Except maybe at Halloween, nobody likes to be confronted by ghosts. But Harry Mark Petrakis couldn’t have been happier about his recent encounters with Ariadne, Marko, Rhodanthe, Nick, Rosemary and all the other ghostly figures who have come back to haunt him.
They are a few of the characters from short stories that Petrakis wrote and published 30 or more years ago, then presumably interred between the covers of his collected stories and assorted anthologies.
Now the characters have sprung to life in the Royal George Theatre Gallery, with the staging of three of Petrakis’ vintage stories: “The Song of Rhodanthe,” “The Wooing of Ariadne” and “Rosemary.”
“I know there are writers who distance themselves from their characters once they’ve created them,” Petrakis said of his work. “But I’m an emotional writer, and they remain very close to me.”
If anything, Petrakis said he feels even closer to the characters in their theatrical incarnations. After watching one of the plays in dress rehearsal, he told the cast, “You made me cry, and I wrote the damned thing.”
Collectively entitled “Greek Streets,” the three plays are the inaugural production of Short Story Theatre, a company founded by Tim Clue and Marco Benassi, speech teachers at the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn.
Thursday night’s opening at the Royal George is actually a “reopening” of “Greek Streets,” which played for six weeks in the same theater during November and December. After a Christmas vacation, the cast was reassembled and the show revived for at least six more weeks.
Though they clearly appreciated the Petrakis stories themselves, Benassi and Clue, who adapted and directed them for the stage, were initially concerned about whether they would seem dated to contemporary audiences.
Their doubts vanished early in the first run, according to Clue.
“Once we got the stories on the stage, people talked about how each one related to them in some specific way, which was why we wanted to do them in the first place.
“The stories are really boundless in terms of theme and emotional diversity,” Clue added. “Whenever you have stories with emotions that people can believe, they transcend context and time.”
As Petrakis was quick to agree, the stories are old-fashioned fables, with beginnings, middles and endings that verge on the O’Henryesque. “There’s nothing surrealistic about them.”
In “The Song of Rhodanthe,” the heroine, tyrannized by her family because she’s 27 and unmarried, meets an unearthly lover in her back yard. The shrewish heroine of “The Wooing of Ariadne” is tamed by the earthy Marko. An act of kindness by Nick, the proprietor of a lunch counter in “Rosemary,” has a disillusioning backlash.
Though Petrakis writes about common people in mundane circumstances, mostly Greek Americans working in beaneries, taverns, steel mills and bordellos, there’s something almost mythic about his characters, as if they inhabit not the sidestreets of Chicago but the lesser peaks of Mt. Olympus.
Despite their Greek origins, Petrakis insisted that his characters “could be Polish, German, Irish or any nationality, because the emotions they feel-Rhodanthe’s longing for love, Rosemary and Nick spinning their webs of fantasy-don’t have any ethnic distinctions.”
That was confirmed for Petrakis during the earlier production of “Greek Streets.” “The audiences were from a different era, and I was startled by how positively they responded to these people on stage, how involved they got in their lives.”
Petrakis was also surprised by how involved he got as his own stories were re-enacted by the cast of two women and four men. “I saw maybe 14 or 15 performances. And each time I was on the edge of my seat.
“I couldn’t understand why I was so drawn to them. But very late in the run, I realized that they’d been given a wonderful life of their own on stage, and I was constantly on edge wondering if these characters would find a different ending than the one I wrote.”
Even when he isn’t sitting in the audience, Petrakis still figures prominently in the performances.
Before and after each story, the author’s videotaped image is shown on a television monitor, talking about how the stories came to be written and his work in general.
Unlike so many other writers, immodesty seems to become Petrakis, whose enthusiasm for his writing can be both disarming and infectious. Lamentably, the 70-year-old author hasn’t had the level of recognition in recent years that he had during the ’60s, when his novel, “A Dream of Kings,” was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Petrakis won’t be unhappy if the production leads to a revival not only of his stories, collected by Chicago’s Lake View Press, but his seven novels, from “Lion at My Heart,” published in 1959, to “Days of Vengeance,” his 1983 sequel to “A Dream of Kings.”
Watching the stories performed, Petrakis said he couldn’t help but recall those happy days when the big magazines were publishing his fiction.
“I can remember my jubilation when I got the word from my agent that he’d sold `The Wooing of Ariadne’ to the Saturday Evening Post for the enormous sum of $1,000.”
Petrakis said he wouldn’t be able to live long on the royalties from “Greek Streets,” but the financial rewards are immaterial. “I’m not going to make any money on this. It’s just being involved with a group of young people devoted to the theater.”
For information about the production of “Greek Streets” at the Royal George, 1641 N. Halsted St., call 312-988-9000.
– Speaking about Harry Mark Petrakis’ characters, it was novelist Kurt Vonnegut who observed that they’d make a “wonderful basketball team . . . Every one of them is at least 14 feet tall.”
Coincidentally, Vonnegut will be in Chicago Wednesday for a free lecture at 4 p.m. at the University of Chicago’s Swift Hall, 1025 E. 58th St.
A graduate of the university, with a masters in anthropology, and an alumnus of the City News Bureau, Vonnegut, whose novels include “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Hocus Pocus,” will talk about his Chicago years.
