Storefront Rebellion

If we're the theater capital, let's start acting like it.

The second line of Chris Jones's two-line Theater Loop post this morning, about the latest extension of David Cromer's outstanding A Streetcar Named Desire at Writers' Theatre (my review here), is quite the tease: "And given the critical acclaim enjoyed by the show, a remount somewhere other than Glencoe would hardly be a surprise."

Now maybe he meant a transfer into the Chicago city limits, which would be terrific. But given Chris's predilection for New York transfers of Chicago work—and Saturday's glowing review by Charles Isherwood of the New York Times—that's where my mind went. And I panicked.

Is growing allowed in Chicago's indie culture?

This is a quickie, since I'm supposed to be writing a review, but I just read Michael Miner's Reader piece on the feminist Venus magazine's new direction. This quote, from Venus founder Amy Schroeder, really struck me, with an assist from Ethan Stanislawski, whose tweet led me to the article. ("Sarah" is Venus's new owner.)

Am I supposed to be on the defensive, or is Sarah supposed to be on the defensive for setting big goals? Or is Venus supposed to be this small magazine that doesn't get beyond a certain point? I live in New York now, and one of the things I think about is Chicago does a really great job of helping indie projects take off, but sometimes it's hard to progress beyond a certain point. Not that there aren't a number of resources there, but there's a great sense of staying indie—and if you try to move beyond a certain point, people don't like you anymore.

Given the allergic reaction some folks in the theatrosphere and the theater twitterverse have to the slightest mention of marketing, audience development or money in general, this pricked up my ears. What say you, folks? Does this attitude apply in the storefront scene in Chicago? Does it not? Is Schroeder's take wrong? Discuss.

First play.

I spent a long weekend in New York last week, binging on plays. I saw a mix of Broadway and (more) Off Broadway, with no particular agenda; I saw Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre, just to see how it translated after I'd seen it twice at the Chopin. I caught a gaggle of gay plays simply because they were all running at the same time—when I read Patrick Healy's NYT story on Monday, I was surprised to discover I'd just accidentally seen three of the mentioned plays in 36 hours. I didn't see everything I would've liked—with more time or in different circumstances I might have gone for McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane or the current Radiohole offering.

I've been asked repeatedly since my return last week what was the best thing I saw? The truth is I liked all five shows I took in (I'm rarely so lucky), but if pressed I have to say the most satisfying show I saw was MCC's production of The Pride, the lovely, challenging British import by Alexi Kaye Campbell that took a complex assessment of the gay experience over a 50-year span.

And I keep coming back to a line from Campbell's Playbill bio, as it relates to that whole Outrageous Fortune business (remember two months ago when I promised we were going to talk about that?).

It's this that I can't seem to get past:

Alexi Kaye Campbell…became an actor and worked extensively in theatre, film and television…His first play, The Pride, was on at the Royal Court Theatre in London in November 2008 for which he received the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright and the John Whiting Award for Best Play.

His first play…was on at the Royal Court. Now I don't know a lot about Campbell, and as this is a blog post intended to stoke a conversation that gets back to Outrageous Fortune rather than being the last word, I'm not going to do a lot of research right now. But, grain of salt, I do know his partner Dominic Cooke is the current AD at the Royal Court.

Setting that aside for a moment, though, and for the sake of argument, can you imagine a major American institution saying to a playwright, "Oh, this is your first play? We like it, let's produce it!" rather than submitting them to the commission/development/workshop cycle?

The closest American analogue I can think of right now is former actor Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose The Brothers Size was picked up by the Public before he'd finished his Yale M.F.A. and whose Brother/Sister Plays cycle is currently running at Steppenwolf.

Keeping in mind that I was blown away by both McCraney's tryptych at Steppenwolf and by Campbell's play at the Lortel, I welcome your comments about their quick trajectories and the slower journeys that most new playwrights face, and how the different approaches in the U.S. and the U.K. affect them.

On Outrageous Fortune

I'm still in the process of reading the TDF study; since it published on December 22 (seriously?! who does that?), my copy arrived at the office during our holiday break and I didn't lay hands on it till Monday. But in reading it, along with all the discussion that's been going lately on about the issues it covers (whether explicitly linked to the book or not; I'm thinking back at least to the Twitterpalooza that surrounded last month's Defining Diversity convening at Arena Stage), my mindgrapes are swirling with all sorts of strong and often conflicting ideas and emotions. I don't think I can quite make sense of it all yet, and I'm feeling a bit defeated tonight by a rough day/week, but I just wanted to say for the record:

We're gonna talk about this.

As you were.

(P.S. to any New Yorkers reading this: You lucky so-and-sos, you get to see Chad Deity.)

2009: The plays I didn't review

I rode the Red Line home a couple of weeks ago with my friend and colleague Ben Kenigsberg, one of TOC's film critics. We had both stayed late on a Friday night working on our 2009 best-of lists. Ben mentioned that he'd spent quite a bit of time over the previous week or two re-watching his potential picks. Man, I thought, What a luxury. There are so many plays I saw this year that I wanted to see a second time but couldn't—Chicago's a town of limited runs, and too many storefront shows in particular only perform Friday through Sunday and in the same "slots" in the season.

I made note tonight in a Twitter/Facebook message that my final count of plays seen in 2009 was 146 (I first said 145 but revised up when I realized I'd missed one); Dianna Driscoll inquired on Facebook about how many of those I saw for pleasure versus the number I reviewed. The question's a bit more complicated than that—I saw some shows for TOC purposes that I didn't review and also didn't enjoy—but figuring out how many shows I saw but not for review purposes still strikes me as somewhat interesting. The chronological list of 42 shows is after the jump. (For the record, I only managed to make return visits to five shows this year: About Face's Stupid Kids, Strawdog's Red Noses, the Annoyance's Sodomites!!!, Caffeine's Under Milk Wood and Million Dollar Quartet, which I first saw in 2008.)

Filler

Oh, hey. I haven't forgotten you. I'm still here, though I'm definitely more there and there right now.

I actually have a post percolating in my head for here that came to me over the weekend; the only question is when to find time to write it. Guess I just wanted to pop in and say I haven't forgotten this place.

In my other few seconds of spare time this week, I'm trying to decide what to be for Halloween. Any ideas?

Chicago Theater 101 in the Guardian

Last Wednesday, I got a call from an editor at the Guardian asking if I'd be interested in contributing a post about Chicago theater to their Stage blog. They were looking for a quick turnaround in a week that was already very busy here; factoring in the time difference, I had to dash this thing off over a couple of very late nights.

It did feel a little odd to me that I ended up using our current New York exports as a way in, especially given what I'd just written here. But for an audience at the Guardian that has up to now only been reading about theater in London and New York, it seemed like a convenient introduction to why they need to keep up with Chicago theater as well. I think I made a pretty good case. This may or may not become an ongoing thing; let me know what you think.

The Only Thing Wrong With Chicago Theater

My buddy Nate posted a note on Facebook tonight about what he calls "The Only Thing Wrong With Chicago Theater." I won't link to it, since I don't know if his or your Facebook settings would allow you to read it, but the gist is this: Nate's remarkably young to have accomplished as much as he has in the theater, but he's worked on shows in a number of cities around the U.S., in a number of capacities, and on both commercial and non-profit productions. He's worked in Chicago on the independent commercial production of Gutenberg! The Musical!, the tour of Xanadu and on several productions by the local, non-profit company The New Colony (which is also run by folks I consider friends).

Nate's beef is against what he sees as a bias in the Chicago theater community against commercial theater producers, a job title that's one of (the many) credits he's working toward putting on his resume. To quote briefly:

I love Chicago, and Chicago theatre. I love (and have worked with) storefront theatres (when the shows are done well (companies who do nothing but rip off bad movies ILLEGALLY is not what I call done well).

What do I hate? Storefront elitism and attitude that commercial theatre is the enemy. Please. If anything commercial theatre (everything from Broadway In Chicago down to mid-sized shows that play the Mercury, Drury Lane, Royal George, etc) bring people in and puts Chicago on "the map" as a theatre city, opening the entire community up for more exposure. We're all (storefront, commercial, non profit, whatever) in the same community. Commercial Theatre is not the enemy.

I'd be interested to know what kind of criticisms he's been hearing on his end about commercial theater. I don't get the sense that there's a bias in the Chicago theater community against commercial theater per se, apart from the character that writes Don Hall's blog (no offense meant, Don, but I think of the "Don Hall" that writes Angry White Guy the same way I think of the "Stephen Colbert" who appears on The Colbert Report). For instance, I haven't heard of any local animus towards Million Dollar Quartet in the year or so it's been running here.

I think—and this is admittedly from my limited perspective both as a journalist looking in from the outside and as someone who's only been in Chicago for a little under a decade—that what bias exists against, say, Wicked and Jersey Boys is about the perception that the gorillas in the room get disproportionate attention from major tastemakers, from the Mayor's office to the Tribune Company. (This recent conversation about why the Tribune-owned ChicagoNow's theater blog is branded and run by major Tribune advertiser Broadway in Chicago, for instance, seems to me like a valid topic of discussion.)

I want to be clear about this: I do not think Broadway in Chicago is an inherently evil corporation, nor do I think exporting our work to New York is inherently bad. National media attention for Broadway productions of work by Keith Huff or the cast of Superior Donuts can do us good, and since I can't get to New York as often as I'd like I'm glad to get the tours of Spring Awakening and In the Heights, the pre-Broadway run of The Addams Family and a sit-down run of Billy Elliot. I love storefront theater—hence the title I gave this blog a few years back—but I love big commercial theater when it's good, too. Nor do I equate financial success, or at least achieving the financial solvency to pay artists a living wage, with selling out artistically.

But I do think that too often our local government and local media are going about it the wrong way. For the last few decades, at least, since the rise of Steppenwolf, Chicago's theatrical identity has been tied up in our homegrown, non-profit theaters. Rather than getting our validation from either sending our own work to New York to be patted on the head with cash and prizes, or from becoming an outpost for franchises of works originated there, we should be focusing on making Chicago a theater destination on its own, equal but separate from New York. Come see theater here not because it's a shorter drive from Columbus to see Jersey Boys, but because you can see Tracy Letts's follow-up to August: Osage County and Josh Schmidt's newest musical.

Instead of writing reviews saying that the next Steppenwolf production should go to Broadway, we can write reviews that say if you want to see the next play by Marisa Wegrzyn or Steve Spencer or Emily Schwartz or Justin Palmer, you have to come to Chicago, whether it's a nonprofit production or a commercial one. And you can see Billy Elliot while you're at it. And maybe that's the way to break this branch of our Second City complex.

Anyway. I started writing all of this as a response to Nate's Facebook note, before I realized I really wanted to hear what all of you might have to say. So please, pile on.

Identity Jeffed

I should be writing my Under Milk Wood review right now, but just wanted to quickly acknowledge that the Equity Jeff Award nominations were announced tonight. You can read the full list at the Jeffs' site or at the TOC Blog, where you'll also find the latest helping of They Wuz Robbed. I considered switching up the format of TOC's response, but people seem to enjoy TWR—it's a true fact that at least one person has said they'd prefer a TWR mention to the actual nomination.

I was rushed in putting the post together today, and I'm already thinking of more I could have included: What about James Schuett's Tempest costumes? Hanna Dworkin for Picnic? How does it make sense that Ensemble is the sole nod for Scenes from the Big Picture? And I'll keep coming up with more. But I mean it when I say that the Jeff committee got a lot of things right this time around. I personally missed some of the most-nominated shows (Drury Lane's Miss Saigon, TimeLine's Not Enough Air), but I'm glad to note the committee didn't nominate much from shows that I did see and had lukewarm feelings about.

And more importantly, they made a number of good calls that I might not have expected: A double nomination for Tanya Saracho, Jake Cohen for Steppenwolf's Up, Taylor Mac for solo performance, Levi Kreis for Million Dollar Quartet, Spencer Kayden as the only acting nom for Don't Dress for Dinner. (And I'll just say that it's…interesting, if not perhaps a little cruel, for them to nominate one of the kids who played Noah in Caroline, or Change and not the other. Suddenly the Billy Elliot compromise makes more sense to me.)

Your thoughts are welcome, either here or at TOC (though it might make the most sense to consolidate the discussion over there).

Critics aren't obligated to support theater we don't like.

I'm reading with some fascination the comment debate on Chris Jones's review of Route 66's High Fidelity, which opened Monday night. I was there, but I'm not reviewing the show for TOC, so I'll leave my own opinions of the show aside until John Beer's review hits on Monday. But the bedrock of the comment by "allison" that kicked off the conversation, and some of the comments that follow, deal in what I consider to be fallacies about a critic's job description; they also address some of what I talked about in my post here earlier this week. Not that he needs it from me, but I feel compelled to defend Chris a bit.

Allison says:

chris, theatre in this country is suffering right now. you are a chicago theatre critic. by your own words "america's hottest theatre city." you are supposed to support and encourage theatre in this town.

Bullshit.