It was an exaggerated news story for about 24 hours, but because it snowballed on mainstream American cable, it cannot be ignored that a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, Gary Sinise, has been publicly discussed by adult professionals as a potential presidential contender for the GOP’s 2012 ballot.
Sinise has been a more conscientious Hollywood participant than Reagan ever was, he’s more connected to the U.S. military than Rudolph Giuliani or Mitt Romney could ever hope to be, and the theater company he co-founded in the 1970s produced just as many influential American women artists as it did men, a gender balance to which the GOP can’t realistically lay claim. But before it’s made clear why courting Sinise would still be a fool’s errand for the Republican Party, we must first consider how the possibility ever made it into national conversation to begin with.
May 10 on the gossipy commentary Web site The Daily Beast, former McCain staffer Nicolle Wallace wrote a column titled “Waiting for Reagan,” asking a fairly standard open question about where heroism lies in with her party’s leadership; she had the good manners to pontificate on heroism rather than get down on her knees and plead for it. Though her reference to Sinise as a potential contender is only a paragraph long, wholly unofficial (her source is “one Republican I know” who “suggested that actor Gary Sinise might be our savior”) and followed by Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno—both of whom she points out are not even considering running—her suggestion still made headlines.
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Spend less than a week away from Facebook and you’re likely to miss out on news stories. After spending an extended weekend apart from both Chicago and the Internet, I learned only today that Sunday night, Chicago’s celebrated director and reluctant actor David Cromer picked up a Lucille Lortel Award for his Barrow Street direction of Our Town (which started as a Hypocrites production down in the fabulous cellar of the Chopin Theatre). The staging also won the Lortel Award, which honors off-Broadway excellence, for best revival.
I’ve personally tried not to draw attention to Cromer in my tenure at TOC, as I don’t want my friendship with him to bias what I write about him. But now that he has nearly 1,400 Facebook friends, I am significantly less important to him, so my mentioning his win is less precarious a conflict of interests.
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Our distinguished hero
Ah, the wonders of Chicago spring: schizophrenic temperatures that can ruin any otherwise lovely event, Cubs fans getting back into therapy and the much-anticipated non-Equity Joseph Jefferson nominations. Named for 19th-century actor Jefferson, who spent much of his career playing the titular character in productions of Rip Van Winkle, the Jeff noms’ announcement inevitably brings as much whiplash-inducing, “What were they thinking?” shock value for the talented non-nominees and observers as they do joy to those whose work was honored. This year we consider what they were thinking, and even try to imagine it, in an attempt to figure out what makes the ever-elusive Jeff committee tick.
Here are our attempted-mind-reading guesses for why some of Chicago’s finest got snubbed this year. Again. (The complete list of nominees follows.)
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I should preface this by saying that a lot of my best friends hated August: Osage County.
Actually, that’s not true. One good pal I don’t see enough, a dude I know from work and my brother all thought it was seriously overrated. (And by the time they saw it, A:OC surely was.)
The reason I offer up that most popular play of the last decade as an object of potential ridicule is because I’m sympathetic to frustrated theatergoers of any stripe who attend something based on its strong critical response or fleet of trophies and come away underwhelmed. I feel that way about this year’s Pulitzer winner, Lynn Nottage’s Ruined.
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Things I learned today from a League of Chicago Theatres press release:
1. My employer, Time Out Chicago, is partnering with the League of Chicago Theaters, the Tribune and Broadway in Chicago to present the Broadway in Chicago Emerging Theater Company Award. (Apparently the winning company will get, in addition to $5,000 from Broadway in Chicago, some free advertising from TOC and the Trib.) This is amusing primarily because in the past TOC has raised some pointed editorial objections to the award—its amount, the procedure through which it’s given, that its first recipient wasn’t exactly in need of it (although the House Theatre was ultimately blameless in that scenario).
2. I don’t have to make a big political mess for my employers by crying outrage over an undeserving group winning the prize. This year’s winner is the side project, a Rogers Park company so small and humble it doesn’t capitalize the letters of its own name. In addition to producing a slew of new plays by unknown writers (most of them on shoestring budgets), the side project plays landlord to all varieties of young Chicago companies who enjoy affordable rent and the benefit of tiny-scale marquee recognition; it’s a venue media people and theater insiders know about. In short, the side project’s a kind of entry portal for the storefront scene through which a ridiculous variety of people have at some point passed.
I doubt $5,000 could cover the expenses of the boulders hanging from the ceiling in Robert Falls’s boulder-heavy revival of Desire Under the Elms, but up in Rogers Park, five K still goes a pretty long way.
Many congrats to side project artistic director Adam Webster—a guy who will read any play anyone sends to him—and his artistic team. You can catch their work starting next weekend when they open Lynne McMahon’s The Bird Sanctuary and Mark Young’s The Rocks, and get more bite-sized new works when the second half of their new one-act festival, Cut to the Quick, opens April 19.
The 2009-2010 season of the off-Loop theater gang the Hypocrites was announced today. And just when you thought you’d had your fill of apocalyptic Nazi musicals.
Later this year, artistic director Sean Graney will be adapting and directing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which has seen umpteen stage adaptations over the years, a situation which will hopefully force the company into creating something completely fresh rather than simply reanimating dead tissue), as well as staging Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.
But the real news is that next spring the ‘crites will be producing Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, under the direction of the House Theatre’s Matt Hawkins, who memorably staged the hillbilly melodrama Hatfield & McCoy in 2006. This is big deal primarily because the contrapuntal Hypocrites are known for a lot of things but, um, musicals aren’t exactly one of them. (Graney’s lukewarm Threepenny Opera last year in the Steppenwolf Garage was the company’s only foray into that theatrical breach.) Read more »
Just when you thought it was socially acceptable to have traditional, two-person, missionary-style theater again, the Orgies are back; gird your loins.
For the uninitiated: The Orgies, now in their fourth year, are an anonymously given theater award “to encourage original, innovative, risky, thrilling, inspiring, and possibly outlandish work in Chicago theatre.” Recipients receive a certificate and a crisp $100 bill. (According to this year’s press release, sent from orgietheatreaward at yahoo.com, this year’s recipients must first respond to an e-mail in order to confirm a mailing address; apparently some past postal flubs have resulted from the fact that, y’know, an anonymous awards-giving body can’t exactly have a return mailing address.)
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Michael Shannon with Jim True-Frost in The Pillowman at Steppenwolf in 2006.
In the middle of a phone call last night with Chicago stage badass Michael Shannon, he stopped on a street in Red Hook and had a brief exchange with a buddy he bumped into. I only caught Mike’s end of the conversation, which consisted of the following:
“What’s goin’ on, man? This is my little girl, Sylvia,”
[Pause.]
“Hey, why are you on a crutch?”
[Pause.]
“Yeah, I’m doin’ an interview right now.”
[Pause.]
“Good to see you, man.”
Then, as Shannon was walking away, he responded to the last thing the guy shouted at him. “Eh, thanks. It’s nice, but you gotta take it with a grain of salt.”
Besides its hilariously eerie resemblance to a sample exchange from Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals, it contextualized where Mike Shannon places the Oscars in his life at the moment: At the end of the conversation, at someone else’s mention, and with a grain of salt.
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Steppenwolf Theatre announced its 2009-2010 season today, and now that the August: Osage County crew is back from its global domination tour, it looks like things are back to usual at the ‘wolf. The new lineup is a fairly traditional one for the company, built rather evenly on a few money-in-the-bag revivals and several so-new-you’ve-never-even-heard-of-them new works.
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In case you haven’t heard, the Wooster Group’s blackface production of Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 drama The Emperor Jones, in which an African-American escaped killer runs a Caribbean island, is tearing up the Goodman Theatre this week as the kick-off of the O’Neill festival. And the fact that the titular character is played by a white woman has caused a predictably controversial stir (though, as is often the case in these situations, not among anybody who’s actually seen it).
Kate Valk’s masterful shuck-and-jive performance will be off-putting to anyone who can’t bear the conceit of a white actor mimicking black vernacular, and more offensive still to proper theater audiences who won’t dig the Wooster Group’s techno-fused production. But audiences willing to enter into it simply to watch an accomplished actor take on a historically important role will be stunned by it.
The Emperor Jones gets a bad rap for a number of reasons, including a very poor 1933 screen version starring Paul Robeson. After the dawn of the civil rights movement, the play was particularly stigmatized; O’Neill being considered a white son of relative American privilege, his Voodoo-voiced character became anathema to social progressives, who considered it as irresponsible a depiction of blacks as Amos ‘n’ Andy (the once-popular, Harlem-dwelling radio characters played by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who went on to become unfortunate symbols of back-of-the-bus race relations).
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