The Reader’s fall preview: Theater
The silent half of Penn & Teller adds some magic to Shakespeare’s Tempest
NOW- NOVEMBER 8
Commonly interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to theater, The Tempest is the tale of a magician performing his final and greatest feat. Prospero plans to use skills acquired over a lifetime to put his wrecked world back together. When that’s accomplished, he promises, “I’ll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.”
Raymond Joseph Teller understands Prospero in a way that few of us ever will. As the silent half of Penn & Teller, he’s spent much of his own lifetime dealing in magic. And he’s lately been applying what he’s learned to The Tempest, which he’s codirecting with Aaron Posner at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The show will have just started previews by the time you read this.
Transplanted from the island refuge of Shakespeare’s script to a traveling tent show, this production promises plenty of enchantments. The music is by Tom Waits and his wife/partner Kathleen Brennan; the choreography by the notable shape-shifters of Pilobolus; and Prospero himself will be played by Larry Yando, whose greatest trick has been making audiences love him as unlikable characters. Three cast members share a role designated as “Rough Magic.”
But the directors are unlikely to be satisfied with sleight of hand. After all, demystifying illusions is as much a part of the Penn & Teller, um, mystique as creating them. And the same goes for Posner, best known for writing Stupid F---ing
Bird— a fourth-wall-crushing satire of Chekhov’s The Seagull. What’s more, Teller has a serious notion to pursue. In a CST promotional video he remarks, “To me, one of the big subjects in The
Tempest is, What would it take to make a magician give up magic?” —TONY ADLER Through 11/8: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM (see website for additional weekday performances), Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.org, $48-$88.
Mary Zimmerman hits the decks with the pirate classic Treasure Island
OCTOBER 7-JANUARY 31, 2016
“Sea voyages are in almost every thing I’ve ever done,” Mary Zimmerman acknowledged in an e-mail exchange. The auteur, known for stage realizations of The Odyssey, The Argonauticka, and other watery epics, supposes that the ocean holds a “great romance” for her because she grew up in landlocked Nebraska. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Inland” (“What do they long for, as I long for / One salt smell of the sea oncemore?”) became her childhood “incantation.”
Now Zimmerman is going down to the sea in ships again, with an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, scheduled to receive its world premiere at Lookingglass Theatre in October.
The novel that gave us nasty old Long John Silver and all the pirate tropes that go with him,
Treasure Island is the tale of Jim Hawkins, an innkeeper’s adolescent son who follows a map through battles and mutinies and all manner of double crosses to a spot marked with an X. If Zimmerman’s version is anything like her previous shows, it will feel at once sumptuous and economical, stylized and idiomatic, graceful and comic. Itwill certainly concern itself with bravery, because, as Zimmerman points out, oceans are “always audacious to cross.” And you might expect some dark tones too, because they “beckon and destroy.” —TONY ADLER 10/7-1/31,Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM (see website for additional performances), Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337- 0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $42-$120.
A transgender house mother schools her Boystown proteges in Northlight’s Charm at Steppenwolf Garage
OCTOBER 14-NOVEMBER 8
Back in 2011 the Reader ran a feature titled “Grit & Glitter,” about Chicago’s underground ballroom scene: a gay, black subculture populated by “male-identified men, drag queens, transgender folks, and born women (whom ballroom participants call ‘allies’).” Though its social life revolves around late- night vogueing competitions, the scene’s real foundation is a network of “houses” (as in fashion houses) led by older members of the community, who are expected to mentor their younger peers. One such house runs the School of Opulence, which offers workshops not only in runway style but in skills the LGBTQ students are going to need to deal gracefully with a world that sometimes still doesn’t want to be their friend. I thought of “Grit & Glitter” when I heard about
Charm, Philip Dawkins’s new play concerning an etiquette class taught by a 67-year-old transgendered African-American woman in “six-inch gator-skin heels,” who’s taken it upon herself to bring some couth (and, one supposes, wisdom) to a diverse bunch of Boystown street folk. Inspired by the reallife adventures of Miss Gloria Allen, who taught just such a class at the Center on Halsted, Charm will be presented by Northlight Theatre at the Steppenwolf Theatre Garage in October.
The subject matter may seem like a wild departure for Northlight, whose 2015-’16 season includes a revival of You Can’t Take It With You and a comedy teaming George Wendt and Tim Kazurinski. But Dawkins has a gift for ingratiating whimsy that should make Charm charming at the very least. —TONY ADLER 10/14-11/8: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, Merle Reskin Garage Theatre, 1624 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$40, $15 students.
At Confidential Musical Theatre Project, mum’s the word OCTOBER 20
The experimental Confidential Musical Theatre Project makes its Chicago debut with, well, no one knows exactly. Avra Fainer and Steve Lavoie choose the top-secret show and cast it, but even the performers won’t meet each other until an hour before the show; everyone involved rehearses on their own time and just prays that everything comes together.
“You want to put a show on, and there’s so many logistics you have to deal with,” Fainer says. “I want a way to put a show on without all those components.”
The concept has had success across the country with impromptu performances of Sunday in
the Park With George and A Little Night Music. “Audiences don’t believe that they haven’t been rehearsed prior,” Fainer says. But part of CMTP’s mission is to mount shows that aren’t performed often, so don’t count on seeing a beloved Broadway classic. Don’t expect anything except surprise, which is half the fun of a confidential musical. — BRIANNA WELLEN Tue 10/20, 7:30 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, confidentialmusicaltheatreproject.com, $25.
In a time of antigovernment Oath Keepers, Idris Goodwin’s The Raid seems appropriate
NOVEMBER 4-DECEMBER 12
Last winter local theater critics Hedy Weiss and Chris Jones got worked up over a play for young people, This Is Modern Art (Based on True
Events), arguing in their separate reviews that it romanticizes the illegal act of tagging. That got lots of people worked up over Weiss and Jones— including Kevin Coval, the play’s coauthor, who smeared them as “old white people” even though he’s middle-aged and white himself.
Present but relatively quiet in all of this was the other ( younger and black) coauthor, Idris Goodwin. I didn’t think much about it at the time, inasmuch as Coval tends to suck up a lot of media air. But now I wonder if Goodwin was just pacing himself, aware that he’d soon be dealing with a style of protest a thousand times more alarming than some paint sprayed on a building. Premiering with Jackalope Theatre in November, Goodwin’s The Raid concerns John Brown’s 1859