Storefront Rebellion

Reading assignments.

Last week I was invited to participate in a forum for a graduate seminar at Columbia College. The class was for Master's students in the arts and media management program, and they wanted me to represent the "working critic." I naturally brought a copy of the cover story we did last month on the Internet's effect on criticism, for which I led a critics' roundtable discussion, to reference in my part of the talk. I was pleased and a little more than astounded to find that not only had another of the panel speakers brought the same issue of TOC, without knowing that I would be there with him, but that the class's instructors had put up part of the cover package on the class website as assigned reading. I also found out that most of the students follow the magazine pretty closely. Most remarkably, one of the students in the section I was participating in was doing a project comparing the criticism of the Tribune's Chris Jones with, um, me. Wow.

I know that pointing you to Time Out content is not the most scintillating of blog content, but I'm on my way to Arkansas for the weekend to celebrate my beautiful sister's wedding, and I want to leave you with something to read. And there's plenty of new material at TOC this week.

I wrote my first long-form review in this week's issue, of Next's American Dream Songbook. It's a really interesting project, and worth seeing just for the first half, Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, which is beautifully rendered. The five new songs by modern composers each have their merits and their drawbacks, and as a compilation they're very interesting. But I was particularly bothered by the race and gender imbalance, as referenced in the last paragraph of my review. It's possible that Next tried to find female and/or non-white composers to participate and couldn't, but I'm really bugged by the fact that Suzan-Lori Parks is the only woman invoked in the dozen or so playwrights pictured on the theater's walls as authors of the American Dream. Where's Lorraine Hansberry? Lillian Hellman? Heck, where's Wendy Wasserstein? Sure, it might be easy for some to write off Wasserstein as a commercial playwright, but if her portraits of the "New Woman" trying to negotiate a balance among career, romance and family in the 1970s and ‘80s aren't those decades' version of the American Dream, I don't know what is.

Also in this week's issue, my reviews of WildClaw Theatre's The Great God Pan, La Costa Theatre's Stuck and seven other new shows can all be found here.

We've had plenty of content on the TOC Blog this week as well, including my less-than-pleased reaction to Broadway in Chicago's announcement that Jersey Boys is becoming a sit-down production, and Christopher Piatt's rundown of the secretive Orgie Awards Thursday morning (read it, you might have gotten an award without even knowing it). Meanwhile, our Out There reporter Jake Malooley filed a balanced report on blog complaints from numerous sources about financial malfeasance at the Bailiwick.

All of that, along with the compelling content from other theater bloggers (I know I'll be checking in Saturday to see if I'm named in Tony's "Critiquing the Critics" series) ought to keep you occupied. I'll be back next week.

Review day, catching up

New reviews up at TOC's Theater site, a day later than usual due to the Presidents' Day holiday yesterday, include my own of ATC's Augusta and Writers' Theatre's As You Like It.

Since I failed to point to them last week, my reviews in that issue were of BackStage's How I Learned to Drive, Victory Gardens' A Big Blue Nail and Botanic Garden at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse. And as Tony points out, I also had a review in the Kids section of Adventure Stage Chicago's The Cay.

Careful readers will note that I've accidentally been on the Celebrity Female Directors beat, having reviewed plays helmed by Olympia Dukakis (who Christopher interviewed here) and erstwhile SNL cast member Nora Dunn. If only I could have gone to New York for the Kathleen Turner–directed revival of Crimes of the Heart, the loop would be complete. (Both Dukakis and Dunn are strengthening ties with Chicago's theater, with Dunn establishing residency here and expressing her desire to work as a director and Dukakis tentatively signing on to perform at American Theater Company next season.)

Review day updates

New reviews at TOC: Fatboy, Dolly West's Kitchen and 1776. Read the rest of the reviews from Christopher, Novid and Brian here.

That TOC blog post about the Jeffs that I pointed to in my last post erupted into a real shitstorm today. As of this writing, 14 comments, and it was one of the most requested pages on the site today. (And I got a lot of incoming clicks on my own post from various webmails, so at least one of you out there is mailing it around.) So far the defenders of non-Equity theater—many of them theater artists, many of them designers declaring that they're members of their own unions and work on both sides of the Equity divide—are outnumbering the non-Equity bashers nearly 2-to-1, but the bashers will brook no arguments. With statements like "Julie is completely correct. The example she chose (Goodman/Lifeline) is based on sound judgement and is unarguable," well, it starts to feel like you're debating gay marriage with Fred Phelps. I beg of you, non-Equity bashers, tell me who bought you that Hater-ade you're drinking?

In happier traffic news, I got to chatting with a young playwright on the bus Saturday after we'd both attended the panel on female playwrights at Chicago Dramatists that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. (I hope to have some notes from the panel up on the TOC Blog tomorrow.) Eventually I asked her how she'd found out about the panel: was it in TOC's listings, the Reader, maybe she's on Chicago Dramatists' mailing list—this is naturally something that interests me.

She thought for a second, and said, "Oh, you know, I saw it on Storefront Rebellion. Do you know that blog?"

Awesome. And hi, Jenny.

Time Out Chicago activity ahoy!

New reviews up at TOC: mine of About Face's The Little Dog Laughed, Court Theatre's Titus Andronicus, and Black Sheep's The End, Christopher's of Goodman's Shining City, Profiles's This is How it Goes, and Lookingglass's Hephaestus, plus Megan's review of Circle's Boy and Kay's of City Lit's Twelfth Night. Check the TOC Theater section tomorrow afternoon for my interview with new American Theater Company artistic director P.J. Paparelli about his plans for ATC and Raven Theatre's Chicago debut this weekend of his play columbinus. (The blood-soaked Fatboy review won't show up until next week.)

I also wanted to note that, after a long fallow period due to, well, nothing really happening in Chicago theater in the early weeks of January, we're back with a vengeance on the TOC theater blog, with posts about the Legally Blonde reality casting show, a tale of two Our Towns, and the possible multiplicity of Steppenwolf Tony nominations. Keep an eye on it.

Say what you mean

This afternoon, I got an email from my friend Jeremy saying, "I'm happy to see that you guys finally updated your blog."

Believe me when I say we've been trying to. We spent a big chunk of last week trying to find something worth blogging about so that August: Osage County's Broadway opening could move down the list. Two weeks after the fact, it was starting to seem like old news (though what might be the final print word, Hilton Als's less than glowing New Yorker review, just showed up online today). But it's a slow time for new openings, and just the same as I practice here, we only post on the TOC blog when we have something to say. This morning we finally found inspiration.

This weekend, I (obviously) saw Actors Workshop's Three Hotels (review here) and the closing performance of Egan Reich's The Most Liquid Currency in the World, in a very well-acted world premiere by Pine Box Theatre, the company I wrote about here.

I took tonight off to watch the incredibly disappointing Bears game with the guys (and honorary guy Julie); I'm taking tomorrow night off as well before spending three nights in a row at the theater; I'll then head off for several restful days in the theater-free hinterlands (a.k.a. Northwest Arkansas), where I'll relax with the family and hopefully catch up on some of the Oscar season's movies I haven't yet seen—I'm thinking if my Dylan-fan dad hasn't seen I'm Not There yet, and assuming it's actually playing in the land of multiplexes, I'll take him to see it. It'll be a nice rest before the plays start opening again in January.

If I don't post again before then, happy holidays, y'all.

Quick, look over there!

Don't forget, folks, that just because I haven't posted here for a bit doesn't mean I'm not blogging about theater. If you're not reading the TOC blog, you'll miss my thoughts on how the Broadway strike could affect Chicago and my picket-line phone call from Fran Guinan. I also blogged there last week about BoHo's arrangement to remount its Songs for a New World, and Christopher mused about the Side Project's addition of text messaging to its preshow announcement of things to please not do.

This permalink will give you just the theater-related blog posts if that's all you're interested in, but you really ought to be reading the whole thing.

I used up my awesome Frank Rich post title over there.

That recap of last night's Frank Rich talk I mentioned can be found here, at the TOC blog, as can Christopher's hilarious recap of the Jeff Awards. Neither of us is sure what to make of the fact that, possibly for the first time ever, we put up two theater-related blog posts in the same morning, and neither of them got a single comment all day.

Please also go back and check out the comments on my previous post, where Kerry and another commenter both called me out on an egregious offense.

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While I'm at it, I'll point to my new review of Promethean Theatre Ensemble's The Light of Love, and all of this week's other reviews available at the TOC Theater section, as well as the thing I meant to link to last week and never got around to, the expanded version of my chat with About Face's Eric Rosen, of which a much smaller form appeared in last week's print issue. It's worth a read, if I do say so myself.

Hey New Yorkers:

Is comparing plays by women to Lifetime movies just Charles Isherwood's default these days?

To be fair, I didn't see When the Messenger is Hot when it was at Steppenwolf a couple of months back, but (correct me if I'm wrong) this is starting to seem like a pattern.

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On the positive side, Mr. Isherwood's Sunday meditation on subsidized ticket prices (notably the Signature Theater experiment) was well done, and coincided remarkably with Peter Marks's Sunday WaPo piece on similar trials in D.C. How does this apply to Chicago, I wonder? Now that I compile the theater listings for TOC, I'm well aware that many Chicago shows are available for $20 or less (we have a special listings icon that accompanies any show for which all available tickets are $20 or under). But most of the shows with this designation are listed in the "Fringe & storefront" section, the one that lists shows where the dailies fear to tread. The phenomenon that the Times and Post are talking about is higher-end theaters offering cheap-ass tickets; this is not unheard of here either—some seats for some nights of the Goodman's upcoming second-space production of The Cook are available for ten bucks.

But what both Isherwood and Marks (and others like Mr. Eisler) seem to be saying is that discount tickets on certain nights, or tickets that are made available through mailing lists or outlets like HotTix or Gold Star Events, aren't going to do the trick, since they only engage patrons that are already looking to be audience members. If the Goodman or Chicago Shakes or Broadway in Chicago were to take on a corporate sponsorship to subsidize cheap tickets, would it be worth it? If current non-theater goers could see shows at Steppenwolf for 15 bucks, would it encourage them to try storefront shows at the same price? If they saw Steppenwolf shows for 15 bucks, would they be disappointed by storefront production values?

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On another note, I am utterly mystified by the Jeff Committee this season. David's blog post today is (fair enough) indignant about The Birds non-recommendation (and again, to be fair, I haven't yet seen the Handbag show and I recuse myself on their shows because I'm friends with too many of their ensemble members). But even before David's sense of being egregiously overlooked (and really, why in the hell wasn't Caged Dames recommended?), the Jeff recommendations this Fall have left me feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. Nearly everything I've loved this season has gone unrecognized. Ape and The Busy World is Hushed were first, but since then The Magnificents, Merchant on Venice, and Songs for a New World have gone unrecognized. (Early last week there was apparently a delay in updating the Jeffs website, and I thought Remy Bumppo's Fiction had gone unrecognized as well. Sadly, I was mistaken.)

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Anyway, occasionally the Jeff committee gets things right. Like with the other shows I saw this weekend, the Chicago production of Altar Boyz and the Hypocrites' production of Desire Under the Elms. Separately, I also reviewed We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!

Dead Lunatics

New reviews up at TOC of two good shows: Teatro Luna's Lunatic(a)s and Big Theater's Dead Letters.

The Agony and the Equity

I've been thinking quite a bit over the past few weeks about the divide, if one exists, between Equity and non-Equity theater in Chicago. Perhaps it's a broader question of the divide between professional and non-professional theater. Where is that line? Is it different in Chicago than it is in other markets? If so, why? What is the magic step that separates that which we might, in certain areas of the country, call "community theater" and what we in Chicago are willing to call "professional non-Equity theater"?

The question is prompted by some recent commentary around the city's theater community. I noted my disdain for Chris Jones's uncharacteristic snipe at Pegasus Players for "[springing] for nary a single Equity contract" for its production of The Frogs. A few weeks later, Don Hall pointed out Chris's blog post knocking, among other things, the American Idol-ization of big-time theater casting a la that Grease reality show. Chris's point this time around seemed to be less about amateur actors than about amateur casting directors (i.e., the voting television audience), but a commenter there made this remark:

Some of the folks on this board will suggest that these participants, because perhaps they performed in their local non-union storefront in fact are professional actors...

This sparked a good bit of thinking-out-loud at Don's blog from, among others, Don, Kerry Reid, and Rebecca Zellar about what that dividing line is. Is union membership the answer?

In Chicago, I believe, Equity status is absolutely not the answer. I don't intend to knock Actors' Equity, which is a fine and necessary union, although I'll freely admit that at no point in my professional life have I ever had a decent working understanding of Equity's arcane-seeming rules and regulations. Regardless, I know a bit about how Equity came into being and why it did, and a living wage for theater artists is definitely a worthy goal. But even Equity realizes that Chicago is its own model; that's why we have our own special set of contracts, the Chicago Area Theater (CAT) contracts. I guess the question is: Is going Equity even a good idea for Chicago-area actors and theater companies?

Here's something to consider: the most recent PerformInk Season Preview (PDF), for the 2006-07 season, lists 38 Equity theater companies. That includes several producing organizations outside of the city limits, and it doesn't include many that apparently failed to voluntarily submit their information, like Chicago Shakes, or local commercial ventures like Wicked. Still, comparing that number to the near-200 members that the League of Chicago Theatres claims tells us that there are far, far fewer Equity companies than there are non-Equity.

And this: many of the Equity-affiliated companies included in that list are on the lowest tier of CAT contracts, the CAT-N, which means that they often will hire only one Equity actor among many non-Equity actors in a cast (and again, if my interpretation of the contracts is wrong, please correct me). I recently saw two shows in rep by Porchlight Music Theatre (Assassins and The Teapot Scandals) that had only one Equity actor in each, and last night I finally saw Collaboraction's The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, with one Equity actor among a hard-working cast of seven.

And this: how many of the high-profile Chicago Equity companies consistently bring in outside talent from New York, LA or elsewhere? Could the Goodman have done King Lear without bringing in Stacy Keach? Surely it could. For that matter, it could have done Arthur Miller's final play, Finishing the Picture, a few years ago without bringing in Keach, Linda Lavin, and Matthew Modine. But it didn't. Chicago Shakes could have cast a Chicago actor as Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida instead of importing Canadian Stephen Ouimette. But it didn't.

And this: how many Chicago Equity companies follow the Steppenwolf model of ensemble-based casting? Would great Equity actors like Amy Morton and Tracy Letts be getting work elsewhere in our fair city if they weren't Steppenwolf ensemble members? And even those companies who aren't expressly ensemble-based tend to draw from the same well—when was the last time you saw a show at Chicago Shakes that didn't feature, say, Greg Vinkler or Scott Parkinson?

And this: how many Chicago theater companies and/or Chicago actors have flirted with Equity status before deciding it was too limiting? Stage Left leaps to mind as a company that tried out Equity contracts in the last few years before retreating; Bailiwick tried it too. Many non-Equity companies in Chicago have annual budgets in the six-figures; does that seem non-professional? And what of the actors who've given it a shot and decided they preferred being non-Equity? Don notes he was Equity once; respected actor Kate Harris notes in this profile by Lucia Mauro that she went off Equity after six years "because the bulk of opportunities were in the non-Equity realm."

My friend Neal, an actor, was thisclose to Equity membership after several years of acting in the Pacific Northwest before moving to Chicago nine months ago. He was advised by several people there to hold off on the union status until after moving here because he'd have more chance to prove himself here in the non-Equity theater, and if he moved here as an Equity member he'd have a hard time getting cast. I told him the same thing. Does the fact that he's had to keep a day job make him less than a professional actor? Are Equity actors who aren't already affiliated with an Equity theater out of luck? Am I wasting my time attending non-Equity theater week after week? Are we all too focused on New York-centered thinking and making Chicago more like New York (and, to be fair to Chris and the Trib, Hedy and the Sun-Times are not that much better about covering off-Loop theater)?

Your thoughts, please. That's what I'm here for.

(Elsewhere: my review of BoHo's The Life, as well as my interview with playwright Wendy MacLeod and my feature on the documentary ShowBusiness, can be found at TOC's website.)