(courtesy of Court Theatre)

Though only two actors command the stage and the set consists of little more than chairs and a backdrop, Court Theatre’s production of “Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” is filled with an energy and charm that belies its spartan setup. Deftly directed by Ron OJ Parson, the play is served well by the intimate nature of the Abelson Auditorium. Although more obscure and seemingly dated than other work by Athol Fugard (best known for “Tsotsi,” which was made into an Academy-Award winning film), “Sizwe” carries underlying themes of alienation and identity that move the piece beyond its 1970s South African setting.

The ninety-minute play opens with an extended monologue by Styles (Chiké Johnson), a photographer in New Brighton who regales the audience with tales of his past as a line worker and his battles with cockroaches in his studio. Just when it seems his stories will never end, a rap at the door interrupts him. The nerve-stricken man he photographs, Sizwe Banzi (Allen Gilmore), falsely introduces himself as Robert Zwelinzima. Styles does his best to draw out this sorrow-ridden character, whose reasons for mystery and misery soon become clear. As the audience finds out, Banzi came to Port Elizabeth in order to find work. Unable to do so, he has found out he has three days to return to King William’s Town—he can work the mines there or remain jobless. After a long night of drinking with Buntu (also played by Johnson), a friend of a friend, the pair comes across a corpse in an alley. The corpse carries papers with a work permit. Name? Robert Zwelinzima. Banzi is then faced with the decision of returning home a failure or adopting the identity of this dead man, losing his own in the process.

The history of this play is in some respects as fascinating as the play itself. Fugard wrote this work in combination with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, who both acted in the original production of the play. Kani used to improvise Style’s opening monologue, in some cases extending his lines until Ntshona forced himself on stage. Although never overt with its condemnation of apartheid, “Sizwe” was controversial enough to warrant the arrest of both actors for obscenity in 1976. Showings were marked by active audience participation and dialogues about the ethics of Banzi’s act would break out in the middle of scenes. The audience at Court Theatre for this production was a good deal more passive, though not for lack of trying on the actors’ parts.

Although the play is certainly a product of its time, this production of “Sizwe” has more going for it than its historical elements. The story’s personalized commentary on apartheid is well matched by the close physical proximity of the actors to the audience, and neither character is afraid to directly confront their viewers, grabbing hands and climbing over seats in one climactic scene. The play is strikingly physical: Johnson appears shirtless, and in one cathartic moment, Gilmore strips to his briefs. Without props or staging to hide behind, Banzi and Buntu’s physiognomies are all the audience has to understand the characters. Questions of identity abound, some obvious and others subtle. At what cost should one give up one’s name? For family, food, life? The dead man who Banzi becomes is not a deus ex machina solution to a problem of work but an absurdist beginning to a debate on identity. Although the play may have begun life as a political feature, its current aim is more philosophical—and Court Theatre meets that aim admirably.
Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through June 13. Wednesdays, 10:30am and 7:30pm; Thursdays, 7:30pm; Fridays, 8pm; Saturdays, 3pm and 8pm; Sundays, 2:30pm and 7:30pm. courttheatre.org

(Michael Brosilow, courtesy of Court Theatre)

The lights open on an empty elevated platform marked only by a small wooden table with a coffee cup and flowers atop it. There is also a simple chair. The performance is already an intimate one. Soon thereafter, Fisher as Didion walks onstage and says, “This happened on December 30, 2003. This may seem like a while ago, but it won’t when it happens to you. And it will happen to you.” And so begins the story of the deaths of Didion’s husband and daughter.

In the ninety-minute play, performed without an intermission, Didion chronicles the two-year period in which both John and Quintana, her daughter, die. Unable to simply list facts, Didion constantly interrupts herself with lists of memorized medications and neurological terms, long heart-breaking silences, and memories. Didion refers to these moments of consumptive memory as “the vortex.” In the vortex, the backlights of the stage shine directly onto the audience with blinding intensity. In the vortex, John still works in his office in their Malibu home, and Quintana’s hair is still green from pool chlorine. In the vortex, one dwells on life and health, not death and sickness. But eventually the lights refocus on the stage, and we are brought back to the drips of IVs in the sterile ICU at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division.

One reason we share Didion’s horror and sadness is she is among the world’s greatest observers. And here, she observes her own life in exacting detail.

On the page, Didion’s prose is extraordinary in its calmness in light of chaos and tragedy, but onstage a different dynamism is required. And Fisher has found it. With an oversized silk blouse and a long scarf draped around her shoulders, Fisher moves across the stage with an ease that causes you to forget that it is one. While Fisher’s energy on stage feels different than Didion’s on the page, she, like Didion, has captured the power of detail. From fidgeting with a bracelet to speaking with a quiver in her voice, Fisher brings life to both the truly funny moments and truly tragic ones.

There is no greater special effect than a well-paired director and actor. In Charles Newell’s production of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a minimal set is the scene of a nuanced drama. Throughout the play, the greatest changes are Fisher’s movements around the chair. As she jumps forward and backwards in time, Fisher’s Didion sits and stands, she moves the chair left and right, and she faces each section of the audience. Eventually, with her back to the audience, sitting in the chair she has moved so many times to punctuate the unfolding chronology of the play, Fisher’s Didion silently settles into its cushion. She seems to have tired of moving around. A soft melody plays. With her back to the audience, Fisher’s Didion spends the last few minutes of the play as a witness to her own story. This is how Newell’s production ends and this is how Didion finally “lets things go.”
Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 14. Wednesdays, 10:30am and 7:30pm; Thursdays, 7:30pm; Fridays, 8pm; Saturdays, 3pm and 8pm; Sundays, 2:30pm and 7:30pm. courttheatre.org

The sort of production that samples from every satirical subgenre in the book, “Irma Vep” can most concisely be described as a parody of gothic horror culture—at least, this is the outermost layer of commentary. Vampires, werewolves, and mummies all make an appearance, and the abrupt facial reactions and over-the-top dun dun duns call to mind the accidental hilarity of early horror films.

But campy horror is only one element of “Irma Vep,” if the most obvious. It would be criminal to neglect the brilliant gender commentary of the two-actor play, in which numerous characters, men and women alike, glide in and out of the parlor with swiftness and confidence. Erik Hellman and Chris Sullivan handle all of these characters with a thought-provoking ease. In one scene, Hellman’s Jane, the saucy maid, engages in a flirtatious conversation with Sullivan’s thuggish stable hand Nicodemus; seconds later Hellman has transformed into the heavily mustached master of the house, Lord Edgar Hillcrest, who calms Sullivan as his relentlessly perturbed wife, Lady Enid. The constant presence of two actors with continuously flexible gender was an obvious statement by Ludlum, who, in drawing up the rights to perform the play, stipulated that the two actors must be of the same sex.

It is testament to the abilities of both Hellman and Sullivan that the individual characters remained coherent throughout. After a short time, however, the sheer gut humor of dude-looks-like-a-lady was sapped; you can only laugh so long about a man in a dress. Luckily, the play moves just one rung up the maturity ladder and offers a complete smorgasbord of bawdy innuendo directed mainly at Jane, the big-busted, highly sexualized maid. Adopting the meta techniques of epic theater, the actors also move beyond the stage, squeezing uncomfortably through the audience and briefly interacting with its more alarmed members. This inclusion furthered the intimacy of a broken fourth wall, inviting the audience along for the increasingly crazy last two acts.

While the humor often pleased, the constant barrage of jokes was sometimes exhausting. Yet there was something admirable about the many directions explored by the fast-paced production, which included physical humor, anachronism, excessive special effects, and nods to the film world. Every little element—and every character—was so good-naturedly embraced by Hellman and Sullivan that it is all but impossible to separate their performances. Indeed, this must have been one intention behind the production: having two actors perform a variety of characters and shift their gender with ease makes each actor seem purely a medium, without the innate qualities that are assumed when the actor portrays one character throughout.

The plot of “Irma Vep” is really the least important part, apparently sewed together with bits and pieces from early Gothic drama and horror. Its campy predictability is just a vehicle for an assortment of commentary sprinkled like confetti on the stage. It is this—the self-conscious humor and gender-bending cross-dressing—that make the production worth seeing.
Court Theatre, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through December 13. courttheatre.org

The play’s progression suggests that it can be about both. As the actors put themselves through the intense emotions of characters in Macbeth, the internal dynamics of the ensemble come to be aligned with, and expressed through these emotional states. The internal turmoil and shame of Macbeth’s treachery presented in the Shakespearian text becomes scrambled with the emotions of the actor who plays Macbeth in the radio version—concern about his own moral failing involving one of his fellow actresses. Throughout, Shakespearian themes bounce in and out of the modern world of the performance.

The idea to present “Macbeth” in such a way stemmed from the discovery of an Orson Welles adaptation of the play for radio, which had been recorded but never aired. Upon hearing the recording, co-directors Anne Bogart and Darren West were struck by the intensity of the play when the audience was left to focus on the sounds and text, leaving the rest to the imagination. Their staging minimizes visual stimuli, and in their place creates a complex series of sounds, both from the text and outside of it, that heighten and punctuate the emotional atmosphere as something being processed and spoken by each individual and devoid of other distractions. Darren West describes the careful choosing of sounds made at each moment as a kind of scoring, “just the way you would a piece of music.”

Beyond the specific inspiration to create a piece centered on the radio version of “Macbeth,” West describes how—after working on five different “Macbeth” performances with over-the-top visual displays—he was generally ready to produce something that let the text speak for itself. For West, it’s about “stripping away all the pretext and expectation about what the play actually is.” Instead of using the vast amount of technology at our disposal to dazzle the audience, he asks, “why can’t we just look into Macbeth’s face and have him tell us? It’s all there.”

In this regard, one of the highlights of the play is the famous “boil boil, toil and trouble” scene, which actress Makela Spielman transforms from a cultural cliché into a chilling monologue. Bogart describes how “it’s so interesting to hear those words, because they have been so obscured.”

For all that “Radio Macbeth” adds to the original “Macbeth,” however, presenting it in this way does add layers that may counteract the attempts at simplification. By making the emotional turmoil among the actors reading “Macbeth” a stand-in for what goes on throughout Shakespeare’s play, the directors have made it a little harder to focus on the pure emotional import of the original. Perhaps the point is to show us that Shakespeare is universal, and that cheating on your husband can entail the same emotional processes and personal significance as murder. I’m not so convinced though, and in watching the play, I found myself watching on the level of the actors themselves performing the play, gathering emotional strength from the Shakespearian text in order to express their own problems, rather than vice versa. Perhaps this was the point, but I can’t help thinking that the struggles that Shakespeare wrote about are a little more powerful than the inner lives of actors. For what it is, the decision to put Shakespeare in such a context does present a new way of watching and hearing a classic, and ultimately raises questions, just as Bogart hopes, about what theater is supposed to do.
Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. November 6-December 7. Wednesday, 10:30am (student matinee) and 7:30pm; Thursday, 7:30pm; Friday, 8pm; Saturday, 3pm and 8pm; Sunday, 2:30pm and 7:30pm. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org

The son of the family that Caroline works for, Noah, adores her, and cherishes the cigarette that she lets him light for her each day. “Caroline is mean, and Caroline is tough,” sings Noah, who, with or without awareness of the irony of the title, calls her “President Caroline.” The little boy struggles with the death of his own mother. She was a bassoonist who played duets with his father, a now-mournful clarinetist who can’t bring himself to pay attention to his young son. The son inexplicably hates his new stepmother, a northern transplant; but his affection for Caroline is not returned.

Told that Caroline can keep any change he leaves in his pockets, Noah begins discarding dimes and quarters, and fantasizing that Caroline talks about him and his extreme generosity with her children at home. However, Caroline, ashamed of the money that she sees herself stealing from the child, does not tell her children where the new, minor windfall has come from. So preoccupied with the complications of Noah’s pocket change, Caroline can’t allow herself to embrace the greater change around her.

Caroline, whose ambitions can no longer reasonably extend beyond her position as a maid, clashes with her own daughter, Emmie, whose outspoken antics make Caroline uncomfortable. Unquestionably part of the next generation, Emmie advocates for the end of the racial and social injustice that Caroline continually shuts out.

“Caroline, or Change” was written by Tony Kushner, with music by Jeanine Tesori. The tale is semiautobiographical for Kushner, who recalls his own childhood in Noah’s. The misapprehensions and passive conflict between the somewhat affluent Jews and the struggling Caroline escalates as the play moves forward. The play is written like a contemporary opera, drawing from gospel and blues traditions with almost every line sung by the talented cast. Director Charlie Newell placed the band above the stage, exposing the musical framework of the piece to the audience’s gaze.

In 1963, Bob Dylan recorded his album “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Dylan sang to his audience, “Admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone. The order is rapidly changing.” As rain falls on stage in the second act of the play, one can’t help but recall Dylan’s prediction of the metaphorical flood that would soon overtake the establishment. Though the sea of change of the sixties and seventies is lauded for the impact it had on the generation that came of age during those rebellious times, “Caroline” is a reminder that for those who were older and in positions without power, the flood was also suffocating. Court Theatre, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through October 28. courttheatre.org

“Orenthal,” a production involving the Renaissance Society, the Experimental Station, and Court Theatre, had begun. The description of “Orenthal” in the email sent by the Renaissance Society was promising: it was to be a one-act portrayal of O. J. Simpson’s rise and fall, which would be contrasted with the story of Shakespeare’s Othello. I wondered what the two really had to do with each other. True, Othello and O. J. were both black, with white wives. And their names both began with O. But the story of Othello is a bit more fleshed out than that of Orenthal James Simpson—Shakespeare accounts for the reason behind Othello’s crime. The murder of Nicole Simpson, O. J.’s wife, was never resolved. What would be the base of “Orenthal,” the play?

To emphasize the O. J.–Othello connection, badly Photoshopped posters of Othello with O. J.’s head decorated the brick walls behind the actor, a chair acting as the only prop. Our O. J., a bit younger and lighter-skinned than the original, began speaking. His voice had a nice rhythm, as he recalled how he was “everybody’s favorite guy,” and how “[he] loved Nicole.” But he was constantly interrupted by a voice from the speakers behind us, a voice insulting him, demeaning him. Whether the voice came from within O. J., or was meant to symbolize the sentiments of his critics was unclear. “Nigga, bullshit!” the voice would screech as O. J. tried to defend himself.

The voice kept screaming about how worthless O. J. was, and I felt sorry for the O. J. in front of me—such a barrage of insults would break anyone down. Is this really what it meant to be O. J.? Was “Orenthal” trying to tell the audience that this was the black male experience in America, the constant anxiety, nitpicking, like Prometheus and the vulture? Or was it trying to tell us about the emotional aftermath of a murder? It felt like more like the former, as “Orenthal” didn’t address the murder issue much. But it wasn’t clear.

Parson’s decision to direct “First Breeze” in part pays homage to the Negro Ensemble Company, founded in New York in 1967 as a response to an article by Douglas Turner Ward written one year earlier. The article strongly suggested that American Theater was reserved “for Whites Only.” Over the years, the NEC has contributed to a burgeoning national Black Arts Movement committed to supporting black playwrights, its training program for young theater practitioners, and expanding the repertoire of roles for black actors. Its mission: “to present live theater performances by and about Black people to a culturally diverse audience that is often underserved by the theatrical community.” When asked about concern over the status of the show as a “classic” and how that may impact its accessibility to a 21st-century audience, Parson shrugged. “[While] it’s a period piece now, where before when I was in it, it was contemporary,” nonetheless, he continued, “It’s timeless.”

“The First Breeze of Summer” is Lucrecia Greene’s story, alternating between flashbacks of her as a young woman in the 1920s—abandoned by a string of men, each of whom left her with a child—and the present-day of the 1970s. She lives with her son Milton’s family, and shares a particular affinity with her grandson Louis, who struggles to find his identity as a young black man. Louis is cast down for dreams of being a doctor in the racially tense backdrop of 1970s society. Young Lucrecia’s scenes take place on a dimly lit elevated upstage, while Lucrecia’s face is often moonlit downstage, capturing the paralyzed, entranced expression of her remembering. When asked about the inspiration behind his staging techniques, Parson replied, “I don’t like to conform to traditional movement on stage.”

“First Breeze” penetrates deeply into the narrative of the Greene family, yet it also suggests race issues in a broader context. Milton’s older son encourages him to increase fees for his plaster business services, and though clearly undercharging, Milton backs down at the threat of losing his white patrons, and so forth. Religious worship plays an influential role in the narrative, with implications in both young Lucrecia’s narrative and the call-and-response church rituals practiced in the Greene home. In a feedback session, Parson noted that this practice is common in African-American homes, not only as a means of religious rites of passage, but also as a way of connecting individuals to their heritage. In fact, the church testifying scene was the most difficult to work on, according to Parson, “the most challenging in terms of content…. It had to be real.”

While specific context can be linked to a historical moment, the disparity in generational values and the capacity for religion to hold a family together transcends the epoch. Lucrecia says to her grandson, “And that’s what I’ve been trying to do all these years abiding by the will of my masters.” Don’t miss this powerful performance at the Court Theatre, running now through June 15th.

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through June 15. For tickets, call (773) 753-4472 or visit www.courttheatre.org

If you are looking for your standard over-the-top, saccharine musical, you won’t find it at Court Theatre. As a continuation of the Court’s rendering of classic American musicals starting six years ago, Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” will be running starting Saturday, March 15 through April 13. Based on the Hungarian play “Liliom” by Ferenc Molnár, “Carousel” explores the lives of individuals in a fishing village on the coast of Maine in 1873; fishermen live at the mercy of the sea while the women of the town face the harsh realities of laboring in the local mills.

It might be difficult to imagine Rogers and Hammerstein, the men who produced “Oklahoma!”, setting a musical in such a dismal landscape. But this unusually gray choice of place sets the tone for the production, displaying the gritty reality of life while still sending an uplifting message through drama and music. Because it is a departure from many other classic American musicals, Court’s Artistic Director Charles Newell describes choosing “Carousel” as the next challenge for him.

With the task of exploring the topics of drudgery, suicide, and violence through musical theater, the musical seems to be formidable indeed. For Newell, the answer was, “Let’s try that! It will challenge us in a new way. It was a question of how we could do a piece with things like suicide and violence that is still life-affirming.” Through a story of love, crime, and death, “Carousel” ultimately sends a positive message in a more realistic way than most musicals. As Newell suggests, “There is nothing more life affirming than the idea that even though we die we will never walk alone.”

Unlike most musicals in which polished musical numbers periodically break the action of the play and ring in the ears of audience members long after the show, the acting and musical aspects of “Carousel” blend much more seamlessly. This technique of “completely integrating the scenes with music” was indeed quite unusual, especially at the time in which the musical was produced by Rogers and Hammerstein. The main character’s soliloquy, “one of the longest pieces in American musical theater” according to Newell, exemplifies this technique: he considers his situation in such a subtle way that he feels entirely different emotionally at the end of piece than he does going into it.

The layered emotional landscape of “Carousel” benefits especially from the small, intimate atmosphere of Court Theatre in this production, as actors can display the subtleties of emotional turmoil without becoming subject to the exaggeration and one-dimensionality that musical theater often demands. By doing the piece completely unamplified, Newell describes how “you can hear the natural human voice played opposite of a string quartet, a couple woodwinds, and a bass, revealing the emotional complexity and nuance of the piece.”

“Carousel” opens with a waltz number independent from the rest of the play, another “radical idea on the part of Rogers and Hammerstein,” in which the audience is introduced to the world of a small fishing and mill village oriented around the brutality of a production lifestyle. According to Newell, “it is much more about the harshness of the world than the pretty, simple, and colorful.” From there evolves a messy emotional story between a young mill girl and a socially precarious carousel barker, with an ending slightly different and more positive than the original Hungarian story, but one which still transcends most other American musicals in complexity. With “Carousel,” audiences get to see Court do “what it does best,” according to Newell—”tell complicated emotional stories and provide an intimate emotional experience.”

“Carousel,” Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. March 15–April 13. Wednesday-Thursday, 7:30pm; Friday, 8pm; Saturday, 3pm and 8pm; Sunday, 2:30pm and 7:30pm. (773)753-4472. www.courttheatre.org.

In his upcoming adaptation for Court Theatre, where he has also been the Artistic Director since 1994, Newell situates the play in the setting of a modern-day dinner being held in honor of new initiates in a powerful secret society. It’s the kind of group that’s as covertly influential as it is elite, full of people that will be “not presidents,” Newell explains, “but the people who determine who gets to be president.” During the event, the initiates are given scripts and asked to do a spontaneous performance of “Titus Andronicus,” with the implicit understanding that their role-playing will be evaluated and will likely have real social import in their lives.

When the newly appointed players begin their impromptu spectacle, they treat it lightly; one actor rubs fruit on his stomach in a ridiculous representation of a stab wound. But as they continue, the line between the simulation of violence and actual violence becomes frighteningly blurry, and is finally immolated when a sexual assault occurs not against Shakespeare’s Lavinia, but against the character playing her at the party. The modern-day characters begin to mold uncomfortably into the roles they’ve been thrust into, and acts of violence that once seemed like harmless masquerade become disturbingly real.

Suddenly, each individual must confront the implications of his or her role in an uncomfortable examination of the relationship between what we do and who we are. We all know people in our lives who draw a casual border between the way they behave and the actual spiritual content beneath the veneer—like the guy who just thinks it’s funny to act like an asshole, but assures you that he’s “a good person deep down.” But in the end, can there really be a distinction between our performance in the eyes of others and the “true” character we’d like to believe resides beneath the surface? The audience will have to ask this of itself as each character ends the play having had to confront, as Newell describes it, “their most bestial selves, their worst selves.”

In the process, the director hopes audiences will see the price we all pay for the perpetual traps of aggression and vengeance he sees plaguing our lives. “It seems like we’re caught incessantly in these cycles of violence,” he says, “that we can’t get out of. ‘I, as an Israeli, have to kill the Palestinian because he killed me; I, the Palestinian have to kill the Israeli because he killed me; I am in a red state; I am in a blue state.’ And we don’t ever connect. How do we break that? We are stuck in violence, not just physical violence, but economic, racial, sexual, and political violence.” As Newell sees it, “Titus” is not simply a brutal collection of shocking acts, but “a human event,” with real costs “to our soul, to our emotional life, to our connection, to our betterment. How do we get out of it?” he asks. I’m hoping that through Shakespeare’s play, we’ll open the door to that question.”

“Titus Andronicus,” Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. January 10-February 10. Showtimes vary. (773)753-4472. www.courttheatre.org

Upping the geek ante, he started a theater club at his high school and continued to study theater as an actor at Emerson College in Boston: “I was an actor, but I was a really terrible actor … some people are good, and some people are bad, and I was just a bad actor.” He got into playwriting in his junior year, and graduated in 1994 with a BFA in Theatre and Writing. The year after he graduated, he moved to Chicago to become a playwright, explaining, “Chicago had a reputation at the time as one of the better theater cities in the country for people just starting out. So I was either going to move to Chicago or Seattle—because I was intimidated by how much New York cost—and I decided to visit both cities, and I didn’t end up ever going to Seattle.” The basis for his decision was the signature show of the Neo-Futurists theater company, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” currently running its 19th season: “I loved it and I was like, if this could run for five years—at the time it was five years—this is the city for me! So I went back to Boston, got everything in order and moved out here.”

Like many a modern struggling artist, he found employment first at a Starbucks, writing in his free time. “I wanted to be a playwright, but I didn’t know what that meant, so I wrote these horrible plays, sitting in my bedroom getting really drunk and stoned.” Working himself out of the post-college funk, “I decided to stop getting drunk and stoned so much, and I got a job in theater as a house manager for Shakespeare Rep[ertory], which is now Chicago Shakespeare.” He only worked there for one season, but made contacts in the theatre scene and learned an important lesson: “I realized that it was really easy to start a theater company, that any old idiot could start one.” Considering himself at least at that level, he started his theater company, The Hypocrites, at the age of 25. “It’s always been my dream to have a theater company. I think it’s every college kid’s dream.”

However, his motivations for starting his own theater company weren’t merely hubristic: “There was a specific type of theater that I liked that wasn’t fully getting made.” That is, absurdist theater: think ‘Waiting for Godot’ or ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.’” “That was the type of theater that really excited me, non-naturalistic theater…I didn’t think that a lot of people in this city were doing theater not based in psychological realism,” he comments. Graney has directed almost every production of the Hypocrites.

Almost exclusively featuring absurdist plays in its earlier seasons (heavy on the Beckett and Ionesco), the Hypocrites moved into more mainstream productions such as “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman,” both of which met with much critical acclaim. Of their success, Graney says, “It’s really easy to start [a theater company], and then you just have to try to get the theater company’s name in the paper as much as you can and then people think you’re successful—it’s really weird. But it’s hard to maintain it.” The Hypocrites have been going strong for eleven seasons now, though they don’t have a space yet and are non-equity, which means that their actors have day jobs.

His directorial style has said to be tough on the actors, extremely emotionally demanding. I mentioned a quote from him in a 2003 interview with PerformInk: “I think the playwright is the slave to the Art. So the playwright knocks out his or her ego to create universal, long-lasting Art. Then the director needs to be a slave to the playwright. Everything you do as a director needs to come from what the playwright wants. The actors and designers are then slaves to the director. I demand of actors a complete mental and physical commitment to the role. And it always goes back to the playwright.”

Graney laughs the quote off, exclaiming, “That was a long time ago!” He’s backed off from that stance, professing, “I think that everybody’s job in theater is equally as important…and it usually starts with the script, and you do your best to try to figure out what the playwright is saying, but that all depends on what the actors are doing, what the designers are doing, and what the director wants to do, sometimes.” So no more slavery, but he adds, “Everybody should have their own input, but it’s the director’s job to provide unity to a production…to make sure everything fits together in a cohesive ‘art package.’”

Graney has been excellent in producing these art packages, having been named Chicagoan of the Year in Theater by the Tribune and having won a Joseph Jefferson Citation in directing. Chicago theater critics hardly ever mention Sean Graney’s name without the phrase “rising star” in the same sentence.

This “rising star” status has led to his current gig directing “What the Butler Saw” at Court Theatre. Graney recounts, “About two years ago I said [to Charlie Newell, artistic director at Court Theatre] that I’d be really interested in working at the Court and I know that it’s probably not for several, several years off, but you let me know what I can do to start that process going.” The moment came sooner than Graney expected, but not too soon at all, judging from the final product. “What the Butler Saw” by Joe Orton is a classic farce about a philandering psychiatrist who, in the midst of seducing a young job applicant, builds an increasingly convoluted set of lies to prevent his wife, among others, from discovering the truth.

Of his direction, Graney opines, “This play specifically is a pretty explicit, graphic, extreme play, so I think to not do it in that way would be awkward and bizarre—not in a good way.” He has executed the play brilliantly, and the acting is superb, especially on the part of Mechelle Moe (who joins Graney from the Hypocrites) and Mary Beth Fisher (who was in “Arcadia” earlier this year). Despite the occasionally slapstick dialogue, the actors play the characters convincingly, appearing inapprehensive even in extreme undress. The set design is impeccable and the white sterility is convincing as a psychiatrists’ office, though there’s plenty to make a mess with.

Graney’s involvement with theater at the UofC does not end there. He is also directing “Top Girls,” a production for University Theater (UT). “Top Girls” will be running from November 28 through December 1. “I’ve been teaching over there [UT] for about three years now and Heidi Culman, the head of the department of UT, asked me if I would be interested in directing a play there. And I said, yes, very interested.” Though he’s directing in so many different theaters with different audiences, he insists that it doesn’t have an impact on his directing: “I try not to worry too much about catering to different audiences…It’s just how I interact with the play, and it doesn’t matter what the setting is. It’s the same.”