FACING OUR TRUTH at the Goodman -- Playwrights Respond to Trayvon Martin

When the world doesn't make sense, writers look for ways to deal with the insanity. Novels, documentaries, investigative journalism... And plays. Playwrights use the forum of the stage to poke and prod at the issues, to turn them over and ponder them. They don't necessarily provide answers. But they do offer questions.

The Trayvon Martin case -- where a gun-toting man named George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed kid and then used Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law as an excuse -- sparked debate and horror in a lot of quarters. It comes as no surprise that the issues of racism, privilege and injustice in our neighborhoods and in our legal system illuminated by the Trayvon Martin debacle have prompted a response on the dramatic front.

New York's New Black Fest, "a gathering of artists, thinkers, activists and audiences who are dedicated to stretching, interrogating and uplifting the Black aesthetic," commissioned Facing Our Truth, a collection of short plays responding to the Trayvon Martin case written by some of America's hottest and most exciting theatrical voices. The playwrights include Marcus Gardley (Every Tongue Confess, dance of the holy ghost), Tala Manassah and Mona Mansour (they co-wrote After, while Mansour is the author of That Hour of Feeling, a Humana Festival play, among others), Winter Miller (In Darfur), Dominique Morisseau (Detroit ’67), Dan O’Brien (The Body of an American) and A. Rey Pamatmat (Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them, another Humana Festival hit).

When Facing Our Truth premiered last December in New York, there were six total pieces, including Pamatmat's "Some Other Kid," Morisseau's "Night Vision," Miller's "Colored," "No More Monsters Here" by Mansour and Manassah, and "The Ballad of George Zimmerman," a folk opera written by O’Brien with composer Quetzal Flores.

Facing Our Truth: Short Plays on Trayvon, Race & Privilege is slated to play various places around the U.S., including -- next Monday -- a performance at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. This special reading of the plays in Facing Our Truth begins at 7 pm in the Goodman's Owen Theater on March 3. Reservations are required, but you will not be able to make them online. You'll need to call the Goodman directly at 312-443-3800.

THE FROGS Opens Tonight at Eureka College Theatre

Are you ready for some amphibian action? The classical Greek comedy The Frogs opens tonight at 7:30 pm at Pritchard Theatre on the campus of Eureka College. The original involves a journey to the Underworld and a verbal duel between playwrights Euripides and Aeschylus, but director Holly Rocke and her cast are making it look and sound a bit different for Eureka. Rocke characterized the production as "eclectic, zany and pretty to look at" when I asked her to sum it up in seven words or less.

The pretty part comes from some over-the-top wigs and puppets, as well as a set that looks like a big pool of water even if it isn't really wet. Some pictures have been shared on the Eureka College Theatre Facebook page that show off the wiggy stuff nicely.

Rocke's cast includes Anna Dabrowski as Pluto, Belle Grober as Dionysus, Hannah Lane as Xanthais, Kelli Robison as Aeschylus, Kevin Wickart as Euripides, Prabhu Venkataraman as Heracles, Hattie Standridge as a snake charmer and member of the chorus, and Ashleigh Feger as a ribbon twirler and member of the chorus. Wickart appears in the far left in the image below, with a sort of red mohawk wig. Ought to be entertaining to find out what that's all about!

 Tickets are $5, and they are available by calling the box office at 309-467-6363 or emailing boxoffice@eureka.edu

Tonight's performance begins at 7:30, and the doors open at 7 pm. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday performances are also scheduled for 7:30 pm, with a Sunday matinee on March 2nd at 2 pm.

You can check out the event page for more info.

Co-Host Switcheroo at DWTS -- Will It Help?

I admit it -- I used to watch Dancing with the Stars. It was fun and silly in its early seasons, until reality show rejects and political pariahs started to proliferate, the deck seemed to be stacked to keep the same pros winning season after season, and good dancing pros were dismissed in favor of members of the Hough and Ballas families. I'd rather have Edyta, Alec and Jonathan, thanks.

Tom Bergeron and Brooke Burke-Charvet

And there have also been issues in terms of the cast. Although host Tom Bergeron has been fine, if occasionally too smarmy, his cohosts have not. In fact, the irritants known as Lisa Canning, Samantha Harris and Brooke Burke-Charvet have served as a big reason not to watch as far as I'm concerned. Canning never seemed to have a handle on her lines, Harris was an airhead with no "there" there, and former winner Brooke Burke seemed to have the IQ of a toaster. A one-slot toaster.

Erin Andrews

As Dancing with the Stars' once formidable ratings have sunk, the producers have made changes, like combining performances and results into one show, changing things around the studio, and more recently, firing music director Harold Wheeler. As they move closer to announcing this year's "stars" on March 4, the producers have also made a significant change. Finally, after way too many ridiculous comments and mistakes, Brooke Burke-Charvet has been fired. As fans speculated that they were getting rid of the co-host position completely, the news broke that a different former contestant, NFL sideline reporter Erin Andrews, will replace Burke-Charvet.

It's an improvement, to be sure, to replace a bimbo with a smart cookie. And Andrews is an experienced reporter and interviewer, so she has more way more skills than are necessary to do the DWTS job. But still... Will it make a difference? Is Dancing with the Stars too far past its prime, too bereft of actual "star" possibilities, too much The Derek Hough Show at the expense of the other pros, too mean, too easy, too... Stale?

We'll see. My guess is that the show peaked a long time ago, and the addition of Erin Andrews, a new band, a more compact show, and all the spray tan, sequins and fringe in the world cannot put it back the way it was. We're more cynical now. It's hard to embrace concepts like

Bring & Sing Till It's Brung & Sung... February 22 at Players

I don't exactly know what "Bring It and Sing It" means, but Community Players is doing it. Or, you know, bringing it. And singing it. On February 22nd.

We know it costs $10 if you want to sing or $5 if you just want to watch, it takes place at Community Players' theater on Robinhood Lane, and the doors open at 7. The "bring" refers to sheet music and the "sing" refers to what's on the sheet music.The good folks at Community Players explain it this way: "You bring sheet music, we supply the audience and accompaniment. Just a fun get together of like minded Musical Theatre geeks."

Is that clear? If your dream is to belt out "Defying Gravity" or "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and you've just never had the chance, this may be your best opportunity ever.

Organizer Kelly Slater is available for questions at ksslate@gmail.com or by phone at 217-440-8239 and that's also the way you would reserve a spot in the singing line-up. You can also check out the Bring It or Sing It event page on Facebook.

Sing out, Louise!

What's Ahead on ISU Stages in 2014-15

Illinois State University's Department of Theatre and Dance has announced what will be on stage in the Fall of 2014 and Spring of 2015. And it's an ambitious and intriguing lineup, with lots of new work, lots of female playwrights, and lots of roles for actors of color.

The first play on the schedule will be Sarah Ruhl's funny, provocative take on women, sexuality, and the birth of the vibrator in the 19th century. In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) will be directed for ISU's Center for the Performing Arts by David Ian Lee, an MFA director who earned rave reviews for his production of Perestroika last semester. The Vibrator Play was originally directed by Les Waters, the current Artistic Director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, for Berkeley Rep in California; Waters then took the play to Broadway with a production that starred Laura Benanti and Michael Cerveris and earned Tony nominations for the play, David Zinn's Victorian costume design, and featured actress Maria Dizzia. The play was also a nominee for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Lynn Nottage, the playwright behind By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, also slated for the CPA this Fall, is no stranger to the Pulitzer Prize. Her play, Ruined, was the 2009 winner of that prestigious prize. Vera Stark is more humorous and more lively than Ruined, telling the story of an African-American woman who works as a maid for a Hollywood diva. But then Vera gets a role on screen as a maid -- the maid to her boss's Southern belle in some epic historical romance film -- and the fact that her sparkling performance upstages everybody does not go unnoticed. She had a career. She had suitors. She went to the best parties. So what happened to Vera Stark? Nottage's play is irreverent and a little wacky, and it will serve as the Crossroads production for the season. Don LaCasse is on tap to direct the ISU version of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.

And here's that Pulitzer word again. The third play on ISU's schedule is a Pulitzer winner from yet another female playwright. Water by the Spoonful is Quiara Alegría Hudes's second play in a three-play series about a soldier named Elliot who has issues when he comes back to the U.S. The first play, Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue, was nominated for a Pulitzer in 2007, while the third Elliot play, The Happiest Song Plays Last, premiered at Chicago's Goodman Theatre last year. Elliot, his cousin, his biological mother and an online circle of recovering addicts populate Water by the Spoonful, a lyrical, innovative play about connections, guilt and forgiveness. Third-year MFA candidate Leah Cassella will direct Water by the Spoonful in Westhoff Theatre.

Going from Quiara Alegría Hudes to Noel Coward is quite a jump. Although Illinois Wesleyan just did Hay Fever last semester, ISU director Sonja Moser is going to go for her own take on the Coward classic. Instead of Spoonful's disconnected cyberworld of 2012, Hay Fever is all about the 1920s during a weekend at an eccentric family's country house. Tennis, anyone? It's lighter than air, fizzy and charming. What in the world will Moser do with it? I guess we'll find out next Fall in Westhoff Theatre!

The last piece of the 2014 puzzle is the annual Fall Dance Concert, under the direction of Sara Semonis, Artistic Director of Illinois Dance Theatre.

As we move into 2015, ISU assistant professor Duane Boutté will bring the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, based on the Joe van Druten play I Am a Camera, itself based on Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, to the Center for the Performing Arts. The original Broadway Cabaret and its decadent view of life in Berlin in the 1930s won eight Tony Awards back in 1967, including Best Musical, Best Composer and Lyricist for John Kander and Fred Ebb, Best Director for Hal Prince and Best Featured Actor for Joel Grey, who played the seedy, scary Emcee. Grey reprised his role and won an Oscar for his role in the 1972 movie directed by Bob Fosse, a film that took home eight Oscars, including Best Director and Best Actress for Liza Minnelli. That's Liza at the top of the heap in the movie poster shown here.

Moving back in time and somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand miles to the east, Anton Chekhov's The Seagull will take the stage at the CPA later in the Spring semester. The Seagull was written in 1895 and its first production was a famous flop. But Stanislavski's 1898 production for the Moscow Art Theatre turned it into a sensation. It's about the interaction and complications between and among a fading actress named Arkadina, her lover Trigorin, who is a writer; her would-be playwright son Treplev; and a young woman named Nina, as well as various other characters who live on the country estate owned by Arkadina's brother Sorin. The Seagull was last performed at Illinois State University as part of the 2004-05 season. This time out, Lori Adams, who heads up the Acting program at ISU, will direct.

Second-year MFA director Jonathan Hunt Sell will twist and (gender-bend) Moliere's classic comedy The School for Wives for Westhoff Theatre, giving Moliere the "Drag and Breeches" treatment with men playing the female roles and women playing the male ones. So the gents will be in dresses -- fancy 17th century French couture -- and the ladies will be in breeches. That should upend and refresh this tale of a creepy guy named Arnolphe and his attempts to keep his innocent ward, Agnes, cooped up and stupid so she won't fall in love and he can marry her himself.

Sell's colleague Jessika Malone, the other second-year MFA candidate in directing, also looks outside the U.S. for her play. She has chosen Selkie: Between Land and Sea, a mystical, mythical Scottish piece by Laurie Brooks, for her Spring production in Westhoff. The legend of the selkie is a cross between a mermaid story and the Swan Princess, with a girl who becomes a seal when in the sea, but a woman when on land. Laurie Brooks has also written a book version of her story, simply called Selkie Girl, and that's the image you see here.

All the details on Illinois State University's schedule will appear here and here once the current season is finished. 

OTHER DESERT CITIES Opens Thursday at Heartland

When Other Desert Cities opens at Heartland Theatre this week, it will not be the first Jon Robin Baitz play to grace that stage. It won't even be the second. As a matter of fact, Other Desert Cities completes a Baitz hat trick for Heartland.

Like Three Hotels and A Fair Country before it, Other Desert Cities is about family and the responsibility we owe to the people we're related to. Should a person do what's best for him (or her) if that isn't what's best for the family as a whole? Should blood trump one's own judgment, values and needs?

Baitz was born in the United States, but his father, a high-level exec at Carnation, the big evaporated milk/instant breakfast company, took his family to exotic places like Brazil and South Africa when Carnation sent him there. Jon Robin, also called Robbie, returned to the US for high school at Beverly Hills High School, but his time abroad certainly informed his later work as a playwright.  

Three Hotels involves a man very much like Baitz's father, a businessman whose company sells baby formula, but a formula that has resulted in illness and death for children in third-world countries. The three hotels in the title show the man, his wife, and then him again, in different places around the world, as they muse on the distance in their marriage, the compromises they've made, and the corrupting influences of ambition and money.

A Fair Country expands on those issues, looking at the family of a diplomat stationed in South Africa and charged with bringing American "culture" -- like a production of "Idiot's Delight" put on by convicts -- to people living under Apartheid. He is desperate to get out of there and bring his family to a better posting in Europe, but his wife is falling apart before his eyes, and his sons -- one an intensely political counterculture journalist and the other a vulnerable, Quixotic type who hopes to save his mother -- have major issues with the way the family operates.

You can see those same political conflicts in Other Desert Cities, with once again a family in crisis. In this one, the mother, Polly, played for Heartland by Connie de Veer,  is tougher and sharper, more of a verbal warrior, and the father, Lyman Wyatt, played by Joe Penrod, is sweeter and more kind, an actor who had a decent career in Western movies before he took a political turn and became an ambassador under his friend Ronald Reagan. But they are still conservative and traditional, on the other side of a huge political divide from their oldest son, a golden boy who took a radical, self-destructive turn as a teen, and from their daughter, a talented writer who had a mental breakdown but has now tried to write her way into understanding what happened between her parents and her brother. And then there's Trip, the youngest Wyatt, a TV producer who does his best not to get involved in the family warfare.

When daughter Brooke, played by Jessie Swiech, comes home with the memoir she's written, one that exposes all sorts of things the Wyatt parents do not want to discuss, things get dicey very quickly. Aunt Silda, played by Carol Scott, sees herself as a free-spirited knight in shining armor, and she is firmly on Brooke's side, even though Silda is living on the generosity of her sister Polly. Trip, played by Joey Banks, has always kept his head low and stayed out of trouble. But this time, lines are being drawn in the desert sand. Nobody is willing to back down, not fierce, vicious Polly, loopy Silda, well-meaning Lyman, not even Brooke, who seems so fragile.

The issues are really very interesting as Baitz unspools them in his play. Is Brooke's first responsibility to herself and to the memory of her beloved brother? Or should it be to her parents, who live in a privileged world that they are loathe to lose, one that will be shaken to its core with the revelations in Brooke's book?

You'll have to watch Other Desert Cities to make up your own mind, but Baitz is careful to give both sides their due. Other Desert Cities was nominated for five Tony Awards and was chosen as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, winning a Tony and a Drama Desk for Judith Light, who played eccentric Aunt Silda in the Broadway production.

Sandra Zielinski directs the Heartland Theatre production, which opens February 20 with a 7:30 pm "Pay What You Can" preview performance. Performances continue through Sunday, March 9, and there will be a panel discussion of those same issues -- the right to be heard, to own one's memories vs. family peace and compromise -- following the matinee on Sunday, March 2.

For all the details, visit Heartland's Show Times or Reservations pages, or check out the Now Playing page.

Romantic Entertainment for Valentine's Day?

I love a good romance, but I go for comedy, not weepers, which means on Valentine's Day, I do not turn to the four-hankie choices like An Affair to Remember, now playing at the Normal Theater, or whatever it is they've made of  Mark Helprin's epic novel Winter's Tale that they're trying to pass off as a Valentine's date movie.

Chocolat, the French romantic comedy from 2000 that stars Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche, is a better option in my book. After all, chocolate and romance are a perfect match, and Swedish director Lasse Hallström has a deft touch with the lighter-than-air material about a magical chocolate shop that brings freedom and sensuality to a repressed little town in France. Chocolat comes to the Normal Theater on Saturday and Sunday. so if you're snowed in tonight, you may want to defer your Valentine's plans till tomorrow to be able to take advantage of that one.

The Art Theater Co-Op in Champaign is going with the classic Casablanca as its Valentine offering. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman will share the memories of Paris and "As Time Goes By" today at 5 and 7:30 pm as well as 11:30 am tomorrow. If you prefer your True Love with humor, adventure and a little castle storming, The Princess Bride may be a better choice. The Art is offering it with quote-along group participation tonight at 10 pm, or without the quotes tomorrow at 10 pm and Sunday at 11:30 am. The beauty of this movie is how it manages to be both romantic and cynical at the same time, with generous portions of both heart and smarts.

What else is out there? ABC is counter programming the Olympics with Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown at 7 pm Central time, and the TV Guide Network is betting on Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan and Sleepless in Seattle, also at 7.

Otherwise, TCM is in the midst of its ramp-up to the Oscars, with a few movies with "heart" or "love" in the title today, like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter -- not at all a romance in any way, shape or form -- at 4:45 Central time, and Love Me or Leave Me, a 1955 bio-pic about the turbulent life of singer Ruth Etting starring Doris Day, at 11 pm Central.

Netflix is releasing an entire season of its original series House of Cards today, too. The political machinations and evil-doing on display in this Washington DC based potboiler make for some twisted romance, that's for sure.

Plus, of course, there's always the Olympics. Maybe the luge, curling and a little figure skating are the perfect route to your heart?