La Dulce Vida Cafe is a bit off the beaten path, but the journey itself may be worth it.
Tucked into a storefront on West Madison, in the shadows of the Harpo Studios, Johnny’s Ice House and about a half-dozen loft/condo developments, it’s a peek, perhaps, at the future: In this beautiful, tasteful coffeehouse is embodied the promise of what many hope will be the new West Loop.
It is a place comfortable enough, upscale enough, for the most discriminating tastes: Three-tiered, with exposed brick walls, designer tile floors, large windows that look out at the street and let the light bathe the furnishings — aside from the usual tables and chairs, a love seat, coffee tables loaded with the latest issues of the local papers, Art News, a couple of architecture mags, national newsweeklies and board games. A wood-burning stove. On the walls, large-scale, colorful paintings by well-known local artists.
The menu is brief but in keeping with the stylings: lattes and espressos, teas, sodas and the like, pastries rich in calories and taste, overstuffed sandwiches stacked with cheese and deli meats.
But La Dulce Vida is also a distinctly Latino place. The swirl of tiles on the floor features three cherubim, all dark. The art is by Latino artists. The most delicious drink offered up by the servers is Mexican chocolate, creamy and lush — as deep and dark or as frothy and light as you like it.
The promise of the West Loop is harmony: architectural, racial. Here, in this mellow oasis where the music is sweet and the service is quick and unobtrusive, it’s as common to see a man still in his suit and tie in for a quick cup after work (while walking his anxious dog, a full-breed no doubt) as it is to see a young woman with black fingernails and the vampirish look in vogue and with the artful staring off into nothingness.
Sometime this month, La Dulce Vida — which has been around for only about seven months — will be offering live drawing sessions on Thursday nights in its basement studio (visible from the first floor through a glass partition). Plans are to expand summer late-night hours (right now, the only real after hours offering is Friday nights, when it goes to midnight).
La Dulce Vida Cafe & Gallery is at 1338 W. Madison St. Call 312-666-1920 for information about hours, activities and current exhibitions.
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We recently caught Mary Zimmerman’s masterly “Eleven Rooms of Proust,” the collaborative production between Lookingglass and About Face theaters. It’s based on Marcel Proust’s voluminous “Remembrance of Things Past,” and it’s being performed in a warehouse in Ravenswood in 11 carefully selected spaces over three floors.
Seeing the piece — and later, reading the glowing reviews — made me wonder if Zimmerman might not consider an alternate career as an installation artist once she exhausts the theater’s possibilities. Each “scene” — essentially an installation with gestures that often seem more akin to performance or dance than theater — featured a visual burst that tended to far outshine the actual text and direction.
In fact, I was a little surprised how bland Proust comes off in “11 Rooms,” how much the adaptation is aided by the space and the novelty of its use. And because I was somewhat bothered by the “instructions” to move from set to set — they tended to take me out of the imagined Proustian/Zimmerman universe, reminded me where we were — I was also left to ponder how else the audience might have been engaged.
Then I attended the equally brilliant but considerably rougher “Lear’s Shadow” at theNeo-Futurists’ place up on Ashland. They are, of course, very different pieces. The Lear show is in one room, its props visible to all at all times, the actors playing a million roles as well as themselves. But there are also wondrous visual moments — the introduction of the players, the quick distilling of the story, the bit with the metal collar and the balls….
But Lear offers something else: A real, intentional rupture, however brief, of the fourth wall. The first occurs at the beginning of the show, when the audience is seated according to each members’ response to a rather provocative question about love. The second when Greg Allen, one of the performers and one of the group’s founders, places eyeglasses on several audience members. Not everyone . . . just a few people . . . but enough to keep you thinking about the relationship between those watching and those being watched.
These are tiny gestures — nothing as elaborate as past Neo-Futurists interactives such as its long-running “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” or “Crime and Punishment,” their adaptation of the Dostoevsky opus that was basically performed — and brilliantly — by the audience each night.
