00. See it in the First Floor Theater in the Reynolds Club at 5701 S. University Avenue. More details here.
March 9, 2010
Winsor McCay and Georges Méliès
Spending a few hours in tech for The Illusion this weekend, contemplating the design of the production (which is really beautiful and mysterious), the play started evoking images to me from Little Nemo in Slumberland (by comic strip artist Winsor McCay) and The Trip to the Moon (by filmmaker Georges Méliès)
I wish I could explain more about what I mean by these images, but I’d have to spoil the play. Suffice to say that there’s a dreamlike quality to some of this production that I’ve never quite seen in theater before.
