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.

Begin, begin, begin!

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.

William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors
Directed by Sean Graney
September 16, 2010 - October 17, 2010

Sean Graney has directed two classic farces at Court Theatre, 2007’s What the Butler Saw and 2009’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. In both productions, I saw Sean challenge himself and push his craft to find a solution for each new problem that these deceptively difficult plays posed for him. Now, as a next step in Sean’s exploration of comedy, as well as his playful inquiry into themes of identity and disguise, he’ll be taking on William Shakespeare’s classic farce about two sets of twins separated at birth, The Comedy of Errors. As a formal challenge to himself, Sean intends to perform the play with only six actors, requiring each actor to play three different characters—often at the same time! 

Home by Samm-Art Williams
Directed by Ron OJ Parson, Resident Artist
November 11, 2010 - December 12, 2010
Our resident artist Ron OJ Parson (directing Sizwe Banzi is Dead this spring at Court Theatre) returns to direct a modern classic, Home. First produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1981, Home tells the story of Cephus Miles and his life’s journey out and back from his small town in North Carolina. Spanning the tumultuous decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Williams’s play is an intimate, enduring story told with charm and poetry. Based in part on his early life in North Carolina, and inspired by his longing for home while living in New York, Williams envisioned the play’s form as something simple, something that could be performed in the street “if push comes to shove.” Ron OJ Parson directed Home at Signature Theatre Company to critical and popular acclaim in New York in 2008, for which he won New York’s Audelco Award.

Play Three
Directed by Charles Newell
January 13 - February 13, 2011

I can’t tell you any details just yet, but we’re finalizing the plans for me to direct a classic play in our third slot of the season. I’m very excited about what this is going to be. Check this blog in the next few weeks for updates!

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Jessica Thebus
March 10, 2011 - April 10, 2011

For some time now I’ve been fascinated by Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando, the story of an English nobleman who falls asleep and wakes up as a woman. An “imaginative biography” of Woolf’s intimate friend Vita Sackville-West that takes place over four centuries and different continents, Orlando seemed to me impossible to adapt to the stage until I discovered acclaimed American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s treatment of it. Her adaptation captures Woolf’s biting whimsy while rendering the story of Orlando energetically theatrical. I’m overjoyed that we’ve been able to invite Jessica Thebus to direct for the very first time at Court Theatre. Jessica has directed a number of Ruhl’s plays (Dead Man’s Cell Phone, The Clean House), and I can’t wait to see her staging of Orlando.

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
By George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin
Directed by Charles Newell
Music Direction by Doug Peck
Artistic Consultant Ron OJ Parson
May 12, 2011 - June 19, 2011

Considered to be George Gershwin’s magnum opus, Porgy and Bess is a “folk opera” with a score that features unforgettable songs like “Summertime,” later recorded time and again by pop, blues, and jazz musicians. Similar to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess was meant to combine the “high” and “low” idioms of classical opera and contemporary jazz and blues, this time to tell DuBose Heyward’s story of Porgy, a disabled man living in a slum of Charleston, South Carolina who falls in love with an itinerant woman named Bess. In 1935, the opera premiered on Broadway with an all-African-American cast, still rare at the time. Since then, it has risen in status as a legitimate American opera while diminishing as a legitimate piece of African-American theater, in large part due to charges of insensitivity in its romanticizing portrayal of poor African-Americans. In collaboration with Doug Peck (Caroline, or Change) and resident artist Ron OJ Parson, we will address the checkered past of Porgy and Bess and return to the original intentions of the authors to create a “true serious picture” of the inhabitants of Catfish Row. A longstanding Everest in my mind, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is a new and exhilarating challenge for me as a director.

It’s time now for me to disappear back into technical rehearsals for The Illusion (opening March 11), but I hope you’ll join me for all five of next season’s plays by becoming a subscriber to Court Theatre. It’s the best and cheapest way to get the most out of what Court has to offer. Until then, see you at the theater!

Check out the Allegory of the Cave in Allan Bloom’s translation below, and be sure to check back for more updates as we go into Technical rehearsals this weekend!

An array of lanterns congregates in the lobby, waiting to be hung.

The iconic table and chair from The Year of Magical Thinking still sits in the back of the house, now demoted to a work bench for our electricians.

Often spotting in the theater during construction time: the shop gnome.

Tony Kushner’s Adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique was first performed as a reading at the New York Theater Workshop in 1988, and received its premiere at the Hartford Stage Company in 1989. It has since been popular in theatres across the country, and gained international notice following Kushner’s rise to fame with the success of Angels in America in 1993-94.

Features of the two initial productions neatly illustrate the common concerns of many productions of this play: the desire to create a stage environment suitable to the conjuring of illusion, and the need to work through the complex transhistorical resonances between Kushner, Corneille, and their works.

The New York Theater Workshop performance took place in front of a set consisting of perspective drawings of classical pillars.   This can be read as a comment on illusion—a sort of visual pun playing on the use of forced perspective in stage design that pithily suggests theatrical distortion. But the design choice also contains a statement on the mode of adaptation used in the work itself, insofar as Kushner makes a classic play present on stage in a mediated form—he is working, the stage suggests, from Corneille’s design if not always from his realization of that design.

Legend has it that the Hartford production was more overtly haunted by Corneille. As Sylviane Gold describes in the New York Times, the production was beset by technical difficulties until Kushner and director Mark Lamos decided to reprint the program to say not “The Illusion by Tony Kushner, based on a play by Pierre Corneille” but “The Illusion by Pierre Corneille, freely adapted by Tony Kushner.” All the technical glitches stopped on cue, save for one: Kushner’s name was mysteriously wiped from the marquee on the night before the show opened. The play continues to be performed and published under this revised heading, lest the original author return to seek his due. Kushner, perhaps in light of this experience, told the Times that after he is dead his plays are “fair game” for those who might wish to adapt his work as he adapted Corneille’s.

Continue reading »

For Court Theatre’s Illusion, scenic designer Collette Pollard has rendered the entirety of Court’s auditorium a cavern (our stage is, after all, built mostly below ground level). Here’s a scale model of the set looking down from house right.

Alcandre’s illusions are conjured on top of what we’ve come to call “the slab” in rehearsal. Alcandre and Pridamant orbit around the slab watching visions from the life of Pridamant’s long-lost son.  Beneath the slab lie a collection of moving gears and cogs that constitute the mechanical magic of Alcandre’s cave. Here’s a closer angle of the set model:

The slab also has a few tricks up its sleeve that will be revealed during the show. It was inspired by a piece of kinetic sculpture by Arthur Ganson called “Thinking Chair” that Collette encountered in Austria, and pictured below:

Finally, here’s the progress of our carpenters, working against a tight deadline:

THE ILLUSION runs March 11 - April 11 at Court Theatre.

The first rehearsal was fantastic.  The rehearsal hall was packed with members of the cast, design team, Court Staff, board members, and students of a remarkably unique class being taught at the University this quarter.  (More on that later.)

After introductions and design presentations, like the costume designs Drew posted below, we got right down into reading.  Let me say, this cast is fantastic, and the show is complicated and rich. Tony Kushner’s adaptation is an adaptation in the strongest sense.  He has taken the outline and some themes from Corneille’s original and has created an entirely new piece informed and inspired by another but possessing a complete life of its own. 

Appropriately for any play named The Illusion, the show is full of all sorts of delightful visual tricks that Charlie and our amazing band of designers have cooked up, but what’s consistently exciting about the piece is the extent to which these delights are balanced with a play full of poetry and ideas, rooted in the past, but in dialogue with the present.  It’s a real thrill to be a part of this show, keep checking back here for more updates throughout our process!