http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0405310106may31,1,2243999.story

THEATER REVIEW

`Cyrano' shuns tradition with panache

By Michael Phillips
Tribune theater critic

May 31, 2004

More than any other production this year, the Court Theatre/Redmoon Theater's "Cyrano" gives Chicago audiences a richly provocative interpretation of a classic, alive and challenging on many levels.

This is not your stuffy textbook swordsman from Bergerac. Rather, directors Jim Lasko and Charles Newell treat the 1897 epic of romantic masochism, in which beast helps beauty woo another beauty, as a mysterious pageant unfolding inside Cyrano's brain.

For some, the results--a stripped-down text, featuring reordered and repeated sequences and a visual environment resembling a 19th Century puppet show gone mad--may go too far. Certainly Lasko, Redmoon's artistic director, and Court head Newell, risk some perplexing narrative in their take on the Edmond Rostand warhorse.

Yet if you swing with it, this defiantly non-traditional "Cyrano," not quite two hours long--an hour shorter than traditional versions--rewards you with poetic grace notes accomplishing a rare magic. The play's final word, "panache," captures and explains the hero's appeal in two syllables. This tale, retold by two Chicago theaters, proves that Cyrano can retain his essential dash while being taken down some exotic alleyways.

"Cyrano" begins near the end, and then unfolds as a flashback. An offstage event, in which an adversary deals Cyrano a fatal blow with a log, is depicted in the opening moments. (The log swings down on a wired from above the stage.) Cyrano relives what has brought him to this point in life.

In Stephanie Nelson's gloriously strange scenic design, the indigo walls depicting a moonlit sky open up to reveal the inner workings of a scrambled mind. Three enormous wheels turn at various times, setting into motion a contraption of pulleys and ropes and a four-tiered series of platforms. The stage suggests a theater where several dramas are unfolding at once.

The text--delivered by way of Mickle Maher's scrappy, effective rhyming verse--is boiled down to the central triangle. Cyrano, played with expressive ardor and pleasing technique by Allen Gilmore, loves his cousin, Roxane (Chaon Cross, a seasoned ingenue who gets better with each role). Roxane's infatuation with the handsome Gascony cadet Christian (Jay Whittaker, comic, callow and touching in shrewd measures) owes everything to Cyrano's love letters, written on behalf of the eloquence-free Christian.

In this eight-actor version of "Cyrano," Redmoon's trademark puppets and mechanical objects fill in all manner of 17th Century French trappings. When Cyrano and Christian woo Roxane in tandem, one actor puts one arm in the left-hand sleeve of a Christian puppet, while the other actor fills the right. It's a simple and achingly lovely creation.

When Cyrano disrupts a performance at the Hotel de Bourgogne, we don't see actors portraying astonished patrons; we see instead three rows of hats turning this way and that. The siege of Arras is realized by disembodied boots marching in tandem. From Scott Pondrom's props and objects to Shoshanna Utchenik's puppets, from Tatjana Radisic's ornately classy costumes to Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman's incomparably evocative soundscape, this design work represents the best this town has to offer.

The production carries with it a few longueurs. The villain De Guiche's lurking presence is less effectively cryptic than, well, just cryptic (and Lance Stuart Baker never seems entirely at home in period costume). The scenes in the Poet's Bakery are a bit vaguely defined, the clearer of the two--the one with the big rolling pin and heart cookies--comes second, rather than first. Also, there's a surprisingly conventional finale, laden with the protracted pathos endemic to most Cyrano death scenes. (It's Gilmore's only real misstep.)

Small matters. The wooing scenes alone are worth the admission price. They work so beautifullythat you're caught anew in a very old setup. Amid the densely textured scenic conception--which does have the disadvantage of confining the actors upstage much of the time--the actors manage to make themselves known. Gilmore, Cross and Whittaker would shine in most any production.

Besides being the most interesting "Cyrano" I've seen, this one is the only one to dig inside all that well-loved romanticism and locate some theatrical poetry to call its own.

"Cyrano"

When: Through June 27

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Tickets: $35-$50 at 773-753-4472

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune