Windy City Playhouse

The Recommendation – Windy City Playhouse – August 18, 2019

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As with past productions, the Windy City Playhouse’s current show provides a different kind of experience, this time moving the necessarily small audience between a dorm room, jail cell, poolside patio, restaurant, bar, and health club sauna, which, as far as I could tell, served no purpose other than to show off the actors’ pecs and the stage crew’s ability to quickly transform the space.

There’s a lot of yelling, which, in my opinion, often replaces more interesting subtlety, and which I find annoying enough in a normal theater space, but when you’re three feet from the actors, it makes me want to close my eyes and go to a happy place.

The actors do a fine job of ignoring audience members while moving among them, except on those occasions when interaction is intended, as when one of them took me by surprise by calling out my name and delivering to me a cold, awful tasting shot of coffee in the middle of a scene, the occasion of which I nonetheless intend to add to my stage resume as an uncredited role.

It’s a serious show, but I found the delivery of the message to be somewhat convoluted, with unnecessary details inserted for no apparent reason other than to fill time. In particular, I couldn’t help but cringe when a lawyer asked his client to sign something that bore no relation to the thread of the story and would be a clear violation of legal ethics rules. I later felt compelled to go to the playwright’s webpage and send him a message citing the rule he had his character breaking. I’m sure that will go over well.

I love the creativity of the Windy City Playhouse, but The Recommendation does not get mine.

Noises Off (Nothing On) – Windy City Playhouse – March 17, 2019

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I think the cast of Noises Off did a really good job (as opposed to the squabbling, irresponsible cast of Nothing On, the play within the play), but how would I know? The breakneck pace of Noises Off, which tells the story of an incompetent acting company, allows for the possibility of the cast doing almost anything they want, going off script and improvising, and having it seem like it’s part of the play.

Once again, as it did with Southern Gothic, the Windy City Playhouse does things a little differently. In traditional productions of Noises Off, the Nothing On stage is turned around in the second act to reveal the backstage deterioration of the show. But Windy City leaves the stage as is and takes the audience around back for the second act, which is still the first act of Nothing On, except on a different night, then returning the audience to their original seats to watch the third act, still the first act of Nothing On, except on yet another night, as that show falls deeper into theatrical hell.

Some of the audience gets to climb a ladder to sit on a second level landing during the second act, with their feet hanging over the backstage. I’m not sure whether this is considered prime seating, but it is voluntary. Maybe next time.

Special mention to Rochelle Therrien, as Brooke Ashton, as Vicki, or really to Vicki, who never drops a line in Nothing On no matter what mayhem is going on around her to cause the line to no longer make any sense whatsoever, which would be confusing to the Nothing On audience, but is priceless to the Noises Off audience.

And to Ryan McBride, as Garry Jejune, as Roger Tramplemain, for the best live pratfall I’ve ever seen at the theater, giving no regard for life or limb as he careened down a staircase. He could make a lot of money doing that as part of an insurance fraud scheme.

Southern Gothic – Windy City Playhouse – May 6, 2018

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This was my first time at the three-year-old Windy City Playhouse, though I’ve been to the Windy City Fieldhouse to see women’s flat track roller derby, which unfortunately was a couple years before I started writing this blog, because it was interesting being the only one there who wasn’t noticeably tattooed.

This time we weren’t the only ones without tattoos. I know this because we spoke with one of the stage hands (who shepherd people around the set as occasionally necessary during this immersive show) before the show started and she told us she didn’t have any body art (the conversation inevitably went there after starting with her unnaturally tinted hair).

Thirty audience members were served several small drinks (Tom Collins, Champagne, and Whiskey Sour) as the play enfolded around them in the dining room, living room, and kitchen of this house constructed within a theater. There also was a porch, a yard, the hint of a bedroom, and a bathroom that probably wasn’t functional (don’t worry, the theater has its own).

The play will never win a Pulitzer (though Laughing Boy won the prize for fiction in 1930, beating out The Sound and the Fury and A Farewell to Arms, so who knows), but the format was fun and very well-executed by a cast that somehow wasn’t at all distracted by the well-behaved audience (though it was tempting to answer the phone when the cast let it ring several times) standing among them.

It made me think that I was on the Starship Enterprise’s holodeck, in passive mode, where you are an observer who can’t interact, except here the actors were real, not computer-generated, I think. But when the play ended (on a great and unexpected closing line), the lights went out, and the cast left, without so much as taking a bow. Surely, had they been real actors, and not holodeck creations, they would have accepted our applause.  They probably get paid in bitcoin.