Fool's Gold Coast

An Overdue Correction

A post on WBEZ's theater blog, Onstage/Backstage, brought to my attention The A.V. Club Chicago's recent interview with Chicago-person-turned-SNL-writer Mike O'Brien in which he discusses his new Web series, "7 Minutes in Heaven." When asked about the show's origins, O'Brien mentions a play he wrote called Mr. 1,000 Miles Per Hour, which was performed at Stage Left a few years ago. Here's how he describes the production and its reception:

It was two 25-minute plays. The first half was these people in their early 20s, drinking and playing Seven Minutes In Heaven. One of them, during the first half, mentions that he’s writing a play, which is a Three’s Company episode placed with the background of the L.A. riots. The second half is his play, so it was pretty close to a Three’s Company episode, but with people getting more and more worried about the rioters. The Chicago Reader, I think, came out with a review. They acted like it was by two different authors. They really didn’t like the first half, but they thought the guy who wrote the second half was funny.

Guess what? I'm the guy who reviewed the show for the Reader, back in the summer of 2007. And I wasn't acting like the play was written by two different authors. I really thought it was. Here's how I tried to explain myself in the comments section of WBEZ's post:

Another name must have been credited with the second play in the program; presumably it was the name of the character who mentions in the first play that he's writing a play about "Three's Company" and the LA riots. I don't know how I missed that. I am a flawed human being.

O'Brien is wrong when he says that I "really didn't like" the first half, though. I said it was "slight" and called the characters "indistinct," yes, but I also found it "pleasant" and praised "O'Brien's knack for dialogue."

In any case, I regret my nincompoopery.

All That Glitters 132

A look at how I've been diverting myself lately.

Books
READ: Star Island by Carl Hiaasen [Michael Grunwald, reviewing a previous Hiaasen novel: "Carl Hiaasen is South Florida's literary proctologist: he examines the region's assholes"].

Plays
SAW: Spring Awakening (Phoenix Theatre) [in Indianapolis].

Movies
SAW: Moneyball.
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
MINE: Country Strong.
KITO'S: Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
[It wasn't one of our best efforts.]
THIS WEEK'S THEME: The South.

Music
LISTENED TO: Fleetwood Mac, Rumours; Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest [I've had "Hard Times" stuck in my head for three days].

Television
WATCHING: Glee (Fox), Top Chef: Just Desserts (Bravo), Community (NBC), Parks and Recreation (NBC), Project Runway (Lifetime), The Good Wife (CBS).

Current Interests
Poo, Betty White, movies, writers, conservatives, tabloid fixtures, cities, female pop stars.

Fool's Four
THE LAST FOUR SHOWS I SAW:
1. The Argument (Interrobang, 10.9).
2. Caesura: A Butchery (The Plagiarists, 10.5).
3. Spring Awakening (Phoenix Theatre, 10.1).
4. Burying Miss America (New Leaf Theatre, 9.30).

A Flashback
FIVE YEARS AGO: "Is it me, or am I getting gayer?"

Glitter
In honor of my older sister, whose birthday is today, here's a song we used to sing together all the time when we were little.

(If you're just joining us, I'm a homosexual.)

Shows Worth Seeing

Whenever people find out that I review plays, one of the first things they ask me, after "Can you get me free tickets to Blue Man Group?" and "Are you a failed actor?", is "Have you seen anything good lately?" I nearly always go dry when asked this question and therefore end up recommending something that closed six months ago, or something that I didn't actually like, or something that I didn't actually see.

And so I'm introducing this new occasional feature in which I will make four theater recommendations. All of the shows are currently onstage and all of them have been seen and liked by me. I've modeled the feature on the "Films Worth Seeing" box that used to run below Stanley Kauffmann's reviews in The New Republic. Productions are listed in the order in which I saw them, starting with the most recent. Click the title of the show to read my original review.

Burying Miss America (New Leaf Theatre). Heartland ennui suffuses Brian Golden's one-act, set in rural Nebraska, about the reunion of a brother and sister at their mother's funeral. Marsha Harman and Ted Evans, as the siblings, movingly convey the blend of love and resentment that underscores any sibling relationship. Through October 29.

Speaking in Tongues: The Chronicles of Babel (MPAACT). A portrait of life in a now-demolished Chicago housing project, as told by some people who lived there, vividly represented by MPAACT's cast. Shepsu Aakhu's script captures the eloquence of the everyday. Through October 30.

Violet (Bailiwick Chicago). Brian Crawley's book--based on a short story by Doris Betts about a disfigured young woman's bus trip to a faith-healing charlatan--is a little thin. But Jeanine Tesori's Americana score is lovely, and Bailiwick's cast sings it beautifully. Through October 16.

Moby-Dick (The Building Stage). Melville's novel gets a low-tech but powerful and endlessly inventive adaptation as six Ishmaels recount the journey of the Pequod in all its complexity and grandeur. Damn near perfect. Through October 30.

Bathroom Humor

Here's how I know that I remain, at heart, an eighth grader. Whenever I'm in the bathroom at work, and farting noises and fecal grunts are exploding all around me, I invariably have to stifle a case of the giggles.

This problem does not afflict sober, mature adults--people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, say. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in the ladies' room at the Supreme Court, and Sonia Sotomayor is over in the next stall, letting fly with a symphony of hilarious sounds, Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not so much as crack a smile.

I am beginning to think I just might not make it to the Court.

ELSEWHERE:
My short review of New Leaf Theatre's Burying Miss America is in this week's Chicago Reader.

Word Scramble

Kito became exasperated with me during a recent argument about something or other. "You just like irking my buttons!" he exclaimed.

I found it difficult to stay mad.

ELSEWHERE:
My review of MPAACT's Speaking in Tongues: The Chronicles of Babel is in this week's Time Out Chicago.

Indianapolis Star

Kito and I have returned from our weekend in Indianapolis. The city's downtown area was pretty lively on Saturday because it happened to be the day of the Circle City Classic, an annual football game pitting teams from two historically black universities against one another--or, as our cab driver helpfully explained, "It's a convention of black people."

That evening, Kito and I dined at St. Elmo Steak House, home of an allegedly world-famous shrimp cocktail that tastes like a mouthful of wasabi. Afterwards, we attended a performance of Phoenix Theatre's production of Spring Awakening, a musical about a group of fin de siècle teens whose horniness keeps causing them to sing mediocre rock songs. I've decided that whenever I'm out of town, I'm going to try to see a play produced by a local company in order to help put Chicago theater in perspective and combat my tendency toward provincialism. The verdict on this particular production: it was okay I guess!

In any case, I'm back.