[I’m part-way through a blog project that I thought would be quick and easy. It wasn’t. It’s been several weeks already, and it looks like it’ll take a few more.
[Instead of just finding and posting an article or two on the same or related topics, I decided to assemble a collection of pieces on different subjects. In this case, I’m using several reviews from around the U.S. that cover what I feel are quirky and intriguing theater from some of the more adventurous troupes in different cities.
[I’m an associate member of the American Theatre Critics Association and I get its monthly e-mail newsletter, The Update. One section is called “This Just In,” a selection of reviews and articles by ATCA members from their base publications.
[I always glance at them, and recently, I kept aside several of the notices that just looked interesting. I’m taking this opportunity to post some of the reviews to show what’s going on in some of the theaters across this country. See what you all think.]
“ANDY WARHOL IN IRAN BY BRENT ASKARI:
[The first selection is from Berkshire Fine Arts (website; North Adams, MA) of 9 June 2022. BFA covers all aspects of the arts in the Berkshires (western Massachusetts), including the major theater companies. Charles Giuliano is the site’s editor.]
Andy Warhol in Iran
By Brent Askari
Directed by Skip Greer
With Nima Rakhshanifar and Henry Stram
Scenic designer, Brian Prather; Costumes, Nicole Wee; Lighting, Joyce Liao; Sound,
Dan Roach; Wig and makeup, Mary Schilling-Martin. Projections, Yana Biryukova.
Barrington Stage Company
St. Germain Stage
June 2-25, 2022
In Andy Warhol in Iran, a new play by Skip Greer commissioned by Barrington Stage [Pittsfield, Massachusetts], the vocal cadence of Henry Stram as Andy Warhol [1928-87] is off key.
With insouciant, faked self-effacement, stutter-step delivery, smirks at his own riffs and put-ons, Warhol’s pitter patter was distinctive and should rightly have been patented. It was a significant part of how the artist and master huckster marketed and promoted himself.
With the deadpan artist the persona was the sizzle that sold his steak.
Or in Andy parlance “Brought home the bacon.”
Stram joins a long list of those who have portrayed Warhol including David Bowie [Basquiat (1996); Paul Bettany recently played the artist on Broadway in Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration, 18 December 2022-11 February 2023]. There seems to be endless fascination with an enigma. Arguably, Andy through his museum, estate, and foundation is now more rich, famous and influential than ever.
He grew up poor and sickly in Pittsburgh. The death benefits of his father paid for his art education. Through illness he was prematurely bald and had bad skin. He was in fact quite homely but accessorized with clear plastic glasses, wigs and makeup. That made him easy to impersonate. Warhol employed a double who made speeches and appearances for him when he didn’t want to leave New York.
Andy was clever with wigs and took to wearing silver on top of a black one. That layering made it appear that his roots were showing. My friend Gerard Malanga, who bunked with him on the road, swears that he never saw Andy without a wig. During lunch breaks they walked home from the studio where Andy’s mother, Julia, made lunch. Often that entailed a can of Campbell’s soup, one of his iconic images. He also used Julia’s unique and florid handwriting as part of his graphic design. As devout Catholics they attended mass each Sunday during the 18 years she lived with him in New York.
Warhol had the schtick of being anything you wanted to him to be. When asked a complex question his standard and gobsmacking answer was “Yes.” As to how do you make your work, he responded “I fake it.” He was the master of passive resistance. Facing the media, reporters or critics essentially framed interviews which Andy cleverly affirmed. The media always got what they wanted though the “answers” were typically enigmatic.
Or, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again.
When queried about war, politics or tough questions he would demur that he didn’t know and that the subject was too “abstract.” That was his standard response to anything that stumped him or attempted to make him take a position on a difficult issue.
He attracted an entourage dubbed “The Factory.” They comprised queers, drag queens, druggies, socialites, artists, dropouts, the poet Gerard Malanga, and whoever showed up for a screen test and proved to [be] somewhat interesting. Andy was a magnet for beautiful boys but was in a long-term, committed relationship.
Each night he fed a menagerie of freaks on his running tab at nearby Max’s Kansas City. Wisely, its owner Mickey Ruskin took art from Andy and other artists to settle bills. Upstairs at Max’s, which served steak, lobster and chick peas, was a room where The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and other bands performed.
Nobody got paid other than Gerard and Paul Morrisey who directed some films. The entourage fed him ideas, starred in the films, and in that manner earned their fifteen minutes of fame. He loved gossip which he shared each day with Brigid on the phone.
Valerie Solanas, a deranged radical lesbian thought he owed her more. June 4, 1968 she walked into the factory and point blank shot him. The play explains that she was angry that he did not produce her play. In fact, he had not returned or acknowledged a film script that she had submitted.
As he explains to the waiter Farhad (Nima Rakhshanifar) a radical revolutionary holding him captive in a hotel room “She ran a movement Society to Cut Up Men (SCUM) but was its only member.”
With irony his beloved Daily News ran the story inside. He got bumped off the cover by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. [Robert F. Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on 5 June 1968. He died the next day.] He fought for his life and was legally dead for a couple of minutes.
“Fame saved me” he explains. When the doctors realized who was on the table they redoubled their efforts.
After that Andy was never the same. He stopped hanging out with freaks fearing another incident. The movies, which cost a lot and took in little, were suspended. With a midlife and career crisis he reinvented himself. He made a series of silk screen paintings of Mao, Marilyn, Elvis, Liza, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and other celebrities.
Hanging out with socialites and billionaires at Studio 54 he came up with a cash cow. Shooting Polaroids, with assistants he transformed them into silk screen portraits in the manner of the iconic Marilyns. While these portraits of the megarich brought home the bacon, lots and lots of bacon, they were generally commercial, uninspired and the aesthetic lowpoint of his storied career. Truth is most captains of industry are not very interesting or inspiring people. Warhol's commercial portraits reveal that. Seeing them gathered at the Whitney Museum was a painfully dreadful experience.
Andy earned some six figures plus for these hack works. Some of his sitters ordered multiples for homes and offices. It was easy money for which he sold his soul.
As Andy puts it in this play “I have a lot of mouths to feed.”
The back stories of the really bad guys he sucked up to for commissions proved to be too “abstract” for him to comprehend. So he was pals with Imelda Marcos [b. 1929; wife of Philippine president/dictator Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986] and attended a White House reception for the Shah of Iran.
No doubt Andy would have loved the Trumps, particularly Melania, and been a frequent flyer to Mar y Lago [sic]. Basically, Andy was a trend and taste maker devoid of a social conscience. He was the Switzerland of art which is to say frequently cheesy.
Which is how Askari focused on a hotel room in Tehran (an apt set by Brian Prather). That’s a fact although there is no record of a botched attempt to kidnap him. It’s also true that he mostly spent time ordering room service. It was too hot for tourism. “Can you believe it you can order a half pound of caviar for just nine dollars.”
Set in 1976, the play imagines events when the artist was invited to Iran by Fereydoun Hoveyda, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, to create a portrait of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s wife. Warhol met the Empress Farah Pahlavi, whom he took Polaroids of during his visit. He was accompanied by his manager Fred Hughes and Bob Colacello, Warhol’s biographer and then editor of Warhol’s Interview Magazine.
Things go south for 80 minutes when the waiter arrives with the caviar. With a knock on the door Andy asks to just leave it outside. Farhad insists on coming in. “You have to sign for it. That’s hotel policy.”
Once in he pulls a gun and demands cooperation. The plan is to kidnap him as a device to get world attention for the cause of ousting the Shah. A car is coming, as Farhad constantly looks out the window. It never does.
Initially, they have nothing in common. Farhad refuses to answer questions while Andy mugs to what he hopes are listening devices.
Andy offers money or a part in a movie. “I can make you famous” he argues. Farhad, a committed revolutionary, isn’t interested in fame or fortune. Andy is flummoxed, “Everyone wants to be famous.”
There is reversal as they find commonality. They even compare their scars. Farhad had been tortured by the Shah’s savage Savak [Iranian secret police during the reign of the Shah] which killed his father as well as countless dissidents. As Andy comes to identify with his captor he muses that he might be a victim of Stockholm syndrome.
As a device the two characters from time-to -time step out of the play to narrate projections (Yana Biryukova) which provide backstories. That of Farhad was particularly riveting as it provided a capsule of how the Shah with the CIA and MI5 [actually, MI6; British intelligence service] ousted the rightful democratic president who died in prison. [Mohammad Mosaddegh (1882-1967), prime minister of Iran (1951-53) until ousted by the Shah with the help of the CIA and MI6.] For that support, he forked over 60% of Iran’s natural resources and petroleum forming what became British Petroleum. The major oil companies shared the wealth of Iran.
It was good to have that brief flashback and unvarnished exposure of America’s role in global imperialism.
Overall we loved this new play. The actors were compelling in their roles and the direction of Skip Greer navigated them nicely. There were twists and turns that kept us engaged. Stram was a very good if not great Warhol. He was actually too pretty with none of Andy’s awkward enigma. This was a play after all and not a documentary. To portray an authentic Andy would have added another half hour at least.
This production kept it tight and sweet. The play is the first hit of the summer season. Jump fast for tickets to a fun and entertaining evening in fabulous downtown Pittsfield. After being shut down for two and a half years Julianne Boyd was thrilled to welcome back audiences. We laughed all the way home.
*
* * *
“SAN FRANCISCO
MIME TROUPE RETURNS TO DOLORES PARK
WITH ‘BACK TO THE WAY THINGS WERE’”
by Jean Schiffman
[Jean Schiffman’s review of SFMT’s annual event ran in the San Francisco Examiner on 23 June 2022.]
“Today I have to write a culminating scene,” says busy San Francisco actor/director/playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s been San Francisco Mime Troupe head writer for the past 22 years. “A lot of things have to come together.”
He is on the phone several weeks before the much anticipated July Fourth grand opening of the Mime Troupe’s latest political musical comedy, “Back to the Way Things Were.” The troupe premieres a new, original free show every year on the Fourth at Dolores Park, but this year it’s especially eagerly anticipated by troupe artists and audiences because it follows the two-year pandemic shutdown.
Sullivan says that recently he’s been sitting in his car, feverishly writing scenes for his one-hour show, between matinee and evening shows of “Ragtime,” in which he’s performing at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.
Co-written with Marie Cartier, “Back to the Way . . .” (tagline: “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be”) is an extended version of the final radio play that the S.F. Mime Troupe aired during the dog days of the pandemic. As Sullivan explains, he and composer/lyricist/music director Daniel Savio knew “the good old days weren’t that great” and aimed to explore that concept. Police brutality, “the war on immigrants,” climate change, civil rights . . . Sullivan ticks off a list.
For the radio play, he created a prototype working-class family: Alice and Ralph (yes, he was thinking of “The Honeymooners” [iconic TV sitcom (1955-56) created by and starring comedian Jackie Gleason]) and their nihilistic college-age daughter, Zoe, who’s about the same age as Zachary, the son of Sullivan and his wife, Velina Brown. Brown and Sullivan played the couple in the radio version; now Mime Troupe regular Lizzie Calogero plays Alice, and Brown directs.
“Those of us significantly older than Zoe remember the days of activism, the days of hope,” says Sullivan. “But Zoe’s generation has never been able to get on an airplane without taking off their shoes because someone might murder them. The U.S. has been at war most of their lives. They’ve grown up with YouTube showing Black people being abused by cops. We say, ‘You’re the future’ (and they think), ‘You’re gonna put it all on us?’”
He relished the opportunity to explore the dystopia Zoe sees around her while at the same time showing what her parents see: the absence of “that constant dread that characterized the Trump/COVID years.”
“All I had to do was make it funny,” he sighs.
Because the San Francisco Mime Troupe is a collective, the group meets to discuss each new annual show — its theme, the issues that need to be covered — and it’s the head writer’s job to fold the ideas into the show, with live original music (this year, Savio plays keyboard with Will Durkee joining us on guitar and Jason Young on drums) and a set that can be put up and broken down as the troupe tours to parks throughout the state during the summer.
“I’m taking into consideration all the issues that (the collective members) bring up,” Sullivan explains. “The election, the Supreme Court, people’s sense of false news. I worked on the unhoused, housing costs, bureaucracy. Zoe has an internship at a homeless shelter and she has to work through all this red tape, which is farcically difficult.”
He says most of his preparation to write each year’s “dramatic comedic critique of modern American culture and economics,” as he describes it, is to read daily news articles from all over the world. “For theater to be viable, it has to be a town square where audience questions are addressed. Whatever is up for them in the zeitgeist, theater is a place to come to, lively and see those issues aired and addressed in a way that’s human. Not necessarily answered, though. A good play will have at least two sides to every argument, and those positions have to be well stated with real human beings in front of you, a sense of danger.”
In crafting a play, Sullivan follows the structure he teaches his playwriting students: a three-act play and within each scene, a setup, a conflict and a resolution. “It’s very mathematical, and also very Aristotelian,” he says. (Aristotle famously proposed three rules for drama: unity of action, time and place.)
Sullivan’s plays have been seen worldwide; most recently, his “The Great Khan” was staged at San Francisco Playhouse, and his adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984” has been running in rep at a theater in Kyiv for several years. (It just reopened; Sullivan declined any further royalties from the company.)
Brown, a busy local actor/singer and longtime member of the Mime Troupe collective, and others wanted to make sure there was some reference in the script to the attack on Roe v. Wade, but otherwise, she says, the play sets up tension between people who are looking at before the pandemic with rose-colored glasses and those who know that things were not all that rosy back then.
Although the cast only has five members — Calogero and Norman Gee (who plays the bus driver-turned-Uber-driver Ralph) plus Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, Andre Amarotico and Alicia M.P. Nelson — the characters include several unhoused people, a CEO, an 1880s robber baron, a cop, a butler and others.
This is Brown’s first time to direct a Mime Troupe live park show; she directed some of the company’s radio work recently and has directed elsewhere. Her specialties as a director, she says, are working individually with actors on their emotional arcs and relationships within the play, creating a safe space where actors can experiment and helping them with the songs. Her husband, when directing, specializes in the physical component; the Mime Troupe’s broad, crisp and farcical comedy harks back to the Italian commedia dell’arte style.
As a drama teacher at San Francisco’s Gateway High School, Brown points out that kids now have not only fire drills and earthquake drills but also active shooter drills. Kids have a different perspective than their parents, she observes, who could look back on a time when certain current concerns didn’t exist — or so they might like to think.
“Back to the Way Things Were” explores the then-versus-now paradox. “There’s so much apocalypse imagery out there,” she sighs. “For us as artists, what if we use that same creative ability to picture ... what if we get it right? What if we find a way to not just descend into shooting each other up?”
Sullivan acknowledges all Mime Troupe shows over the past 63 years have something in common: “the critique part,” as he calls it. “That can be tiring for people,” he concedes. “Sometimes they just want to be entertained. It’s not like we’re taking away hope. Some things need to be condemned, some altered. The job is never done. That’s a challenge for the Mime Troupe and a challenge for those committing to try to change the world. Some audience members want to see theater as an escape from trying to change the world.”
The Mime Troupe isn’t likely to give up the changing-the-world job — ever. But they’ll continue to make you laugh all the while.
*
* * *
“REVIEW: IN A
STORM OF SILLINESS, THEATER WIT’S HURRICANE
by Nancy S. Bishop
[Nancy Bishop’s review of a 2017 play was published in the Third Coast Review (online magazine; Chicago) of 29 June 2022, 3CR specializes in Chicago-area arts and culture coverage.]
Dionysus/Diane has messages for us. The messages we continue to ignore about the serious dangers that climate change portends for our future—and more importantly, for the futures of our children and grandchildren. Yes, while we seethe with anger about SCOTUS decisions and the January 6 insurrection, playwright Madeline George wants us to get mad about climate change too. She’s right, of course.
Her 2019 [sic; premièred at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, on 14 January-12 February 2017] play Hurricane Diane, directed by Jeremy Wechsler, is now on stage at Theater Wit. George’s premise is that if she presents us with a climate change message wrapped in a flamboyant comedy, we’ll listen. And so it starts. The Greek god Dionysus (or Bacchus, if you prefer the Roman version) descends to earth as a butch lesbian gardener, determined to attract acolytes and form a cult focused on saving the earth. Upon her arrival on stage, Diane (Kelli Simpkins) [is] swathed in white satin, wrapped in a leopard skin, and crowned with leaves and grapes. And she’s here to tell us of the danger we’re in: “It’s eleven fucking forty-five on the cosmic clock!”’
She chides us, directly: “You‘ve been busy, haven’t you? Mining and stripping and slashing and burning and generally despoiling the green earth that gave you life. It’s not like I haven’t been aware of your misdeeds, I’ve been watching you fuck shit up for hundreds of years.”
Diane/Dionysus has chosen a perfect locale for her first recruitment campaign: a cul de sac of four identical homes in Red Bank, New Jersey, a community like others along the east coast recently pummeled by other named hurricanes (we remember Sandy). The four women could be the cast of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Monmouth County.”*
*Monmouth County is an important county in New Jersey—for a certain narrow sector of the population. In addition to Red Bank, other key place names are Freehold, Asbury Park, Long Branch, West Long Branch, Belmar, Colts Neck, Manusquan, Rumson, Matawan and Ocean Township [all “Jersey Shore” towns]. West Long Branch is the home of Monmouth University (location of the respected Monmouth Polling Institute and site of several Bruce Springsteen Symposiums that I’ve participated in). If those names mean nothing to you, it’s only because you’re not a Springsteen fan.
Diane begins her campaign by marketing her landscaping services and lesbian lust to each of them, usually getting some resistance—at first. Diane’s preferred natural garden is a fragrant paradise with “a lush green understory, teeming with beneficial insects, worms, beetles . . . native groundcovers: hognut and bee balm, foxglove and awl-fruit, hawkweed and bladderwort and milk vetch.“ No lawns. Diane rips out lawns.
Carol Fleischer (Carolyn Kruse), a tightly controlled corporate-compliance officer, wants a garden with themes drawn from HGTV magazine. Most of all, she wants a wrought-iron accent bench. “I don’t do furniture,” Diane replies.
Pam Annunziata (Lori Myers) wants her garden to reflect her Italian heritage with “my own Italian garden exactly like in the mural outside Delfini’s, you know the deli on Front Street? . . . . with the hanging vines, the roses, the fountain, the whole nine.”
Renee Shapiro-Epps (Jazmin Corona) is the first to understand Diane’s landscaping vision; she’s an editor at HGTV Magazine. She enthusiastically buys into Diane’s concept and yearns for a forest permaculture in her back yard.
Beth Wann (Aniesa Hicks) tells Diane she wants a fairy garden “just like it says in the poem” with a leafy bower and “the kinds of flowers that attract fairies. So I can lay my head among the mosses while they sing me to sleep.” Beth’s husband has deserted her and she’s the first to succumb to Diane’s lecherous charms.
Hurricane Diane is totally silly with a broad array of sure-to-please laugh lines. Wechsler gets distinctive characterizations from the five actors, with Simpkins using her comedy chops to good advantage. (I’ve seen her in several serious roles—like Men in Boats, We’re Gonna Be Okay and [The Gulf]—and I can only say, she should play comedy more often.) The 90-minute play moves along briskly, using the single kitchen setting to represent the four identical homes with prop changes and landscapes scrolling by outside the back windows. There’s far more to the scenic design but no spoilers here. The clever set design is by Joe Schermoly with lighting by Piper Kirchhofer and sound design by Joyce Ciesil. Mara Blumenthal and Maddy Low are responsible for the creative costume design.
Hurricane Diane has been extended through August 14 [2022] at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave. Performances are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 2pm. Tickets are $25-$36 and are on sale now at TheaterWit.org or by calling the Theater Wit box office, 773-975-8150. Run time is 90 minutes, no intermission. Proof of vaccination is required for entry and masks must be worn over nose and mouth while you’re in the building.
*
* * *
“‘AND THEN I LAUGHED’”
by Kerry Reid
[The review by Kerry Reid of this unusual performance ran in the Chicago Reader of 4 August 2022. The Reader is an alternative weekly newspaper noted for its coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater.]
Theatre Y and Marvin Tate’s Laughing Song is a one-of-a-kind experience.
At one point in
Theatre Y’s ambulatory Laughing Song: A Walking Dream, Marvin Tate
as George W. Johnson ([1846-1914] the first Black American recording artist) is
asked by a reporter at a press conference, “Is your laugh real, or is it fake?”
It’s a reasonable question—but by the end of this four-hour show, which weaves
together elements of Johnson’s life with Tate’s own experiences growing up in
North Lawndale [West Side neighborhood, since 1950s largely African-American in
population; poverty-ridden and economically depressed], it also feels utterly
beside the point. How do we even know where our laughter comes from? If we stop
to examine it, do we kill the fleeting moment of joy? And given everything that
happens in the span of our earthly existence, shouldn’t we just be grateful we
can laugh at all?
The devised piece, created by Tate and Evan Hill in collaboration with the
12-member cast and directed by Theatre Y artistic director Melissa Lorraine,
does indeed unfold, as the subtitle promises, in a sort of dream state. If
you’re unfamiliar with the landscape of North Lawndale (as I largely was before
seeing the show), it’s a chance to see the neighborhood’s broad boulevards and
parks lined with vintage greystone buildings (more than any other neighborhood
in Chicago), interspersed with boarded-up storefronts that tell the story of
decades-long disinvestment in the west-side community. (This is the third
installment in Theatre Y’s ongoing Camino Project—a series of
outdoor walking performances inspired by the Camino de Santiago
pilgrimage in Spain.)
This is where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed to highlight the crisis in housing for Black Chicagoans. This is also where activists set up a 47-day protest in “Freedom Square” in 2016 to call attention to the Chicago Police Department’s infamous Homan Square interrogation facility. And it’s where young Marvin Tate first discovered his calling as an artist. Early on in the show, he recounts (as he did in a profile by Reader contributor Jack Helbig) that his childhood encounter with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” helped him find his voice (one that had been hampered by the fact that he had a stutter).
But Tate’s biography is more implied than told, except for a haunting segment that unfolds on some abandoned railroad tracks, where we meet his mother, Ophelia (Cat Evans), who always carried an ice pick for protection and waited for her wandering husband to return. Lamarion Hall embodies the absent father, dressed in black tuxedo pants and a white dress shirt and walking far down the tracks while Ophelia trails at a distance, wearing a bright blue dress and lugging a suitcase—a poetic evocation of romantic longing and loss, as well as a subtle reminder of the Northern Migration that brought Tate’s mother to Chicago.
We learn more direct details about Johnson’s story, which is probably because it’s been largely untold. Some of it is still all too familiar, though—particularly the ways in which the record companies ripped him off. Eric K. Roberts plays “Charles Emerson,” a portmanteau name for Charles Marshall and Victor Emerson, who both heard Johnson singing at a ferry terminal and began recording him on wax cylinders. (Johnson’s biggest hit, “The Laughing Song,” gives the piece its title.) Sometimes Johnson would do the same song in the studio 50 times a day, since the early days of phonography didn’t allow for mass reproduction. (No wonder people wondered if the laugh was “real,” or as one commenter puts it, “Can you still keep your laugh when it’s being sold?”)
After cutting loose Tate’s George and his vaudeville band (mass duplication now being possible, and thus negating the need to keep George on payroll), Roberts, riding a three-wheel bike, leads the audience on one side of the street while the cast berates him for his villainy from the other. It’s a cunning way to highlight the socioeconomic split not just between moguls like Emerson and struggling artists (particularly Black performers), but between largely white neighborhoods that receive tons of private and public perks while communities of color are ignored—until it’s time to exploit them through gentrification and development. (This tour of North Lawndale doesn’t include businesses like Lagunitas and Cinespace, though we do go by the old Sears Tower on Homan, once the headquarters of the retail giant.)
Music and visuals add texture as Johnson’s increasingly sad story unfolds. Both his common-law wives died before him, and he faced murder charges in the death of the second. He was acquitted; a trial scene set in a colonnade gives this part of the story an air of Greek tragedy, with his dead wives standing motionless, shrouded in heavy veils. (The sound of Michael Jackson singing “I’ll Be There” from over the fence at a nearby barbecue added an unplanned piquant touch at the opening.) The ensemble, whom we meet initially as Johnson’s fellow vaudevillians in a “backstage” prologue at a theater (the YMEN Center), play multiple roles and exhibit skills as dancers, clowns, acrobats, and at improvising dialogue with the audience as we stroll along.
August Garrett as young passionate George feels like the hopeful conscience and connective historical tissue between Johnson and Tate, his helmet and goggles suggesting that being ready to tackle the open road is a good way to get through life. A portable stereo wheeled by an ensemble member accompanies us throughout the journey, often playing songs that reference smiles and laughter (“When You’re Smiling,” “Laughter in the Rain,” “My Funny Valentine”).
I didn’t attend either of the previous Theatre Y Camino shows, so I can’t say how this one fits in with those excursions. But I can’t imagine a more engaging tour guide than Tate, or a more unique experience in Chicago theater right now. It ends up back at the YMEN Center, where we all share a delicious chicken dinner prepared by chef Joseph Cooper. (And it’s all free, though donations are accepted.)
But before dinner, Tate gathers us all together to practice letting out some big laughs. Are they real or fake? Does it matter? The important thing is that Laughing Song asks us to spend time in a sometimes overlooked community, learning about a lost figure in Black cultural history, in the presence of a contemporary Chicago Renaissance man and an ensemble working hard to help us to appreciate everything around us in light and shadow—from sunny open parks to grimy underpasses. It doesn’t get more real than that.
[I’ve saved a few more notices of curious shows like these from recent ATCA newsletters. I may post another collection soon (since it doesn’t look like I’ll finish my current Rick On Theater project in the next week or so).
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