Award winning director dado sums up a fall season full of theatre that puts you right in the middle and sometimes inside some of the more interesting productions around town.
Eurydice
By Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Faith Hart and Jill Marlow
Produced by Snails on a Bike
To find this deliriously unique theatrical experience, you would drive to Lincoln Park down North Ave on a pretty summer’s eve, turn down by the Whole Foods on Kingsbury, park way down by an REI and walk towards the Chicago River’s Wild Mile, which is one of the most exciting theatrical venues I have seen in my lifetime as a theater artist. The Wild Mile is an innovative flagship ecosystem developed by Urban Rivers. Eurydice was produced in collaboration with Urban Rivers, on their education platform, floating upon larger sized piers in the river.
The Wild Mile project is one of the reasons why Eurydice was so wildly successful. Taking a wildlife-first approach to greenspace, the plentiful fowl, ducks, geese, swallows, and a nascent moon were exciting additive participants to this stunning immersive work. The Wild Mile project itself is open to the public 24-7, and hosts many events, including research, education, and various community art projects, and at the same time, this exciting initiative is cleaning the Chicago River. Not only is it cleaning it, it is cleaning it extremely well! The Urban Rivers project is becoming an eco model for other river cleaning endeavors across the country and boasts a hearty volunteer arm. It is so nice to float upon a self-cleaning ecosystem while you are watching a retelling of the famous myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. This particular rendition by Sarah Ruhl includes Eurydice’s father, with whom she reunites as she is plunged into Hades on accident on her wedding night. By the way, this production has Eurydice hop into a kayak and paddle ferociously down the river on her journey into hell! Magdalena Dalzell played Eurydice and I was stunned by her furious rowing! There were countless ways for the artists to employ and engage the environment, visually, sonically, and spatially, and there are countless ways for the environment to employ the artists. On the night that I saw this work, many fishermen with long, large nets walked right on through the performance, several loud geese brayed their enthusiasm at specific highlights, a scary spider on the pier deck/stage dodged a larger than life demon on stilts and scuttered into a patron’s sidebag under his seat, and I saw an off stage actor assist a hallucinating man (not a patron, just wandered by) to a bench so the actor could prepare his entrance. None of this detracted from the story at hand in any way, but added to the visually unpredictable underworld that Eurydice lives in for a good deal of the story. The story itself used height in the form of ladders, existing accessibility ramps (which make a terrifying sound when you are the devil riding a scooter down it to meet with Eurydice) and the darkening night sky as the story cloaks itself in its conclusive darkness. This is testament to the fearlessness and come what may artidezza of directors Faith Hart and Jill Marlow. The lush, native landscaping serves as a dressing room and holding area for the actors and musicians who drift in and out of the action seamlessly and confidently, making you believe anything can happen in hell, and anything does indeed happen. The night I saw Eurydice, an audience member lost her phone into the river, or rather it somehow slipped out of her bag and through the slats of the pier; but so enamored was she of the performance and the venue that she seemed to not care a whit for her missing valuable.
The amount of chance taking here on behalf of Snails On A Bike is important, because a good deal of Eurydice’s fate can be factored by random acts and small but life altering moments that alter the course of things. The SOAB production artists had to be willing to leap into the unknown forages of the Chicago summer night variety of menus to help tell its story. This was an evening to be remembered, and the audience I was with that night felt the same, as they lingered under the sky on the pier, basking in the summery moments that make Chicago and its crazy collection of risky artists such a worthwhile place to live and partake, whether as a maker or a voyeur.
The Lover
by Harold Pinter
Directed by Yasen Peyankov and myself, dado
Facility Theatre
Speaking of voyeurs, next we have The Lover, a teleplay turned theatrical script by none other than Harold Pinter. Pinter takes a lot of crap for under writing or under exploring female presenting characters in his canon. And that would be true. Arguably, he did that. However, with The Lover, we have one of the most infamous and complex of women, Sarah, who is married to Richard, and they live in a house together where the play takes place, entirely. This site specific production has little to no similarities with The Wild Mile, as its immersive properties were much more intimately… locked down, shall we say. This production is housed in the tight quarters of a chic mid century apartment above the Humboldt Park situated Facility Theatre, a newer theater in Chicago that recently hosted a quarter of Rhino Fest and is a community headquarters to a good deal of experimental theater and musical events. The script of The Lover is from 1963; it is a cryptic, strange, sometimes sexy sometimes not examination of the marriage of Sarah and Richard, who use some bizarre role playing antics to keep things fertile and (in Pinter’s words) titillating.
The unassuming and curious audience is kept in the spacious downstairs lobby of the main theater, because upstairs, as you might imagine, there is no dressing room or green room since it is literally a domicile. Downstairs, the audience is offered bathrooms (none are at the Wild Mile, by the way, so we daisily traipsed to a nearby brewery afterwards to use their facilities), bite sized twinkies, madeleines, and, in a lovely move by mixologist Beth Martini, custom cocktails themed after the characters in the play. Using Becherovka (a Czech spirit) as a base, the drinks complimented the summery feel and the unique ambience of the upstairs rooms. The audience chats, goofs off, has some snacks and finally settles in upstairs as the house staff explains that “every seat is an obstructed seat” and that if you feel the need to lean over to see down a hallway or peer over to the next room at a davenport, you should absolutely indulge the urge to do so.
The play is billed as a nervy examination of a marriage, and it is. However, in this environment, the set itself is also a character, much like the wild mile set of the aforementioned Eurydice. Here the audience is a huge part of the constitution of the set, as they cannot be separated from the walls and everyone can see each other, visually we are all exposed. Because we are not in a theater, or outside (as in Eurydice), the audience is lit just as much as the actors are. There is no bifurcation of audience/actor. The audience is essentially looking at people who are looking at people who are looking at a marriage and so on and so forth. The refractive nature of this setting is what gives it tension, culpability, intimate pressure, and an unparalleled vulnerability that is helmed, deconstructed and reinvented by the very focused actors who must contend not only with our unnatural proximity, but the rowdy noises sometimes coming from California Avenue on a summer weekend.
In its confines we accept and absorb the inherent acoustic domesticities, and as the story unfolds, so does our ear sharpen. Because we sit along the walls of their abode, some audience members cannot always see each actor at every given moment. And so our Pinter Ear comes alive, and we begin to listen to words, sounds, not words, silence,, as Pinter would have us listen, and we are now in the Pinter exacto-knife soundscape that makes his writing so humanly acute, and so inhumanly savage.
Suddenly, we realize, in this marriage, we are, like it or not, a participant. We are, like it or not, a lover, a voyeur, a partner, a spectator, and what’s more, we are included.
Surprisingly, this story is alarmingly timeless.
Pinter didn’t mean it, or maybe he did, and that’s what is so entertaining, especially for those of us who have been looking at and interacting with his texts for so long. But his timeless story in its last few beats surrenders to the absurdism of the body, what is too fat what is too thin and how does this relentlessly contradict itself in the wild scheme of human psychophysiology. The result is that unwittingly we experience an audience reduction, and access to the myriad folds of human vulnerabilities that transcend the binary and become purely intimate.
Rosemary with Ginger
by Edward Allen Baker
Directed by Me! dado
Habakkuk Theatre
In a completely different model of immersive theater making, Habakkuk Theatre puts their Edward Allen Baker play, Rosemary With Ginger, into a so-called tapas bar on Roosevelt Avenue in Berwyn called Monse’s (note: I never saw any tapas on the menu or served at the restaurant). A full dinner is attached to the ticket price. At first, Rosemary with Ginger feels like a conventional choice, it is a two hander script set in complete and abject realism, taking place inside of a down trodden diner that is closing up its business, with two sisters duking it out over a heartbreaking situation. However, Monse’s is not a diner, it is a spacious and peculiarly decorated room with exposed high ceilings, tables, booths, and a bar. But the idiosyncratic venue is filled with all sorts of lovely caveats that reveal treasures and complications that make the story ever more unpredictable.
This particular stretch of Roosevelt that bridges Cicero to Berwyn is filled with small mini mall strip areas filled with slot machines in every nook and cranny, including Monse’s. The restaurant is tucked into a corner on a strip mall with a convenience store (with slots), a coffee shop (with slots), next to the storied Fitgerald’s music venue. When you are watching this play, the slot machines in the restaurant are off limits/closed down, and the venue is only for theater patrons, however this does not stop the cultural void of gambling customers who may rattle the door or the new errant waiter who might accept an uber eats order and suddenly unleash a driver, packages, drinks etc as the play goes on and the diner in the play approaches its sad end. The restaurant has other spontaneous quirks such as malfunctioning ATM machines that can beep persistently through a performance, a mysterious dishwasher that can suddenly turn on remotely, and a loud slushie machine for margaritas and fancy daiquiris (we finally figured out how to turn that off).. These are the naturalist-absurd quirks a playwright does not write into their play, but that align somehow with the world in which the characters reside. Your dining experience serves to acclimate your peripheral awareness and most especially your acoustic sensibilities. Both actors blessedly have enough vocal presence to undertake these challenges and the play's brevity is also an asset here.
The audiences here seemed to come in groups of 3-5 and enjoyed the casual roll of the evening, sipping drinks and chatting away until the performances began, and staying after to continue socializing. Unlike in a theater, where you are cleared out at the performance's conclusion, Monse’s opened the gambling portion of the restaurant after the play and the audience was at liberty to linger. Although there were perhaps conceptual things about this venue that were unclear or uneven, this served the overall production. The only set pieces brought in (and removed each night) were large moving boxes, some saltine baskets, and a small jukebox for one sound cue, and the venue itself did the rest of the heavy lifting.
Field of Flesh
By Derek Spencer
You eventbrite your ticket with little to no information at the time of purchase. A few hours before the performance, you receive an email with an address in Humboldt Park. You are instructed to wait outside on the sidewalk and to not have a full bladder, because bathrooms will not be available in this venue until after the performance. Only 12 guests may see Field of Flesh at a time.
The mysterious venue here is a gallery called Leisure, a new and experimental multimedia space on Division. Around 8pm, guests are piled into a small lobby, and a kindly man invites them to leave their belongings there if they care to, as the doors to the building are now locked. He inquires after a few other things, food sensitivities and if people are okay being touched or spoken to, and after that, he hands each guest a (seemingly random) object. I was given a smoothie cup. Another person had a large stick, another a loaf of bread, another a very large bottle of red wine. A door is opened and furtively the dozen of us creep into a dimly glowing tented area with a cluster of people all hunched over at the end of a very long table. A moment of tension as the two groups stare at each other, and then suddenly the far group descends towards us chattering loudly, greetings, admonishments, callouts, and a whole lot of context is dished out in those first five minutes. Basically, your object helps the performers know who we “are” and approximately where we will be sitting. The man in the lobby has just cast the play by handing certain objects to certain guests. It is up to us, in the clatter, to figure out how - and if - we fit in at all.
The table is covered with a lot of objects. It felt sort of like Joseph Cornell dumped a lot of his boxes out onto a long dining table and then glued them together. There was a very, very big metal bowl being passed around that was filled with pills. A young man sitting next to me was compulsively whipping through tiktok posts, talking nonstop about a family secret, and shoving fistfuls of these pills into his mouth. He seemed attached to me, but I could barely keep up with his diatribes.
About ten minutes after sitting down, while sipping on a glass of wine, which I felt good about, because I was having some social anxiety, the woman across from me gave a cell phone to the woman seated next to me and said can you talk to this person. The call was on speaker and the person on the other end of the line was canceling a food delivery. Apparently it was the dinner of this multi family mystery event, so all we had was some wine and pills. At one point, I read a Turkish poem to an ill man in a bed in a side room, and at another point I played truth or dare with the young kid who took all the pills. I may or may not have also played a half of a game of surreptitious chess with another audience guest who was playing the family dog.
The room itself was fairly obsequious. As outrageous as this performance was, the site specific properties here were the most controlled of the four pieces, and inostentatious, compared to the actors and the objects they handled, mainly their phones. Also, of the four pieces, this production intermingled the audience and performers in a pseudo integrative fashion, comporting the guests as the immersive objects (actor and audience alike). Interestingly, the performative dynamic was surprisingly undemanding of us guests, even though we were individually tasked with a variety of goals (I was supposed to carve a turkey that never appeared), there was a cloak of unaccountability around each of us, as if we were constantly able to fail, bail or high tail it out of there. There was no murder to solve, no one was emitting a super objective or a goal to head towards, it was as meandering as your basic family summer barbecue complete with phones, general alcohol, and lots and lots of superfluous noise.
The family members had a skittish and inattentive nature, and they seemed very intent on the idea of the gathering; however the content of the gathering was very specious, up for grabs, and questionably vacuous. There were toasts, some almost-singing, some insider arguing, some outsider arguing, and although it always almost seemed like the bad news was going to break, inciting a plot, nothing does break, and the evening dissolves into surrealism and dissipates. Much like many of the barbecues I have been to, or hosted over the years.
The above productions happened in such a short time span, and are only a sample of some immersive work in the city, and it is impressive and awesome to sit in an excited, curious audience, having an adventurous experience, trying something outside of the (theatrical) box. One of the earliest and more formative site specific experiences with site specific immersive performance was years ago, just after moving to Chicago in the 90’s. It was produced by a dance performance ensemble named Abiogenesis. My memory of this is scant but I believe you were delivered (by telephone!) an address to arrive at (I no longer remember how we got the reservations in the first place). We were sent, by car, to lower wacker drive (!) where an army of performers suddenly appeared in the underpass and performed quickly, swiftly, subversively and then disappeared. They were in white paper jumpsuits that allowed them a degree of both anonymity and cohesion. It was a dash in the night, suffused with the green pallor of the murky glowy underpass, and loud music coming from car speakers. I don’t remember feeling danger or disappointment at the performance's brevity or bravery. I remember thrill, and the savory feeling you have after a salacious meal, that you ate well, and in good company. The courage of this work is burned into me, and it has always been hard for me to say no to the auspice of an immersive potential.
It is an honor and a surprise to be so involved in the small percentage of site specific performance in Chicago that I was so privileged to both view and work on as an artist, because there is a peculiar vision to be had, and whether you are the haver or the beholder, it is something to take in, because the venue itself has specific candor that a theater box cannot. You carry that revel with you for awhile, and it gives you an umbrage that is important to the boiling pot of Chicago art water, evaporating as it is heating up, and sending its vapors into the ephemeral summery air.