March – May 2012
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: PLAYWRIGHT, POET, DREAMER
A JOURNEY INTO “BIEITOLAND”:INTRODUCING THE UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD OF DIRECTOR CALIXTO BIEITO
A Conversation with Fish Men Playwright Cándido Tirado
Co-Editors | Lesley Gibson, Lori Kleinerman, Tanya PalmerGraphic Designer | Tyler Engman Production Manager | Lesley Gibson
Contributing Writers/Editors | Neena Arndt, Jeff Ciaramita, Jeffrey Fauver, Lisa Feingold, Katie Frient, Lesley Gibson, Lori Kleinerman, Caitlin Kunkel, Dorlisa Martin, Julie Massey, Tanya Palmer, Teresa Rende, Victoria Rodriguez, Denise Schneider, Steve Scott, Jenny Seidelman, Willa J. Taylor, Kate Welham.
OnStage is published in conjunction with Goodman Theatre productions. It is designed to serve as an information source for Goodman Theatre Subscribers. For ticket and subscription information call 312.443.3810. Cover: Image design and direction by Kelly Rickert.
Goodman productions are made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; the Illinois Arts Council, a state agen-cy; and a CityArts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; and the Leading National Theatres Program, a joint initiative of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Written comments and inquiries should be sent to:The Editor, OnStage Goodman Theatre 170 North Dearborn Street Chicago, IL 60601or email us at: [email protected]
March – May 2012
CONTENTSIn the Albert 1 Why Camino Real?
2 Tennessee Williams: Playwright, Poet, Dreamer
7 Tennessee in Chicago
8 A Journey into “Bieitoland”: Introducing the Unconventional World of Director Calixto Bieito
In the Owen 12 A Conversation with Cándido Tirado
15 For Love or Money: The World of Chess Hustling
At the Goodman 16 Insider Access Series
In the Wings 17 Imparting Culture and Communication: A Conversation with Ira Abrams
Scene at the Goodman 19 Race Opening Night
Celebrating Race and Diversity
Off Stage 20 A Legacy of Great Theater
For Subscribers 21 Calendar
VOLUME 27 #3
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FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Why Camino Real?During my tenure as artistic director I have had the privilege of bringing some of the most notable directors now work-ing on the world stage to the Goodman, including Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ivo van Hove, Elizabeth LeCompte, Flora Lauten (from the esteemed Cuban company Teatro Buendía) and our own Mary Zimmerman. Although vastly different in style and approach, these directors share a passion for exploring new ways of theatrical storytelling, an uncompromising singularity of vision and a radical (and often controversial) way of reimagining classical texts. To this group I am extremely proud to add Calixto Bieito, a Barcelona-based director whose soaring, radical interpretations of everything from classic operas to Shakespeare have astonished, inflamed and challenged audiences throughout Europe and South America.
My first experience with Calixto’s work came in 2004, with his sexually charged interpretation of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio in Berlin. I found that production to be both fascinating and disturbing; Calixto’s inves-tigation of the dark subtext that lay beneath the “classical” exterior of the piece displayed a courage and sophistica-tion that was, to me, profound and unsettling. Soon after the performance I met with him, and was immediately impressed by his warmth, intelligence and infectious passion for his work. When we began to discuss possible projects that might be of interest to him, he revealed his love for the works of one of my favorite writers, Tennessee Williams. Though our conversation began with a discussion of Williams’ better-known works, in talking to Calixto it occurred to me that his bold artistry might be better used to explore one of Williams’ less often performed plays, Camino Real. First produced in 1953, Camino remains one of the author’s most poetic works, and one of his most ambitious: it is an impressionistic musing on the nature of love, loss, humanity and the encroachment of time, peopled largely by iconic figures of romance who are coming to terms with their own mortality. Because of its non-realistic milieu and aching lyricism, I felt that this seldom-produced work, long considered one of Williams’ most personal, would inspire Calixto to do what he does best: to create a world in which the playwright’s images and ideas could take flight and soar. After reading the play, Calixto agreed, and the result is a full-bodied, extraordinarily theatri-cal piece which fuses Williams’ poetry, music and evocative imagery to create, in Williams’ words, “the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream.”
Although Camino Real is notably based less in realism than its author’s more familiar works, it shares with those plays a highly charged blend of disparate elements: beauty and brutality; moments of romance punctuated by shock-ing dissolution. As interpreted by one of today’s most courageous and uncompromising directors, I guarantee that its vivid images and haunting, sometimes squalid beauty will live with you for a long, long time.
Robert FallsArtistic Director
Pho
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Tennessee Williams: Playwright, Poet, DreamerBy Neena Arndt
In the foreword to his phantasmagoric 1953 allegory, Camino Real, playwright Tennessee Williams, who by then had made a name for himself with psychologi-cal dramas like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, wrote, “More than any other work I have done, this play has seemed to me like a construc-tion of another world, a separate exis-tence.” Casual Williams fans may remain unfamiliar with the dreamlike Camino Real, which differs stylistically from his better-known works. In fact, those who know only Williams’ “greatest hits” might be hard-pressed to believe that Camino Real—broad in scope and sweepingly ambitious—flowed from the same pen as the classics they cherish. But Camino Real springs from the deepest recesses of Williams’ heart and psyche, and offers a glimpse into the staggering imagination of this multifaceted writer.
In 1951, two years before Camino Real premiered, Tennessee Williams became a household name when 27-year-old Marlon Brando swaggered and shouted his way to immortality as Stanley Kowalski in the film A Streetcar Named Desire. Under the direction of Elia Kazan, Brando portrayed Williams’ most iconic male character as lustful and sen-suous, giving a grandiose performance that nonetheless was grounded in the realistic acting style of which Brando was a master. An early “method” actor, Brando was steeped in the theories of visionary Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, which permeated American
theater and film in the mid-twentieth century. This style supplanted melodra-ma, which saw its heyday in the nine-teenth century and took its last fluttery breaths in the middle of the twentieth, when writers like Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller trans-formed the American stage with such masterworks as Streetcar, Long Day’s Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman. Directly imitating real life had never been among melodrama’s goals, but now, both on stage and on screen, many artists aimed to hold up a mirror to the world around them.
Today, Tennessee Williams is most often remembered as one of the writers who pioneered this style in America. Indeed, the works for which he is best known use largely realistic plots and characters to achieve Williams’ goal of rooting around the human psyche. Their stories concern
SYNOPSIS Tennessee Williams’ hauntingly poetic allegory takes us to a surreal, dead-end town occupied by a colorful col-lection of lost souls anxious to escape but terrified of the unknown wasteland lurking beyond the city’s walls. When Kilroy, an American traveler and for-mer boxer, inadvertently lands in this netherworld, he sets off on a fantasti-cal adventure through illusion and temptation in an attempt to flee its confines—and defy his grim destiny.
Tennessee Williams,
circa 1955. Photo by
FPG/Archive Photos/
Getty Images.
events that could occur in the real world, and their characters confront their prob-lems in psychologically realistic ways. Yet, even in these works, Williams’ language is languidly poetic, and his stage direc-tions often indicate that he envisioned his works being performed with an undercur-rent of visual and auditory metaphors. In A Streetcar Named Desire, for example, Williams indicates that Blanche’s descent into madness is underscored by echoing voices and “jungle noises.” If, in the text of Streetcar, Williams is holding a mirror up to life, it is a warped mirror, each dis-tortion meticulously sculpted. The poetic elements in these works afford readers a glimpse of his wide-ranging sensibilities. But in order to fully appreciate the vast-ness of Williams’ dramatic imagination, one has to experience his more overtly surrealistic works like Camino Real, The Gnädiges Fräulein or Stairs to the Roof . In The Gnädiges Fräulein, a pair of south-
ern ladies chatter and preen in rocking chairs while being entertained by a retired vaudeville performer who has had her eyes pecked out by an oversized bird. In Stairs to the Roof, the characters go on a whirlwind surreal journey before ascend-ing symbolic stairs to the roof of an office. Here, the mirror Williams uses is straight out of a fun house—and like those twist-ed images that confront us at carnivals, they provide a different, but equally valid, way of perceiving and making sense of the world.
The phrase “camino real” translates from Spanish as “royal road,” but in Williams’ play it ironically represents a dead end. Camino Real places familiar characters from literature—such as Don Quixote, Casanova and Lord Byron—in a mythical town in an unspecified Latin American country where the “spring of humanity has gone dry.” Although the play contains
references that place it in the twentieth century—an airplane, for example—the play’s time period remains fluid and ambiguous. The presence of literary characters from different eras reinforces the notion that the action occurs either in many time periods simultaneously, or in no time period in particular. These liter-ary characters are joined by characters who are products of Williams’ imagina-tion, such as an enigmatic gypsy and a freaky faction of “streetcleaners” whose job is to remove corpses from the streets.
Much of the action centers around Kilroy, a newly arrived American whose name is inspired by the popular World War II era graffiti phrase “Kilroy was here.” A prize-fighter with a “heart as big as a baby’s head,” Kilroy first appears to be the all-American hero—but the nightmare dream-scape in which he now finds himself proves more treacherous than any fighting ring. While Kilroy and his fellow inhabit-ants of the town are theoretically free to leave, outgoing transportation is sporadic and a vast desert wasteland stretches to the horizon—so setting out on foot seems foolhardy. Most of the characters remain stuck in their current situations, both geographically and emotionally, allowing Williams to explore the inner workings of their desperation, and their love for (or perhaps just attachment to) each other.
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“ More than any other work I have done, this play has seemed to me like a construction of another world, a separate existence.” —Tennessee Williams
Just as they occupy the town, the char-acters also inhabit the fertile landscape of Tennessee Williams’ mind, represent-ing his experience of the world rather than the world’s literal outward appear-ance. Prior to Camino Real’s Broadway opening in 1953, Williams published an essay in The New York Times describing his thought processes about the play:
My desire was to give audiences my own sense of something wild and unrestricted that ran like water in the mountains, or clouds changing shape in a gale, or the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream. This sort of freedom is not chaos nor anarchy. On the contrary, it is the result of painstaking design, and in this work I have given more conscious attention to form and construction than I have in any work before. Freedom is not achieved simply by working freely.
When the play premiered on Broadway in a lavish production by Elia Kazan, some critics and audiences applauded its stylistic originality, while others decried its lack of storyline and expressed confu-sion regarding Williams’ intentions. (Also
in 1953, theatergoers scratched their heads over Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, another play which places little focus on plot—but is now considered a staple of the Western canon.) Critic William Hawkins noted, “The first thing evident about this brave new play of Tennessee Williams is that explanations of it that suit you may not suit anybody else. The playwright has composed his work in terms of pure emotions. They are abstract, without excuse or motiva-tion. What you see and hear is the effect on the heart, of human nature when it is greedy or hilarious or sorry for itself.” For other critics, the play inspired less openmindedness: John McClain opined,
“There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Williams has some provocative and high-flown thoughts about love and life, and he is capable of lyrical and humorous and sometimes utterly earthy writing, but it seems to me that in this instance he knocked himself out being oblique.”
Never inclined to scorn or ignore his audiences’ reactions to his plays, Williams returned to the typewriter after the play opened on Broadway and revised the script. The published version reflects the changes he made to help audiences enter his admittedly mysteri-ous world—an added prologue which sets up the action, and some additional
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WOMEN’S BOARD SPONSORS CAMINO REALThe Goodman Theatre Women’s Board continues a long tradition of support for exciting and chal-lenging work with its sponsorship of Camino Real. Since its formation in 1978, the Women’s Board has made it part of its mission to spon-sor a production every season and provide crucial funding for the Goodman’s Education and Community Engagement programs.
Goodman Theatre gratefully salutes the Women’s Board as a Major Production Sponsor of Camino Real, and is extremely thankful for the dedication and generosity of its members.
OPPOSITE: Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in A
Streetcar Named Desire. ©Bettman/CORBIS. BOTTOM:
Denholm Elliot and Elizabeth Seal in a scene from
the Tennessee Williams’ play Camino Real. Photo by
Popperfoto/Getty Images.
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HONORING A LEGACY: HOPE ABELSON AND CAMINO REALThrough its 2011/2012 production of Camino Real, Goodman Theatre honors the legacy of a true luminary of the Chicago arts world, the late Hope Abelson. At the Goodman—as well as many if not all theaters in Chicago—Hope was a champion of new work.
Hope began her life in the arts as a performer, working as an actress in radio drama. Her career led her to serve as a producer for several Broadway shows. She also founded the American Friends of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and she was instrumental in the early days of the League of Chicago Theatres.
In 1953, Hope served as an assistant on the original production of Camino Real. She was responsible for daily script changes and she made herself indispensable to both Tennessee Williams and the play’s director, Elia Kazan. She became a critical supporter of arts organizations large and small, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia Festival, Court Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater and Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Hope was an early board member of the Goodman and also served on the Illinois Arts Council.
The Goodman is grateful to her daughter Katherine Abelson, a Goodman Women’s Board member, and Katherine’s husband Robert J. Cornell, for carrying on this tradition through their support of our education and community engagement programs for Camino Real.
scenes. Williams was also careful to note, in an afterword, that due to its reli-ance on visual elements, this particular play would provide a far more satisfy-ing experience on the stage than on the page. While he acknowledged that some plays are “meant for reading,” he emphasized that text is not always of primary importance to a play:
Of all the works I have written, this one was meant most for the vulgarity of performance. The printed script of a play is hardly more than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed. The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel’s.
In the years following, the revised play went on to numerous regional produc-tions (including one at the Goodman in 1958), usually receiving mixed reviews. In 1970 it was revived in New York by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, and critic Clive Barnes proclaimed, “There are people who think that Camino Real is Tennessee Williams’ best play, and I believe that they are right. It is a play torn out of a human soul.” Barnes went on to observe that when the play was first produced in 1953, “there were many who found it obscure. Our stan-dards of obscurity, like our standards of obscenity, have escalated since those dark days of theatrical innocence.” When Barnes wrote those words, only 17 years had passed since Camino Real’s premiere—now, we experience Williams’ work at a distance of nearly 60 years. In the interim, innovative playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco and countless others have
spurred audiences to expand their ideas of what constitutes a play. These writ-ers employ techniques such as extensive use of symbolism and placing their plays in no particular place or time. Viewed through the lens of history, Camino Real seems less radical than it did in 1953—though it remains a vivid, visceral peek into the mind of one of America’s most complex and beloved playwrights.
BOTTOM: Mundy Spears and Emily Webbe in The Gnädiges
Fräulein performed as part of WSC Avant Bard’s 2011
Tennessee Continuum. Photo C. Stanley Photography.
“ The playwright has composed his work in terms of pure emotions. They are abstract, without excuse or motivation. What you see and hear is the effect on the heart, of human nature when it is greedy or hilarious or sorry for itself.” —William Hawkins, Critic
Hope Abelson and her daughter Katherine at the Goodman’s Inaugural Gala.
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Tennessee and ChicagoBy Steve Scott
Although the city most often associated with Tennessee Williams’ work was New Orleans (his adopted home and the setting of some of his most famous works), it was Chicago that gave him his first real suc-cess in the theater and that would provide artistic haven to him late in his career. Williams’ love affair with the Windy City began in 1944 with the landmark suc-cess of The Glass Menagerie, produced at the Civic Theatre prior to its arrival on Broadway. Claudia Cassidy, the venerated critic for the Chicago Tribune, became a passionate advocate for the play, writing in her initial review that, “it reaches out its tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell.” Cassidy’s praise, and her continued exhortations to local audiences to support the play, brought national attention to the work before it had even moved to New York, and helped establish Williams as the pre-eminent dramatist of his generation.
Thereafter, Williams considered Chicago to be one of the best theater towns in the world; in a 1951 letter to Cassidy, he urged her to stump for the establish-ment of a strong locally based theater community here, exclaiming, “No better place on Earth!” Touring productions of his Broadway hits were a staple in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, and, as local producing companies began to sprout, Williams’ plays were an impor-tant part of their repertoire. Director George Keathley’s first major hit at the old Ivanhoe Theatre was a much-lauded revival of The Rose Tattoo which swept
the first annual Joseph Jefferson Awards in 1969. Two years later, Keathley pro-duced the world premiere of Williams’ Out Cry, an experience unfortunately marred by the playwright’s erratic behav-ior—although Williams later admitted, after the failure of a subsequent New York production with a different director, that the play “was better in Chicago.” Problems also plagued the 1980 premiere of Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which starred Goodman School of Drama alum-na Geraldine Page as the ill-fated Zelda Fitzgerald; although Williams himself was in better emotional shape, his play was greeted with critical disappointment.
Later that year, the playwright embarked on an alliance with Goodman Theatre that would result in in his final major work for the stage. Some Problems for the Moose Lodge, which was produced first in the Goodman Studio as one of three short plays collectively billed as Tennessee Laughs (a title Williams apparently loathed), was a darkly sav-age comedy detail-ing the travails of Cornelius and Bella McCorkle, an elderly couple dealing with the disintegration of their family and their marriage. The reception of Moose Lodge was positive enough to encourage
Williams to expand the play into a longer one-act, now entitled A House Not Meant to Stand, produced in 1981, again in the Goodman Studio. Despite some critical misgivings, Williams kept working on the play, encouraged by then-Artistic Director Gregory Mosher; the result was a full-length version of House, which premiered on the Goodman mainstage in the spring of 1982. Now subtitled by the author “A Gothic Comedy,” the new version expanded the expressionistic absurdities of its earlier drafts, revealing even more passionately the playwright’s own frustra-tions with the challenges of aging; as Richard Christiansen noted in his Chicago Tribune review, “it is a loud, harsh, bitter pain-filled shriek at the degenerative pro-cess of life…a tantalizing and frustrating creation.” A House Not Meant to Stand would be the last production with which Williams himself would be associated; tragically, he died nine months later.
LEFT: Peg Murray and
Scott Jaeck in Goodman
Theatre’s 1982 pro-
duction of Tennessee
Williams’ A House Not
Meant to Stand. Photo
by Lisa Ebright. BELOW:
Tennessee Williams
and Goodman Theatre
Executive Director Roche
Schulfer outside the
Goodman Studio.
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IN TH
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Introducing the Unconventional World of Director Calixto BieitoBy Tanya Palmer
Over the past 15 years, Spanish director Calixto Bieito has earned a reputation as a “bad boy” of European theater, simultaneously admired and reviled for his radical revisionist productions of classic operas and dramatic texts. His harshest critics have condemned his work as “sickening,” “puerile” and “tasteless,” while his advocates describe him as a “director of vision and courage, an Almodóvar of the opera stage.” His most famous (or infamous) productions include a version of Verdi’s A Masked Ball at the English National Opera (in a co-production with the Liceu in Barcelona and the Royal Danish Opera) which relocated the mise-en-scene from eighteenth century Sweden to 1970s Spain and began with a controversial image of a vast public urinal; a staging of Macbeth (first produced in German for the Salzburg Festival and then restaged in Catalan at Teatre Romea) in which the characters were cast as mafia dons and molls, monarchs of what one reviewer called a “hedonistic, drug and drink-fuelled culture with no bounds” on a set
of garish white leather sofas, cluttered drink trolleys and porcelain tigers growl-ing ominously at passersby; and a pro-duction of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Golden Age classic Life is a Dream, which Bieito staged on a gray sandy set dominated by a giant suspended mirror which functioned as a “metaphorical tool, providing both a dazzling image of an elusive world that can never be entirely controlled and a commentary on a play that continuously questions what we mean by ‘reality’ and ‘fiction.’”
Fluent in five languages, Bieito has jug-gled a career in his native Spain—where he was the artistic director of Barcelona’s Teatre Romea from 1999 to 2011—with an international career directing primar-ily opera around the globe. His work has taken him to Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France, Italy, Switzerland, South America and Mexico, but his upcoming collaboration with the Goodman will mark only the sec-ond time his work will have been seen in the United States, and his first collabora-
tion with American actors and designers on the work of an American playwright.
While some critics accuse Bieito of des-ecrating classic texts with needlessly shocking images of violence and sexual-ity, his work is the result of a conscious approach to create a visceral connection between contemporary audiences and classic works. Theater scholar Maria Delgado suggests that Bieito’s work con-sistently asks radical questions about how and what texts mean to different genera-tions. In a profile of Bieito in Fifty Key Theatre Directors, a book that explores the work of directors from around the world who “have shaped and pushed back the boundaries of theater and per-formance,” Delgado writes, “With the classics especially, he has demonstrated the ability to reinvent texts, stripping them of the legacy of past productions and reimagining them for contemporary audi-ences.” This method of “reinventing texts” often involves working closely with a translator and/or adaptor to cut and rear-range canonical works—deleting charac-ters and interpolating contemporary musi-cal or cinematic references into the perfor-mance texts, such as a 2004 production of King Lear which contained depictions of violence that were a direct homage to the final sequences of Kill Bill and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For Bieito, this process of connecting the dramatic text or opera to the contemporary moment—and locating himself and his collaborators within the work—all begins with an effort to interpret what the writer was trying to communicate. Rather than simply laying on a concept, Bieito’s goal is to create a visual and auditory universe that releases the text from the confines of history—thus unlocking its meaning and connecting it
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more directly to the present moment. In a recent conversation with the Goodman’s Associate Dramaturg, Neena Arndt, Bieito explained his process this way:
I have a way of approaching the text, I have to prepare…reading a lot about the context, the period, about the writer. In this case, with Tennessee Williams, there are his Memoirs. After that, you think—what was the writer trying to do? And what does it mean for the audience, today, or what does it mean to me today? And what can I express of myself with this?
Bieito first came to prominence inter-nationally in 1997, when his produc-tion of Tómas Bretón’s 1894 zarzuela (or popular operetta) La verbena de la paloma (The Festival of the Dove) was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. Setting the piece in an urban wasteland, Bieito’s production under-mined the “celebratory tone” in which the piece was generally read, presenting it instead through the “prism of an overt social criticism of bourgeois complacency and corruption.” The production marked
Bieito as an important and original young voice, but by that time he was already well known in his native Spain, where he’d built a reputation tackling a wide variety of texts—everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim.
Born in 1963 in a small Spanish town called Miranda de Ebro, Bieito moved to Barcelona at the age of 14. He came of age in the final days of the Franco regime and was educated by Jesuits. Bieito grew up in a musical household—his mother was an amateur singer and his brother teaches in the Barcelona Conservatoire—and went on to study art history at the University of Barcelona. As a young man he traveled around Europe, studying and working alongside some of the continent’s most visionary directors, including Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Giorgio Strehler and Ingmar Bergman. He made his professional debut in the mid-1980s at Barcelona’s Adrià Gual theater with a production of Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance. His directorial approach—marked by rigor-ous textual readings of complex dramatic works that evolved on sparse stage envi-
ronments where décor is reduced to its bare essentials—was in many ways at odds with the Spanish, and in particular Catalan, theater scene at the time, which was defined in large part by the acrobatic ingenuity of non-text based performance companies like Els Joglars, Comediants and La Fura dels Baus.
From the beginning of his career, Bieito has sought to balance his identity as a Catalan director with his interest in work-ing across linguistic and cultural bound-aries. “Bieito is one of the few Catalan-based directors who has consciously sought to work both in Catalan and Castilian,” explains Maria Delgado in her article “Calixto Bieito: A Catalan Director on the International Stage.” “He has
Rather than simply laying on a concept, Bieito’s goal is to create a visual and auditory universe that releases the text from the confines of history—thus unlocking its meaning and connecting it more directly to the present moment.
OPPOSITE: Director
Calixto Bieito at Teatre
Romea. Photo by David
Ruano. RIGHT (left to
right): Don Carlos, by
Friedich Schiller. 2009.
Production: Teatre
Romea & Nationaltheater
Mannheim. Tirant lo
Blanc, 2007. Production:
Teatre Romea, Institut
Ramon Llull, Hebbel am
Ufer, Schauspielfrankfurt
& Ajuntament de
Viladecans.
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resisted the monolingual register favored first by Franco—who promoted Castilian at the expense of the other languages of the Spanish state—and later by Jordi Pujol, president of the Catalan Parliament between 1980 and 2003, who sought to remedy the balance by prioritizing Catalan as the official language of Catalonia.”
As the artistic director of Teatre Romea, which began its long history as a home for Catalan-language drama, Bieito sought to expand the theater’s mission to include presentations of contemporary European plays and reimagined classics alongside contemporary and classical Catalan plays. But while he has sought to break down linguistic and cultural bar-riers in his work, he continues to identify strongly with his heritage:
My references come from my Catalan, Hispanic and Mediterranean culture. From the Spanish Golden Age, Valle-
Inclán, Buñuel, Goya…. The black humor that shapes my work is part of this cultural heritage. Spain is not only about flamenco and bullfighting. It’s part of my imagination. It’s an approach to everything I direct.
Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert Falls knew Bieito by reputation, but his first encounter with Bieito’s work came in 2004 with his staging of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio for Berlin’s Komische Oper. In what would become a notorious production, Bieito dispensed with the traditionally “light” opera’s Turkish setting, locating it instead in a modern day European brothel modeled after one that sits near Berlin’s Olympic stadium. The cast, including a contingent of sex workers, displayed their wares in a series of transparent boxes. As one critic put it, “there [was] enough onstage sex and nudity to make the golden calf orgy in the Met’s production of Moses and Aaron
seem like a Sunday school play.” For Falls, the production engendered in him an emotional response that convinced him to seek out more of Bieito’s work:
I find it hard to be shocked in the the-ater. And this production shocked me. Coming in I didn’t know much about The Abduction from the Seraglio; but I was so taken by it and disturbed by it—and to me that is a good thing, because I don’t often feel that way in confronting art. Generally when I see a painting or listen to music or watch a play I may like it, I may think it was good, but in terms of being viscerally stimulated or disturbed, I don’t feel that way very often. I had a profound reaction to that Mozart opera. It sent me back to listen to the music and study the libretto, at which point I realized that the story is very much about rape and the subjugation of women. Calixto put those images of subjugation and domination on the surface in a way I felt was brave and profound. I felt that he was unabash-edly and fearlessly trying to reveal something deep in the subtext of the work, and that inspired me in my own work. At the time I was preparing my production of King Lear, and I was seeking courage. He provided me the inspiration to go further in examining what the play was really about, and to not be afraid of presenting the horrors of the world to an audience.
Falls initially approached Bieito about directing a Eugene O’Neill play as part of the Goodman’s 2009 festival, A Global Exploration: Eugene O’Neill in the Twenty-First Century. But ultimately their conversation turned to another
“ I thought that Calixto could illuminate this play in a way that some American directors might not be able to, that he’d identify it is a poem, rather than a play by an American southern playwright.” —Robert Falls
LEFT: La Ópera de Cuatro Cuartos (The Threepenny
Opera), 2002. Production: Focus, Salamanca 2002,
Festival d’estiu de Barcelona Grec 2002 & Teatro Cuyás.
OPPOSITE: La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream), 2010,
Production: Teatre Romea & Complejo Tetral de Buenos
Aires. Photographer Carlos Furman
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major American playwright: Tennessee Williams. Bieito was familiar with the more widely known Williams plays like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, but it was Falls who introduced him to Camino Real. With its inclusion of the iconic Spanish literary figure Don Quixote, its Latin American setting, and its surreal, dreamlike musi-cality, Falls felt that Bieito might respond to it—and he was right. Falls was excit-ed to see what this distinctly European director would uncover in the work of an iconic American playwright. “We think of Tennessee Williams as a realist. I think Williams was trampled down by the general conformity of the 1950s and the rise of the method actor, some of whom brought everything down to a non-poetic, mumbly, grumbly realism. And Williams was a real poet. I thought that Calixto could illuminate this play in a way that some American directors might not be able to, that he’d identify it as a poem, rather than a play by an American south-ern playwright.”
Williams saw this play as an attempt to challenge himself, his audience—and the theater as a form, writing in the play’s foreword that his intention was “to give audiences…the continually dissolving and transforming images of a dream.” He writes, “We all have in our conscious and unconscious minds a great vocabu-lary of images, and I think all human communication is based on these images as are our dreams; and a symbol in a play has only one legitimate purpose which is to say a thing more directly and simply and beautifully than it could be said in words.” This wild dreamscape—this reliance on a striking image to reveal what a torrent of words cannot—makes
Williams’ play a remarkable match for Calixto Bieito’s approach, in which a text and the theatrical space are stripped to their bare essentials, as Delgado explains, “allowing the construction of a multi-dimensional world where the real and the poetic can exist cheek by jowl.” When asked what he sees as the role of the director in approaching a play, Bieito explains his task this way:
To understand the play. In your way. To be honest with yourself, and be brave. And to express yourself with the piece. To others…and sometimes you don’t know exactly what you want to do; you have an intuition, you have to follow this. Sometimes I am sleeping and I have a dream…and suddenly in the dream I have images that come into my mind and I use them the next day in the process…I try to feel free, to feel open, to feel naked. You have to give answers, but you have to keep the mysteries, the hidden things of the play, keep them hidden as well.
INDIVIDUAL SPONSORS FOR CAMINO REALGoodman Theatre would like to thank the following individuals for their support of Camino Real.
M. Ann O’BrienOrli and Bill StaleyRandy and Lisa WhiteSallyan WindtDirector’s Society Sponsors
Katherine A. Abelson and Robert J. CornellEducation and Community Engagement Programs Sponsors
Commitments as of January 23, 2012.
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A Conversation with Cándido Tirado
This spring marks the second production in the Goodman’s ongoing collabora-tion with Teatro Vista, Chicago’s larg-est Equity theater company dedicated to producing Latino-oriented works in English. Starting April 7, the world premiere of Cándido Tirado’s Fish Men will take to the Owen stage. Set in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, Fish Men chronicles an afternoon with a group of chess hustlers as they attempt to lure unsuspecting “fish” into high-stakes games for cash. But the action—played out rapid-fire in real time—quickly leads to a series of devas-tating revelations.
Playwright Cándido Tirado is Teatro Vista’s writer-in-residence this season, and while Fish Men contains only one Latino character, director Edward Torres—also Teatro Vista’s artistic direc-tor—maintains that the play’s multieth-nic focus is an essential element of its Latino identity. “The urban landscape has shifted dramatically, and I define ‘Latino’ now as being at the center of world cultures—African, indigenous
European and Asian—because for me Latino culture is rooted in all these other cultures,” he says. With this shift in the cultural landscape in mind, Fish Men also represents a first step in a change of direction for Teatro Vista towards pre-senting more multicultural work. Says Torres, “We hope to present the work of fresh Latino writers from their unique perspective and the world they’re living in, which is often at the intersection of many different cultures.”
It is precisely at this intersection of cultures that the Fish Men playwright Tirado spent his formative years. A native-born Puerto Rican, he immigrated to the Bronx at age 11 and came of age in a densely populated neighborhood where people of myriad cultures con-verged. Just before rehearsals began, he talked to the Goodman’s Lesley Gibson about chess, Latino theater and how his experience as a live witness of the events of 9/11 informed this new play.
Lesley Gibson: What was your initial inspiration for Fish Men?
Cándido Tirado: I’m a chess master myself, and it’s one of my greatest loves. I’d been trying to work on a play about chess and had a lot of false starts. Then one day I was out with a friend and we walked into Washington Square Park and the play came to me like a wave. My initial inspiration was to make the play about hustlers. But man’s inhumanity to man is a big theme in my life, and I’ve always wanted to write about it because that’s a great interest of mine—how we treat each other and how things like genocides happen; there were so many genocides in the twentieth century.
So I decided to try to deal with that subject in the context of a chess hustle, where the hustler is trying to almost dehumanize his opponent, not just over the [chess] board but psychologically to make him feel worthless, to make him feel less-than, to break him down so he’ll be easier to beat. There’s a type of psychological war that happens. So instead of just being a play about playing chess, it becomes about life and death.
LG: Did you spend a lot of time in the park researching and playing chess?
CT: I always go to the park to play. I used to hang out to listen to people talk. Chess players are very funny, and a lot of them are a little bit more than acquaintances; we talk often. So that’s part of my world, whenever I walk in
SUPPORT FOR FISH MENThe Goodman is proud to acknowledge the fol-lowing sponsors who support our dedication to producing new work including Fish Men.
Julie and Roger BaskesLynn Hauser and Neil RossCindy and Andrew H. KalnowEva LosaccoCatherine Mouly and LeRoy T. Carlson, Jr.Shaw Family Supporting OrganizationBeth and Alan SingerOrli and Bill StaleyNew Work Season Sponsors
Harry and Marcy HarczakNew Work Student Subscription Series Sponsor
The Davee FoundationMajor Contributor to Research and Development of New Work
Commitments as of January 23, 2012.
Contributing Sponsor for Fish Men
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there everybody says, “Hey, Tirado!” And I love that, because it’s like Cheers, where everybody knows your name. They make you feel welcome for a little while, then they just want to play you and try to beat you. But for five minutes it’s good.
LG: Are any of these characters based on actual people you played with in the park?
CT: They’re basically composites of people. Flash is a composite of three different people; I knew a guy who was really brilliant but he dropped out of school and became a hustler. Nobody knew why he dropped out of school, but he was really intellectual, he had a fast mouth and he could beat you with his mouth he talked so much. He was a great trash-talker but he was also nerdy, so in order to create the character Flash I wanted to give him more street tough-ness. I know another hustler who was more “street” who could confront you—because when you’re hustling you got to get tough. Sometimes the people losing don’t like losing; not everyone wants to give you their money, and sometimes you have to make a stand or a threat. So I wanted to make this character live in both worlds; have a kind of a street
toughness and an intellectual side. But some of the other characters are totally fictional or are based on situations I’ve seen that I’ve taken creative license with.
LG: The characters in this play come from all different backgrounds; only one of them is Latino. Do you think of this as a “Latino play”?
CT: I don’t; that’s my quick answer. For me, the central theme of Fish Men is whether human beings are going to con-tinue on this planet. So the characters in the play come from different ethnicities—there’s only one Latino character—but he’s a major character because I wanted to talk about some part of a Latino/Indian genocide that happened. So I don’t consider the play a Latino play, but I’m Latino, and I wrote it so I guess it is.
In this country everybody gets defined by their background. So I’m a Latino playwright in this country. But the plays I write—I like to do more symbolic char-acters, I like to do metaphorical charac-ters. In Mamma’s Boyz, one of my plays that Teatro Vista just produced, there are three young drug dealers whose names are Mimic, Shine and Thug. Each name means something, but they don’t have to be Latino actors to play them. They could be Italian or Irish or African American; as long as their cul-ture is that of the street, impoverished, where drugs or crime seem like a way out. I had a friend from Italy who saw the play said, “Wow, that seems like me and my two friends.”
LG: You mentioned in a previous inter-view that you were in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001; did your experience that day affect your work on this play?
CT: It did, a lot. After the first plane hit I was still going to work—I worked across the street from the second tower that got hit. There was a policeman in the middle of the street—it had just happened—and he was blowing his whistle and telling people, “Don’t go that way,” but people
“ There’s a type of psychological war that happens. So instead of just being a play about playing chess, it becomes about life and death.” —Cándido Tirado
OPPOSITE: Cándido
Tirado. RIGHT: Steve
Casillas, Jessie David
and Marvin Quijada in
Mamma’s Boyz. Photo
by Art Carrillo.
weren’t listening. But he looked me in the eyes and told me not to go where I was going, so I walked away, and about two minutes later the second plane hit; I would have been underneath that build-ing when the second plane hit. With all the glass and parts that were falling I probably would have been really hurt or killed. I ended up walking home across the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a lot of fear and adrenalin, because at the time I thought, “If they hit the build-ing they’re going to hit the bridge too,” which sounds dramatic now but it’s what I was thinking.
For a while after I got really depressed—coming so close, being there, and then dealing with a lot of survivor’s guilt. It informed me about the play, and about the characters, and how big this thing is—man’s inhumanity to man. There are characters in the play who lost their family; I could never get close to that and I hope I never will, but I got a little taste—a very small taste—of that.
But then at the same time as I was com-ing out of my depression and my fear and all that stuff, there was kind of a spiritual thing going on in New York. You know, if the recovery workers needed socks, in an hour they had too many socks. If they said, “We need blood,” in an hour they had too much blood, and they kept making announcements, you know: “Stop giving blood, stop giv-ing socks.” So there was this spiritual
thing that brought everybody together, and that feeling was amazing. The fear was horrible, but this spiritual thing was amazing, and that informed in me in the play because I think that’s very special in humanity.
LG: Do you think your chess skills seep over into your process as a playwright?
CT: People tell me that the way I think is like a chess player. In chess there’s something called a “trio of analysis.” You analyze a few variations of a move, and each variation has all of these branches, so it could go on forever, but you usually pick the top three responses and analyze them to see which has the best payoff.
And I look at writing like that—I analyze the possible ways of doing something, and sometimes I take the least likely way to get to that place. People tell me all the time, “The way you just made that point is like a chess player.” I really don’t get it because that’s how I think naturally. I’m a playwright; I think about structure and form and how you make a play, and I also know chess and the argument of chess. So maybe writing a play and playing chess are more similar than they appear.
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GOODMAN THEATRE WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL NEW WORK DONORS FOR THEIR HELP IN MAKING OUR PRODUCTION OF FISH MEN POSSIBLE.
BELOW: Steve Casillas and Jessie David in Tirado’s
Mamma’s Boyz. Photo by Art Carrillo.
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GOODMAN THEATRE WINS 2011 EDGERTON FOUNDATION NEW AMERICAN PLAYS AWARDGoodman Theatre is the proud recipient of a 2011 Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award, to support its world-premiere production of Cándido Tirado’s Fish Men. Since it launched nationally in 2007, the Edgerton Foundation New American Plays program has awarded grants to not-for-profit theaters for 150 new plays. The awards are competitively granted to theaters to give plays-in-development extended rehearsal time, allowing the production and its theater artists the opportunity to reach their maximum potential. Past awards from the Edgerton Foundation include support for the world-premiere productions of Chinglish, Stage Kiss and Turn of the Century.
For Love or Money: The World of Chess HustlingBy Steve Scott
They can be found in any of New York’s public parks or gathered in chess shops throughout the city. Their names evoke the legendary status that some of them achieve: Broadway Bobby, Russian Paul, Sweet Pea, Poe. Their ranks have included future Hollywood greats, day laborers, students, international champions and homeless knockabouts. Although the trade that they ply is tech-nically illegal, they are largely ignored by legal authorities—and their unique brand of fame has been chronicled by newspapers, blog sites and at least one feature film.
Welcome to the world of chess hus-tlers, players who compete at the board game for money, a fixture of New York street life that has been referred to as the “largest growth industry” in the city. Chess hustlers have plied their trade in Manhattan’s parks for decades; according to local lore, actor Humphrey Bogart made his living as a master of speed chess during the Depression, as did future Unites States chess champion Arnold Denker. Film director Stanley Kubrick (whose passion for the game made its way into such movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey) was a frequent—and victorious—habi-tué of Washington Square Park’s chess boards in the early 1960s. But the popularity of street chess is generally acknowledged to have started with a former convict named Bobby Hayward, who in the late 1960s or early 1970s set up shop on a garbage can on Eighth Avenue, between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Word soon spread, and Hayward’s enterprise was immortalized by photographs in The New York Times. Such mainstream attention brought
visibility (and perhaps legitimacy) to Hayward and his fellow hustlers, and soon street chess was a sought-after activity for both chess wizards and New York tourists.
The form of the game preferred by most hustlers is known variously as speed chess, blitz chess, or lightning, in which each side has five minutes (or three, in a variation known as bullet chess) to complete all their moves. There are two ways to play speed chess: touch-move (meaning that if a player touches a piece, he has to move it) or the more common clock-move (meaning that a move is not complete until a player punches the clock). Veteran speed chess players can keep several games going at once, keeping track of the tally as they go. This can be an effective method of bilking more money out of the neophyte player by causing him to lose track of the number of games that have actually been won, or to lose track of the amount of the wager made on each game. There are other tricks that the hustler can use to fix the outcome of a game: rigging the clock so that the opponent’s time runs out faster than the hustler’s or, when a hustler’s luck runs out, fleeing the game via an unannounced break. In his 2000 book The Virtue of Prosperity, author Dinesh D’Souza describes one such game in which his opponent, a storied street chess champion, was unexpect-edly down after fifteen minutes. “I’ll be right back,” the opponent said, heading for the men’s room in a hotel across from the park. A few minutes later, an observer pointed out the obvious to D’Souza: the hustler wasn’t coming back, and D’Souza wasn’t getting his five-buck winnings.
Although such shenanigans are eschewed by many bona fide chess hustlers, the competition among hustlers is fierce, and the stakes may be higher than the monetary bet at hand. As the character Flash in Cándido Tirado’s Fish Men says, “We’re not happy with just winning. We want to obliterate the opposition.”
ABOVE: Chess hustlers in Washington Square Park.
Photo by David Shankbone.
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Want to Learn More About What Inspires the Work on Our Stages? Discover the Insider Access Series. Insider Access is a series of public programs that provide insight into the Goodman’s artistic process. With Artist Encounters, you’ll meet the names and faces behind the work on our stages—actors, playwrights, directors, the gamut! And PlayBacks take place directly after selected performances; they’re the ideal chance for audiences and artists to interact and analyze the production right after the curtain comes down.
CAMINO REALARTIST ENCOUNTER: CAMINO REALA Conversation with Calixto BieitoSunday, March 11 | 5 – 6pmInstitito Cervantes | 31 West Ohio Street, Chicago, IL
In this one-night-only event, internationally acclaimed director Calixto Bieito takes us inside his new adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ fantastical 1953 play, Camino Real, in an intimate conversation with Goodman Theatre Resident Artistic Associate Henry Godinez. Dubbed “one of Williams’ most imaginative works” by The New York Times, Camino Real is a rarely per-formed carnival of desire and temptation; this production marks the first original collaboration with an American theater for Bieito, who is known throughout Europe for his radical revision-ist interpretations of classic operas and plays. FREE, reserve tickets at GoodmanTheatre.org or 312.443.3800.
PLAYBACK: CAMINO REALFollowing each Wednesday and Thursday performance of Camino Real, Albert Theatre audiences are invited to attend PlayBacks, post-show discussions with members of the artistic team.FREE THEATER THURSDAY: CAMINO REALThursday, March 8 | Reception: 6 – 7pm Performance of Camino Real at 7:30pmGoodman Lobby
Join us for a pre-show reception featuring internationally renowned Catalan director Calixto Bieito, co-adaptor Marc Rosich and the Goodman’s Associate Dramaturg Neena Arndt. Enjoy Spanish-themed hors d’oeuvres, beer and wine—as well as a discussion with Bieito and Rosich on their preparation and vision for the play. Then catch a performance of Camino Real, directed by Bieito, known as “the Quentin Tarantino of opera.”Tickets to the reception and play are only $50. Use promo code THURSDAY when purchasing at GoodmanTheatre.org, or call 312.443.3800 and mention “Theater Thursday.”
FISH MENARTIST ENCOUNTER: FISH MENFeaturing playwright Cándido Tirado and director Edward TorresWednesday, April 11 | 6 – 7pmChicago Cultural Center, First Floor Garland Room 78 East Washington Street, Chicago, IL
Join us for an intimate conversation with Fish Men playwright Cándido Tirado and director Edward Torres before a 7:30 performance.FREE, reserve tickets at GoodmanTheatre.org or 312.443.3800.
PLAYBACK: FISH MENFollowing each Wednesday performance of Fish Men, Owen Theatre audiences are invited to attend PlayBacks, post-show discussions with members of the artistic team.FREE
INDIVIDUAL SEASON SPONSORSGoodman Theatre is grateful to these individuals for their outstanding support of the 2011/2012 Season.
The Edith-Marie Appleton Foundation Ruth Ann M. Gillis and Michael J. McGuinnisPrincipal Sponsors
Sondra & Denis Healy/Turtle Wax, Inc.Merle ReskinLeadership Sponsors
Julie and Roger BaskesPatricia CoxAndrew “Flip” Filipowski and Melissa OliverCarol Prins and John H. HartAlice Rapoport and Michael Sachs/Sg2Major Sponsors
Commitments as of January 23, 2012.
Chuck Smith at the Race Artist Encounter. Photo by David Raine.
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Imparting Culture and Communication: A Conversation with Ira AbramsThe Goodman’s Student Subscription Series (SSS) provides matinees, post-show discussions and educational resources for Goodman productions to Chicago Public School teachers and students free of charge. In return, partner teachers must provide lesson plans detailing how they use Goodman productions in the classroom, attend professional development workshops and previews for each production their students see, and organize annual school visits with the Goodman’s education department to ensure their continued participation in the series. Education Associate Teresa Rende recently spoke with one of the Goodman’s Student Subscription Series teachers, Ira Abrams, who has worked with the Goodman to bring theater to his stu-dents at the Chicago Military Academy for over eight years.
Teresa Rende: What inspired you to participate in the SSS?
Ira Abrams: It just seemed obvious to me that if there was this incredibly generous offer out there that my students should be able to take advantage of it. Coming to teach in the Chicago Public Schools, I could see how students often felt alienated by much of the cultural knowledge we were trying to pass on to them; the Goodman bridges that gap for students.
From an instructional point of view, the Goodman program has been the cornerstone of my efforts to help students see what is possible to do with a text. My students come to the Goodman having studied the script and struggled with its shape and its nuances. Then they get to compare their reading with the pro-duction. There’s a light bulb that comes on in this context and I would be hard-pressed to reproduce that kind of learning by any other means.
TR: What were you hoping to impart to your students when they saw Race this January? IA: Chuck Smith, the director for Race, asked the question, “Why aren’t the races talking to each other?” It seems to me that “not talking to each other” is one of the great themes of our time. In Race, playwright David Mamet looks specifically at the way manipulating story lines and public images has become more important than genuine communication. I wanted my stu-dents to do their own writing to explore the difference between genuine communication and posturing conversation, both public and private.
TR: What has been your favorite element of the program thus far?
IA: I can think of dozens of students for whom the SSS program has been either a doorway to a bigger vision of life, or a literal life-saver. One student in particular stands out for me.
This young woman had virtually dropped out of school by March, when we began studying The Story. She was very bright but had always been an inconsistent student, and now her mother had become ill and was relying on her to work and be a caregiver. Eventually, she admitted that she was planning to drop out of school and was only coming to my class because she wanted the chance to perform and to attend the plays. I made her a kind of a deal, whereby she had to meet some basic goals to earn a ticket to the show.
Somehow, after the trip to see Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Story, she got a burst of energy and started coming to school. I never did figure out what it was about that play that made such a dif-ference for her, but for the last months of the school year every time I saw her in the halls she had her ragged copy of that script tucked under her arm. She managed to graduate and is now an accountant, but theater was her double-major in col-lege. She still acts in her church.
GOODMAN THEATRE WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DONORS FOR THEIR HELP IN MAKING OUR OUTREACH PROGRAMS POSSIBLE.
Ira’s Chicago Military Academy students participate in a post-show discussion with the
playwright and cast of El Nogalar; April 2011.
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It’s the second best thing to being there. The new Goodman website will bring you closer than ever to the magic of live theater, with exhaustive archives, interactive features and new ways to experience the drama—wherever the internet may find you!
SEARCH for the best seats and buy tickets with greater ease
• EXPLORE our extensive archive of all productions staged from 2000 through today
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GoodmanTheatre.orgEARLY SPRING, 2012
ON THE NEW GOODMAN WEBSITE YOU’LL BE ABLE TO:
AS WELL AS:
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Celebrating Race and Diversity On January 25, 2012, at Club Petterino’s, the Goodman held its winter Diversity Night event featuring David Mamet’s Race, directed by Chuck Smith. This free event is a product of the Goodman’s ongoing commitment to reflecting the diversity of our community in all areas of our organization, and is designed to bring a new audience of culturally diverse individuals to our theater. At the event, guests saw a special video that included a wide range of Chicago-based artists and cultural leaders, putting into context the themes and issues raised by Race. We hope our guests came away with a framework for engaging in conversation about how theater addresses the difficult social and cultural issues of our time. This Diversity Night was defi-nitely an evening to remember!
Goodman Theatre gratefully acknowledges each of the spon-sors including: including Diversity Initiatives Leader Charter One Bank; Diversity Initiative Partners Accenture, Allstate, Ernst & Young, Fifth Third Bank, Exelon Corporation, Loop Capital, Macy’s, McDonald’s Corporation and Mesirow Financial; along with Corporate Sponsor Partners for Race Mayer Brown and Event Sponsors Baker & McKenzie LLP and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.
RIGHT (top to bottom): Ralph Hughes from Diversity Initiatives Partner Macy’s and Glenn
Mazade, Event Co-chair from Diversity Initiatives Leader Charter One. Goodman Board
Chairman Ruth Ann M. Gillis from Diversity Initiatives Partner Exelon Corporation and
Marc Grapey from the cast of Race. Goodman Trustee and Event Co-chair Rebecca Ford
Terry and Tamberla Perry from the cast of Race.
Race Opening Night On January 23, 2012, sponsors and guests gathered at Club Petterino’s to celebrate the opening of David Mamet’s Race. Following cocktails and dinner, guests attended the opening per-formance of Mamet’s latest work.
Special thanks to our sponsors who made this production possi-ble: Corporate Sponsor Partner Mayer Brown LLP; Media Partner WBEZ 91.5 FM; Season Sponsors The Edith-Marie Appleton Foundation, Julie and Roger Baskes, Patricia Cox, Andrew “Flip” Filipowski and Melissa Oliver, Ruth Ann M. Gillis and Michael J. McGuinnis, Sondra and Denis Healy/Turtle Wax, Inc., Carol Prins and John H. Hart, Alice Rapoport and Michael Sachs/Sg2 and Merle Reskin; and Director’s Society Sponsors John and Caroline Ballantine, Mary Jo and Doug Basler, Doris Conant, Julie M. Danis and Paul F. Donahue, Paul Dykstra and Spark Cremin, Linda Hutson, M. Ann O’Brien and Susan and Bob Wislow.
RIGHT (top to bottom): Goodman Resident Director and the director of Race Chuck Smith,
Trustee Elizabeth A. Raymond (Mayer Brown LLP) and Marc Kadish, Director of Pro Bono
Activities and Litigation Training at Mayer Brown LLP; Mayer Brown LLP is the Corporate
Sponsor Partner of Race. Director’s Society Sponsor Mary Jo Basler and Trustee and
Season Sponsor Alice Rapoport.
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A Legacy of Great TheaterIn November 2011, the Goodman lost a cherished member of our theater family, Bettie Dwinell. A Subscriber and donor, Bettie’s long-standing commitment to the Goodman spanned more than 60 years. Bettie’s passion for theater could be traced back to her childhood in Mt. Morris, Illinois. “Living in a remote area, listening to theater and other shows on the radio
was all we had to do,” she once told the Goodman’s Director of Development Dorlisa Martin. Years later, she began attend-ing shows in Chicago and even met her late husband while he was a lighting design student at the original Goodman School of Theatre. Over the years, she became involved with many other
Chicago cultural organizations, including the Field Museum, the Art Institute, the Lyric Opera and the Saints.
Bettie’s enduring love of the arts inspired her to join the Spotlight Society, an association of theater enthusiasts who have remembered the Goodman in their estate plans. Thanks to Bettie, future generations of Chicagoans will experience the outstanding productions and community educational programs offered by the Goodman.
To learn more about Spotlight Society membership or make a planned gift to Goodman Theatre, please contact Jenny Seidelman at (312) 443-3811 ext. 220 or [email protected].
PRESENTS Underwater Photographer Brian Skerry in
OCEAN SOUL Monday, March 26, 2012 | 7pm | Albert TheatreNational Geographic Live returns to Chicago this March for one unforgettable night at Goodman Theatre! Voyage across the oceans with one of our most seasoned photographers. Brian Skerry dives eight months of the year, often in extreme condi-tions beneath Arctic ice or in predator-infested waters, and has even lived at the bottom of the sea to get close to his subjects. Skerry has spent more than 10,000 hours under water creating portraits of creatures so intimate they appear to have been shot in a studio. The evening will include riveting stories of Skerry’s encounters with whales, sharks, and giant squid and feature stunning, high-definition images from his new book, Ocean Soul. Special ticket pricing for Goodman Theatre Subscribers at GoodmanTheatre.org/natgeo.
Special Rates at Chicago Kimpton HotelsParticipating Chicago Kimpton Hotels are offering Goodman Theatre patrons special rates under $200—up to 60 percent off regular rates—through August 31, 2012. Participating hotels include Hotel Allegro, Hotel Burnham and Hotel Monaco. These rates apply for standard rooms, but special savings may be available for suites with Jacuzzis; inquire at the time of your reservation.
GUESTS AT CHICAGO KIMPTON HOTELS ENJOY:• Superb dining at area restaurants• Gorgeous rooms with eclectic décor• Central location in exciting downtown Chicago• Complimentary wine bar for hotel guests• Fitness rooms and classes• Plus, pets are welcome!
To obtain Goodman Theatre rates at participating Kimpton hotels use promo code GMT when ordering online at KimptonHotels.com, or call 312.325.7211 Monday through Friday, 8am – 5:30pm. In order to access the rate, you must click on the individual hotel’s website.
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FISH MEN APRIL/MAY 2011In the Owen
CENTER STAGE Subscriber and annual donor Beatrice Hall shares why she supports Goodman Theatre.
How long have you been involved with the Goodman? So long I don’t really remember. I can tell you that I was there at the old theater when you could have dinner in the rehearsal room. Back then I was not a Subscriber; I was buying ticket by ticket. I saw all of August Wilson’s plays.
With all the options in Chicago, why do you support Goodman Theatre?One reason is because it’s the theater where I was introduced to theater. Also, it’s always been easily accessible from my home and my office when I was working. And I’ve always been really impressed by the programs you offer for inner-city students.
Do you support other arts and cultural organiza-tions in Chicago?I do attend other organizations, but the Goodman is where my support really goes.
Which Goodman Theatre productions have been favorites in our recent history?I enjoyed Silk so much that I actually bought the book it was based on; there was just something about that production. I also loved Crowns, King Lear and The Piano Lesson.
BELOW: Subscriber and annual donor Beatrice Hall
SOMETHING NEW AT SOUTH WATER KITCHENWith the addition of acclaimed Chef Roger Waysok, Goodman Theatre preferred partner restaurant South Water Kitchen has recently revamped its menu. The new menu was inspired by the classic Midwestern dishes from Chef Waysok’s childhood, and includes fresh takes on classic favorites, like roasted all natural chicken, BLT tuna tartare and smoked pork pizza. For a quick bite before or after a show, opt for the delectable tavern menu, which features tasty and affordable small plate options.
South Water Kitchen is located at 225 North Wabash Street, next door to the Hotel Monaco. For the complete menu, visit SouthWaterKitchen.com. For reservations call 312.236.9300.
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WIN THE TRIP OF A LIFETIME!On Friday, May 11, 2012 at Goodman Theatre’s annual Gala five
lucky winners will be selected to win this extravagant prize.
Don’t miss out. Look for the World Travel Raffle brochure inside this issue of OnStage. For more information, please contact Katie Frient at 312.443.3811 ext. 586 or [email protected].
