Strauss at Midnight
by Jeff Dorchen
the author of Ugly’s First World and The Life and Times of Jewboy Cain.
“dense, wild, painfully funny… a weird, marvelous, and unexpectedly compassionate spectacle… may be the best cast I’ve ever seen in an Oobleck show” Chicago Reader
“savage, inventive and very funny…” Time Out Chicago
“probably the boldest production you’ll see this year” NewCity
“A must-see show… more than once” CenterStage
Theater Oobleck discovers in Oscar Madison’s apartment a magical space to explore such Odd Couples as liberty and tyranny, love and hate, man and superman.
When a time-traveling tourist on a prehistoric safari accidentally kills a butterfly, Oscar and Felix’s poker table becomes the battleground for human civilization.
This world premiere takes Neil Simon’s most famous play into Tom Stoppard territory in an examination of free will in a society where the super-privileged can redesign the fabric of time and space.
Production Manager: Jen Moniz
Set Design by Mickle Maher
Light Design by Martha Bayne
Costume Design by Angela Altenhofen
Sound Design by Chris Schoen
Props by Kristin Basta
Set Construction by Chris Wooten & Ellen Kirk
Photography by John W. Sisson, Jr.
Graphic Design by Jeff Dorchen & Colm O’Reilly
Video previews by Danny Thompson & Dan Nelson
Technical Assistance from Guy Massey, Shawn Reddy, Michael Zerang
Web by David Isaacson
This project is presented in association with Chicago DCA Theater.
June 11–July 19, 2009
Thursdays–Saturdays at 7:30pm
Sundays at 3pm
Chicago DCA Theater
78 East Washington Street, Chicago IL
$15 suggested donation, more if you’ve got it, free if you’re broke
buy $15 advance tickets online
Pay-what-you-can rate available by calling 312-742-8497 or visiting the DCA Box Office at 66 East Randolph.
Strauss at Midnight Related Articles:
Time Out reviews Strauss at Midnight
HALE BELLOW WELL MET
Isaacson has a bloody good time.
Aristophanes’ merciless lampoon of Socrates in the comic playwright’s The Clouds, figuring the philosopher as a manipulative fraud, helped lay the path to the hemlock cocktail, according to Plato. The late U. of C. professors Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom are beyond the reach of the law, but from the moment Strauss (Shapiro) appears onstage leading a snarling Bloom (Troy Martin) on a chain, Dorchen’s savage, inventive and very funny new play places itself squarely in the Aristophanic tradition. It’s debatable how much blame these godfathers of neoconservatism deserve for the litany of Bush/Cheney-related evils with which Dorchen saddles them via a remorseful Saul Bellow (Isaacson). Still, Strauss at Midnight’s righteous anger over the calumnies of these self-styled philosopher-kings provides a corrosive, invigorating force in what otherwise might be just a goofily entertaining time-travel scenario.
The setup: The poker table around which The Odd Couple’s Oscar Madison (Ward) gathers his cronies has become a kind of transdimensional Yggdrasil connecting his apartment to the afterlife in which Bellow kvetches endlessly at his colleagues. Meanwhile, as in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” a time traveler has created one of those chrono-synclastic infundibulums by killing a butterfly. The play’s a little too in love with its own cleverness, and the succession of metafictional metatheatrical metarecognitions eventually gets metalabored. But who could help loving a show in which Oscar and Felix (Brian Nemtusak) give voice to their long-repressed longings? Oobleck’s characteristically assembled an impressive roster of fringe talent, among whom Isaacson, veering from petulance to anguish, stands first among equals. –John Beer, Time Out Chicago
posted 06/24/2009
