A Scene from 'The Last Ninety Minutes in the Life of Nikoa Tesla'; Sam Bowman

In Praley’s play, there are five different Teslas: the inventor, the lover, the dying, the inquisitor, and the puzzler. “I always was interested in how I became different people at different times,” Praley reflects. “Who I am with my family is someone different than who I am with my friends, and both of those Augies are different from who I am with my girlfriend.” The five different Teslas are played by five different actors, two of whom are women and three men. Praley continues, “This is a very cerebral play. I don’t expect everyone to understand all of it; some of the writing is meant to be confusing.” Although navigating the different narratives throughout the play is difficult at times, Praley hopes that audience members come away understanding the central idea. He recites a line from the third act of Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town”: “Do human beings ever realize life while they’re living it?” Praley takes a minute to reflect. “That moment is what I wanted to encapsulate.”

In January 2009, Praley finished his last draft of the script and handed the play over to Holtzman. “When rehearsals began, my thoughts around the show started to change,” Holtzman says. “I shifted my thinking. At first, I was thinking about the arc of the show and the accessibility of characters. But in the rehearsal process I began to think about how I could make this script come to life.” Over the past ten weeks, Holtzman, along with the show’s dramaturge Molly Zeins, a twelve-person cast, and a large tech staff, has spent countless hours putting her vision together and bringing it to life. “It’s exciting to see all the ways in which students collaborate on a project about creation and production. I’m excited for people to see what we can produce.” For a show that, according to Holtzman, plays with the ambiguities of boundaries, the world Holtzman has created onstage truly exceeds the limitations of a student theater space and budget. “This production has been an enormous learning experience for me,” she says. “It’s a new work, so it’s a work still in progress. But I’m really proud of what we’ve created.” When the final curtain falls on Saturday night, in contrast to the play’s title, it will not mark the end of the life of “The Last Ninety Minutes in the Life of Nikola Tesla,” but instead the beginning.
Third Floor Theater, 5706 S. University Ave. June 3-6. Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm. $6, free on Wednesday. ut.uchicago.edu

Bobby Strong's revolt; photo by Daniel Forbush

The denizens of the decrepit city that serves as the setting for the play are a twitchy, fidgety bunch—and with good reason. A drought means that the poverty-stricken parts of town are being squeezed for cash. All have to pay per pee at the last functioning urinal in the vicinity run by the plunger-wielding Pennywise. Bryn Adams, who breathes life into a hybrid of Ms. Hannigan and Matron “Mama,” manages to achieve a convincing blend of bitter ruthlessness and ham-fisted humanity. A woman hardened by urban squalor, her no-nonsense attitude means she doesn’t hesitate much to call the cops on those who fail to adhere to the rules of Urine Good Company’s rules, warning, “If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go through me.”

Seated comfortably atop Urine Good Company is the detestable Caldwell B. Cladwell (Augie Praley) who epitomizes the corporate Fat Rat with a natural and notable stage presence. With a resonant voice to complement theatrical ease, he gives a rousing performance as Caldwell (“I can bring in bucks by the buckets”) Cladwell. The iron-fisted, maniacal persona works effectively to poke fun at the corruptibility of capitalism and the petty bureaucracy.

But what is a despot without minions? And mignon they are: Cladwell’s cronies come in the form of Officers Lockstock and Barrel, who make the stiflingly scrutinizing society what it is by prowling the streets for deviant pissers. Officer Lockstock’s tongue-in-cheek charm is conveyed impeccably by the charismatic Morgan Maher and accompanied by a profound voice.

Molly Zeins, who appears to have stepped out of a Broadway musical and onto a University Theater stage, plays the seraphic Hope (“Life should be beautiful”) Cladwell, foil to her father, the malevolent mogul. The ingénue’s rosy outlook on life and her grade school teacher charm are enough to inspire the quixotic everyman-cum-swashbuckling hero Bobby Strong, whose unfortunate initials are not incongruous with the tone of the play. Lucas Whitehead brings energy to the role, infusing his unpolished character with the innocent determination of a klutzy revolutionary.

It is a challenge not to go over the top with characters as farcical as the ones in “Urinetown,” and Little Sally (Amanda Jacobson), a pert and insightful street urchin who functions as a narrator alongside Officer Lockstock, does a decent though occasionally overly energetic job of balancing hyperbole and childishness.

Granted, the “central conceit of the show,” as Officer Lockstock points out, is urination, but along with all the swagger and satire the show’s self-conscious nature is endearing and not at all unwelcome in times like these. Wondering about the privilege to pee might not be as hilariously absurd as it is made out to be in light of current economic circumstances. Officer Lockstock’s ironic narration can sometimes warrant a thought to the future rather than a chuckle, as when he contemplates, “Don’t you think people want to be told their way of life is unsustainable?”

The murky, derelict environment is achieved effectively, though the set design and costumes, whilst well chosen, are occasionally not in keeping with the context of the play. There is, for example, Penelope Pennywise’s pristine white shirt gleaming beneath a tatty work robe, or the finish on Hope’s supposedly designer dress. The choice to perform in a small theater seems to have been the right one, allowing for intimacy that has you squirming in your seat with laughter and a renewed sense of social obligation. Props go to professional director Jonathan Berry and choreographer Kat Lieder, who impart verve on the musical lampoon, to go with a well-orchestrated score that ranges from gospel to jazz and often recalls Sondheim.

Francis X. Kinahan Theatre, 5706 S. University Ave. Through March 14. Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm. $6. ut.uchicago.edu

In director Augie Praley’s rendition of “Bat Boy,” a production of the University of Chicago’s University Theater that goes up this week, there is a similar, and successful, emphasis on wanting to civilize the savage-like creature. The child is given the name Edgar after he is handed off to Doctor Parker, the town veterinarian (Morgan Maher), in the hopes that he will get rid of the ravenous animal. Edgar, played forcefully and humorously by Lucas Whitehead, is initially only capable of grunting and groaning. However, with the patience and care of his adoptive mother, the wife’s doctor (a nurturing Molly Zeins), the young man is quick in learning to imitate and repeat the sounds and words she makes. In fact, he becomes cultured to the extent that from the moment he learns how to speak, his words are pronounced in a highbrow British accent—a little something he picked up from “BBC language tapes.”

For the most part, “Bat Boy: The Musical” is catchy and witty, possibly due to the cooperative and creative vibe which permeates the play. While the musical numbers are not sung in pitch perfect voices, they are sung in good humor, and the lyrics are often funny, such as those in “Touch Me Bat Boy” and “Can’t Rid Ourselves of our Christian Charity.” Furthermore, the entire play is accompanied by live music, which consists of a bassist, a keyboardist, and a drummer, and this contributes enormously in setting the tone and mood of the production. While the play is not concise—it does run over two hours—the actors are all effective in their parts. This good showmanship pervades the play, where there are many comical if not slightly bizarre moments, such as the birth of ‘the Bat Boy’ and a rendition of an Adam and Eve story between Edgar and the veterinarian’s daughter, Shelley (Amelia Baxter-Stoltzfus).

“Bat Boy: The Musical” is worth seeing, if anything, for the experience—as Praley explained, he modeled the décor and setting “on early ‘60s horror films.” Sometimes, the play strays away long enough from the comedic to create dramatic segments, and ultimately it manages to leave a mark on its audience. In its attempts to humanize Bat Boy, someone who only happens to look “different,” as his adoptive mother assures her daughter when he first enters their lives, it is a real testament to the fact that we are not born as man or woman, but that we are only raised as such.

First Floor Theater, Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University Ave. June 5-7. Thursday-Saturday, 8pm. $6.

“I started thinking about this project at the end of my first year. Initially I just wanted to do Richard III, a character I’d always found compelling and that I’d come back to again and again,” reveals Griffin Sharps, the director of “Shakespeare’s King Richard III: a retelling.” Sharps also edited the play to fit his specific—and dreadful—vision. The staging goes up this Wednesday after a full two years of development. It depicts the conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York over the English crown during the War of the Roses, and the eventual rise and fall of the deformed Richard III. The original idea included an all-female cast and a thematic emphasis on the corruption and perversion that runs throughout the text, staged as a hyper-violent drag spectacle. Indeed, Richard’s world is a nightmare of violence and upheaval: the throne lacks a legitimate king, which has upset both the political and natural worlds. In the midst of this terror, noblemen battle for power, and families tear themselves apart in a mad scramble for the crown.

Sharps elaborates, “I thought about how problematic that would be for Shakespeare’s audience. You’re showing a world in which the natural order has been disrupted, presumably this is the worst thing that could happen to a country, but you show it to people and they consume it as entertainment.” Why would the Bard do such a thing to his audience? Of course, in the original, singular production of “Richard III” there’s a moral: we are permitted to be enthralled and entertained by Richard because, in the end, he gets what’s coming to him, and the kingship is restored along with our belief in the necessity of a divinely-ordained king. Sharps had a different idea entirely. He says, “Initially I thought, ‘What happens if you just cut that out? What if you just leave the nightmare and just never wake up?’ What I found was that the more you think about it that way, the more it forces you to think about how the audience is consuming and participating in acts of horror… and even in some way enabling them, since the audience is always involved with what is going on onstage.”

Although a desire to explore and exploit this insight in relation to the darkness and turbulence of the text motivated what had been Sharps’s original all-female horror-porn concept, the play has greatly evolved since that initial burst of inspiration. The current show, which now features a mixed-gender ensemble and several child actors, is actually a cutting together of several plays (“Henry VI” part 2 and 3 and “Richard III”), which allows it to have a single story arc centered on Richard. Several scenes and secondary characters have been cut to give the plot a brisker pacing and thematic form. Richard’s monologues act as counterpoints, giving us a glimpse into his wretched inner workings, while serving as vantage points on the unfolding misery and intrigue. Tellingly, a lot of the carnage has been moved offstage: “What I found was the more I could push it into the realm of the grotesque in terms of its effects on people instead of through onstage violence, the more effective it was. You don’t see the son die, but you see the mother watching him die.”

The show’s designers have assembled a coherent and effective aesthetic for this tragedy. The set design by David Jarvis is minimalist yet bold, with the singular throne appropriately dominating the space and shaping the activity within it. The sleek costuming gives a definite visual style, as well as a certain edge. The lighting creates a placeless world for the characters, where concrete settings are replaced by an affective environment infused with dread, mourning, and violence. This serves to accent key scenes and intensify the emotional impact of the many fight scenes and performances, which is fortunate because the cast is largely terrific. Ryland Barton is perfectly detestable and fully believable as the title character, while David Guyton and William Butts give intense and thorough performances as King Edward IV and the Earl of Warwick, respectively.

Sharps is ultimately proud of his morally ambiguous work. “What I’ve tried to do is to create a situation in which the audience is given absolute permission by the play to consume all of these objects of horror and violence unproblematically… which I think forces people to realize that there’s something deeply wrong about that.”

Francis X. Kinahan Third Floor Theater, Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University Ave. May 21. Wednesday, 8pm, free. May 22-24. Thursday-Saturday, 8pm, $6.

College was supposed to be a land of both social and academic opportunity. To a large extent it is, even at a work-intensive school like the University of Chicago. But how exactly these opportunities present themselves, and how ardently we protect them and involve ourselves, is a more complicated tale.

As a forlorn first-year, one sometimes feels like a worthless fish, adrift in a gigantic, somewhat hazy sea. For the first week or so of college, the opportunities that arise are forced, nonspecific group outings, rather than anything truly exciting or necessarily compelling. Anything extracurricular is also intensely communal. This is not to say that a little bit of forced bonding is an awful endeavor, but it is one that can make a new student feel as if among a herd of cows munching on free cud (in addition to feeling like a worthless fish). And while I like Michigan Avenue, community service, and John Hughes movies just as much as the next person, the first week of college can certainly leave one feeling stripped of anything resembling individuality. Even once we all get our placement test results and end up enrolled in some liberating and/or numbing combination of courses, that first autumn at the UofC is an experience of lumping, not separating.

But when the RSO (Recognized Student Organization) fair comes around, a small bit of freedom is offered. The cows and fishes all scatter to various tables, lured by eager, smiling faces. Students brandish a pen to sign up for dozens of mailing lists, pick an identity, join a club.

Of course, at this point, classes start, and after the free pizza offered at the initial meetings of many RSOs runs out, attendance tends to dwindle. It could be any number of things; nobody can actually be expected to show up at a dozen weekly meetings, or sit through rehearsal for a handful of different shows. At some level, RSOs tend to offer students a grasp at identity as they meet their first casual or close friends outside their dorm, students who share their interests. Yet for some reason, RSOs at the UofC often have a lifespan only slightly longer than those fake clubs that groups of friends would make up in high school, just so that they could have a picture in the yearbook together. Even RSOs that are generally successful can fade as leadership shifts, or attendance or submission lags. By one’s third or fourth year, even minimal RSO involvement is often left to a few hundred hardcore individuals, who run meetings and bring dozens of reimbursement receipts to the basement of the Reynolds Club.

The mystery of student organizations is a difficult one to unpack. There are six RSOs that receive funding separately—WHPK (radio), University Theater (drama), Major Activities Board (huge concerts), Council on University Programming (large parties), Doc Films (cinema), and Fire Escape Films (making movies), and they tend to involve a lot of students and get a lot of money from the college. These RSOs are also some of the oldest on campus. WHPK has been broadcasting from the Reynolds Club for over fifty years, and Doc Films is the oldest continuously screening student film society in the country. Yet contributing in a leadership role to either of these organizations can be a huge time commitment, and on top of a stressful class schedule, having to commit a serious amount of extra effort to a large organization can be both rewarding and draining. But for the most part, the continued existence of these RSOs is rarely in jeopardy.

Not so for the smaller schools of fish. The most visible casualty of this tends to be publications. If a magazine or review can’t produce enough content to fill an issue, or if they don’t have an editorial board (or even a single person) willing to trudge through submissions, they often fall apart. Some, such as Sliced Bread (formerly Aubade), have re-branded and re-energized. Others’ publishing simply dwindles, or ceases entirely. Their registered organization status is switched to ‘inactive,’ until an eager or entrepreneurial student attempts to revive or resuscitate the cause. RSOs don’t really die, you see. They simply retire quietly and wait until someone new finds them.

When one searches for a list of all RSOs, active and inactive, on the Student Activities website, 456 organizations are returned. The first is the undergraduate chapter of the American Medical Student Association, and the last is the Zombie Readiness Task Force. The Zombie Readiness Task Force was only established as a registered organization within the past year, whereas pre-med students have existed since the dawn of the university. Between these groups, both intellectually and alphabetically, exists hundreds of other options for students.

But the question of what fails and what succeeds has to do as much with zeitgeist as anything. Despite the fact that the Zombie Readiness Task Force received thousands of dollars of funding from Student Government’s Uncommon Fund, they still need to keep an active membership to survive. Maybe when the apocalypse does come calling, there will be no one to protect campus from a gaggle of flesh-eating beasts because students have joined the Anti-Cyborg Coalition, or the Alien Invasion Support Group. All facetiousness aside, the possibility of a continuous student life is often undercut by us students ourselves. After all, we graduate.

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.”