Chicago is an awesome town. I know this because I have been there once and I had a blast. Chicago buys you whiskeys and beers-back in friendly, binged-in pubs, and Chicago puts its arm around you and tells you about its job as an assistant district attorney and how it married its high school sweetheart and has a nice family though one of its kids is disabled with something you cannot remember because of all the drinks Chicago has stood you. And then later when you go to take a piss you find Chicago making out with this kind of skanky chick in the men’s room stall, and you’re pretty sure she’s not Chicago’s wife who Chicago was just telling you about–what was it? Five minutes?– or half an hour ago? Doesn’t matter. Who are you to judge? Doesn’t change the fact that Chicago is an awesome town.
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But how awesome is Chicago as a theatre town? My personal experience on this subject is much more limited. This production of Louis Slotin Sonata that I am going to see this weekend is my first full production in what is, by nearly everyone’s estimation, one of the United States great stage cities.
Certainly everyone in the business likes to point to the Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company as the model for how to be both commercially successful and artistically relevant. How many nascent ensemble-based theatre companies have promised you, with their collective hand out for a donation, that they intend to be Seattle or L.A.’s next Steppenwolf? Me, honestly have no idea if Steppenwolf is all that great. I have only seen one production by that team, nearly two decades ago, in New York City. It was their adaptation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and it was… oh right, it was frickin’ awesome.
Chicago is certainly less shy about promoting its theatre scene than Seattle. The Tribune’s critic, Chris Jones calls his blog “Theater Loop: News from America’s Hottest Theater City.” What critic in Seattle would ever be so boldly boosterish? By my admittedly loose estimation, Louis Slotin Sonata received more reviews per capita in Chicago than in Seattle, Los Angeles or New York. The fact that they were not all unqualified raves does not really matter. Coverage is coverage and wide coverage is a sign of health for a theatre town.
To be fair, Chicago does seem to have more than its fair share of block-headed, Broadway-bedazzled reviewers. Back in January, the above-mentioned Mr. Jones offered his thoughts on Outrageous Fortune, TCG’s ground-breaking analysis of the plight of American playwrights. He dismissed us as “whining” and “absurdly self-indulgent.” More recently he began the meat of his review of my Louis Slotin Sonata by saying, “By reacting fast, blocking and ending the reaction, Slotin saved the lives of the men who were with him in the lab that day,” thus moronically parroting the blatant falsehood that the U.S. government began spinning within hours of an embarrassingly avoidable accident. One might forgive Jones for perpetuating this historical and scientific deceit if the precise counterpoint were not demonstrated over and over throughout the play, providing (I hope) the essential underpinning of Slotin’s unique path to redemption.
So critics can be patronizing blowhard nitwits in the Midwest, too. Doesn’t matter. Who is Seattle to judge? (We can’t even get our best reviewer to commit to staying past intermission.) Doesn’t change the fact that Chicago is almost certainly an awesome theatre town. On this trip I want to learn more about how and why this is so. I think the Emerald City could learn some things from the Windy One.
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*A note on Gary’s illustration: I’m so excited by this one because it gives an inside view to a process usually only seen by myself, Gary and the director of whatever show we might be working on. Gary likes to diagram. I think he calls these things bubble charts and they represent one of the ways he gets his arms around a play.
I stared at this one for like fifteen minutes last night after it came across the inter-tubes. I could make sense of pieces of it, but the whole eluded me. I chalked this up to Gary being smarter than me. The next morning I looked at it fresh and realized my error. The main path represents not “Paul’s” progress, but “Chicago’s”. Of course! I’m not the main character of this piece, Chi-town is (especially in the first paragraph, which this picture maps to perfection.)
Gary’s diagrams cut straight to the heart of a story and expose the essential mechanics that even the writer didn’t fully understand when he constructed it.
Plus they’re funny.