I usually see about 100 theatrical productions each year. My mother, back in Arkansas, frequently expresses amazement that there are that many shows produced in one city. In fact, of course, there are many, many more--as I rediscover each December, when the theater critics release their top tens, of which I might have attended two or three at the most. I am not complaining. Chicago theater is a bounty for which I am grateful. Based on the sizable but not comprehensive portion I sampled in 2011, I hereby present:
Fool's Gold Coast's Second Annual Non-Monetary Awards Recognizing Achievement in the Dramatic Arts
Best Touring Production
The Merchant of Venice from New York's Theatre for a New Audience. A sense of moral murk veiled by sleek surfaces pervaded Darko Tresnjak's suits-and-laptops staging of Shakespeare's most troubling comedy, in which the good guys are untrustworthy and the bad guy breaks your heart.
Most Unhinged Critical Reaction
Hedy Weiss's histrionic pan of the Goodman Theatre's Mary. The Sun-Times theater critic and "Power Edwardian" fashionista called Mary "a travesty of a mockery of a sham" and "a personal insult to the intelligence of that most worthy of all congregations--the actors and playgoers who join hands in the theater in the name of enlightenment and entertainment" (which is somewhat surprising language coming from a woman who glares at you like she'll cut a bitch if you so much as hiccup during a show).
Invoking the Duke and Earl from Huckleberry Finn, La Weiss also said that the playwright, Thomas Bradshaw, "had better start running" lest the audience drive him out of town for his charlatanry. Given that Bradshaw is black and US history contains several instances of white people driving black people from various towns, it seemed a poor choice of words to say the least.
Achievement in the Field of Crazy Titles
Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a Rave Fable) (Halcyon Theatre).
RUNNER-UP: A Nude Hope: A Star Wars Burlesque.
The Cold Shower Award for Least Sexual Chemistry
Brad Armacost and Susan Moniz in Shadowlands (Provision Theater). Granted, the play as written depicts the relationship of author CS Lewis and his American-born wife as something closer to companionship than romance. But Jesus Christ, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet could have generated more heat than these two.
RUNNERS-UP: Brianna Borger and Wayne Hu in Porchlight Music Theatre's The King and I (Hu was the king, Borger the "I").
Creepiest Thing I Saw All Year, in Any Medium
Dream Journal of Doctor Jekyll (The Mammals)--a quasi-Victorian cabinet of horrors housing a "hunchfront," Siamese twins joined at the bustle, a group of hypnotized somnambulists, and other imaginatively lurid grotesqueries.
Best Props
Sunmi Kang's menagerie of paper critters--including a beautifully detailed, life-size hawk--folded for Animals Out of Paper (part of Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Next Up repertory).
Most Self-Indulgent Autobiographical Show
Performing Tonight: Liza Minnelli’s Daughter (The Neo-Futurists). Mary Fons took a promising premise--that her resemblance to Liza Minnelli means the star is her real mom--and turned it into an overlong, increasingly unpleasant exercise in begging the audience for validation.
Best Evocation of Chicago
Speaking in Tongues: The Chronicles of Babel (MPAACT). Taken from interviews with former residents of the now-demolished Washington Park Homes housing project, MPAACT's documentary-like production presented a vivid picture of what life was like there. It also functioned as a kind of postmortem on the city's failed experiment to warehouse the poor in shoddily constructed high-rises. Shepsu Aakhu's eloquent script was both angry and nostalgic without ever getting bitter or whitewashing the past.
Best New Theater/Least Imaginative Theater Company
Black Ensemble Theater. The brand spanking new complex in Uptown is gorgeous. The material is the same old stuff.
Best Farce
Or, (Caffeine Theatre)--a delightfully ramshackle production of that rare thing, a farce with a brain.
Best Male Nudity
Bob Skosky, who went full-frontal as the straight man in Sleeping with Straight Men (Ludicrous Theatre Company).
Best Actress When It Comes to Turning Self-Abasement into a Form of Aggression
Caroline Neff, whose fevered, emotionally raw performances imbued a potential doormat (Under the Blue Sky) and a self-destructive cousin-fucker (Where We’re Born) with the power and thrilling volatility of a tragic heroine.
Best Designers of Semi-Sentient Sets
Jacqueline and Richard Penrod, whose magical sets for The Last Act of Lilka Kadison (Lookingglass Theatre Company) and Goodnight Moon: The Musical (Chicago Children's Theatre) seemed to move of their own accord. In both cases, animated inanimate objects fit perfectly with the show--underscoring in Lilka Kadison how the past can bubble up whether summoned or not, and capturing a child's anthropomorphizing fantasies in Goodnight Moon.
Most Cumbersome Set
The Misunderstanding (Theatre Y). For much of the play's running time, director Kevin V. Smith stuck the cast (which included himself in the principal role) under yards and yards of translucent plastic sheeting--and in July yet.
Best Onstage Death
Maari Suorsa, who exploded while attempting to rescue the last quiche on earth during a nuclear attack in 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche (The New Colony).
The White Castle 100-Slider Crave Crate Award for Most Poignant Pig-Out
Dani Bryant, "Kitchen" (part of Walkabout Theater's Within). Performing her own moving one-act, Bryant played a heavyset young woman whose rigorous dieting, unsuccessful attempts at dating, and quiet loneliness culminated in a midnight binging scene just brimming with longing and good intentions turned to pot.
Best All-Around
1. Church/Pullman, WA (Red Tape Theatre). James Palmer's immersive staging of two Young Jean Lee playlets placed audience members, first, at a motivational, how-to-live seminar where the lecturers realized as they were speaking that they didn't have any answers. The leaders of Church's Sunday school didn't have any either--yet Lee found a way to salvage the compassion and forgiveness at Christianity's core. Red Tape's sad-funny-strange production stayed with me longer than any other I saw this year.
2. Solo Works (Theatre Zarko). Puppeteer Michael Montenegro performed 10 solo pieces starring his ingeniously engineered, eerily beautiful creations. "Though he be made of cloth and glue," he said of one of them, "his heart beats just the same." I completely believed it.
3. Moby-Dick (The Building Stage). Six Ishmaels, discursive narration, and an arsenal of low-tech effects helped director Blake Montgomery and company bring Melville's masterpiece to the stage without sacrificing its grandeur, complexity, and sprawling multifariousness.
4. Waiting for Drew Peterson (The Annoyance). Imagine Waiting for Godot, except that instead of two hoboes waiting for a powerful figure who never arrives, you get lunatic twin sisters pining for a Bolingbrook police officer suspected of killing two of his four wives. It might not sound promising, but oh my God, I laughed 'til I couldn't breathe--largely owing to the twisted ditziness (twitziness?) of writer-performer Nancy Friedrich.
Thanks for a great year, everybody!
ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Talk about God: Five Cents and iO's Joy! are in this week's Chicago Reader.
