Unlike television or movies, the living theater is indeed live. You can’t rent it or listen to it in your living room; you have to go out and experience it at the particular time and place it is being presented.
Nevertheless, and with that caveat in mind, the suggestions here (neither definitive nor scholarly) of landmark texts, important productions and basic reference works may help in preparing one to be an informed member of the audience, one who is eager to enjoy and be excited by the experience of theatermore specifically, Western theater, English language theater, American theater and Chicago theater.
Productions
– “King Lear” (written about 1605)
The greatest poem and the greatest play in the English language, this all-encompassing Shakespeare tragedy is the bedrock and pinnacle of Western dramatic literature. It is enlightening to read, but bear in mind that, as with all the scripts noted here, it becomes a play only in performance.
– “Tartuffe” (1664)
This key work by Moliere, the essential comic playwright, offers classic subjects (hypocrisy, greed) and classic characters (foolish husband, saucy maid) that are enriched by the author’s poetry and his deep, sometimes dark vision of humanity. Richard Wilbur’s translation from the French is the standard English text.
– “Ghosts” (1881)
Henrik Ibsen’s pioneering melding of burning social issues with eternal verities is at its most powerful, most moving and most influential in this study of a mother’s plight when she learns that her beloved son is dying of syphilis.
– “The Three Sisters” (1901)
Anton Chekhov’s pivotal drama, set in the disintegrating world of Russian aristocracy, is the supremely summarizing work of the 19th Century, capturing the sadness, futility and humor of a society in transition.
– “Mother Courage and Her Children” (1939)
Bertolt Brecht’s drama, written just before the Holocaust, stingingly depicted the horrors of war and the catastrophe of capitalistic greed in a new, epic style of presentation that made the German playwright and his work internationally renowned.
– “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (1940)
Family tragedy, a recurrent story in American drama, reaches its peak in this long, harrowing, exhausting drama by America’s greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill.
– “Oklahoma!” (1943)
In its integration of song and story, this first of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II collaborations laid the groundwork for the gol age of American musicals. All that, and “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” too.
– “The Glass Menagerie” (1944)
Tennessee Williams’ first success, based loosely on his own family’s history, established him as an American master and set the mold for his subsequent dramas of poetic realism. Besides, it premiered in Chicago.
– “Waiting for Godot” (1952)
Written with spare eloquence, this is the tale of two tramp-clowns waiting endlessly in a barren land for a savior who will never come. Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece stands as the key work of drama in the 20th Century.
– “The Caretaker” (1959)
Harold Pinter, Beckett’s artistic child, revolutionized the English stage with this lean, taut “comedy of menace” (much reviled in its premiere), and paved the way for such future Beckettian grandchildren as David Mamet.
– “The Odd Couple” (1965)
This seminal comedy of mismatched men, containing the funniest first 20 minutes of any American play, is the sure-thing classic by the most successful playwright in Broadway history, Neil Simon.
– “A Chorus Line” (1975)
The anatomy of a Broadway chorus line is not only a brilliant musical. In its examination of the lives of its characters, it’s also a stunning study of the basic nature of illusion and reality in the life of the theater.
– “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1984)
The Pulitzer Prize winner about a motley group of real estate salesmen scratching out an existence in money-grubbing America is a quintessential work by Chicago’s own David Mamet, a successor to Beckett and Pinter and the most influential American dramatist of his generation.
Videos
“Les Miserables” in Concert
Taped before an adoring audience in the Royal Albert Hall in London last year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the landmark epic musical, this splendidly orchestrated concert version, with a cast of 250 persons, captures both the grandeur of the Alain Boublil-Claude Michel Schonberg score and the unique, irresistible theatrical schmaltz of this special occasion.
– “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s marathon adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel, recorded in performance at the Aldwych Theatre in London, conveys better than most the immediacy and excitement of a live performance of a thrillingly directed and enacted production.
Publications
Chicago’s theater scene is avidly chronicled by daily and weekly newspapers, each of which has its own listings of the week’s schedule. These guides, many with brief critical summaries of productions and most of them published in Thursday or Friday editions, offer the basic information on what to choose from the array of theater available to us.
Histories and criticism
– “Act One”
Moss Hart’s autobiography, recounting his first Broadway success in 1930 with the comedy “Once in a Lifetime,” recalls the old glamor and allure of American commercial theater with affection and enthusiasm. The best read in this bunch.
– “Our Theatres in the Nineties”
George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, was also a superb theater critic, as these 1895-98 reviews demonstrate. A champion of Ibsen and a naysayer on “The Importance of Being Earnest,” he was, above all, a witty and informed man of the theater who loved to talk about it as much as he loved to write for it.
– “Something Wonderful Right Away”
The story of The Second City, one of our most enduring and influential institutions through its now-hallowed tradition of improvisational theater, is chronicled in the 1978 oral history by Jeffrey Sweet. It’s almost a casebook of making theater, Chicago style.
– “The Season”
Many of the shows that William Goldman wrote of in his history of one particular Broadway season (1967-68) have long since faded from memory, but his sassy, expert account of the Broadway process, its follies and fortunes, is timeless.
– “The Theatre”
From the ’20s through the ’40s, Stark Young covered American theater with great insight and perception. This book is at times a bit pretentious, but it is also an extremely wise analysis of the fundamental elements of drama.
Reference works
– “The Cambridge Guide to Theatre; The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre”
In a field crowded with dictionaries, histories and encyclopedias, these two volumes offer concise, accurate and accessible information bytes on all the obvious and less obvious plays, players and productions.
– “Broadway Musicals”
The first of critic Martin Gottfried’s big, beautiful books (others include “More Broadway Musicals”) that celebrate, criticize and analyze the nature of musical theater is lavishly illustrated in coffee-table book style, but in its discussion of the many aspects of putting together a musical, it also provides an excellent introduction to under-standing what makes this major art form tick.
Theater-going
Almost every kind of American theater can be found in the Chicago area, from big musicals in the downtown houses to original and experimental works in the scrambling off-off-Loop venues.
Goodman, Steppenwolf and Shakespeare Repertory are the three largest (in budget) professional resident not-for-profit theaters, each with a subscription season. Smaller in that same category are Victory Gars, Northlight, Organic/Touchstone and Apple Tree. Musicals and comedies are the mainstays at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre, Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace and Drury Lane Evergreen Park. Behind them are a swarm of off-Loop houses, presenting schedules of everything from classic to gay theater.
Sample. Choose. Go.
On the internet
for a multimedia presentation on this installment and a look at the previous essentials, go to: chicago.tribune.com
