Time Out Chicago / Issue 196 : Nov 27–Dec 3, 2008

Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company . By Douglas Maxwell. Dir. Carlo Lorenzo Garcia. With Dan Behrendt, Layne Manzer, John Wilson, Kevin V. Smith.

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BOYS’ LIFE Smith, left, narrates a nasty tale.

Photo: Kirstie Shanley

Scottish playwright Maxwell’s dark comedy follows three friends from a go-nowhere town on Scotland’s western coast over two decades. We see Fraser, Paul and Alan at ages nine, 19 and 29 (portrayed throughout by Behrendt, Manzer and Wilson, respectively), but as Maxwell darts back and forth through time, it’s revealed that the relationship among them is largely defined by their grudging attachment to a fourth: a morose young lad, ironically nicknamed Giggles (Smith), who possesses an uncanny gift for storytelling. Giggles appears only at age nine, and as Maxwell slowly parcels out details at Fraser, Alan and Paul’s reunion at age 29, it becomes clear that Giggles’s absence has become a driving force in each of their lives.

Maxwell has a strong ear for the wayward boredom of small-town adolescence, and Giggles’s parabolic fables (acted out by the other three boys) are affectingly charming. But the script’s winning elements never quite cohere into a whole. Magnet veers in many directions: Domestic abuse, adultery, mental illness and the relative merits of ’80s indie music are all lightly touched upon. Maxwell may be the current theater’s most authentic writer of capricious kid-speak, which is something, but Magnet still feels like a play in search of a thesis. The drama’s U.S. premiere is helped by Garcia’s note-perfect cast, playing out unruly lives marked by the jagged Scottish cliffside. While Behrendt in particular compels as the ringleader turned outsider, all four actors shine amid the gloom.

Three 29-year-old childhood friends reunite on a bleak bluff in Girvan, Scotland, to remember a fourth–strange, unhappy Giggles, who wrote wonderful stories and killed himself at 19. Or did he? Despite the plot’s dark underpinnings, Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell milks considerable mirth from the characters’ interactions, especially in a flashback to their nine-year-old days. Carlo Lorenzo Garcia’s four performers do a great job of embracing their inner boys (though sometimes they drop their brogues), and the fantasy scenes enacting Giggles’s stories are believably childlike, funny and touching. But Maxwell trumps up a conflict that takes over the end of the play only to muddy the waters–and the final, lovely moment.

–Laura Molzahn

Source: http://events.chicagoreader.com/events/Event?oid=859309

“I have language at my disposal,” says a teenage version of playwright John Patrick Shanley in 1991’s “Beggars In the House of Plenty.” Considering he would go on to win an Oscar for his “Moonstruck” screenplay and a Pulitzer for his drama, “Doubt,” that would be an understatement, no?

Corralling his thoughts and words the way a cowboy lassos a calf, Shanley’s best work captures a sense of place and personality, a skill he turned on himself in this autobiographical and seriously surrealist look back at his childhood in the Bronx. An experiment in form, this emotionally messy and intriguing Mary-Arrchie production (directed by Kevin Christopher Fox) offers up a palpable sense of what life was like within the thundering walls of the Shanley home.

A Baby Boomer from a working class Irish Catholic family, he was the youngest in a household of mismatched allegiances and careless insults. The dialogue is plain-spoken subtext—an alternate universe where everyone talks with the knowledge of hindsight. The comedy is bruising, and the symbolism overt.”I’m the center of everything!” his sister announces on her wedding day, only to disappear from his life thereafter. Pop works in a slaughterhouse, forever clutching a weapon—a meat cleaver, a shotgun, a pipe from the boiler room. “I will never approve of you,” he says. “May ya never die until I kill ya.” From older brother Joey: “If you’re ever disrespectful to Ma and Pa, I’ll kill ya.” And: “I love beer. That’s the one thing I’ll always have. Cold beer.”

Sometimes the navel-gazing is a bit much, but the performances here are worth seeing, particularly Daniel Behrendt as Joey, a swaggering, unpredictable force who is charming and dicey and ultimately crushed by forces that Shanley (Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, tender and rough around the edges) was better equipped to escape. Mary Jo Bolduc plays Ma, and she has just the right flat accent and abrasiveness.

She also has the best line. A lonely, pyro, klepto, lying Shanley would like nothing more than some metaphorical mother’s milk. She informs him: “I gave you formula.” Ouch, in all the right ways.

Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune

Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-fringe-0530may30,0,4807175.story

Raw, weird memory play features dazzling staging and excellent performances

Mary Arrchie Theatre always likes to challenge their audiences with gritty, in-your-face plays. John Patrick Shanley’s “Beggars In The House Of Plenty” sure qualifies as a challenging work. Billed as an autobiographical memory play depicting Shanley’s family, “Beggars” tackles the demons from his past as a surreal comedy filled with wit, insight together with confusing twists. I wonder why Shanley chose to mount this work? It is a raw, often vulgar and brutally honest work about an Irish-American family on the brink of destruction. Who would want to explore the painful memories of such a loveless and violent family? I have much trouble with Shanley’s treatment but not with Mary-Arrchie’s fine staging and the powerful acting by the entire ensemble. This is a strong, abstract show that will rock you to your bones as it both engages you and confuses you.

Johnny (Carlo Lorenzo Garcia) is a five year old child going on adulthood who has a violent father (Karl Potthoff) who loves working as a butcher in a slaughter house. Ma (Mary Jo Bolduc) is the wacky unloving mother. We witness events in the household through the eyes of 5 year old Johnny. There is Sheila’s marriage, the return of older brother Joey (Daniel Behrendt), the sailor who threatens Johnny with a beating if he disrespects Pop and the arrival of Sister Mary Kate (Laura Shatkus), the aunt. We hear the family dynamics in adult language as each try for lover and acceptance. This absurdist style produces many funny moments despite several long ranting speeches. There is no love in this family and Johnny doesn’t seem to have a place here.

The play then shifts years later when Johnny is now a young adult—he is a loser having been kicked out of everything from kindergarten to college. He starts fires, lies and fails at everything. Joey is even more of a loser but the two brothers have tender moments and terrifying fights. Johnny still sees Joey as his hero despite Joey’s self destruction. The last scenes take place in the basement of the family’s old house. The set becomes alight with a red glow that suggests hell and Pop emerges as a meat clever armed demon. He challenges Johnny and seeks out Joey for destruction. This scene is powerfully scary as it shifts into abstract illusion.

“Beggars” is a disturbing yet engrossing work that can be hard to follow with its non sequiturs and screwball comedy and it dark undertow. It is a brave rendition of the destruction of a family seen through the eyes of a gifted playwright. Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, Karl Potthoff and Daniel Behrendt anchor the excellent ensemble. This play will shake your world.

Recommended

Tom Williams

Source: http://chicagocritic.com/html/beggars_in_the_house_of_plenty.html

John Patrick Shanley channels Christopher Durang’s surreal, bizarrely comic style in a 1991 autobiographical play spanning multiple decades in the lives of “Johnny” and his family. The first scene, set in the 1950s, ricochets between humor and sadness, even terror, as Johnny’s butcher father arrives home in bloodstained clothes and occasionally brandishes his cleaver. Pop could seem a homicidal monster throughout, but director Kevin Christopher Fox treats him more as a buffoon in the first two of three scenes, heightening the surreality. The apocalyptic final scene, set in the hellish confines of the family basement, raises the stakes to operatic levels at the same time it trivializes the family relationships with psycho-drivel. At the eye of this overwrought storm are Karl Potthoff and Mary Jo Bolduc, monolithic and impenetrable as the parents.

–Laura Molzahn

Source: Chicago Reader

Riveting ‘Caretaker’ gets expert treatment

THEATER REVIEW | Pinter masterpiece is a joy to experience

March 5, 2008

BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It begins in the half-dark, with the benign yet oddly ominous sound of water dripping from a leaky ceiling. A door slams shut. There are voices in the hallway and footsteps on a staircase. This is no luxury hotel, to be sure. Not by a long shot.

In fact, we are in the gloomy, junk-stuffed attic of a decrepit building in a polyglot neighborhood of London, circa 1960. We also happen to be in the darkest corners of playwright Harold Pinter’s dramatic imagination, and that is quite a marvelous space to inhabit: Sinister and deceitful, violent and poetic, laughably mundane and extravagantly ambiguous. It is a space that truly wreaks with the stench of humanity — and man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. And to enter this world by way of Pinter’s early masterpiece, “The Caretaker,” is to be completely hooked, particularly if you find a production as altogether brilliant as the one now at Mary-Arrchie Theatre.

The theater itself — in a grimy old walkup loft — could easily serve as the backdrop for this play, though John Wilson’s fabulously atmospheric set (spookily lit by Matthew Gawryk) ratchets things up, as do Joe Court’s sound effects. But it is the combination of Pinter’s uncanny writing, the clockwork direction of Hans Fleischmann and the priceless performances by the show’s three precision-tuned actors — Todd Lahrman, Richard Cotovsky and Dan Kuhlman — that make this production so completely riveting. The actors act the stuffings out of their roles. They should not be missed.

The room in question is lived in by Aston (Lahrman), a painfully introverted and lonely man forever at work on some project. On this particular night he has rescued Davies (Cotovsky), a dissembling, self-important, bigoted vagrant who was about to be beaten up. Of course no good deed goes unpunished. And the more Aston, a strange but compassionate and unselfish fellow, offers to help Davies (a bed, a pair of shoes, a bit of money), the more he is met with a certain arrogance, greed, ungratefulness and sense of entitlement.

Enter Mick (Kuhlman), Aston’s younger brother — a gentlemanly thug of sorts. A man with an entrepreneurial spirit and a keen sense of how the world works, he is the owner of the building, and knows just what Davies is up to, so he proceeds to play some serious (and often quite hilarious) mind games with him.

The ever-shifting dynamics among the three men are expertly rendered and full of surprises. And along the way we learn something about each of them: Aston’s terrible encounter with electroshock, Mick’s fantastical dreams of interior decoration and Davies’ uncanny ability to move with the prevailing winds, putting self-preservation above all else.

The current Broadway revival of Pinter’s “The Homecoming” has received raves, but I can’t imagine it is any better than this “Caretaker.”

Source: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/weiss/825590,CST-FTR-Care05.article

PINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT Cotovsky, left, pauses for Kuhlman.

One criterion in evaluating playwrights is parsing the vagueness. Is a play’s indeterminate meaning a strength rather than a weakness? The tragicomic quandary of Chekhov and Beckett, the works of dramatists from Shakespeare to Shaw all survive because they pass a test of flexibility; how many readings the plays can plausibly sustain have always been a hallmark of greatness. And, of course, we can now add the ambiguities of Pinter. Though I’m inclined to favor the hardcore dread-and-menace take on The Caretaker, the Godot-ian character of the piece is no accident. With this work, potentially a semifarce surrounding a gritty ache, emphasizing the marooned comedy can make the play’s empty heart that much emptier, a tiny battle for simple survival. Director Fleischmann has bravely taken the less-traveled route to existential dismay.

John Malkovich tried this approach in 1986, but the Steppenwolf kids were already too big for these play-it-down britches, and New York wasn’t impressed. But then, he wasn’t armed with Cotovsky, the walking legend of Chicago storefront who’s the physical embodiment of down-and-out Davies, a vagrant taken in by a weird pair of codependent brothers. Just watching him carry a full-length play is a treat, but Cotovsky is masterful, evoking a hapless, hilarious Fagin. Lahrman is most moving as the damaged, depressive end of the bipolar brothers, and as his manic, proto-condo-flipping counterpart, Kuhlman personifies slick impotence. If this lacks a certain edge, it still more than lives up to to its contrarian nature, ending with not even a whimper, but a small laugh.
— Brian Nemtusak

Source: http://www.timeout.com/chicago/articles/theater/27066/the-caretaker

Classic Pinter play marvelously produced by Mary-Arrchie Theatre

Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. loves to mount gritty, raw and naturalistic theatre to critical acclaim over the years. Their latest achievement is a terrific production of Harold Pinter’s 1959 classic, The Caretaker. Pinter would thoroughly appreciate Director Hans Fleischmann’s mounting. From the 20 second opening silence scene to the rich language of ambiguity, Pinter’s unique take on absurd theatre is a troublingly engaging piece of theatre. Pinter’s first major hit play is flawlessly performed by three excellent actors; Richard Cotovsky (Davies), Todd Lahrman (Aston) and Dan Kuhlman (Mick).

The press notes state: “Aston, a quiet, reserved man, lives alone in a tiny, cluttered apartment in a poor London district. He befriends and takes in Mac Davies, an old derelict who has been fired from a menial job in a cafe. In time Aston offers him a job as caretaker of the house. Aston’s brother, Mick - a taunting, quasi-sadist - harasses the derelict when his brother is away, countermanding his orders. Pinter uses elements of both comedy and tragedy. The complexity of the play, Pinter’s masterful use of dialogue, and the depth and perception shown in Pinter’s themes all contribute to The Caretaker’s consideration as a modern masterpiece.”

The Caretaker deals with failed communications and unfolds as a power struggle between Davies and Aston and Davies and Mick. Pinter’s language is filled with over 100 silent pauses and several repetitions of a single phrase, mostly by Davies. These signature Pinter techniques are performed to perfection by Rich Cotovsky, Dan Kuhlman and Todd Lahrman. I can’t remember a fine three-hander as each player deftly lands the unique nuances of these lost, lonely souls. John Wilson’s junk filled set on Matthew Gawryk’s eerie light complete the apt production values. If you have never seen The Caretaker or a Pinter play—then you need to get to Angel Island to experience a great playwright in a near perfect production.

Highly Recommended

Tom Williams

The Caretaker
Critical Evaluation: *** out of ****

Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company’s new production of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” is a solid piece of work. There is nothing innovative about the production; director Hans Fleischmann and his able cast are completely loyal to Pinter’s script about a quiet, mentally challenged man (Todd Lahrman), a down-and-out derelict (Richard Cotovsky) whom the man befriends by bringing him to live in his cluttered and depressing flat, and the man’s sadistic younger brother (Dan Kuhlman). Like virtually all Pinter plays, the action lies in the tension created more by what is not said than the actual dialogue of the play. Pinter is always about power relations and the underlying aggression in human interaction as his characters jockey for power over each other. It is a keenly observant, but unnervingly bleak view of humanity and one which requires the utmost in timing on the part of the actors.

To their credit, this cast under Fleischmann’s direction has mostly found their way with the timing and even managed enough humor to keep the depressing nature of the play from dragging the evening down. Cotovsky, especially, brings warmth to the derelict Davies that is far from automatic in Pinter’s frequently austere characters. As Davies weaves his tales about getting his papers from Sidcup and getting his life together, there is just enough humanity to have the audience pulling for him - at least some of the time - while knowing full well that he can never get anything together. His lack of gratitude for the things that Aston does for him and the way he attempts to usurp Aston’s place in the apartment are grotesque, but like Aston, we forgive him most of the time.

Lahrman’s light touch preserves Aston’s position as the most sympathetic character of the lot. His anger only occasionally bubbles up, but it’s effective when it does and this saves Aston from being pathetic. Younger brother Mick is the most aggressive of the characters and Kuhlman is thorough in his control and humiliation of the other two. These three are more literal than many Pinter characters, but there is still a surreal feel to them. Cotovsky, Lahrman and Kuhlman manage to make them human through a strong, if not perfectly seamless, ensemble effort.

The small upstairs space at Angel Island is perfect for presenting “The Caretaker”. John Wilson’s dormer-windowed flat looks like a natural part of the walk-up theatre’s attic. The audience is so up-close that it is necessary to step over part of the clutter to get to some of the seats. This was my first visit to the space and the set appeared so natural that I had to pause to make certain that we weren’t just being ushered into the theatre’s grimy workshop.

The other technical aspects of the show are also effective; the lighting convincingly portrays the passing of day to night to morning again and little sounds punctuate the feel of the creepy flat. There is no real ending or meaning to this work, only the experience of being there for a while with some too real members of the human race. The space adds to that sensation. “The Caretaker” is a definitive Pinter play and Mary-Arrchie’s presentation is a tight production. If you are a Pinter fan, this show will satisfy; however, it is unlikely to win over Pinter critics or bring Pinter novices into the fold.

“The Caretaker” is at Angel Island and runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 7:00 p.m. through April 12 2008. Tickets are $18-$22 and may be purchased by calling 773-871-0442. Angel Island is located at 735 W. Sheridan Rd. in Chicago. For more information, visit www.maryarrchie.com.

reviewed by Randy Hardwick