A tale of two theater towns

Chicago. Cold night. A sold-out production of Sex with Strangers, Laura Eason’s crackling, infinitesimally intimate new play about two writers whose work and lives collide onstage, on the page, and in the ethereal neverland of the internet, fills the 299 seats of Steppenwolf’s Upstairs Theater, a plush proscenium venue that (quoth the theater) “directly reflects Steppenwolf’s commitment to the intimacy of the actor-audience relationship,” but which seems awfully swank, and awfully sizeable, for such a populist sort of goal—in any case, the house, on this cold night, is packed with what strikes me, first and foremost, as exactly the same sort of crowd you might find milling about apologizing and mumbling and finding their unassigned seats in the Guthrie’s Dowling Theater. My companion, not a regular theater-goer, looks around Steppenwolf and says flatly, “Everyone’s white.” Well, and there’s that. Minneapolis. Cold night. Up those damnable elevators to the Dowling for a sold-out showing of the much-lauded Theater Latte Da production of Song of Extinction, EM Lewis’s play of vast scope and ambition, put together by one of the best small theaters in town, on a budget that’s a fraction of Steppenwolf’s, in what’s basically still a black box venue, for better and for worse. This venue does, in fact, pay homage to the intimacy of the actor-audience relationship, as Song makes eminently clear: where Sex is set in a wildly detailed, densely decorated, lush and cozy single room, packed with deep-seated couches and chairs and mugs of coffee and wine glasses and rugs and wide windows onto a snowstorm and, impressively, an entire floor-to-ceiling library of books, Song takes place in several disparate places on the planet, to say nothing of a noodle shop, a hospital room, a classroom, a bus station, and a car. The set design challenges of Song would make any designer weep, but then, that’s the beauty of a black box theater: you can make the thing do anything and be anywhere you want. It’s spare, it’s suggestive, and sometimes you just have no idea where the hell you are, but in the case of Song, a nuanced use of music and spectacularly effective lighting transitions (Marcus Dilliard), flesh out the necessarily bare-bones set (the Guthrie’s Michael Hoover) such that your sense of each setting is palpable, if not visibly clear. But as I sat down with my not-a-regular-theater-goer companion, I worried that this particular show might be one of those I have all too often seen in the Guthrie’s various black boxes over the years: made up of too many parts, cobbled together, overreaching, and distressingly concerned with a Big Point It Must Make. My companion stared at the stage. “Where’s the set?” she asked. The three men behind us discussed the fact that they had intended to come to Latte Da’s next production—they thought—but weren’t sure—and should they just leave? * I hate the word “about” when it comes to plays or books or poems or any such thing—“what’s it about?” is a maddening question, because generally it’s about lots of things, and if you happen to have written it, you often find yourself totally without a clue as to what it’s about, and when people ask you, you mumble, “something something, and redemption,” because publishers and agents and audiences like the word “redemption.” But for what it’s worth: ABSTRACT: Sex With Strangers is about writing and identity (and redemption) in the virtual age. It’s not about sex. Sex is the setup (the actors have a lot of it) and the metaphor (sex is literal contact and connection in an increasingly theoretical, aphysical world). At its core, this is an intellectual play about a very specific, not exactly universal, and very much not timeless, subject. It’s also a full two acts of nonstop, intensely wordy dialogue between two people, on one topic, in one room. That’s a play rife with risks, and it’s not an easy one to move from the playwright’s head and into the audience’s emotional world. To come alive, this kind of play requires powerhouse acting, and in the Steppenwolf production, that’s exactly what it gets. SPECIFIC: Sex with Strangers is about two writers: a tattooed, twenty-something, hoodie-wearing, blogosphere superstar whose sexual exploits (with the titular strangers) have been turned into bestselling book; and an anxious, more than slightly neurotic writer whose publishing career consists of one brilliant, out-of-print volume. The two meet—to her dismay, his delight—one snowed-in night at a swanky writer’s retreat. Two hours of verbal fireworks ensue, as the actors (long-time Chicago and New York presence Sally Murphy and the alarmingly talented Stephen Louis Gush, who very nearly upstages Murphy) give weight to the notion that there’s a Chicago style, and that style is “muscular”: their volume is tightly controlled but amped up so high that when there is a moment of quiet tenderness it almost hurts; and their physicality leaps into the room like a third body as they pace like caged cats, twist their clothes, gesture frantically, hop up and down, crash against one another, bounce off, and fall into a kiss that cuts quickly to black. Sex has a relatively straightforward plot, and a pretty predictable one. We see from the outset that he (that which is young, virtual, easy, new) will be disillusioned, and she (that which is mature, proven, hard-earned, and real) will be redeemed; the virtues of the truly literary will triumph over the vagaries of a moody publishing industry; and eventually the two characters will have to determine the nature of their relationship: is it virtual or actual; have they truly encountered and known each other, or are they, too, just strangers? And there’s your Big Picture. This play—though in almost every respect the polar opposite of Song of Extinction—is a Play With a Point. * I do not know if playwright EM Lewis actually said this or is only quoted as saying this in press materials; if she did say this, she should be kicked and given media training, because she makes her play sound like an absolute bloody mess, and why anyone would want to see it after hearing this, I can’t say; in any case what she may have said was that Song of Extinction is “a play about the science of life and loss, the relationships between fathers and sons, Cambodian fields, Bolivian rainforests, and redemption.” ABSTRACT: The play is about—I do like this phrase—“the science of life and loss.” That seems to me the most incisive way of getting at the heart of a play whose heart is not immediately obvious or, I think, fully realized. But the three or four intersecting stories (depending on how you count) and the multiplicity of relationships share their theme of extinction: how we sometimes live in ignorance and die in revelation, how we bear witness to death, and how we hold precious what is alive. SPECIFIC: The play is about a genius child, a dying mother, a bumbling scientist, a noble teacher, an evil businessman, and a bug. I knew very little about Song when I sat down in the Dowling Studio to watch it. I knew it had actors I liked very much and a few I liked less; I knew it had been gushingly praised (for, not surprisingly, a wide range of things) since the start of its run; I knew it had something to do with the cello, and I like the cello; I knew that a trusted friend had said of it, “It really shouldn’t work. But it does.” And, by and large, it did. It did so because the acting, while uneven, showed moments of real beauty and humanity and life. It did so because Peter Rothstein, directing, made a kind of magic out of an incredibly unwieldy concept and script. It did so because the lighting design really was that good. And it did so in spite of itself, in spite of the play per se. This, too, is a Play With a Point. All such plays—those with a significant politically- or socially-driven plot or theme—run enormous risks. They can be boring, They can be maudlin. They can be sappy. They can be too dense, and can suck the life out of a vital issue; they can, by the same token, be superficial, and make a serious issue seem empty and frivolous. Issue plays, in script form, often read like heavy-handed diatribes or soliloquies or dissertation defenses. Once mounted, they can lurch along for what seems like a Wagnerian period of time, heavy with the weight of the playwright’s voice and agenda, unleavened by humor or nuance—these are plays that even the best acting and direction can’t save. I confess I have seen too many of them to count, both here in the Twin Cities and in half a dozen other decent theater towns. They pop up in black box theaters from San Francisco to New York, billing themselves as “important new work” by Jane Hot Playwright, pulling broader, “hipper” audiences than the main stage, and acting as a counterbalance to the dog-eared old chestnuts those main stages regularly do. And some of them are very, very good. I saw a production of 9 Parts of Desire off-off-off Broadway, breathtakingly performed by the playwright, in a theater the size of my shoe, and it remains one of the most important productions I’ve ever seen. And for every truly significant new play put up, to acclaim and fuss and standing ovations and awards, there are two absolutely awful shows getting the same attention and praise. Song of Extinction is not, in my opinion, a very good play. I may be the only person who thinks that; the play and its writer are dripping with honors and awards. But the evening I saw Song performed, the audience went along for the ride, just as the audience went along the night I saw Sex with Strangers—which, despite brilliant performances, is also not a great play qua play. The Dowling audience got to their feet at the end (of course, Twin Cities audiences always enjoy a good standing O), and the Chicago audience came bursting into the lobby seeming inspired and engaged, when they’d just watched two hours of thicket-dense dialogue fleshing out a very thin plot. But perhaps it is to their credit—Steppenwolf’s and Latte Da’s—that they chose these two plays. Both, for starters, do take on substantive issues—and there’s something to be said for theater that engages, in some way, with the concerns of the contemporary world. Both shows play to the interests of their audience, and their audience’s demands; both play to the strengths of their actors and companies as a whole. Maybe the risk of a new play, a new playwright, a hot-button issue are enough to make a show worth putting up, and going to see. Maybe the fact that these plays fail in some ways is immaterial, because they the ways in which they succeed matter more. * If the two plays traded cities, I think neither would have been nearly as successful. Sex was too broadly performed, too full-frontal-emotional-assault to hold up on a Twin Cities stage; Song was too fragmentary in structure and reserved in tone for Chicago’s tastes. In terms of speaking to their ticket holders, at least, the plays were chosen well. But I would like to see Sex with Strangers performed in Minneapolis, for the very fact that it would be a risk in a risk-averse town: put on a show that’s new but not obviously conceptual, issue-oriented but not earnest, contemporary in its concerns but traditional in its structure, just for a change. And I’d like to see Chicago take on Song of Extinction and see what kind of animal a Chicago cast and director would come up with using the same abstract, cerebral, wide-ranging script that was used here. Taken in isolation, these plays act as extreme examples of what we think of when we think of Chicago and Minneapolis as theater towns: the practical and literal versus the conceptual and suggestive; the heart and body versus the mind. Minneapolis has tended to take its cues from New York. I think it needs to look closer to home: it has just as much to learn from Chicago, and frankly, the actors in Chicago are abundant, good, and cheaper to fly home. Likewise, Chicago has tended to jut its chin out and take its cues from its own damn self—and I think it could stand to look around, and cast a wider net than it traditionally has (a good call, for starters: Polly Carl, dramaturg on Sex, hails from the University of Minnesota and the Playwrights’ Center). Both Midwestern cities are vibrant with theaters new and old, bursting with young, talented companies and artists, and ripe for new work. I may not have thought these were perfect plays—they weren’t—but both were passionate works in different ways, thrilling at moments, and absolutely worthy of the stages they were on. Minneapolis and Chicago are home to some of the finest, freshest playwrights and theater artists in the country. I’d give my eyeteeth to see more of their work onstage.