A Player's Map of the World

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

During the past decade Chicago has nurtured the nation's liveliest regional- theater scene. Now a group of enterprising veterans of that inventive but often underfinanced milieu has undertaken to expose the city's audiences to the best of what the world has to offer. During May the $2.4 million Chicago International Theater Festival has featured four productions by Britain's National Theater, works by companies from Spain, Italy, Israel and Japan, and a stirring cry against apartheid by five black members of the Market Theater Company of South Africa--plus nearly a dozen shows by Chicago troupes, ranging from classics to sex farce. The last American stage festival of this magnitude was in Los Angeles during the 1984 Olympics. The next is less than a month away, in Baltimore. Chicago has set a high standard for it to match.

The visiting companies and their productions seem to have been carefully chosen to fit the Chicago sensibility. The city's ensembles specialize in raw, emotive, hyperkinetic staging, frequently marked by raucous humor and explosive violence. The best-known ensemble, Steppenwolf, describes the bulk of its work as "rock-'n'-roll theater." Although none of the visiting troupes is so aggressively young and punky, all of them display a gutsy, freewheeling manner.

El Tricicle, a gymnastic trio from Barcelona, charmed audiences by taking on and conquering the unlikely challenge of finding 90 minutes of virtually wordless comedy mostly about waiting in an airport. I Saltimbanchi, which opens this week, features Italian brothers in slapstick adaptations of commedia dell'arte routines. Humor was used for darker purposes by the Market Theater in Asinamali!, an episodic piece about five political prisoners and how they wound up being jailed, and by Israel's Haifa Municipal Theater in Ghetto, a Brechtian circus depicting the oppression of Jews in a Lithuanian enclave. Both pieces depend more on the energy and charm of performers than on the sprawling scripts.

World War II is also the theme of the updated version of The Trojan Women by Japan's Suzuki Company of Toga, which is still running. The troupe, which mingles ancient and modern art in a melodramatic spectacle, has influenced a number of young American directors, notably Peter Sellars of the American National Theater at Washington's Kennedy Center. Trojan Women, in the repertory for a decade, has become the company's signature piece. Not much of Euripides' tragedy is recognizable to non-Japanese-speaking audiences, except a particularly vicious dismemberment of a doll representing Astyanax, the last male member of the ruling house of Troy. Most of the piece is a sung-spoken graveyard lament by an old and penniless woman who imagines herself to be Hecuba, the bereft and enslaved queen of Troy. Menace and suffering pervade the foot-stamping movement by the supporting cast of 16, and in the lead part, Kayoko Shiraishi is an embodiment of timeless agony.

The high point of the festival was the only U.S. engagement this year for the National Theater subcompany, led by Edward Petherbridge, twice a Tony nominee for roles in Nicholas Nickleby and Strange Interlude, and Ian McKellen, a Tony winner for his portrayal of the jealous composer Salieri in Amadeus. Each production in Chicago has showcased the two principals and three comparably talented colleagues, Greg Hicks, Eleanor Bron and Jonathan Hyde. The stand opened with The Duchess of Malfi in a faithfully Grand Guignol rendition of Webster's Jacobean tragedy. Actors clad in funereal black moved menacingly amid the stately but decaying gray palatial sets; virtually the only color was a frequent splash of blood. The ensemble followed with an energetic rendition of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

For a jubilant finale, the troupe is now performing an uproarious double bill about bad theater and worse reviewers: Tom Stoppard's staging of his own The Real Inspector Hound, followed by Sheridan's dizzying spoof of epic tragedy, The Critic, last seen on Broadway 40 years ago in a production that featured Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson in roles that McKellen and Petherbridge play. Hound is a schoolboy-clever send-up of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, with all its clunking contrivances, coupled with the petulant fantasies of a second-string critic (Petherbridge) about an uprising by all the world's also-rans. Delightful all the way, it is nonetheless utterly upstaged by Sheridan's farce, one of the funniest plays in the English language and certainly the funniest about the theater.

McKellen, giving perhaps the best performance of his career, is Mr. Puff, a hyperkinetic and vaguely Celtic specialist in panegyric, which is to say, a forerunner of the modern public relations man. From touting others, he has turned to writing his own epic tragedy, The Spanish Armada. At a rehearsal, everything goes wrong. The actors drop whole swatches of dialogue as turgid and unplayable. The bit players upstage the leads, who swat them. A sword fight is a model of slapstick ineptitude. A Minister of State (Petherbridge) comes out, stares at the audience long and balefully, and departs; he is, Mr. Puff explains, contemplating politics but discreetly not discussing it. When at last the battle with the armada unfolds, it is a clash between two tiny, hand-manipulated boats, reminiscent of a puppet show. At this point the scenery begins to collapse around the cast until the stage is a shambles. McKellen, still capering, still jigging, still shaking his frizzy ginger hair, surveys this chaos, cheerily chirps, "Ah, yes, very well, but not perfect," and really brings down the house. For this capstone to a richly varied festival, Chicagoans can thank the homegrown troupes that have put the city's name in boldface on the theatrical map of the world.