thingstodoinchicago

Quentin Tarantino’s movie Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is in part a gauzy wish fulfillment fantasy that fictionalizes and rewrites the true-life brutal murder of actor Sharon Tate. The play graveyard shift at the Goodman Theatre takes a similar, if not more practical, path. The play knows that it’s impossible to practice necromancy and raise the spirit of the beloved from the grave but hopes that perhaps it is possible to drape flowers on her legacy. Like Hollywood, graveyard shift bestows the same gentleness and beauty that Tarantino lavished on Tate. It’s an act of grace that is rarely granted to the average Black woman.

On July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland moved from Chicago to Texas to begin a new job and was pulled over during a traffic stop by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia. The routine interaction, which should have resulted in no more than a warning or a ticket, quickly spiraled out of control and Bland, who recorded the entire exchange, was pulled from her car, forced to the ground, and arrested. Three days later, Bland was found dead, hanging in her jail cell. Encinia was indicted for perjury for making false statements about her arrest and fired; the charges were dropped when he agreed to leave law enforcement permanently.

The senseless and tragic murder of Black people by law enforcement in America has become a national crisis that Bland was aware of before her death and was an activist against. Rubbing salt in the gaping wound of these tragedies is the predictable and unempathetic public reaction. Within hours of these violent acts, the common reaction of the general public is to search for reasons why an officer might have been justified in an outsized violent overreaction, whether that Black victim was back-talking, selling cigarettes on the street, or walking home after buying Skittles.

The fact is that there is no justification for murder, and good police officers regularly take even extremely violent people into custody without causing harm. Racism is clearly in play. Writer korde arrington tuttle understands that even while processing the grief of loss of life, it is doubly brutal to reduce the life of a murdered Black woman to a statistic. He builds the scaffolding upon which to elevate the rest of her humanity in graveyard shift. Last April the Goodman and Black Lives, Black Words staged The Interrogation of Sandra Bland by Mojisolo Adebayo, a theatrical recounting of the transcript of the Sandra Bland traffic stop featuring 100 Black women, as part of the I Am
. . . Fest. I was one of those 100 Black women. To engage with these works as a Black woman is to unflinchingly contemplate my own mortality.

Tuttle creates a fictional Black woman named Janelle who embodies the spirit of Bland, and we follow her through her job search and move from Chicago to Texas. Actor Aneisa J. Hicks plays Janelle with full vibrancy and joy, leavened with the moments of doubt and insecurity of being a young professional striving to establish a career in a troubled economy. Director Danya Taymor does an exceptional job keeping the scenes light and frothy in the beginning, wisely anticipating the challenge of staging a story whose ending we already know. Set designer Kristen Robinson has smartly arranged the stage as a marble cemetery slab, so even as we laugh at the many mirthful moments, it ominously never fully lets us forget that lynching looms in the future like a dark shadow.

Janelle is paired with Kane, her long-distance boyfriend in Texas, played by an incredibly sincere and heartbreaking Debo Balogun. We ride the heights and depths of their relationship, and Kane offers a flawed yet painful requiem of anguish after the inevitable. In a metaphorical mirror, the other side of the stage is the interior of a Texas state trooper’s office where we follow the day-to-day life of Brian, self-proclaimed fuckup and a proxy for Officer Encinia, played by Keith D. Gallagher. Gallagher brings a full and necessary humanity to a character that would be tempting to write off as a one-note villain. His affable “good ol’ boy” charm allows us to see that the face of evil is often one and the same with the faces of those that we love. A scene where Brian tells a cornered raccoon “I know you’re just trying to survive” foreshadows the tenderness often granted to animals that isn’t extended to cornered humans.

The play vacillates between traditional storytelling methods and lyrical, poetic stylings for occasionally on the nose, yet usually smart and impactful, effect. When Janelle and Kane playfully sing the lyrics “Say my name, when no one is around you, say baby I love you” it takes on a sickening double meaning when contrasted with Brian and Elise rocking out to rap music, singing the “N-word” with impunity, knowing that the PC police cannot mandate empathy in the graveyard of shadowy hearts. #SayHerName. v

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In 2017, First Floor Theater premiered Leah Nanako Winkler’s Two Mile Hollow–a send-up of what Winkler terms “white people by the water” plays, in which a wealthy clan gathers at a beach house to fight, reveal secrets, and reminisce. The catch for Winkler’s work was that the characters were all played by people of color, offering ironic counterpoint to white privilege’s ridiculous insularity.

Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly, which had its world premiere in 2006 with Chicago’s Congo Square before eventually opening on Broadway in 2011, has some things in common with the world that Winkler parodied. But Diamond’s family is actually Black and wealthy, with long roots in Martha’s Vineyard and Romare Bearden paintings on the wall. Diamond, who grew up the daughter of an academic, has written about the collisions of class and race within and without Black families and communities in several works. In Stick Fly, now revived at Writers Theatre under Ron OJ Parson’s direction, the outlines of the traditional “well-made play” serve her well in anatomizing the subtle but hurtful hypocrisies and internalized self-loathing that keep the characters from fully connecting.

The title comes from the work that Taylor (Jennifer Latimore), an entomologist from an economically lower class, does with examining insects; they have to be secured to a stick in order to document their wing movements. But things rapidly become unglued over the course of a few days, as Taylor’s fiance Kent (Eric Gerard) faces the disdain his neurosurgeon father Joe (David Alan Anderson) has for his nascent career as a novelist, compared to the chip-off-the-old-block attitude Dad has toward his eldest, plastic surgeon Flip (DiMonte Henning), who brings Kimber (Kayla Raelle Holder), an old-school WASP, to meet the family. Meantime Cheryl (Ayanna Bria Bakari), daughter of the family maid, learns the truth about her parentage.

Diamond’s writing works against the grain of the potentially soapy plotlines, and each character gets at least one moment to burst through social constraints to reveal what they’re really thinking. (Latimore’s Taylor more than the rest.) Old history (familial and otherwise) collides with present-day realities, and by the end of Diamond’s wise and funny play (well acted across the board here), everyone’s wings have been clipped by reality. v

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Adapted by Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan from the original play Scherenschnitt, (scissors cut), by German playwright Paul Portner, Shear Madness is not so much a fully realized work of comic theater as a kind of silly party game writ large. The premise is reminiscent of interactive murder mysteries: setting–a beauty salon; characters–a brace of stereotypes (gay hair dresser, ditsy beautician, bulldog homicide detective); McGuffin–the murder of an upstairs neighbor. But the real mystery is why we should care about the death of a character we never meet. This is theater for people who don’t know much about theater, and comedy for audiences drunk enough to laugh at anything. (The snack bar serves alcohol that you can take into the auditorium.)

The current Mercury Theater Chicago revival, directed by Warner Crocker, is by design tipsy and “fun.” Actors break character all the time, ad lib ad nauseum, or fake cracking up (like the late Harvey Korman used to do way too often on The Carol Burnett Show). And then about halfway through it all the fourth wall is ripped down, and the audience is invited to “participate” in the “solving” of the “murder.” I suppose this kind of thing must have seemed daring in 1963, when Portner’s original play opened. But today the premise is too tired to even be called retro. There is nothing novel about Crocker’s point-and-click direction.

Still, the casting is great. In the leads, Ed Kross and Brittany D. Parker get lots of chances to show off their comic chops. But the flashes of comic brilliance they and the rest of the cast display from time to time make one wish they were in a real play. v

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Kate Hendrickson directs the Chicago premiere of Krista Knight’s Lipstick Lobotomy, an arch but moving 2019 play about mental illness, conformity, and the search for understanding in World War ll-era America. When Ginny (Ann Sonneville) checks into an upper-crust sanitarium hoping to be cured of obsessive thinking and persistent depression, she immediately latches on to Rosemary (Abby Blankenship), an unruly fellow patient and the eldest daughter of kingmaker Joseph Kennedy. What starts out as an over-the-top comic skewering of social mores gains a tragic gravity as the “cure” for the women’s illnesses comes into sharper focus.

Ginny’s and Rosemary’s families want them to fit in and not embarrass them, so they resort to the latest, largely-unproven procedures to correct their behavior. When Rosemary’s lobotomy goes so badly that it leaves her permanently incapacitated, Ginny is forced to rethink her ardent desire to follow her friend into the operating room.

The conflict between the desire to be like everyone else and to hold on to what makes one unique is an evergreen problem, given a twist in Knight’s cheerfully tragic text. Each era has its quack cures that look barbaric in hindsight. I have no doubt that many 2020 treatments for mental and emotional troubles will be considered savage and inept within a couple decades. So cutting out chunks of brain matter to make women behave is, sadly, not as outlandishly archaic as it should be. The horrific final image of a roomful of patients dancing and singing in grotesque smile masks is now lodged in my head like a bad dream. v

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Anton Chekhov’s famous dictum that if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must go off by the second is reimagined in Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco’s Kiev in the seemingly innocuous form of a diving board. No one literally goes off the board into the stinking murky waters of the pool on the Badenweiler estate, soon to be demolished by steamrollers. But what it hides has poisoned the whole family.

The parallels to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard are deliberate. But Blanco, whose work receives its dynamic and absorbing U.S. premiere with Aguijon under Abel Gonzalez Melo’s direction (in Spanish with English supertitles), has more than the economic disruptions of one family in mind. And that pool, in which matriarch Eiren Badenweiler’s child drowned years earlier, isn’t just about that earlier tragedy. The Badenweilers are representative of any family living under–and complicit in–the horrors of an authoritarian state, like the one that dominated Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Eiren (Rosario Vargas), like Madame Ranyevskaya in Chekhov’s play, is torn between past and present, and depends upon generous helpings of denial to help her deal with her pain. But that denial has come at great cost to her disabled son Alden (Oswaldo Calderon) and daughter Dafne (the luminous Marcela Munoz), who soothes her own pain in opiods when not trying to smooth the conflicts among everyone else. Uncle Esvald (Sandor Menendez) has kept the estate running over the years–but for what purpose?

The arrival of Tavio (Israel Balza), the former tutor for the drowned boy, threatens to uncover everything Esvald has tried to hide. But his own guilt (and the disaster unfolding in the city of the play’s title) means that a true healing reckoning can’t be found. “The civil atom is as dangerous as the military atom,” Esvald observes at one point. In Kiev, that civil danger lives on; remorseless, relentless, and inescapable. v

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It’s not every day you see 128 roof tiles displayed on a gallery floor, ash from joss sticks painted on a canvas, and artwork cocreated by trained silkworms. But at Wrightwood 659, it’s possible. The four floors of the museum are filled with “The Allure of Matter: Material Art From China,” a new exhibition that looks at Chinese artists working in the material arts movement, which focuses largely on every-day items like hair, plastic bottles, or found objects. These artists experiment with one material for decades and transform it into something monumental. The Smart Museum of Art and Wrightwood 659 are introducing this movement in two parts with a total of 26 artists who produced work from the 1980s until the present day.

When I walk into the space, the docent reassures me that there is no right or wrong way to view the exhibition. I take the elevator up and am confronted with Zhu Jinshi’s work, Wave of Materials, a large installation made from xuan paper, cotton thread, bamboo, and stones. Xuan paper is a type of material used by calligraphers and painters and has been used as a significant material in Jinshi’s work since the late 1980s. Here, Jinshi crumples, flattens, and hangs the paper from the ceiling to create a monolithic, yet delicate, installation on the top floor.

Traveling down leads viewers towards Transformation, an installation created by Yin Xiuzhen in 1997. Scattered across two gallery floors and down a set of stairs, the piece exhibits black and white photographs on tiles that lie on the floor. I appreciate the experimentation with displaying photographs, as photography can become traditional and less experimental than other mediums, transfixed to frames on white walls. Xiuzhen takes city streets–the rubble, the physical materials that build a city–and conflates them with images of day-to-day life from her Beijing neighborhood.

My favorite piece in the exhibition is Zhan Wang’s Beyond 12 Nautical Miles–Floating Rock Drifts on the Open Sea, made in 2000. The single-channel video documents a performance of a stainless steel “rock” floating in the open sea. The viewer sees a shining silver object with soft edges rocking back and forth slightly on the waves for eight minutes and 36 seconds. The work is meant to reference how any country can claim open water as their own territory, and how the rock simply travels wherever the waves take it. In five different languages, the rock has the following inscribed into its surface: “This is a piece of art created specifically to be exhibited in the open sea. If by chance you pick it up, please put it back into the ocean. The artist thanks you from afar.”

Bringing things back down to earth are Liang Shaoji’s trained silkworms. What started small has resulted in Chains: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Nature Series, No. 79, a large installation of chain-like pieces hanging from the ceiling wrapped in silk and cocoons from Shaoji’s silkworms. The artist–who has said, “I am a silkworm”–has raised them for more than 25 years. In his Nature series, the silkworms spin silk into certain objects, and in this work, it’s hollowed chains. Shaoji and his silkworms create work together as they play the role as the artist and the art.

It’s challenging to take in and absorb the exhibition, especially because the artwork is exhibited in two different parts of the city. Digesting one exhibition takes time to process; the works all range in concept and unconventional material. A personal tip: pick a museum to visit first, bring water, take a breather for a day or two, and tackle the next collection with a new set of eyes. It takes physical and mental time to sit with each piece, to really interpret and analyze the process. But at the end of it all, it’s worth it. v

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Among the matches burning in the dumpster fire of U.S. immigration is the system of chutes and ladders facing foreign artists. To make a long, very complicated story short: Overseas artists who want to stay in the U.S. without obtaining a U.S. spouse– or those who’ve already married another foreign national–must apply every three years for an artists visa. This is also known as the O1B: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement.

Woof.

As they check off the long list of qualifications that comprise such an application, the artist must present press coverage of their work. You know, art criticism, a thriving field with abounding coverage.

Double-woof.

That’s where badass art critic and historian Lori Waxman wants to step in. An internationally renowned critic with a regular byline in the Tribune, Waxman is currently bringing her 60 wrd/min project to artists in need of this press–live and free of charge. Waxman spends 25 minutes looking at submitted work and writes a 200-word review. As a former student and number one Lori Waxman Superfan, I can attest that her writing is nothing short of face-meltingly insightful. This is truly a gift to Chicago’s artistic community.

While the initiative launched on February 1, artists can still schedule appointments for the 22nd, with completed reviews published in the April issue of Lumpen. For more information, visit 60wrdmin.org. To schedule an appointment, email [email protected]. v

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Long before smartphones provided immediate access to porn and the ubiquitous “dick pic,” gay men were limited to physique magazines, adult bookstores, and covert illustrations produced by Bill Schmeling (also known as “The Hun”) and his more popular contemporary, Tom of Finland, to view hardcore expressions of gay male desire–all of which were taboo 50 years ago, if not against the law.

Today, the work of Schmeling–once obtainable only in discreet, plain-wrapped packaging via mail order–is available for in-person, public viewing at the Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M) in Chicago, which acquired the collection in the summer of 2019.

According to LA&M’s executive director Gary Wasdin, Schmeling’s work, with its depictions of fearless, sex-positive acts, will educate and titillate viewers as it first did in the 1960s, perhaps even more so today in an age marked by factory-style porn where live streaming platforms means everyone is his/her/their own adult content studio.

“Intense is probably the word that comes to most peoples’ minds when they see Bill’s art,” Wasdin says. “People see these images and instantly think of Tom of Finland because his work is so iconic. Bill’s work is in that general style of exaggerated hypermasculine art, but it is more raw, aggressive, and much more sexual, with depictions of kink play, BDSM, and lots of bodily fluids.”

Beyond Schmeling’s portrayal of “dangerous” fantasies featuring “tormented” men in brutal and often compromising situations–a trademark of the Hun’s style–was his penchant for drawing interracial sex scenes, an element that made his work all the more innovative, especially for the time. In fact, Schmeling was white and his husband, Roland, an inspiration for a solid portion of his work, was African American.

“I think it’s just amazing to see art like the Hun’s and realize that people were pretty fucking creative, and despite the challenges of the time, people were doing some amazing stuff and enjoying life,” Wasdin says. “These artists and photographers are pioneers who put themselves out there to make this material accessible for all of us.”

“The Bill ‘The Hun’ Schmeling Collection” encompasses tens of thousands of items, from personal correspondence to sketches to original artwork. “Archives generally measure collections by feet, not by item,” Wasdin says when pressed for a more specific number to describe the scope of the collection. “The Hun collection is probably 200 linear feet, packed mostly in bankers’ boxes, and then of course, the art is stored separately from that.”

In August 2018, Wasdin began the delicate process of discussing the acquisition of the collection from Schmeling, who at the time was storing it rather indiscriminately, from attic to basement, in his two-story house in Portland, Oregon. It took about a year of conversations with the 81-year-old artist before he granted the release of his life’s work to the LA&M.

“We came to an agreement to have his full collection come here–meaning Bill didn’t want to parcel out pieces here or there–and from a researcher’s standpoint that is something we’re always anxious to do,” Wasdin says. Schmeling’s donation included not only the entirety of his collection of illustrations and comics, but also the ability to use his images and to sell merchandise. (And, yes, there is a gift shop on-site where attendees may purchase anthologies of his work, comic books, and greeting cards).

In July 2019, Wasdin, his archivist, and a LA&M board member traveled to Schmeling’s home to pack up the collection and prepare it for shipping to Chicago. “When Bill first met me he said, ‘You have really small feet!’ As you see in the comics, the Hun had quite a fetish for feet,” explains Wasdin with a good-natured laugh. “The whole experience was phenomenal. He was so warm and friendly.” Schmeling–who suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease–passed away on September 12, 2019.

Visitors to the LA&M, from the casual viewer to the academic researcher, are granted access to the collection as long as prior notice is given to the museum. “This collection is approachable from a lot of different angles,” Wasdin says. “It could be of interest to someone studying the history of gay pornography to someone researching the evolution of BDSM and kink and its growing acceptance in the U.S., to someone writing a novel set in gay New York City 1972–the options are boundless.” Low-resolution photography for not-for-profit purposes is permitted, as is posting on social media, although some of the Hun’s imagery may not meet the terms and conditions established by various platforms.

“A lot of people, quite frankly, see some of Hun’s artwork and they’re like, ‘Nope, that’s too extreme,’ Wasdin says. “It’s not for everybody, but that’s part of the beauty of it–things are not supposed to [appeal] to everyone. I will say that for me, personally, I always liked the Hun because it is more like me: I’m big, I’m hairy, and that’s what the Hun was, that’s what his characters looked like. It’s almost inconceivable to think of a pre-Internet world where it was almost impossible to find people like you, where you couldn’t simply Google ‘hairy, naked dad-bods.’

“It’s important to remember that these drawings weren’t just Bill’s fetish–he was making a living at this, which is a testament to the level of interest that was out there,” Wasdin says. “His work helped us proliferate a connection and a sense of community and revealed a completely different perspective of human sexuality.” v

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Before Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic in 2014, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic A Raisin in the Sun clearly showed the effects of racism on Black Americans seeking better living conditions–a problem we’ve yet to fully address. The Younger family–so cramped for space in their roach-infested apartment that son Travis has to sleep on the living room couch–hopes to buy a better piece of the American pie, thanks to a life insurance payout from their late husband and father. But what that pie looks like varies wildly, and Invictus Theatre Company’s current revival of Raisin, directed by Aaron Reese Boseman, honors those conflicting dreams with conviction and heart.

Matriarch Lena (Cheryl Frazier) wants to buy a house, even if that means moving to an unfriendly white neighborhood. Her son, Walter Lee (Michael Lewis), wants to stop being a driver for white people and take the wheel of his own destiny by buying into a liquor store. His little sister, Beneatha (Ashley Joy), wants to be a doctor and is torn between a bourgeois beau, George (Keith Surney), who is interested in her as arm candy, and a Nigerian student, Joseph (Jo Schaffer), who offers a broader vista for her life. Meantime, Ruth (Nyajai Ellison), Walter’s wife, is facing an unexpected pregnancy and anguish about her husband’s growing anger about his deferred dreams.

Hansberry crammed a lot of life into that small flat (the story is based in part on her own family’s legal challenge to racist restrictive housing covenants), and Boseman’s production goes for broke with heartfelt zest, spilling over the edge of Kevin Rolfs’s appropriately tiny dingy set. On opening night, there were some moments where the actors didn’t feel completely connected to each other, but it’s clear that they know these characters’ hurts and hopes to the bone, and I suspect the ensemble will grow even stronger over the run. v

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