Independent Players present a Classic Comedy

In a play about the theatre, in which actors play the roles of actors and other theatrical personnel, the possibilities for a multi-layered plot are intriguing. Where Noel Coward's Present Laughter (1939) is light on plot, it's heavy on characterizations, to which good actors will bring the best of their craft.

Directed by Don Haefliger, the Independent Players' cast of eleven seized the opportunity on opening night Friday at the Elgin Art Showcase.

In a role which Coward created for himself, Gabor Mark plays Gary Essendine, a temperamental and self-indulgent actor turned 41. Mark captures the exaggerations and peccadilloes of a spoiled British Thespian in his brilliant caricature, flinging out lines like "My entire life is one long torment, and no one remotely cares!"

Standing out among the supporting cast was Madeline Franklin as the vivacious Joanna, a wife and mistress within Gary's inner circle. Her stage presence and delivery commanded attention in every scene she shared with the other quirky and pretentious characters.

Coward's classic script is witty and downright hilarious at times, but still richly detailed with self-conscious lines like "I'm always acting," and "Don't be affected, Gary," and "Stop being theatrical!" All of these characters — not just the actors — are profound liars in their own way, and even the hired help injects drama into the story.

But this is really an actor's play. The more experienced players' quality of entrances, body language, and diction was superb, showing just the right restraint in this barely civilized farce. Some of the accents were better than others, but they were all successful, even communicating region and social class which, along with excellent costumes, created vivid personalities.

The run time is more than two hours (with an intermission), but you won't be checking your watch with all this colorful and comedic melodrama happening just a few feet away. See it for yourself, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm through March 16th at the Elgin Art Showcase, 164 Division Street. For tickets and more information, go to independentplayers.org

Independent Players perform "Interview" at Elgin Fringe Festival

The Independent Players consistently bring great material to a fringe festival, the most off-off- of all stages. This year's feature was "Interview," a one-act play from the edgy 1960's America Hurrah trilogy by Jean-Claude Van Itallie.

What looks like a perfunctory job screening quickly becomes a fragmented montage of superficial banter, as a full cast of eight generic characters talk over each other and repeat empty formalities like a bad case of the hiccups.

The Independent Players present "Interview" at the Elgin Fringe Festival.

The premise doesn't become a plot -- it's just a cover for a brilliant subversive composition that assaults the dehumanizing effects of corporatism, mass media and technology. Each character will reveal a glimpse of authenticity only in a monologue or an aside to the audience, stuck between sequences of group cooperation that are singularly absurd.

The excellent cast handled the onslaught of words and cues superbly, and the action was on par with choreographed modern dance. Director Don Haefliger could not have done any better with this minimally staged piece, in which people become props in a corporate agenda that is increasingly devoid of meaning.

You must show up for an "Interview" in the large basement theater of First United Methodist Church, Saturday, September 16th at 4:30pm or Sunday, September 17th at 3pm.

Independent Players Spell Out Blessing's Eleemosynary

Five years was worth the wait to finally see the Independent Players' excellent production of Eleemosynary (1985) by Lee Blessing. The unlikely title is a deep dictionary word so recondite it gets in the way of its own meaning and usage. It's a perfect metaphor for the flaws of three generations of women whose preoccupation with arcane knowledge has taken the place of understanding themselves and maintaining meaningful relationships.

A near-capacity audience was seated on two sides of a minimally set space at the Elgin Art Showcase Saturday, as the action shifted fluidly through interconnected moments of narration and dialog anchored to impressions of place and time. The talented cast was well directed to maintain such continuity through the excellent non-linear script.

The overall skill and professionalism of this production was epitomized by Marge Uhlarik-Boller as grandmother "Dorothea," a free spirit whose frustrating formative years evolved into a fascination with theoretical possibilities. Her colorful delivery was perfectly timed to inject comedy that often carried, like the play's abundance of obscure words, layers of embedded meaning.

Dorothea's daughter "Artemis" — from the Greek goddess of wilderness and the hunt — was played with tangible complexity by Lisa Schmela. Her stage movements and body language brilliantly decoded the references in Artie's words: she is always seeking relief from her multiple "attachment disorders" by immersing herself in biochemical research and moving from place to place.

Sarah Bartley played Artie's daughter "Echo," a precocious chatterbox (raised by Dorothea) whose source of joy, object of love, and purpose for living is to know the spelling and definition of every word in English. The frequent spelling recitations and sheer number of words make this role challenging, but far from one-dimensional. 

Echo covers the greatest range of all, from infancy through childhood, and on to maturity in a powerful role-reversal in the closing scene. Like her loquacious, mythical namesake, words were at times an emotionally obstructive handicap, and Echo's voice indeed reverberates with the quirky tendencies of her two mothers. But Dorothea (meaning "God's gift") is the prophet of the family as she repeats, "It's a terrible desire to want to know everything."

Clockwise from upper left: Lisa Schmela, Sarah Bartley, and Marge Uhlarik-Boller.

This ensemble did an amazing job of creating surprisingly relatable characters in vignettes that often consisted of six-syllable words, one-sided conversations and imaginary props. After 39 years, the Independent Players have not lost the knack for assembling together wonderful actors, directors and scripts. 

Eleemosynary, directed by Larry Boller, continues for one more weekend, March 17-18 at 8 p.m. at the Elgin Art Showcase.  Tickets are available at independentplayers.org or at the door.

After 38 Years, Independent Players Still Fresh with "Third"

Elgin's Independent Players theater company have three shows left in their 38th season — three more nights to present Wendy Wassertein's Third, a subtly complex period play that still sounds fresh and often funny ten years after it was written.

Set at an elite New England campus, the play explores the psyche of English Professor Laurie Jameson, an ultra-liberal academic with hardened views of gender, race, privilege, public policy and social status. When she meets an incongruous freshman who doesn't fit her theory of society, she endures two semesters of cognitive dissonance that confirm for us multiple ironies of the human experience, among them, that we tend to exemplify the very qualities that we condemn in others.

Lori Rohr plays Jameson with just the right haught, in prickly spars with her family, colleagues, and students.  Her quick head turns and flashing eyes project the arrogance and prejudice that Jameson can't see in herself, and crucial lines like "I shouldn't be here" (in therapy) and "I still know what I know" are bold-faced code words that signal her self-segregation from a larger, more complicated society.

Woodson Bull, III ("Third") is Jameson's freshman foil and in the title role, Wasserstein's artistic subject (though technically the antagonist) is portrayed stalwartly by Benedict Slabik II. At times awkward, and other times wise beyond his years, Third is an undersized wrestler who grapples with forces larger than himself, but ultimately settles for a draw. The wrestling subtext is clear and well-placed, but perhaps necessarily underdeveloped.

The plot revolves around a term paper writeup of Shakespeare's King Lear, and Wasserstein cleverly employs references to Wilder's Our Town and Austen's Pride and Prejudice as thematic devices throughout the play.  Jameson's aging and demented father Jack, played skillfully by Richard Westphal, is the image of Lear as a confused father, perfected (in a dance) by Third's own theory of the sublimation of desire.

Excellent performances by Molly Wagner (daughter Emily) and JoAnn Smith (Professor Nancy Gordon) add flavor to this well casted five-member ensemble, playing crucial scenes that deepen and advance the plot. Very careful touches by Director Larry Boller, like playing backs to the audience, and shaking or not shaking hands, did not go unnoticed.

With lights and audio on point, and the friendly acoustics of the Elgin Art Showcase helping lift every line, this play can't miss.  Listen carefully for the antecedents in Act One, and you'll relish every masterful dramatic cadence in Act Two of Wendy Wasserstein's final play.

Third continues May 21, 27, and 28 at the Elgin Art Showcase.  Go to www.independentplayers.org for more information.

The Independent Players Take the Trick in "Octette Bridge Club"

Eight Irish Catholic sisters and their biweekly ritual are the ingenious premise for "The Octette Bridge Club," by P. J. Barry (1984), performed for a full house on opening night by the Independent Players.

Beautiful depression-era set design and costumes set the tone for a story that transports us to a time when people still relied on traditional gender roles and brittle social norms to find their place in the world. When these sisters gather to play cards, they gently suppress their classic birth order personalities and find moral support in censoring each other.

Cast of "The Octette Bridge Club" (back row, from left) Lori Rohr, Laura Schaefer,
Beth Hitzeroth-McDonald, Nancy Braus, Angela Douglass; (seated, from left)
Marilyn House, Patricia Rataj, B. J. Franquelli; Christopher Lenard.

Each of the actresses in this excellent cast must rely on careful timing to squeeze her lines in edgewise during scenes cluttered with smalltalk, which masks their real-life problems the way corsets and face powder hide their bodily imperfections. Repeated lines like "You're not yourself!" are subtle signals that even the sisters themselves can't decode.

Yet as the play develops, each artist manages to introduce glimpses of individuality through body language and highly nuanced delivery of an opportunistic script. Then a sudden childish regression takes over Betsy (played by Lori Rohr), triggering a game-changing breakdown as momentous as the crumbling walls of Jericho.

The struggle for true individual identity is not a unique plot trajectory, but this clever script is an excellent choice by veteran director Don Haefliger. Large families have a language and culture all their own, and "Octette" elicited standout performances by Rohr, Beth Hitzeroth-McDonald ("Connie") and Patricia Rataj ("Martha") in challenging roles.

Playing the entire second act in Halloween outfits, the sisters literally compete for the Best Costume award, but only Betsy rips off her veils to expose herself as she truly is. And the card game is a brilliant metaphor for the constant tension between cooperation and competition, switching partners, and "playing the dummy" in a family — and a society — with complex rules.

If you love a relatable story, vibrant acting, or powerful composition, and whether you like comedy or drama, you'll find it in "The Octette Bridge Club," which runs Friday and Saturday nights through March 19th.  For reservations, call (847) 697-7374.

Independent Players at Elgin Fringe Festival

If one could draw a line from Gertrude Stein to Monty Python's Flying Circus, it would pass through Eugène Ionesco's 1950 absurd play The Bald Soprano, staged by the Independent Players Friday at Elgin Fringe Festival.

Two (or three?) couples in a suburban London parlor are essentially a talking tableau against which language itself becomes the protagonist.  Completely awash in prattle, the narrative is just barely conventional enough to explain the presence of actors, yet the characters are strangely absent.

The Independent Players perform The Bald Soprano at the 2015 Elgin Fringe Festival.

The long scenes of loquacity were handled skillfully by the Players, whose delivery of sometimes meaningless lines shifted attention to the art of enunciation. The action, minimal but well-rehearsed, was welcome relief from a script so dense and disconnected it sounds like a memorized dictionary.

In our age of smartphone-powered distractions, we like to lament the loss of conversation and the intimacy it produces between people. But Soprano suggests this is not a new problem: people can converse for years and still not recognize each other—or themselves.

In the end, as the dialogue becomes even more random, structureless and repetitive, the speakers seem to form a collective mind, but it's both more and less than a consensus. Walking in circles, shouting in unison, they finally agree—on precisely nothing.

Though avant-garde theatre is one of those genres that people love to hate, it belongs in a Fringe Festival and the well-directed Players make it worth a look.