Re(Appearing) Act
CHICAGO: Theatrical common sense dictates that a company’s first show is often heavy on enthusiasm but chock full of rookie misfires. That wasn’t the case for the House Theatre of Chicago’s Death and Harry Houdini, which bowed as the group’s first production 10 years ago. “It was a nice little hit,” artistic director Nathan Allen says, with Midwestern modesty. In 2001, Allen and his cohorts were fresh out of college and eager to play around with the idea of magic, because Dennis Watkins, a company member, came from a family of professional magicians. “An actual family of magicians,” Allen emphasizes. Magic would allow the fledgling group to explore vaudeville, silent film, stage illusion and various other kinds of theatre spectacle that piqued their interest.
The show had a six-week sold-out run and attracted the attention of such Windy City heavy-hitters as the Lookingglass Theatre Company’s then artistic director Laura Eason. “She called us the day after she saw the show to welcome us to the city. The Lookingglass absorbed us into the family. We were an ensemble—one is born every day in Chicago,” Allen jokes.
The group’s next show, The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan, was an even bigger hit and ran for six months. Since so many fewer people had seen Houdini, compared to Pan, House decided to remount it in 2003. “The first time we did Houdini, no one would let a bunch of 22-year-olds use a giant water tank in a garage space—so we used puppets,” Allen says. By the time House presented the second Houdini, the group had gained enough street cred for Watkins to do Houdini’s famous water-torture trick the way they wanted.
Now, in celebration of 10 years, House will present Houdini for a third time: first at Chicago’s Chopin Downstairs Theatre through March 11 and then at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, April 26-May 20. “It’s a way of celebrating and looking back at how far we’ve come,” declares Allen, adding that it doesn’t feel quite like a remount. “This time we’re really looking at the differences between biography and mythology—I find the story even more moving now,” he says.
Moreover, the group has honed in on its aesthetic of creating ensemble-driven work with a focus on classical stories. “A lot of the original members are still together,” Allen attests, “only now we’re in our thirties. We’ve gotten married and started having babies. The art-making is more interesting because we’ve had more life experiences.”
—Eliza Bent
An Ode to the Earth
KANSAS CITY, MO.: In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore called global warming a “moral issue.” Steve Cosson, artistic director of New York-based theatre company the Civilians, is inclined to agree with that sentiment. “Climate change and our relationship to the environment is arguably the greatest threat to humankind,” he asserts. “It is the thing that can take us down.”
His newest play tackles that environmental threat. The Great Immensity—the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant—premieres at Kansas City Repertory Theatre this month and runs through March 18.
The play follows its main character Phyllis as she searches for her missing sister, in a journey stretching from the Panama Canal to arctic Canada. En route, she also uncovers a plot surrounding the international climate summit in Auckland, New Zealand (a stand-in for the real-life U.N. Climate Change Conference).
Phyllis’s journey is based on truth. To research Immensity, Cosson and composer Michael Friedman took trips to Barro Colorado Island (in the center of the Panama Canal) and Churchill, Canada (“the polar bear capital of the world,” according to Cosson). At both destinations, they interviewed scientists studying the effects of global warming, including the melting of the polar ice caps in Churchill.
That was how Friedman found inspiration for the play’s songs, which are used to find the emotional resonance in certain environmental issues, such as animal extinction. “There’s a jaunty barber-shop song about the last days of the passenger pigeon,” he says, referring to a bird that went extinct in the early 20th century. “What would it be like to be the last of your species in the whole world with no one to love?”
Trying to find a relatable human element within global warming, and therefore bringing home the gravity of the situation, is the central goal of Immensity. And for those wanting more info, www.thegreatimmensity.org contains video interviews with scientists and informative blog posts.
“Ultimately, it is a play about people,” Cosson explains. “What we’re really exploring is us and our relationships to these problems. What could be done to change the hearts and minds of the people in our society, to actually know what is happening and respond to it?”
—Diep Tran
Baked ‘Goods’
NEW HAVEN, CONN.: Yale playwriting department chair Paula Vogel calls them “bake-offs”: 48-hour writing frenzies that help trump self-censorship and inspire bleary-eyed creativity. “Possession” was the spooky theme of one such exercise that motivated former student Christina Anderson to pen a metaphysical ensemble drama, Good Goods, now premiering at Yale Repertory Theatre through Feb. 25. “In a lot of ways I feel like I’m going home to put on a play,” says Anderson, whose work has been produced at Playwrights Horizons, American Conservatory Theater and Penumbra Theatre. Anderson situates Good Goods in the “timelessness” that she sees in many Southern cities, and calls her setting “the side pocket of America.” As director Tina Landau tackles this mysterious collage of voodoo, history and survival, the adventuresome Anderson wonders how far audiences will follow her: “Will logic hold them back?”
—Harrison Hill
A Camp-Free ‘Carrie’?
NEW YORK CITY: Canadian-born director Stafford Arima can trace the exact start of his Carrie fascination: a Saturday matinee of the notoriously short-lived Broadway musical on April 30, 1988, when he was 19 years old. But it wasn’t until 20 years later, after Arima had staged the Off-Broadway hit Altar Boyz and Ragtime on London’s West End, that he took another look at Carrie. What he discovered was the universal story of an outcast who feels incomprehensible, even to herself. “We’re all Carrie,” Arima says. “We all know what it’s felt like to be an outsider.”
Carrie was certainly an outsider on Broadway, where its 21-performance run became the stuff of legend. With book by Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted the 1974 novel by Stephen King for the 1976 Brian DePalma film), music by Michael Gore and lyrics by Dean Pitchford, Carrie premiered replete with lasers, pyrotechnics and buckets of pig blood, much to the derision of critics. That didn’t stop a cult following of fans from returning repeatedly to revel in the unintended camp.
MCC Theater’s current production, playing through March 25, isn’t just its first New York revival; it’s the musical’s first revival anywhere. Actually, Arima shies away from the word “revival,” preferring to call it a “reimagining,” as he’s worked with the original creators to reshape it over two years of development. Starring Molly Ranson as Carrie and Marin Mazzie as her domineering, misogynistic and evangelical mother, Carrie will incorporate new songs and scenes, staged with the director’s characteristic minimal approach.
So he’ll be playing it straight? “The core of Carrie was a great story and a very exciting score, and those elements have not changed,” Arima assures. “We’re not shying away from the darkness of the material, but we’re doing it in a different way from the campy Broadway version.”
—Julie Haverkate
A Kafkaesque Love Story
DALLAS: When a professor at a community college with delusions of grandeur begins delivering lectures a tad too arcane for the tastes of his supervisors, he gets fired. So starts Len Jenkin’s latest play Time in Kafka, which bows at Dallas’s Undermain Theatre Feb. 15–March 17. Jenkin describes the play as a “part fairy tale, part time-travel love story.”
Broke and with a baby on the way, Professor Spellman dreams he’s visited by Franz Kafka. Kafka tells Spellman about a novel he wrote in 1913 while visiting a spa in northern Italy. “Kafka actually did go to this spa,” Jenkin says. “So did Thomas Mann and Rudolf Steiner. Kafka was a bit of a hypochondriac,” he adds. Kafka tells Spellman that he left the novel at the spa and never returned. The next day, Spellman boards a plane bound for Italy in search of the Hartungen Clinic near Lake Garda. There he meets a cast of characters that includes a Russian countess, a doctor, an old general, various hustlers and a harlot—and slowly realizes he has traveled back in time. Meanwhile, Spellman’s pregnant wife has reported her husband missing and is having Italian authorities dredge Lake Garda. Spellman uses his cell phone one last time to let his wife know how to find him, and she sets out on a time-traveling hunt.
“There are strange tales that get told and a series of philosophical conversations,” says Jenkin, who cites Kafka’s diaries and Kafka criticism by Guy Davenport as informative. Black-and-white projections by longtime-collaborator John Arnone will pepper the stage. When asked if the play is Kafkaesque, Jenkin responds, “I suppose it’d have to be!”
—Eliza Bent
I’ll Meet You in the Deep, Dark Woods
SAN FRANCISCO: Paige Rogers couldn’t believe her eyes and ears. There she was at a UCLA Live performance by the fabled experimental Polish troupe Teatr ZAR—and suddenly, unexpectedly, all her preconceptions about storytelling in the theatre were evaporating into thin air. Plot? Character? Text? No, she realized, sometimes all you need to tell a story are the barest of essentials: the actors’ bodies and voices. Movement and song.
For Rogers—co-founder (with her director husband Rob Melrose) of San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater—this was an epiphany that wasn’t going to waste. From the moment of her first encounter with ZAR, she knew she wanted to create an original theatre piece utilizing the Grotowski-derived process that seemed to imbue ZAR’s work with such elemental power. But, Rogers knew, ZAR worked for years to perfect each of its performances. “How in the heck are we even going to simulate this kind of developmental process in the amount of time we have to prepare productions?” she asked herself.
Nearly five years later, Rogers has an answer: Just do it, one step at a time. Resident playwright Eugenie Chan created a nonlinear text based on improvisations inspired by an ancient Estonian fairy tale—about a mysterious, haunted forest known as Tontlawald—that Rogers’s son had encountered in elementary school. Co-director Annie Paladino and choreographer Laura Arrington came on board to work with an ensemble of actors. The music (which Rogers felt should be American, in the same way that ZAR’s music is Eastern European) was cobbled together from sources that included Rogers’s own jazz-pro grandparents. When ZAR returned to the U.S. on tour last May, four of its members (including artistic director Jarosław Fret) joined Rogers and her eight-member Tontlawald cast for a revelatory workshop.
Now Tontlawald is ready for its debut production, Feb. 17-March 11. The story—of a traumatized girl who discovers what Rogers called a “Freudian representation of herself” when she’s swallowed up by the magical forest (the tale is available on www.cuttingball.com)—may be twisty and complicated, but its method is elemental: bodies and voices, movement and song.
—Jim O’Quinn
Almanac
90 Years Ago (1922)
The Curran Theatre opens in San Francisco. It will both produce and present work; early tenants include the Theatre Guild and the Civic Light Opera. The Broadway-style house will also stand in for a New York theatre during shooting of the classic film All About Eve.
50 Years Ago (1962)
Jerome Robbins directs the fancifully titled Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad at Off Broadway’s Phoenix Repertory Theatre. The downtown hit by Arthur Kopit features Jo Van Fleet, Austin Pendleton and Barbara Harris. A Broadway transfer and a film adaptation will follow.
30 Years Ago (1982)
Polish the flatware: A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room opens Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. The collage of WASP decline will go on to run for 583 performances, prompting Don Shewey of the Village Voice to pen an essay called, “Can Playwrights Horizons Survive Success?”
20 Years Ago (1992)
After a five-year campaign, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis announces $26,114,345 in pledges—at the time, the highest amount ever raised by an American theatre.
