Court Theatre was honored by an incredible 18 Jeff nominations for the 2009/10 Season including nods for The Comedy of Errors director Sean Graney and his production of The Mystery of Irma Vep last fall at Court.

Court Theatre is honored by the eighteen 2010 Joseph Jefferson Award nominations it received for the 2009/10 season. We extend our sincere appreciation to all of the artists and audiences who made Court’s 55th season an incredible year. Below is a list of Court Theatre’s nominations.

PRODUCTION - PLAY - LARGE
”The Illusion”
”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
”The Mystery of Irma Vep”

ENSEMBLE
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”

DIRECTOR - PLAY
Sean Graney - “The Mystery of Irma Vep”
Charles Newell - “The Illusion” Erik Hellman and Chris Sullivan in The Mystery of Irma Vep, directed by Charles Newell

ACTOR IN A PRINCIPAL ROLE - PLAY
Erik Hellman - “The Mystery of Irma Vep”
Chris Sullivan - “The Mystery of Irma Vep”

SOLO PERFORMANCE
Mary Beth Fisher - ”The Year of Magical Thinking”

The cast of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by Ron OJ Parson ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE - PLAY
Allen Gilmore - ”Sizwe Banzi is Dead”
Timothy Edward Kane - “The Illusion”

SCENIC DESIGN - LARGE
John Culbert - “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
Collette Pollard - “The Illusion”

Allen Gilmore in Sizwe Banzi is Dead, directed by Ron OJ Parson COSTUME DESIGN - LARGE
Jacqueline Firkins - “The Illusion”
Alison Siple - “The Mystery of Irma Vep”

SOUND DESIGN - LARGE
Joshua Horvath and Nick Keenan - “The Illusion”
Joshua Horvath and Ray Nardelli - “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”

LIGHTING DESIGN - LARGE
John Culbert - “The Illusion”

Mary Beth Fisher in The Year of Magical Thinking, directed by Charles Newell

The Comedy of Errors scenic model, designed by Tom Burch.

The Comedy of Errors takes place in Ephesus, which director Sean Graney and scenic designer Tom Burch have envisioned as a once-prosperous city fallen on hard times. The setting of a city street is typical of Roman farce, from which Shakespeare adapted his play. Sean also gave Tom three “starting points” for thinking about the look of the play: postwar East Berlin, eighteenth-century France, and the torture room from the Saw horror movies. Tom gravitated toward French architectural elements but also French portrait paintings, which he described as society’s artistic outlet for thinking about the self (identity is an important theme in Comedy of Errors). Tom also envisioned Ephesus as being so desperate that its citizens have had to use scraps of doors, windows, even works of art to patch up its crumbling infrastructure (the doors will also open and close as the rate of entrances and exits increase). Lighting designer Heather Gilbert also hinted at some of the surprising sources of light that will appear from behind the wall of doors and windows.

The Antipholus twins, both played by Erik Hellman. Costumes designed by Jacqueline Firkins.

The Dromio twins, both played by Alex Goodrich. Costumes designed by Jacqueline Firkins.

For the costumes, designer Jacqueline Firkins had to tackle the practical problem of designing costumes for six actors playing twenty different characters. Each character must be sharply distinct from the others, but their costumes must be simple enough for the actors to change quickly from costume to costume (audience members who saw The Mystery of Irma Vep are familiar with this challenge). For visual inspiration, Jacqueline drew from a range of styles and periods in order for the costumes to telegraph both a historical and a contemporary sensibility.

A Boatswain and the “Angry Merchantess,” both played by Stacy Stoltz. Costumes designed by Jacqueline Firkins.

Dr. Pinch and the goldsmith Angelo, both played by Kurt Ehrmann. Costumes designed by Jacqueline Firkins.

After the designers finished their presentations, the cast began to read the play for the first time. Sean has been adapting the script so that all the characters can be performed by six actors, but this was the first time everyone had the chance to see how it was going to work. Some of the choices Sean has made with the play have never been done before with Comedy of Errors, and the result has been a new, nuanced reading of an often overlooked Shakespearean comedy. For the assembled crew, however, the most important revelation of the day was how truly funny this four hundred year-old piece remains to this day.

Check back here for more behind-the-scenes updates as we delve further into the rehearsal process!

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare opens September 16, 2010. It is adapted and directed by Sean Graney.

Today, we have a very clear word to describe the group of people who come to see a play.  We call them “audience.”  However, this word doesn’t truly do justice to what seeing a play entails.  “Audience” comes from the Latin word audire, meaning “to listen.”  When we see theater, we not only listen to it, but also watch it.  There is no English word which encompasses both.

Thus, in the mid-sixteenth century, when theaters as we know them first appeared, and the idea of a group of people paying to go to a theater and see a show first emerged in the collective consciousness, a massive semantic debate began.  What should this group of people be called?  There were two distinct schools, which each espoused a different theory as to why theater happens.  The first was the audire school.  They argued that that the true merit in theater is hearing beautiful poetry read out loud.  Championed by poet-playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, artists of this school appealed to a wealthy, educated audience who would sit in the galleries and let the beautiful words wash over them.  They called playgoers “auditors,” or “the audience.”  The second school championed the Latin word spectare, meaning “to watch.”  They believed theater should be a massive visual spectacle, involving dancing, elaborate costumes, and over-the-top stage business, like in the court masques of Inigo Jones.  They mainly appealed to the “groundlings,” manual laborers, artisans, and merchants who would pay the lowest ticket prices to stand en masse and watch a show.  These playgoers were less educated, and would rather watch a stunning visual display which they could interact with.  Artists of this school called playgoers “spectators.”

Clearly, the first school won, and today, we speakers of English call our playgoers “audience,” and not “spectators.”  However, the terms of the debate still live on.  Which is more important in a play: beautiful language, or awesome onstage action?  Do you go to theater to watch something you could never see in your day-to-day, or do you go to hear words which move you?

Most good theater combines both.  A good play should have moments of poetry, where we are bowled over by the power of words, and moments of spectacle, where we can simply watch and be amazed.  Shakespeare is a master at creating this balance.  His plays have beautiful sonnets, and lines which are so perfect that they are part of our common vocabulary.  They also have massive stage fights, ridiculous clowning, unusual costumes, and magic influences.  Shakespeare dexterously pulled the best of both schools, and it is perhaps why, among other things, his work has lived on in a way that the plays of his contemporaries haven’t. 

—Will Bishop, Production Dramaturgy Intern

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare opens September 16, 2010. It is adapted and directed by Sean Graney.

Going to a play in Elizabethan England was an entirely different experience as it is today.  At the time, playgoing was considered a crude, almost sinful entertainment, often likened to going to a whorehouse.  Playhouses in London were completely shut down in 1642 for breeding frivolity in a harsh political climate.  Whores and cutpurses were far more common to find at the theater than they are today.  Unaccompanied women would often get sexually assaulted, and full-fledged brawls, either between audience members or the audience and the actors, shut down a number of performances. 
Even when playgoing was not violent or criminal, it was an entirely different experience from today.  Firstly, most of Shakespeare’s plays ran at under two hours.  Today, the same plays usually come in at at least three hours.  This means the action of the play, as well as the dialogue, was extremely fast-paced, to the point where audiences would completely ignore large sections of the play.  They would eat, smoke, talk, laugh, yell, throw things at the stage, try to converse with actors, and generally ignore every rule of theater decorum we’ve currently established.  Going to a play was thus much less about seeing a work of art, and much more about having a great time.  If the play itself wasn’t amusing, you were free to amuse yourself as you saw fit.  Playgoing four hundred years ago was in many ways similar to going to a bar with live music today.  If you enjoy the band, you can watch them play.  If not, there is nothing wrong with socializing as well.
The playgoing experience was also completely conditioned by social class.  The more you paid for tickets, the “better” seats you got.  This created a highly stratified physical structure for the audience.  The “best” seats depended on the theater.  In some, like the Globe, where Shakespeare’s company worked, the best seats were boxes behind the stage or special chairs onstage.  The poorest stood on the ground in front of the stage.  In this system, the best seats did not have the best view, but they allowed the whole audience to look at you – again revealing that going to a play often had very little to do with watching plays.  In other playhouses, the reverse was true – the better the view, the more the tickets, establishing the system of tiered ticketing we use in theaters today.  Whether rich or poor though, the level of carousing was the same.  The rich would flaunt their position, wearing massive hats and smoking expensive tobacco during the shows, while the poor would chew on apples, tossing the cores onstage during scenes they didn’t like.
Those interested in learning more about Elizabethan theater should read Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, by Andrew Gurr, who revolutionized the subject by exploring the conditions of both rich and poor at the theaters, as well as tracking the changing role of theater throughout the Elizabethan period.

—Will Bishop, Production Dramaturgy Intern

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare opens September 16, 2010. It is adapted and directed by Sean Graney, the founder of the Hypocrites.

A selection from “George Washington’s Fortune” from Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People (1912) by Constance D’Arcy Mackay:

Read the rest of the play, and even more bizarre American pageants for children, at Project Gutenberg.

Like most classical comedy, Shakespeare has no fear of using archetypes, or instantly recognizable character types. Normally, he has a hero of some kind who falls in love with a woman, generally an innocent, ingénue type. The play is about these two trying to get together despite circumstances which oppose their marriage. Along the way, they interact with other archetypes: the hero has a witty comedic sidekick, while the ingénue has a wiser, more worldly female companion. There is usually a villain of some kind, almost always an older man, who seems threatening but becomes ridiculous before the eventual marriage. Finally, there is a group of clowns, whose attempts to wow people in power compose the play’s main subplot. Of course, Shakespeare spices this formula up in every case, adding a few different twists—be they fairies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or absurd laws (Measure for Measure)—but all of these character types are present.
The Comedy of Errors follows a very different formula. While most of Shakespeare’s comedies draw mainly from courtly romances of the time, which thrived off the hero and ingénue types, Comedy is far more grounded in Roman farce, being based off two Plautus plays (The Brothers Menaechmus and, to lesser extent, Amphitryon). Plautus himself used a whole series of archetypes, mainly based on Greek comedies: there is the clever slave, who is the only sane one in an insane world, the wise old man, the vain concubine, and the arrogant blowhard military hero. Roman farce also had a very different focus than courtly romance: while the second places the emphasis on a love story, the first focuses instead on layers of deceit, where characters become more and more confused by progressive lies. 
The Comedy of Errorsis fascinating because, while it is rooted mainly in Roman farce, Shakespeare borrows elements from courtly romance to make it more palatable to his audiences. Thus, while the plot is driven by self-assured masters and their wise slaves, the play ends with a traditional coupling. There is a contrast between women, the innocent and the less innocent, but neither of them are young ingénues. Comedy thus reads as an interesting cross-genre piece. It has elements of traditional Shakespearian comedies, but lives in a noticeably different world than most of them. It thus creates a style of comedy all to itself, both a “comedy of errors,” a farce piece, and a romantic comedy.

—Will Bishop, Production Dramaturgy Intern

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare opens September 16, 2010. It is adapted and directed by Sean Graney, the founder of the Hypocrites.

Since 1981, Court Theatre has produced five shows per season in our 250-seat theater on Ellis Avenue. Our name, the “Court,” however, follows from our origins as a summer repertory theater that performed in Hutchinson Courtyard on the campus of the University of Chicago. Founded in 1955, the Court Theatre produced three classics per season before expanding their season into the new indoor theater. Since that time, we’ve sprung from a community theater to a nationally-recognized professional company. We no longer perform in Hutch Courtyard, though that tradition has been sustained by University Theater and the Dean’s Men (a recently-formed student society that performs strictly Shakespeare). From Court Theatre’s 1959 Season program:

For its 1959 season, Court Theatre produced Shakespeare’s Othello, William Congreve’s Love for Love (a Restoration comedy), and a seldom-performed nineteenth-century play titled Francesca Da Rimini by George Henry Boker, a verse adaptation of a tale from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno.

*The addressograph, circa 1955.

The Chicago Reader has recognized actor Chris Sullivan (The Mystery of Irma Vep, The Illusion) for his protean abilities:

Chris Sullivan first performed for Chicago audiences in Defending the Caveman—Rob Becker’s warhorse one-man comedy about the backward American male—and when the gig ended in 2007, he may have felt the need to prove that his range extended beyond playing fratboy neanderthals. If so, he’s succeeded stunningly.

In February 2009 Sullivan showed us what a real brute looks like with his depiction of Yank, the doomed stoker in The Hairy Ape, directed by Sean Graney for the Goodman Theatre’s Eugene O’Neill festival. Then, in November, the burly actor slid to the opposite end of the spectrum, switching among three roles—most notably that of the alluring Lady Enid—in a revival of Charles Ludlam’s camp quick-change farce The Mystery of Irma Vep, also directed by Graney, this time for Court Theatre. This spring Sullivan returned to Court as Alcandre, a powerful, cruel, wise magician, in Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion. Taken together, the three appearances constitute a tour of tours de force.

Here’s a sample of Sully’s work during Court Theatre’s 2009-10 Season:

Congratulations, Sully!

Kris Vire, theater editor at Time Out Chicago and a wonderful champion of Chicago theater, makes the perennial pitch: we should be are the theater capital of the United States:

A number of out-of-town critics have praised Chicago as America’s real theater capital over the last several years. What if, instead of continuing to export our stuff elsewhere for praise and dollars, we embraced what London’s Michael Billington, Toronto’s Richard Ouzounian, New York’s Terry Teachout and others have written and sell ourselves, not New York, as said theater capital?

If Cromer’s Streetcar [currently playing at Writers Theatre in Glencoe] deserves more viewers—and it surely does—why shouldn’t they come to Chicago to see it? Instead of courting the Scott Morfees and Jeffrey Richardses of New York, maybe Gigi Pritzker’s ready for another go at producing theater in Chicago after Million Dollar Quartet.

As Alan M. Berks notes in the first installment of his TCG [Theater Communications Group] report from the Twin Cities, one of the unofficial themes of Chicago’s TCG conference was the awesome, non-hierarchical nature of Chicago’s theater scene. Mayor Daley said a lot of great things to the nation’s theatermakers Saturday morning, as he did to the city’s press a couple of weeks prior when marking the tenth anniversary of the downtown theater district, in the presence of NEA chair Rocco Landesman, about the value of theater and other arts in building a world-class city.

So what if, instead of continuing the New York–centric 20th-century model, we make our city a theater tourism destination? With others so willing to call Chicago the real theater destination of North America, wouldn’t it be great if we embraced that label ourselves? What if theater audiences actually had to come to Chicago to see Chicago-style theater?

Coming off this weekend’s TCG conference here in Chicago (which, if nothing else, gave Chicago theater artists like Court the opportunity to strut in front of other national theater-makers), you’ll be hearing more talk like this throughout the coming year, leading up to a Columbia College-planned conference next spring titled Chicago – Theatre Capital of America: Past. Present. Future.

Shakespeare was a master of adaptation.  Very few of his plays are completely original.  For many, he took interesting stories which he read – whether fictional or historical – and reinterpreted them to make them work onstage. To write other plays, he took pre-existing plays and updated them to work for his audiences.  The Comedy of Errors is a play of the second sort. 

The play is a 16th century version of a mash-up, a music track where two very different songs are mixed together to create a totally new song. Shakespeare collided two of the famous Roman playwright Plautus’ plays to create Comedy. Consequently, Comedy has more in common with Roman farce than his later comedies. While his comedies begin to get darker as he matures, Shakespeare leaves Comedy as light as its sources, relying on slapstick and wordplay very similarly to Plautus. However, he adds an element of romance which is lacking in the original, as well as a Christian abbess who comes in to save the day at the end. These elements appealed especially to an Elizabethan audience – Shakespeare used adaptation to make a play more relevant for the audience who would be watching it. 

Shakespeare’s affair with adaptation is especially relevant for Court’s production of Comedy. Sean Graney has again readapted the play, making it an adaptation of an adaptation. Like Shakespeare, Graney has adapted the play to appeal more to today’s audiences. I don’t want to give too much away, but expect cross-dressing, crazy wigs, and a witty misuse of Shakespearian English which will make you totally reevaluate Shakespeare’s use of words. Finally, you have the chance to laugh at all those Shakespearian terms which sound so funny. 

So when you come see Comedy, you have the rare opportunity to see a story being retold multiple times onstage. Try to pick out what comes from Plautus, from Shakespeare, and from Graney – this is your chance to see how classics grow, change, and transform over time. This play is built on a long, exciting tradition of adaptation.     

—Will Bishop, Production Dramaturgy Intern

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare opens September 16, 2010. It is adapted and directed by Sean Graney, the founder of the Hypocrites.