Buoyed by the great financial success of its 1998 revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera,” the American Theater Company (ATC) will soon be announcing a season far more ambitious and of a higher profile than the self-styled working person’s theater troupe has ever attempted before.
The biggest mark on the new ATC slate? Carmen Roman starring as “Medea,” no less.
According to the artistic director, Brian Russell, the redoubtable Roman will be taking on the role of the much-maligned and singularly intense Euripidean tragic heroine in a new translation developed especially for ATC by Nicholas Rudall, former artistic director of the Court Theatre and a widely respected translator of Greek tragedy. Ever since her superlative work in last fall’s Northlight Theatre production of “Master Class,” Roman (an ensemble member at ATC) has enjoyed a national profile.
The remainder of the projected 1999-2000 season (dates are not yet fixed) includes a newly revised version of David Ives’ “Don Juan in Chicago” (which will move to Vienna, Austria, after its ATC run) and revivals of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” and Lee Blessing’s classic of cold-war detente, “A Walk in the Woods.”
So does this new revival-heavy season mean that ATC is stepping away from new work? After all, it seems that this season’s audiences were far more receptive to Brecht and Weill than to Ed Mast, the author of the poorly received premiere “One Day Only,” which bombed at ATC last Christmas.
Not at all, says Russell, noting that the current production at ATC is a new script that has been performed only once before. In previews this weekend, Mark R. Giesser’s “Pledge of Allegiance” opens on Monday night. The guest director is Michael Halberstam, best known as artistic director of Writers’ Theatre Chicago in north suburban Glencoe.
Set mainly during the 1780s, “Pledge of Allegiance” deals with the story of the many apolitical Americans who refused to take either side during the Revolutionary War and thus became enemies of both the British loyalists and the American rebels.
“You get a sanitized view of the American Revolutionary War in a history class,” says Halberstam (who happens to be British born, which has afforded him a rather complex perspective on this topic). “Back then, at least a third of the country just wanted to get on with their life and not support anybody in particular. This is a play about individuals, caught in the thick of a war, who did not have any political ideology of their own.”
In his work (also seen off-Broadway), Giesser also draws clear analogies with today’s so-called “silent majority,” the great bulk of the United States population that remains silent on the great issues of our own day.
“I chose this play,” says Russell, a man who openly wears his social consciousness, “because it reminds us all that one must always engage. There are always serious — and usually negative — consequences that come from refusing to take sides.”
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Larry Kramer, the maverick playwright, activist and political dissident, could be found nursing a cup of coffee in a North Side restaurant one morning last week and expounding on subjects close to his heart. He surveyed the latest developments in AIDS research and asserted that the current optimism surrounding the containment of the HIV virus is dangerously out of sync with medical fact. And he mused on the current political scandals and their relationship with the AIDS-related politics of the 1980s.
“History,” Kramer observed with a wry smile, “is dictated by the sex lives of its leaders far more often than historians are ever willing to admit. All of the Clinton-Lewinsky ordure has thrown into full relief how a public person’s private life can affect an entire country.”
Kramer was justifying why he is revising his nasty, but funny, political satire about AIDS, sex and the Reagan years, “Just Say No,” for a major production in May at the Bailiwick Arts Center (there was a reading of the work there last year).
It’s a harsh — some might say potentially libelous — script that implies that the former president and then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch both had “very private sexual reasons” for not stepping to the forefront of the AIDS crisis. When the show was first seen in New York, Kramer was accused of bitter inhumanity to his subjects (he changed none of the names). The show flopped in short order.
This new, full production is likely to attract a great deal of attention because of the inexperienced actor currently slated to play the role of Ronald Reagan Jr. Although final details are still being inked, it appears virtually certain that the pin-up Olympic diver, Greg Louganis, will be strutting across the Bailiwick stage this spring. Especially since Louganis has such box-office clout, Kramer and the Bailiwick artistic director, David Zak, both say that they hope to move the play quickly to New York. They both say they feel that the chronological remove will make the play more palatable.
But does Kramer not feel guilty about (re-)attacking the Reagans in a such a malicious fashion?
“I’m an `Electra’ who never goes away,” Kramer responded without missing a beat. “I’m angry. I don’t forget, and I don’t want anyone else to forget either. Besides, I think that hypocrisy should be exposed no matter how far away from it you are in time.”
