Perhaps the greatest challenge for “Downsize” director Stephan Mazurek was persuading property managers to let him use their restrooms.
“You feel like a pervert when you start talking to people about using their locations,” Mazurek says. “There’s this feeling of, ‘What are you going to be doing in there that you can’t do out here?’ And then there are people who have actually said, ‘Hello — have you ever heard of building a set?'”
You see, “Downsize,” Walkabout Theater’s half-hour play about the machinations of five desperate, midlevel corporate types plotting to get ahead, is set in an office building’s men’s room.
And in a stroke of daring ingenuity by Mazurek, the play is now being staged in various restrooms around the city, making “Downsize” one of the latest Chicago examples of the benefits — and perils — of what is called “site-specific” theater.
“It completely changes the relationship between the audience and the actors,” Mazurek says. “Everything becomes more charged.”
That’s why staging the play in a bathroom “came to me pretty immediately,” Mazurek says. “The audience is choosing to stand there and be involved, however indirectly. It raises the stakes — you’re standing in the same light as the actors, literally just inches away from them. So there’s no place to hide or doze off, as opposed to when you’re sitting in the dark in seat 8H somewhere.”
From the actors’ perspective, as cast member Jerry Miller observes, “it’s as if the audience is onstage with you.”
Depending on the size of the facilities — from the compact men’s restroom at the Steppenwolf Garage to the more expansive, T-shaped space at Piper’s Alley — anywhere from 8 to 20 audience members pile into the john, line up against the wall and spend the next 30 minutes absorbed in this pocket-size “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
In a summer that so far has been littered with an assortment of blah theatrical offerings, “Downsize,” halfway through its eight-performance run, is one of the better shows in town.
“It takes a while for people to get used to being in a bathroom,” Mazurek says. “Some women are really thrown by it — obviously, they’ve never been in a men’s room before and it takes a moment to adjust.”
He quickly adds, “This play is not about titillation. People hear that it’s going to be in a bathroom and all of a sudden they think `Puppetry of the Penis,’ or they’re going to see someone urinate. But none of that happens. That’s not what this play is about.”
A quick survey of the audience milling around Piper’s Alley before a recent performance resulted in a few shrugged shoulders — no one was quite sure what to expect — although one person said he plans to attend performances at the final two locations, just to see how the show differs from place to place.
Judging by the post-performance reaction, the small crowd clearly “got it.”
As one woman said, “It was a little unsettling being in the bathroom, in a good way.”
Scouting sites
Finding the right spot for a site-specific work can be a major hurdle, notes the Tony Award-winning director Mary Zimmerman, and she should know. In the spring of 2000, she staged “Eleven Rooms of Proust” in an abandoned North Side warehouse, retrofitted to suit the needs of her expansive imagination.
Three years later, the production remains one of Zimmerman’s most bewitching creations, site-specific or otherwise. But it did not come without a cost.
“We had a really hard time finding an empty, not-in-use space,” she says.
“And logistically, the warehouse was a huge nightmare. The sprinkler system didn’t function, so it became this whole struggle with the city. And we ended up spending $5,000 building an extra staircase and making the place wheelchair accessible.”
In 2001, choreographer Ann Carlson staged a series of photograph-inspired tableaus titled “Night Light” at various spots around the Loop. And over the last 12 months alone, the Neo-Futurists performed its musing on literary genius, “Drinking and Writing,” in an Andersonville bar; choreographer Beppie Blankert staged “Odyssey,” her dance interpretation of Homer’s epic poem, outdoors abutting the Chicago River near the Merchandise Mart; and Redmoon Theatre produced “Nina,” a vivid re-imagining of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” on the grounds of Humboldt Park.
Luckily for Walkabout Theater, “Downsize” requires no structural adjustments — the bathrooms are left “as is,” urinal cakes, fluorescent lighting and echoey acoustics intact. It is portable theater incarnate. The only piece of equipment Mazurek adds is a hidden mini-microphone, which allows him or the stage manager to stand outside the bathroom, monitoring the show on headphones and giving the actors their entrance cues.
Because the bathrooms don’t have permits to operate as paid-performance spaces, no admission is charged, although the troupe does ask for donations.
All the performances (with the exception of the upcoming show at the MCA) have been scheduled during off-hours, when the bathrooms do not have to serve the general public. At the Steppenwolf Garage, this meant a late-night start time (ditto for the Athenaeum); at Piper’s Alley, the show was performed at noon on a weekday, when the building was virtually empty.
Because of the production’s itinerant nature, the ensemble must block and tailor the play anew each time it’s staged in a new space — often with little rehearsal time — and sometimes with fascinating results.
The compact, square-ish, two-stall affair at the Steppenwolf Garage, where the first two performances were held earlier this month, is by far the smallest of all the bathrooms on this so-called “toilet tour.” The confined space actually heightened the sense of mental claustrophobia pervasive throughout the play.
“Downsize,” which first-time local playwright Chris Welzenbach wrote for the stage and not the washroom, features Archie, a snakelike bully played by John G. Connolly, who is the ringleader of a pack that calls itself Charlie Company. In lieu of a better hideout, they gather in the bathroom to connive, sweat and plan out their tactical moves to win the coveted “new accounts” designation. In the especially close proximity of the Steppenwolf bathroom, many of the lines were delivered in a near whisper — something you almost never hear onstage, which makes it all the more engrossing.
Amid the drama
The intimate setting also reveals those physical quirks actors unintentionally bring to a role. As he struggles to control his fury, you can clearly see on Connolly’s forehead the outline of a vein squiggling down from the corner of his hairline to the outer tip of his eyebrow — and that vein says more than any amount of dialogue.
What Mazurek achieves at these moments is virtually cinematic — the theatrical equivalent of a close-up. In fact, the entire production feels like a three-dimensional film come to life. Which makes sense, once you learn that Mazurek earns his living as a director of photography on commercial shoots and episodes of VH1’s “Behind the Music.”
In the slightly more roomy, T-shaped bathroom at Piper’s Alley, the effect was something closer to a shaky, hand-held film, a la “The Blair Witch Project,” forcing audience members to whip their heads back and forth to keep up with the action as it unfurls along a Duchampian bank of urinals. Connolly’s vein is less prominent in this setting, but his petulant flushing of every single urinal, like a child hitting all the buttons in an elevator, is an equally potent and extremely funny visual.
“Doing it in such a small space makes the play more pointed, more microscopic,” Mazurek says, “like you’re looking at it through a magnifying glass.”
Accidents happen
“The great and terrible thing about site-specific work is that accidents happen,” says Zimmerman, who includes site-specific assignments as part of the curriculum for her performance art students at Northwestern.
During Blankert’s “Odyssey,” it is said, a jogger inadvertently ran across the dance space midperformance. And Nicolas Minas, director of the Theater-Hikes production of “Travels With Lewis and Clark,” which is being performed at multiple outdoor locations this summer, says that, earlier in the run, “someone’s little white fluffy dog ran into one of the scenes. So the guys started petting him and sort of incorporated the dog into the show. It worked out OK, even though this was definitely not the kind of animal Lewis and Clark would have encountered on their trek.”
And even though the Walkabout crew is careful to guard the restroom door during a performance, Walkabout Artistic Director Kristan Schmidt says there was at least one minor incident at the Piper’s Alley location
“About a minute before we were about to start the show, a man was walking quickly towards the bathroom and I had to ask him if he was here to see the play in there. The look he gave me was priceless.”
But practicality won over the needs of the show.
“He really had to go, so, of course, we let him use the facilities.”
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“Downsize” will be performed Thursday through Saturday at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave.; and Aug. 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; for more information, call 312-458-0566.
