Second City, But First Love

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Chicago may not always have been receptive to the grandeur of drama, but it has always been a theatrical town--a city of pugilistic journalists and publicity-hunting mobsters, of outrageous politics and a histrionically unruffled electorate. It was probably inevitable, in a city where showmanship has been so much a part of public life, that a feisty, populist stage community would emerge sooner or later. And sure enough, over the past decade, it has, with at least half a dozen companies elbowing their way into national prominence and the best known of them, the Steppenwolf collective, capturing a 1985 Tony Award as the nation's best regional theater. While much of the rest of the American theater seems overrefined, elite and abstract, the Chicago troupes have built an enthusiastic mainstream audience for what many of the artists characterize as "rock-'n'-roll theater," rough-edged, noisy, pulsating with energy, appealing less to the mind than to the heart and groin.

Chicago's troupes honor their forerunners who went on to stardom from the Second City--including the company of that name, which propelled Mike Nichols, among others, to Broadway and Hollywood--but the new generation is holding on fiercely to what they have built back home. Having savored the East and West coasts, they insist on returning to the heartland. Their commitment is yielding a season any city might envy. Last week Danny Glover, the busiest black actor in Hollywood (The Color Purple, Witness, Silverado), made his Chicago stage debut at Steppenwolf's intimate--and perforce uncommercial--211- seat space in Athol Fugard's A Lesson from Aloes. A few blocks away, William Peterson, star of the film thriller To Live and Die in L.A., has rejoined the funky, avant-garde Remains Theater in a portrayal of brainwashing, Days and Nights Within.

James Earl Jones, one of America's foremost classical actors, is appearing at the Goodman Theater in Fences, a new play by August Wilson, author of the Broadway melodrama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Wisdom Bridge Theater, which last year toured in Britain and played a summer season at the Kennedy Center in Washington, this week is reviving a much praised multimedia Hamlet. Directed by Robert Falls (who last month shifted from the artistic directorship of Wisdom Bridge to the same slot at the bigger-budget Goodman), this Hamlet employs a slide show, blues and rock sequences, video monitors and a staging of King Claudius' taking power as a press conference resonant of Watergate. The initial run starred doe-eyed, victim-like Aidan Quinn; he is now appearing off-Broadway in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, and Peter Aylward plays the role, in striking contrast, as a robustly funny bullyboy.

The Chicago influence continues to spread. Steppenwolf is now represented on Broadway by an uneven but crowd-pleasing, hyperkinetic production of Pinter's The Caretaker, directed by John Malkovich, who was a 1985 Oscar nominee for his supporting role in Places in the Heart. Steppenwolf Artistic Director Gary Sinise will leave the cast March 1 to restage Lyle Kessler's Orphans, another past Steppenwolf venture, in London with a cast featuring Albert Finney. Meanwhile, Sinise, Malkovich and Peterson have all formed film- production companies. Also active in Hollywood is the first voice from the new Chicago theater to emerge into national prominence, Playwright David Mamet, who won a 1983 Oscar nomination for The Verdict and in 1984 received the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet's longtime collaborator Greg Mosher, who as artistic director of the Goodman was perhaps the most influential force in shaping Chicago's theater sensibility, now directs the two long-closed theaters in New York City's Lincoln Center. His first production, a pair of Mamet one-acts, was widely panned, but Mosher is unfazed. He points out that at the Goodman, he lost 14,000 of the 16,000 subscribers, then replaced them with 18,000 new ones.

Of the shows now on Chicago stages, none is stunning, but each displays a facet of the city's theatrical strength. A Lesson from Aloes seems a more overtly political play, more about the inequities of the government in Fugard's native South Africa, than in its 1980 Broadway production. Yet it sacrifices none of the personal agony in Joan Allen's portrayal of a woman literally maddened by the intrusions of the police state. As a black friend who may or may not have been betrayed by the woman's husband, Glover makes the suffering less classically tragic but more universal. On Broadway, James Earl Jones envisioned the character as a great soul stifled into ordinariness. Glover instead evokes a man already ordinary, a common laborer whose simple yearnings are still too much for apartheid to permit.

Days and Nights Within was chosen to showcase Peterson's talents and those of the woman he lives with, Remains and Steppenwolf Actress Amy Morton. The story depicts the actual and dreamed encounters between a woman accused of spying in East Germany in the early 1950s and her Communist inquisitor. In the original production at Actors Theater of Louisville last year, the characters engaged in a kind of perverse romance, with each wistfully trying to break down barriers. In Chicago, the struggle is for power: Morton endows the woman with toughness, and Peterson portrays the questioner as an unimaginative bureaucrat striving for advancement. Remains has made the show less lyrical but more contemporary, a document of the implacability of all unjust governments.

Fences is an import from the Yale Repertory Theater, which also originated Ma Rainey. Once again, Playwright Wilson heaps too much plot onto a slice-of-life structure, but he gives Jones one of the very best roles of his career. Troy Maxson is a frustrated man of 53, a former baseball player who was too old to have made the jump from the Negro leagues to the majors. A former lowlife who has lived for duty, respectability and the right of absolute authority at home, he destroys everything he achieved and leaves no one to mourn him. Jones revels in the malignity of the man while sustaining sympathy for him. It is a magnificent performance.

For all its activity, Chicago theater seems to have reached a crossroads. Says Mosher: "It is human nature to look, after a while, for change." Peterson, who vows to live and work in Chicago "for the rest of my life," nonetheless acknowledges, "There may be some point at which you no longer have anything to learn from doing work with the same people you have been with for years, and who have the same strengths and weaknesses that you do." Mosher's successor Falls, who directs around the country, says that the Chicago scene's future depends equally on attracting young talent willing to work cheap and developing more institutions capable of challenging established artists. Although the Chicago League of Theaters has 109 members, only a handful pay Actors Equity-scale wages. One of them is Steppenwolf, which used to pay the average member about $3,000 a year and which has upped the figure to a still uncomfortable $10,000 or so. That kind of sacrifice has afforded Chicago a stage vitality and inventiveness rivaling the best of off-Broadway. The challenge is to sustain the freedom to experiment, and fail, while ensuring that artists as well as audiences can reap the rewards.