Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
A RT S
JOURNAL
WINTER 2015
Dear Readers,
Have you ever had the sort of postal correspondence with a
faraway loved one in which long stretches of time pass
during which notes are taken on various subjects, with the
intent to convey the texture of ones life and time but the
card itself languishes in a drawer unsent? Thats something of
how we feel lately. In the past few months, weve seen a bunch
of shows, weve had a bunch of ideas, weve laughed and
thought of you and now were at a backlog. Its been too
long, readers. But what better time, then, than this horrendous
cold snap to send you our fondly-scribbled notes in the form of
a new issue? Do you have a fireplace to sit by? If not, put some
beans on the stove and pull up a chair. We need to catch up.
In looking over the various reviews, stories, arguments and
conversations in this issue, we have gotten to thinking about
tradition and continuity. In the theater reports department, we
find several local stagings of Samuel Becketts works, providing
fruitful thoughts on the man and his current interpreters,
stretching or ignoring the canon; we recall Carl Sandburgs
Rootabaga style of folk tales and their mythologized
Midwestern landscapes, a form riffed upon in these pages by
Mark Leach; we ponder the long-running festival atmosphere
encountered for one weekend each summer at Mary-Arrchies
Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins; and we steep in the
communal, semi-fictional theatrical neighborhoods of Beau
OReilly, co-author of Curious Theatre Branchs March!, here
Johann Blumer
for the Editors
johann.artsjournal@gmail.com
Table of Contents
Page 3
Endgame
By Right Brain Theatre Project
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
Happy Days
By Theatre Y
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
11
14
March!
By Curious Theatre Branch
Reviewed by Ira S. Murfin
18
20
23
26
30
Notes on Contributors
Winter 2015
Endgame
By Right Brain Theatre Project
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
I think Right Brains conceit in this staging was that this day was
the day Hamm would finally die, and that Clov knew it, and had
invited us all in to watch. The set was done up in apocalyptic
hoarder fashion: dingy newspapers covering the walls, sacks of
something mysterious populating the corners, and crude chalk
drawings here and there depicting bombs falling, the devastated
landscape alluded to sketchily in Becketts text. I thought, Why
didnt anybody tell me this was an apocalypse play? And the answer
is probably that its not, not explicitly, but thats a valid reading of it,
and one Im still considering. Do I need the world to have ended
outside to feel the desolation of living endlessly with the one person I
cant escape? Not necessarily, but its an approach.
I had a lot of questions when the play was over. Such as, Who
were those puppets? Is the actor supposed to be looking right at me
like that? Why wouldnt a name spelled Clov be pronounced
Clahv? I asked around. It turns out that my friends, even the
engineers, read a surprising amount of Beckett, and a number of
them filled in some mysteries for me.
Endgame by Samuel Beckett ran at the Right Brain Project (4001 N. Ravenswood)
from September 4 October 4, 2014. It was directed by Aaron Snook, and
performed by Bries Vannon and Vincent Lonergan.
Happy Days
By Theatre Y
Reviewed by Arlene Engel
It was only a few weeks after I saw Endgame that Johann rang up
again and asked if I wouldnt mind accompanying him to a
production of Becketts Happy Days, put on by Theatre Y in the loft
of St. Lukes Church in Logan Square. Sure, I said. Whats this
one about? He laughed but wouldnt say, so I asked the Internet,
who told me its about a lady buried up to the waist in the ground,
going about her daily business. Well, of course it is.
Winnie is not quite a society lady, but she has airs: routines and
mannerisms that feel very middle-class British, and also very of-atime. Hearing her phrases, I remembered how Id laugh whenever
Clov in Endgame said It wont act, speaking of Hamms
medication. It was a funny little way to put it I knew what he
meant, but probably nobodys said it that way for eighty years. Much
of the Beckett Ive heard so far feels purposefully antiquated, as if
nobody really used these phrases even when Beckett was writing
them, but he was choosing the older language for effect. Is that true?
Im speculating wildly.
Johann wanted me to tell you that he was very taken with the
space in which the play was performed (and so was I). My mother
used to do contra dancing in the basement of St. Lukes, but the play
took place in a part of the building Id somehow never noticed
before. Rather than industrial concrete hallways and small gathering
rooms, the alley door of Theatre Y opened onto a foyer of old wood,
painted in various peeling shades of blue, with high ceilings and a
winding staircase leading up to the performance space. Beautiful,
crusty, and somehow completely eerie. At the top of the stairs, a
bank of audience risers faced the junk pile in a massive room under a
gently-pitched gable roof, all black inside except for a striking red
And this brings me to the only part of the play that really baffled
me. (This is to the productions credit, since in different hands it
might be a baffling work throughout.) All this time in the second act
Winnie has been going on, periodically calling for Willie, and now
he appears. Hes got on some version of finery, but its old and
dusty, too small. He stands up full behind Winnie, and now we see
his face, which is a good face but punctures the feeling of eeriness its
long absence gave before; and now he takes a waltz pose and sort of
gently spirals from his side of the stage to the other side. Winnie
speaks to him throughout this movement, seeming comforted and
pleased that he has finally got up and wants to be near her. Only: is
he? Is this a dream sequence?, I wondered. In the performances final
tableau, Winnie finishes speaking and the lights go down; the actress
silently dismounts her pile and comes to upstage left to stand with
the actor against the wall; they join hands and she takes up the long
hem of her skirt in her free hand; the two pause in this position,
smiling, as if they are posing for a wedding portrait; then, lights
down. The end.
I didnt know what to make of this as a final gesture, and as I
examine Becketts script I find that its not there, that it signifies
something to this production but not to the play originally. Is it
perhaps a visual representation of the music-box song Winnie plays,
I love you so? The two in their frozen position under the spotlight
looked like a picture in a locket. Several of my Beckett-loving friends
opined that they wished people (usually of an academic disposition)
wouldnt mess with the works so much, that they would just do
them, whatever that means. I think thats a fair plea, and yet even
listened, and for the first few minutes wondered, Is something else
going to happen? Are people going to come out in scary masks? But no.
Even so, it was well-written, in that particular Found Objects way:
knowing how to find the crevice in an idea and slip inside it, to keep
descending until the vessel is miles below the surface and no one
remembers how to get out, but everybody has a good vocabulary for
telling you about the desolation. But also I think, This is an odd way
to begin an all-night theater fest, with a thing that literally instructs us
to sleep, and then sits us in the dark, looking either at our inner eyelids
or the bare room Its something of an energy drop, but the virtue
and the vice of these things, the Abbie Fest things, is that nothing
among them is very long, so be it a soporific or a splendor, itll go by
in a relative blink. And so it is: twenty minutes of sleep or not-sleep,
and heres the next.
And then, in perhaps more canny programming sense, came
Wild Dogs, a Mary-Arrchie production. It was a two-hander by
Matt Borczon about a strait-laced guy who hits the rocks with his
lady and goes to stay with his buddy whos a real tough-and-tumbler,
a wildman kind of dude. And it was mostly an exercise in oddcoupledom: the guy in the tie and the guy in the undershirt.
Probably the best thing about the whole piece was the opening,
when the wild guy (played by Cotovsky, natch) ran circles around
the onstage furniture, scratching and baying Like a wild dog, you
might say, and youd be right and then shook a Twinkie from the
wrapper with his teeth and knelt down on all fours to eat it off the
floor. That one bit was so simultaneously gross and deeply erotic
that I hardly needed the rest of the play.
After these and a few further acts I went out to feed the meter and
take a solitude break in the lobby, and so I missed or partly missed a
few things, and I feel fine about that. One of them, heard from a
That next time I saw Jake was at a party on a hot summer night in
Chicago, after his second sixteenth year. Time spread both forward
and backward as I talked to him, I knew him before I met him and
would know him well after Id forgotten him, I am sure. What I am
trying to say is that there wasnt a structure to knowing him, we
worked in dream time. If I took a step toward him, Id break the
skin barrier like it was mist and my arm or leg would blend part way
through his like overlapping shadows, looking like one but doubled
in opacity where it was both of us. I could breathe the breath out of
his lungs, we were partially melted against each other. He could have
been my brother, he could have been the voice in my head. If Id
been older, confusion might have overruled my awe at the
strangeness and I might have turned away. My full adult mind might
have let this first note fade slowly to silence.
When I was last there, I saw Jake again. I try to see him every five
years or so since the first time I met him. That could have been
twenty-five years ago. He was fifteen? Or sixteen? Or a hundred. I
wasnt much older. His own parents didnt know his age, they forgot
it and he had to be sixteen for two years in a row. I remembered him
when I met him at fifteen, or no, I committed him to memory. I
dropped a marker at that moment to rest on, to come back to. I
didnt see him again for years.
11
slow roll of his walk, I could feel his presence stretch and break piece
by piece. First the flutes and clarinets, high and crisp, dropped away,
leaving me lower, blurred notes of warm brass. I closed my mouth
around one lone strand of oboe.
excrement, layered with green, green leaves and grass. People yelled
across the street at each other. Car doors banged. Sound carries
better in the humid air, with something to hang on to. Images carry
better too, and the whole feel of it is closer to blood level.
Absorption. In that walk, in every rich inhaled breath, heavy with
life ripened to the point of corruption, I knew Jake couldnt survive
New Orleans.
Now Jake lives in New Orleans and years have passed. Hes older.
When I see him, I have to look at him for ten minutes in silence to
see everything thats gone by since Ive known him. I watch his blue
eyes go to green, then gray and then crescent moons when he smiles.
New Orleans is a city version of him, Im half sunk every time I set
foot in that place.
He told me this, what I already knew, after wed walked some time
to get with the rhythm of the streets.
I cant stay here.
Why not?
Cant you see them, sitting on the porches? All the ghosts? I cant
be somewhere like this with the temptation.
All the houses as you pass have friendly front stoops and porches
with chairs that must have been owned and sat on forever. You can
smell them like ice broken out of trays, dropped into tea offered to a
guest, layered with the after breath of a refrigerator door closed.
Ghost smells.
13
most distinctive element, but which proves elusive in work that does
not at least threaten to overflow its spatial, temporal, and narrative
containers. The cast lives together, in some sense, there onstage, and
for a little while the audience lives with them, too. The audiences,
then, who know the work and often know the people in the work,
must fit these communal configurations and the dynamic worlds
they fragmentarily imply, of which the plays themselves are but a
sliver, into the multi-chambered spaces of a sprawling, unlikely, but
nonetheless coherent whole, made up, by turns, of fictional, metafictional, and apparently real imaginaries.
March!
By Curious Theatre Branch
Reviewed by Ira S. Murfin
A taxonomy of Beau OReilly plays, such as might be found in
some invitingly idiosyncratic museum of experimental oeuvres,
would surely include, alongside the rooms devoted to various subcategories of dramatic and autobiographical monologue and postBeckettian vaudevilles, a whole wing dedicated to the community
play. Not community theatre, that is, but community as theatre and
vice versa. In these works, the fictional reality of the dramatic world
is laid palimpsestically atop histories, relationships, and geographies
shared amongst collaborators. In recent years these notional,
emergent communities have included the sprawling theatrical family
of The Madelyn Trilogy and the eclectic, eccentric residents of a
fictionalized Rogers Park in Evanston, Which Is Over There. That
some critical mass of the audience no doubt knows that OReilly
himself comes from a sprawling theatrical family and has long made
his home in the environs of Rogers Park is less a signal that some
slippage might reveal real life facts onstage than it is about the ways
in which theatrical reality is perpetually adjunct to a deeply felt and
shared lived experience.
Just as the museums many fictional spaces and displays exceed the
practical or topographical arrangement such an institution would
require or be able to sustain, the plays script exceeds the narrative
functions of a single dramatic work or a single authorial
14
15
venerated, here the couple finds itself out of synch with the
environment, exposed and interrupted. The museum itself
discomfits coupledom. Meanwhile Jenny Magnus and Vicki
Walden, having the most fun of anyone in the show as a pair of
candy eating, fluidly gendered, vaudevillian clowns, remain as
harmonious and uncomplicated a pair as any imaginable in their
mischievous creative partnership.
I am not sure that I can make sense of March! or its museum, but I
am not so sure there is sense there to be made beyond what one can
glean by just being there. A convivial co-presence, like a night spent
voluntarily locked in a vast museum or castle or shopping mall with
a dozen or so of your best friends, pervades the atmosphere, as does
the sense of exuberance that comes of the license that attends such
situations to sing, to be silly, to be honest, to hook up, to confess,
and so on. Where we might expect a tightly structured dramatic arc,
we find instead a community engaged in play with a sense of
freedom and mutual agreement. Whether that community consists
of the fictional denizens of the museum or the real theatre artists of
Curious Theatre Branch actually seems somewhat beside the point.
From this perspective it is not individual narratives that matter,
but the ecologies of interdependence and contingency within which
all meaning is suspended. So long as we, the audience, or we, the
museums visitors, are engaged with the interplay between the
possibly infinite chambers of this imaginary structure, everything
that happens there will be deeply meaningful and richly layered; but
once outside of the fictional museums physical spaces (or the
16
March! ran at the side project (1439 W. Jarvis) from November 7 December 7,
2014. It was written and directed by Beau OReilly and Julia Williams, and
performed by Brook Celeste, Brian Collins, Jenny Magnus, Lynn Marie, Beau
OReilly, Briavael OReilly, Matt Rieger, Vicki Walden, Julia Williams, and Ryan
Wright.
17
The sacks hit the concrete sidewalk and split their sides. Two
clouds arose, dusting everyone with tweezle seeds. They each looked
around at all the others, and laughed harder. Each time they laughed
they ungrew a little shorter, until they were no larger than Pee-Baby
birds.
That did it. They stopped laughing and stopped ungrowing, which
was fortunate, because they were now the size of Pee-Baby eggs.
What are we going to do? they all asked at once. Flimsy said,
My Uncle Hansom Ransom always said, If youre the size of a PeeBaby egg, youve got to do as the rootabaga lizards do. The nearest
rootabaga field was just behind the store, so thats where they went.
Trip, Triang, and Delt and Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-TooTight arrived at the same moment at the stores shelf of tweezle seed.
The girls stopped singing. The boys stopped shouting, all mixed up
inside because they wanted to shout at the girls so really bad that
they had no air in them to shout with.
Each group took a sack of tweezle seed, paid the cashier, and went
outside. Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight started shouting
at nothing-at-all. Trip, Triang, and Delt looked at the boys and
began laughing a pure, happy, case-of-the-giggles laugh.
Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-Too-Tight looked at the girls and
18
before we could flip them. Not bad at all. The racing fever should
break by sunset. We can start putting them feet-side down after
supper.
The children, still the size of Pee-Baby eggs, struggled to keep pace
with the lizard. Fortunately, they hadnt far to go. The race of the
pillbox beetles has already started, said the lizard. But theres still
plenty of time to stop them. They all watched as thousands of
pillbox beetles sped around and around a great sinuous course that
wound among the rootabagas. The racing beetles thundered past,
filling the air with stinky farts, which Pants-Too-Tight later
described as, Like when you go in the fridge and open a yogurt
container and find last months tacos which nobody ate because they
were made with smelly socks, fish guts, and nail polish salsa.
The large lizard with the whistle still around her neck said to the
children, It is our tradition to provide gifts to our helpers. She
produced two tiny sacks of tweezle seeds, handing one to Triang and
one to Pants-Too-Tight. The children quickly grew to their normal
height, perhaps a wee bit taller. The sacks of tweezle seeds enlarged
too.
On their way home, Trip, Triang, and Delt sang about Pee-Baby
birds and laughed about creatures that would race themselves to
death. On their way home, Burgerbreath, Flimsy, and Pants-TooTight shouted at trees, shouted at cars, and shouted at nothing-at-all,
but mostly they thought silently about creatures so mixed up inside
that they race themselves to death.
19
Playing these works in the round felt bold to me, but at some
serious points it was really a problem concerning Becketts intention.
20
of dress and movement in his texts; they were written and performed
in the style of their time, and so the styles of other times dont tend
to rankle too much (unless they do; and theres another kettle!).
Beckett, on the other hand, is more or less referring to our own time,
and hes precise. About everything! In Catastrophe, the director
asks for a light and the assistant lights his cigar she does not bring
him a pen light so he can look at his notes! The fact that he is
holding notes at all the fact that he is standing, even changes
the action and the character. (The Mamet film version does this as
well, annoyingly, though Pinter is still a marvel as the Director.)
Why do they do it? My kingdom for some Germans! (Who do what
theyre told, as Beckett once joked, instead of giving a text their own
spin. The man spun plenty there to begin with.) But forgive me;
Im on a tear. Carine
I often think age has something to do with Beckett being done
well. Burgess Meredith, Burt Lahr, Pinter, Buster Keaton these
are people who got Becketts ancient-old-man humor and sensibility.
The aches of the body, the angst of the mind. Edmund
I think youre right experience, in life and onstage, helps but
lets not confuse a grumpy-old-man stereotype with a careful,
thoughtful actor. I think Beckett gets reductively read as dour too
much. (My college roommate was once reading a collected works
and one morning burst out of the bathroom, towel only, and
exclaimed, What is this? Everybody acts like Beckett is so dark, but
theres a fucking banana peel joke here! She must have just then
gotten to Krapps Last Tape.) Sure, hes not always cheerful, but what
I think is important in doing his work is not a deep sense of ennui or
of suffering but an ordinary patience. And maybe young actors, and
21
Hellish Half-Light: Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett ran at Angel Island (735 W.
Sheridan) from July 24 through August 30, 2014. It was directed by Jennifer
Markowitz and performed by Molly Fisher, Rudy Galvan, Lauren Guglielmello,
Adam Soule, Stephen Walker, Kathrynne Wolf, and Bob Fisher.
22
CAJ: You teach courses at Columbia College and SAIC. How does
your teaching life interact with your personal artistic practice?
23
The trick is in establishing a balance between all the teachingrelated hours and making time for a consistent art-making
conversation a flow of ideas and the manifestation of those ideas
within my own mind, and then from my own studio. In some
semesters thats easier to do than others. Lately, Ive been being
especially watchful of preserving my own time for writing and
making as Ive got some larger, more long-range projects and plans
in the works.
CAJ: Under the aegis of Creative Push Collective, you and Jenny
Magnus offer intensive art courses outside of an institutional
academic setting. Can you tell us about the origins of this program,
and what you hope to offer in it?
24
25
This was actually perfect for artists such as myself who had no clue
how to market their work. I would just wait for the next invitation
to come along, which always happened, without much effort. At the
same time, I was curating performance series at Club Lower Links,
working with the same artists who curated my work. The sense of
community was very strong, and, I guess, incestuous.
RM: For the past year or so, Ive been experimenting with video
art, which has been sort of a return to my roots, so to speak. I was
accepted into the film program at SAIC, but it did not take me very
long to realize that I was neither patient nor meticulous enough to
transform these ideas and images into a visible form. The camera was
a big obstacle for me. But now, with an iPhone camera and doing a
lot of guesswork on iMovie, I can take my ideas exponentially
further than I could as a grad student. And video is really a perfect
medium for me to merge writing with the allure of film. The first
couple of video projects I completed this year were simple stories or
dialogs, presented as subtitles over extremely slow moving or cyclical
images (a car descending 12 levels of a parking garage, a cloud
gradually swallowing a landscape a lot of transportation imagery
cars, busses, trains). A friend commented that although he liked
the videos, he was missing the kinds of voices that were so present in
my performance work. This stayed with me for a while, and I grew
more and more curious to explore how my subtitled videos could be
arranged for live performers, with live voices. That is the impetus for
Sunday Evening. The performance is composed of monologues,
dialogues, and songs in 6 semi-related episodes.
CAJ: What can you tell us about your upcoming show, Sunday
Evening. Shortly Before Dinner. in the Rhinoceros Theater
Festival? What forms, themes, or ideas does it explore?
27
And then there are more literal themes such as clouds, or counting,
or television watching, or apartment hunting, or commuting.
CAJ: Do you think the musical and lyrical influences you mention
affect your visual style as well? That is, does style translate across
media, in some synaesthetic way?
RM: I think thats true, especially with artists like Dylan and Cohen
whose lyrics are so visually layered. One of my favorite songs of all
time is Leonard Cohens Waiting for the Miracle. I cant imagine
any lyric more visually compelling than:
The sands of time were falling
from your fingers and your thumb,
and you were waiting
CAJ: Your work includes movement, live and recorded sound, text,
and collaborations with artists across many media. Do you see
yourself in a tradition of new experimental dance, performance,
opera or something else?
28
johann.artsjournal@gmail.com
29
Notes on Contributors
Arlene Engel is a doctoral candidate in the biological sciences.
She lives in Chicago with several cats, one man, and more
houseplants than would seem necessary.
Margaret Murray was born and raised in very rural Iowa with a
father from Ireland, a mother from New Hampshire (by way of
Quebec), and not one solid piece of rational thought between
them. She is grateful for the spare practicality of Iowa, Allen
Iverson, and language, which her father told her was worth more
than any other aspect of life.
Ira S. Murfin is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D in Theatre &
Drama at Northwestern University. His dissertation examines
talk as a performance strategy employed by key artists in the post1960s American avant-garde. His criticism has appeared in
Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International,
Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Chicago Art Criticism. He is
also Performance Editor for the journal Requited. Ira makes solo
and collaborative performance work as a theatre artist and writer
in Chicago.
Mark Leach is a longtime activist, an ecologist and occasional
teacher, and a lover of Captain Beefheart. He makes his home in
rural Wisconsin.
Carine Loewi works in the medical technology field and serves
as Assistant Editor at Chicago Arts Journal. Her contributions to
Winter 2015
Sue Cargill
WINTER 2015