DRINK UP ME HEARTIES - 'Pirates of Penzance' at The Chopin Theatre

"The most wonderful time of the year" in Chicago is probably late June. Winter in this city sucks. And although a basic understanding of geography would imply that the Midwest should lie temperately between Maine and Los Angeles, it's a whole lot more of a bitch than that. Thanks to some particularly off-color polar jet streams, Chicago winters could warmly be described as frigid. And much to my dismay, the theatre willingly falls face-first into that pit of icy, grossly commercialized, Judeo-Christian, anti-artistic depravity. Come Black Friday, playgoers are accosted by a rigorous onslaught of nutcrackers, reformed Dickensian curmudgeons, and cotton balls lazily whoring themselves out as virgin snow. (Note: Christmas is the only time of year in Chicago when a "bear" in a tight red suit is truly appreciated outside of Andersonville.)

But beneath the salted streets, in a cozy basement theatre appropriately reminiscent of a Prohibition-era speakeasy, a treasonous troupe of actors is ushering in the holidays the right way – with mai tais! At the Chopin Theatre, The Hypocrites Pirates of Penzance is an eighty-minute non-stop beach party, raging with riotous laughter, catchy music, and cheap booze.

Last winter when I took in Pirates of Penzance the first time around, the ingenuity of the small company's counter-intuitive seasonal programming went right over my head. Rather than beating the proverbial dead reindeer, Pirates of Penzance is high-fiving its audience with tropical, umbrella drink-laden frivolity, the likes of which could only otherwise be found on some sort of awesome hipster lido deck.

Director Sean Graney has adapted the original, much longer operetta into a condensed, but considerably more satisfying, intermissionless eighty minutes. The fast-paced brevity of the performance makes for an experience of perfect length, and includes just enough dialogue to keep the plot clear and moving. Graney’s additional quips make the funny hysterical, with a dutiful literary motif somehow becoming one of the heartiest repeated laughs of the evening.

The operetta is staged in promenade style, meaning the action occurs unexpectedly all around you. While there is a runway stage that crosses the room diagonally, the entire space is utilized. At any moment, your safe haven of quiet introversion could become a dance floor. This theatrical immersion is nicely complimented by Tom Burch’s backyard set, which surrounds the participants with beach balls, swimming pools, tiki torches, and drink coolers – a summer playground for the actors and audience.

The cast is adorned with vibrantly colored swimtrunks, flippers, and other varieties of garish-but-sexy beachwear designed by Alison Siple. And Jared Moore’s lighting design imbues the play with unexpected moments of solemnity amidst all the fun.

Kevin O'Donnell has cleverly reduced the typically lush orchestrations of Gilbert and Sullivan to a hodgepodge cacophony of acoustic guitars, accordions, and found object percussion. The result is a plucky, quick moving soundscape whose irreverence sets the tone for the farcically frenzied production.

Jamming out to the music is a tight, wild cast of ten. They run around the room with jovial childishness, playing with just about everyone and everything they can. But don’t worry! The nature of the audience interaction is such that it never becomes intimidating or inadvertently victimizing, but more socially akin to a superbly witty kegger. Matt Kahler as the Major General has an ease with dry witticisms and one-liners and finds humor in the unlikeliest of places. Christine Stulik does double duty as the as both the aging matron, Ruth, and the puerile flower, Mabel. Stulik navigates through youthful promise and forlorn spinsterhood with skillful malleability and punch. While some voices lack the maturity to tackle opera seriously, this production is anything but serious and everything but mature. And its better for it! The majority of the cast has returned from last season’s production, and their newfound comfort and enhanced enthusiasm makes them absolutely thrilling to watch.

This is the second year The Hypocrites have produced The Pirates of Penzance, and I would not be surprised if it became an annual holiday offering. It is a show that, like only the best of drugs, demands repeated indulgences in order to once again experience that amazing feeling you got the first time. Pirates also makes for a shockingly good family outing. On opening night, I noticed four kids in the audience. Having never seen any children at The Hypocrites before, I was super curious as to how they would react…

Near the end of the performance, one small girl, probably about five years old, walked bravely onto the narrow runway stage as Rob McLean, the Pirate King, sang a couple of feet away. She stared up at Rob in dough-eyed rapture as he, perhaps unknowingly, serenaded her. After a few seconds, she scampered back to her mother, realizing that she, not the actors, had become the audience’s focus. It was an adorable moment; a breathtakingly beautiful moment; and an uplifting reminder to us pessimistic Scrooges in the audience that great theatre has the intangible power to reach just about anyone, regardless of how many TVs they own.

Not all children will react the same way, of course. The other three youngsters, while visibly engaged, sat the whole time. But the important thing to remember is that this Pirates is not an adult show, nor is it a family show, nor is it a twentysomething show; it is an everyone show. And there is something in Pirates for everyone to enjoy and appreciate.

Gilbert and Sullivan were writing in the middle of the Victorian-era, a seventy-year stretch remembered primarily for imperialism and widespread urban industrialization. So, with their comic operettas, the duo allowed their audiences a brief escape from the day-to-day banalities of cultural enslavement and the inhalation of borderline toxic air. Yum.

With their Pirates of Penzance, The Hypocrites are offering essentially the same service to those of you wishing to temporarily forget the daily doldrums of mile-long Starbucks lines, Outlook Express, and that most grandiose of Chicago villains, Rain-Snow. So strap on your onesie, break out the Ray Bans, and drink up me hearties, yo ho.

The Hypocrites' Pirates of Penzance plays through January 22 at The Chopin Theatre

THE TIES THAT BIND -- SOPHOCLES: SEVEN SICKNESSES

“Disrespectful.” “Lacking grandeur.” “Midwestern.”

Listening to intermission chatter is always a riot, not to mention a unique learning opportunity for a theatergoer. Lobbies become limbos of corroded expectation and loudmouthed brainiac assertions; factoid minefields.

This show is good/bad because [fill in the blank].

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own distinct opinion (well, other than Ann Coulter...), but what really struck me during the first intermission of The Hypocrites' Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses (currently running at the Chopin Theatre) was the depth of the audience commentary. Folks were really confused, and considering we were all stuffing our faces with yummy vegan eatables, they were downright befuddled. They all knew what a Greek play was, and yet they had no idea what they were watching.

So, what is it? Is Greek a genre, style, both, or neither? Well, first and foremost, it's delicious. But all saganaki aside... What truly characterizes Greek theatre? A seasoned gentlemen seated on the plush couch to my right in the Chopin's eclectic basement lounge believed grandeur to be a key player. Eh, kinda. What is grand to us size-wize was par-for-the-course in ancient Athens. And as for the perceived formal grandeur of Ancient Greek, much is lost in time and translation. British people certainly sound formal, but have you ever had dinner with one? Better know your favourite football club... So those are all legitimate, I daresay, commonplace conceptions as to what Greek theatre is all about...

...But The Hypocrites get them there Greeks a whole lot better than any Mr. Moneybags regional theatre or grossly overpriced textbook. This innovative company knows that, at its core, Greek theatre is a reflection of community, togetherness, and culture. With Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses, director Sean Graney has adapted and conceptualized the remaining seven texts of (you guessed it) Sophocles, and given them voice for our community, our culture, our heartbeat.

Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses is a work of staggering conceptual scope (including Oedipus, In Trachis, In Colonus, Philoktetes, Ajax, Elektra, and Antigone), running about four hours, yet someway, somehow it is more intimate and more inclusive than my primordial cave-like studio apartment. Graney, his cast and crew go out of their way to cultivate a warm, familial environment for their audience, and it is absolutely integral and vital to the success of this production. Seems a teensy bit strange to feel enveloped by waves of group positivity, feel good vibes, and a communal meal as you observe a woman's esophageal lining become acquainted with the acidic burn of bleach... But then again, I imagine you have, at some point in your life, watched a horror movie with friends. Greek theatre should be kind of like a horror movie. Skream.

And this horror movie is most definitely a Chicago-based horror movie. It takes place in a hospital. Like Chicago Hope and ER, these tiled floors see a whole lot of blood, saliva, vomit, dirt, sickness, and any number of other unpalatable yucky messes, but they always get mopped up. Greece always rebuilds. Thanks to two saucy nurse-chorus members played with eye-roll-larity by Sarah Jackson and Shannon Matesky. The entire company of actors is completely in-tune and fantastically transformative. Character changes happen seamlessly, and the performances are uniformly vibrant. Tien Doman’s portrayal of Denjanira, the tragic wife of Heracles, brings new life to a text that is given the cold shoulder far too often. Same goes for Walter Briggs’ sexually-charged, powerful Ajax.

The design team beautifully imposes story and personality onto a sterile hospital scene. The colors of Tom Burch and Maria Defabo’s runway stage are stark white, robin’s egg blue, and sickly green, evoking not the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean’s subterranean underbelly. Jared Moore’s lighting design burns lasting images into your retinas, and Stephen Ptacek’s sound design marries oddly, and chillingly well with the godly rumble of the Red Line below.

The real star is Sean Graney’s unpredictable adaptation. Graney's whipsmart dialogue zigzags between the colloquial (“Like, ya know”) and the formal (“plow her fields”) , often using abrupt shifts to make light of the overblown tragedy playing out before us. There is a clever, invisible purpose behind the jawdroppingly funny humor though, and that is the genius of this compilation.

Audiences today cannot sob together. Nope. We’re just too scared. We have been woefully, yet successfully conditioned to stifle honest tears, and if you're anything like me, you actually consider getting measly watery eyes to be full-on "crying".

But we sure do love to laugh, don't we? Laughing has got to be one of the few universal human constants; one of the few 'Ties That Bind' (the first track of Bruce Springsteen's "The River" from which the evening's music is mined from). Here the tragic is symbiotically bound to the comic, achieving a modern equivalent to the original Greek audience's response. Pretty damn cool. The performance I attended was chocked full of critics and Jeff Award voters. Not exactly a rowdy, happenin’ bunch, but you’d never know that from the roars. Graney’s text and the ensemble’s quirks are so bellysmackin’ funny that as you watch the play...on a couch...spattered by blood, your neighbor becomes your friend. A lovely and all too infrequent sensation.

For a production to captivate an audience for even ten minutes is a sadly reserved luxury in today's theatrical climate. But for an entire hour, the climactic end of Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses grabs you by the jugular, beckoning you forward without option. That being said, the pleasures and sensations brought forth by Sophocles are more akin to those achieved through sadomasochism than through your run-of-the-mill “wah! wah! wah!” production of Antigone. This creative team has a paddle, a whip and a ball-gag, and the safe word is ‘Sickness’. The slap-in-the-face final sixty minutes of Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses solidifies The Hypocrites’ season opener as the theatrical event of flu season.-Johnny Oleksinski

Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses runs at the Chopin Theatre through October 23.

WOYZECK? YES PEAS! - 'Woyzeck' by The Hypocrites at The Chopin Theatre

Early German Expressionism.

On paper, it is about as exhilarating a string of words as 'Discount Oil Change'. Historically however, German expressionism onstage is the artistic product of one of the most tumultuous eras of modern European history.

The more you know ~~~~~*


During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Germany was experiencing a radical wave of militant ethnic nationalism that would result in, not one, but two devastatingly destructive world wars. Pretty retrospectively exciting, right?
In 1836, a young Georg Büchner, one of Deutschland's most enduring dramatists, wrote his masterwork, Woyzeck. A heartily theme-laden and purposefully abstract piece, Woyzeck tragically tells the tale of power, religion, class, obligation, and jealousy through the eyes of a demeaned soldier.


Sounds like ideal fodder for The Hypocrites, a company founded on the principle of providing honest live experiences that put the theatricality back into theatre. Performed in collaboration with About Face Theatre, Sean Graney's visceral production of Woyzeck at The Chopin Theatre reinvents German expressionism from a genre lathered in soapy pretension into something titillating and treacherous.

Woyzeck was notably left unfinished by Georg Büchner at his death - a fact that many directors, editors, and writers have mined as a mandate to impose their own, oft-misguided visions over Büchner's prevailing voice. Unlike many of these artistes, director Sean Graney, in his work with The Hypocrites, has repeatedly proven himself an honorable adapter, nearly always keeping true to the spirit of the play at hand. While so many of his contemporaries lazily pull the trigger at aging dramas, Graney instead employs a sharpened scalpel for cutting the text - with the finesse and the respect of a Dexter-like serial killer. Like the final line of Büchner's play, this adaptation certainly is "a beautiful murder".

Sean Graney's thoughtful adaptation successfully captures the unique iron rigidity of nineteenth century Germany, while his direction imbues the world of the play with whimsy, shocking humor, and striking imagery - all at once bizarre, flamboyant, and luxurious. Imagine a blood soaked murderer eating peas over a fallen corpse while a woman upstage calmly strokes a fake deer. I would call that cross-section one of the more straightforward moments of the evening.


Woyzeck can be a difficult play to wrap your head around initially, but the plot itself is actually quite simple. Woyzeck, a soldier and government scientific experiment (he is forced to only eat peas!), kills his wife out of jealousy, believing that she had sex with another man (which she did). Easy enough. The trouble comes when one tries to make logical sense out of every single minuscule bit of minutiae that pierces the eyes, ears, and other less activated theatrical senses.


Woyzeck, and particularly this Woyzeck, requires willingness and patience from both the audience and performers. Woyzeck washes over the audience like the tide. You can stare out at the ocean for hours and hours and guess how far inland it will eventually encroach, but you will only truly know once it has arrived. I encourage you to allow Woyzeck to arrive. You will not be disappointed.

As you stare out at the proceedings, you will find yourself lost in a world that effortlessly fits the play, the performers, and the space. Every onstage facet is seamlessly welded together like a well-built German car. The scenic design by Tom Burch employs thick chopped logs as the primary element, and they are used with swiftness and rigor by the cast. The remainder of the stage is covered in obscured plastic sheets and sickly lime green. The phrase gorgeously yucky comes to mind.

Less Fiskness's lighting design marries with the scenery in a way that is so perfect, it seems at times that the light itself is emanating from the stage and the actors rather than from some hanging metal instruments above our heads.
The costumes by Izumi Inaba evoke the layered, worn clothing of old Germany, but reinterpret it as svelte, sexy punk wear. The characters that we like and the characters that we loathe all reek of something sinister.

One of the few (and believe me, there are very few) qualms I had with the production was the, at times, overpowering sound design by Mikhail Fiskel. I adored the bouncy Bavarian music (by Kevin O'Donnell) that transported me onto Willy Wonka's messed up boat, but the actors had to compete with it, and like the Triple Alliance, they lost.


Like most of the technical elements, the actors form a cohesive, yet playful and joyous unit - each establishing unique and quirky characteristics while still remaining one unified being. As Woyzeck, Geoff Button bleeds likability and hardship. His character has been trampled mercilessly by those in power around him, and the woman and child he works so hard to support do not truly love him back. Through all this, Button never plays the victim, which would be the easy way out - but like all the characters in this production, he exudes energetic innocence.

A fascinating choice by Graney involves a character named Jude-Marktschreier, played with a Cheshire Cat grin by Zeke Sulkes. Known in many productions as the Charlatan, Graney evolved this role to personify everything that is corrupt and paranoid about Woyzeck. Each time Woyzeck requests Maria to take his money, the Marktschreier says, "She will always,' signaling Woyzeck's insecurities right from the get go. The inclusion of this role gives enhanced rationale for Woyzeck's eventual murderous actions, and firmly establishes the play as a tragedy.

Of course, this all sounds super duper serious - but surrounding the blood, the horrific trauma, and the psychological exploration is ample hilarity and fun. There are jokes abound, and although the woman sitting in front of you might occasionally give you a judgmental glare when you laugh at them, laughter is indeed welcome. I mean, c'mon! Within two minutes of a disgusting, grotesque murder, the entire cast is singing Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time'. How silly!

After fourteen years as The Hypocrites' artistic director, Sean Graney is stepping down at the end of this season and opting for greener pastures. Woyzeck was part of his first season at the Hypocrites, and this production will be his final show at The Chopin - his tenure coming full circle. Woyzeck embodies everything that The Hypocrites have come to represent - excitement, danger, sexuality, honesty - and I cannot implore you enough to take in this incredible production by one of the best companies in Chicago - equity or non-equity. So even though it has a funny title, even though you may not know anything about it, even though it's early German expressionism - put all those old stigmas aside and see this positively electric show. Discount oil change, my ass.-Johnny Oleksinski

Woyzeck plays the Chopin Theatre through May 22.