`George,” Lookingglass Theatre’s new production, looks like an important event in this ensemble’s history. It’s an extremely sophisticated staging of an almost surrealistic work, directed with eerily compelling style by Shirley Anderson, a new member of the group.
Set up on a thrust stage in a recently reconfigured auditorium of the Theatre Building, it’s imaginatively designed in every aspect, and it features a most forceful central performance by the actor Troy West.
Seated alone at a bare desk and in a pool of light at center stage, West begins the play with a despairing monologue in a dry-as-dust voice. In flashback, his story then unfolds.
A drone editor of a Parisian children’s magazine, living alone with his aged father, he becomes involved with the widow of a firebrand writer who had once been his schoolmate idol. He marries the woman, and she hands over to him her late husband’s unpublished manuscript, a gutsy novel called “The Hatred.”
The book, which, at his new wife’s urging, he has retyped and submitted as his own work, is a publishing sensation. It makes of him a wealthy celebrity, and it ruins him, for, as he disastrously discovers in trying to repeat his success with his own writing, “You can’t fake genius.”
Translated and adapted by John McCray from a French novel by Henri Troyat, “George” mixes biting irony and breezy social satire along with its philosophical questions on the nature of creativity. In the Lookingglass adaptation, the satire frequently becomes too exuberantly overplayed, and, in the beginning, the story moves as slowly as the maddeningly steady tic-toc of a clock that is heard in the background.
The clock effect, however, is perfect in delineating the character’s dull existence; and it’s typical of the theatrical inventiveness of Anderson and her designers: John Musial (sets), Christine Solger-Binder (lights), Todd Scales (sound) and Toni Hill (costumes). All of their arts come together in a terrifying swirl when the poor editor’s world collapses.
West, dumpily wearing a drab three-piece suit of gray, is superb as the hapless editor, going from stolid lump to triumphant celebrity and at last to frenzied madman, believing himself possessed by the soul of the dead writer.
The supporting players include Christine Mary Dunford, dressed by Hill in several outrageously fashionable gowns, as his opportunistic wife; Doug Hara, agilely scaling a ladder to a chair perched precariously atop the stage, as his windbag boss; Gary Wingert as his doddering papa; and, in the latest of her recent brilliant turns on Chicago stages, Marilyn Dodds Frank as a hilariously pompous philosopher and editor.
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“George”
When: Through April 11
Where: Lookingglass Theatre at the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.
Phone: 773-327-5252
