A decade or so, when it was fashionable for the media to carp about how young working people were moving back in with their unfortunate parents, Chicago’s Jim Carrane became a poster child for this way of delaying adulthood.
Adroitly capturing the slacker gestalt, Carrane’s dark, cynical, autobiographical show, “I’m 27, I Still Live At Home And I Sell Office Supplies” ran here at the Annoyance Theatre under Gary Ruderman’s direction for a whopping 18 months between 1992 and 1993.
As a result, if a reporter was doing a piece about the supposedly widespread reluctance to leave the parental nest, Carrane’s intense 27-year-old face usually showed up. He appeared on the Jenny Jones Show and sat with any number of radio raconteurs yammering about delayed maturity.
With posters all over town and lines on the sidewalk outside Annoyance, Carrane became a genuine off-Loop phenomenon. And his funny one-person show went to New York.
“I suppose I was the spokesperson for a generation,” Carrane, now 36, mused recently in his typical nasal tone. “I enjoyed that.”
So what has happened to this guy? Aside from one new (and less well-received) piece done at Live Bait a couple of years ago, we have heard very little from him.
“Hey, people still recognize me on the street,” Carrane said. “Every couple of years.”
No, really, what has been going on?
“Well, I went to Los Angeles, but I didn’t stick,” Carrane said. “They don’t understand sarcasm out there, and that’s really all that I do.”
Ergo, Carrane is back in Chicago with a sequel to “Office Supplies.” Opening on Tuesday night at Second City ETC (where it plays midweek nights only) is “Jim Carrane is Living in a Dwarf’s House.”
Although the character (a.k.a. Carrane) will have aged only two years since “I’m 27, I Still Live At Home And I Sell Office Supplies,” in the new show, he will at least have moved away from home — to a cheap apartment in a low-rent Chicago neighborhood where the landlord is a religious zealot and other challenges abound.
“My life is now full of tiny obsessions,” Carrane said. “And that’s what this new show is all about.”
Interestingly enough, Carrane did this telephone interview from his parents’ house. But he claims not to live there anymore.
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Thursday night brought the first scheduled public performance of the Broadway-bound musical “The Producers” at the Cadillac Palace Theatre and the much delayed reappearance of that rare but glorious entity in Chicago entertainment — the hot theater ticket.
Thanks to the familiarity of the Mel Brooks film upon which this show is based and the national popularity of stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, there’s more interest in “The Producers” than there has been in any other show here for several years. Disney’s “Aida,” which also tried out here last year, did not attract anything approaching this level of interest. And this is all, of course, without anyone yet gaining any sense of how good “The Producers” will turn out to be. The movie may be classic, but who knows how it will translate to the stage — or what will be the impact on it of 30 years of changing styles and tastes.
Off-Loop aficionados tend to react with disdain to the kind of much-hyped celebrity invasion from New York that “The Producers” has brought to us. But such events actually are vital to the long-term health of the Chicago theater community.
When, for example, director Susan Stroman extols the virtues of the Chicago theater scene to a “Sixty Minutes” camera crew (as she did at a press conference last week) that buoys the creative community in ways that are felt by the smallest theaters. Unless the Steppenwolf acting ensemble can find an excuse to party in public every year (please, no), these celebrity-driven shows are about the only way to provoke interest in Chicago theater from the bulk of the local electronic media.
So, welcome to Chicago, celebrities all. And may the huge local box-office success of this untried product serve as a reminder to the real producers that when Chicagoans are provided with top-flight theater of the kind of which Grand Rapids or Green Bay could only dream, we do show up en masse in our best duds. So when’s the next such show?
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While we’re in the midst of Broadway seduction, this seems an apt moment to note that not every Chicago actor dreams first and foremost of the Great White Way. Greg Vinkler was part of the original cast of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Terry Kinney’s production is headed for New York in the spring, and Vinkler was offered the chance to make his Broadway debut at a Broadway salary.
But there was a rub. Barbara Gaines, artistic director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, had offered Vinkler the title role in her Chicago production of “King Lear.” It’s a part most actors regard as the Mt. Everest of the stage.
Vinkler listened to his creative, rather than his business, side. He picked Lear.
“It’s a punishing role,” said an exhausted Vinkler after a day of rehearsal. “There’s so much emotional turmoil.
“Years ago I learned that I had to do the work that is most satisfying,” Vinkler continued. “I did `Cuckoo’s Nest’ already. I never thought I would ever have the chance to do Lear. I wanted to have a whack at it.”
Next month, we will see the results. Right here in town.
