From Chopin Theatre to NYC's Barrow Street Theater


- The Sleeperer: How Theatre Oobleck’s The Strangerer got the 3 AM e-mail from New York - Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader 7/3/08

The latest Chicago stage production to head for New York hasn’t exactly been high profile at home. Though it’s had three runs here over the last two years, Theater Oobleck’s The Strangerer managed to fly under the radar of the lead critics at the local mainstream papers. Playwright Mickle Maher says the dailies’ big guns never made it to the show, which leaves it nicely positioned as an “underground” hit. That’s always sexy. And the critics who did make it pretty much raved their heads off, with words like “brilliant” and “hilarious” leaping from their keyboards. Still, when The Strangerer opens July 13 at the Barrow Street Theatre in lower Manhattan, it may face a little marketing challenge. The play’s an odd duck: a take on the Albert Camus novel The Stranger (last read by most of us in high school) wedded to a fictionalized presidential campaign debate—minus the current candidates. In The Strangerer, it’s 2004 and George Bush is facing John Kerry while Jim Lehrer moderates. When I posted news of the New York gig to the Reader’s Onstage blog, a commenter was moved to remark that the idea “just doesn’t seem timely.”

Maher, who plays Kerry, thinks word of mouth will correct that impression. “Bush is still president,” he says. “Everything he’s done, including the war, is all still there.” Besides, the play is “about how we acclimate ourselves to violence and senseless murder.” Maher expects Bush, like Nixon, to be relevant as a character long after he’s out of office, and notes that politics owes a lot to the art of theater. “If you’re going to wage a successful war you have to have the audience behind you,” he says. The real-life Kerry was like a “poorly written,” inconsistent character, whereas Bush was better defined. From a dramatic perspective, Maher says, the election’s outcome wasn’t surprising.

Maher’s script is whip-smart, and his performance in a swooping wig as a narcoleptic Kerry is funny enough, but the success of the play hangs on the two actors who trade off as the implacable Lehrer (Colm O’Reilly originated the part; I saw it with Brian Shaw, who has his man down cold) and on Guy Massey’s performance as Bush. An Oobleck ensemble member, Massey had already played an inspired W in the company’s 2004 preelection show, The Passion of the Bush. At this point he’s superb, nailing every blink, wince, and weird pause.

The ensemble’s origins go back to the University of Michigan in the early 1980s, where a core group of students including Jeff Dorchen, Danny Thompson, David Isaacson, Terri Kapsalis, and Maher founded the Streetlight Theater. They moved to Chicago in 1987 and launched Oobleck in ’88, with performances at Cafe Voltaire. Staging just two or three shows a year, the company’s made it to a 20th anniversary with no staff, no facility of its own—and no directors, who are regarded by Ooblecks as useless interlopers. A headless body of ten ensemble members and miscellaneous associates, operating on an annual budget that will hit $70,000 this year (including a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation), they write and perform their own work, subjecting it to heavy actor input in readings and rehearsals. In Chicago, admission is by donation of about $10—“free if you’re broke, more if you’ve got it.”

Maher says Oobleck was planning to put this show to bed after the close of its three-month run at Chopin Theatre on June 29. But one night he and Massey ran into Chicago actor Amy Warren—now in the New York production of Next Theater’s The Adding Machine—on the Chopin steps. As Maher recalls it, she said, “You’ve got to come to New York,” and they replied, “Yeah, yeah,” figuring that would be the end of it. But Warren followed up, putting a bug in the ear of producer Scott Morfee as well. The upshot was a 3 AM post-Tony-party e-mail from Morfee saying, “Come.”

Morfee says he got hooked on Chicago theater after producing Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe in 1998. He and producer Tom Wirtshafter took over the 200-seat Barrow Street Theatre in 2003 and since then have hosted a number of shows with Chicago connections, including Letts’s Bug, Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow, the musical improv troupe Baby Wants Candy, TJ & Dave (the Reader’s choice for best improv group in our Best of Chicago issue last week), and The Adding Machine (at the Minetta Lane Theatre).

But none of the others came together with the breakneck speed of this one. According to Morfee, Barrow Street will provide the space, handle the box office, assist with marketing (it’s got a 30,000-name e-mail list), and invite the critics. The Oobleck people will travel and be housed on their own dime. Details of the box office split hadn’t been nailed down at press time, but it’ll be “in the neighborhood of 50/50,” says Morfee, for the anticipated six-week run. Back at home, Oobleck’s scheduled to open a new election show at the NeoFuturarium in late September.



STRANGERER” TO NY - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 6/24/08

Theatre Oobleck is heading to New York’s Barrow Street Theatre with “The Strangerer,” its successful Chicago-bred political satire by Mickle Maher. The show, which will give its final performance here this Sunday at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, will open Off Broadway (in the same house where Tracy Letts’ “Bug” was produced) on July 9. Imagined as a 2004 televisiondebate between George Bush and John Kerry, the play skewers many aspects of contemporary American politics and weaves aspects of Albert Camus’s existential novel, “The Stranger,” into the mix. Tickets: (773) 347-1041.



Back By Popular Demand

Critic's Choice "The Democratic presidential primary campaign, with its confusing attacks and counterattacks, offers Theater Oobleck the perfect background for a remount of this 2007 hit, which views the theater of politics through the prism of Albert Camus' 1942 novel The Stranger.

Set at a televised 2004 faceoff between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Mickle Maher's comedy skewers the notion that debates about candidates' positions and records can give voters what they really need—insight into these would-be leaders' secret selves and the hidden obsessions that might shape their attempts to impose rationality on an irrational world.

Like Camus' murderous antihero Mersault, Maher's Bush (brilliantly portrayed by Guy Massey) is driven by a stubborn—and perhaps mad—passion for the absolute. Maher himself impersonates the stiff, somnolent Kerry, while Colm O'Reilly and Brian Shaw alternate as PBS icon Jim Lehrer, whose attempts to moderate the absurd debate epitomize the media establishment's ineffectuality.

The Strangerer is funny, smart, scary, and frighteningly relevant" - Albert Williams, Chicago Reader 4/10/08

Don’t Miss! - “Mickle Maher’s 21-gun salute to Camus and George W is back with a vengeance” TimeOut Chicago 4/24/08

Critic’s Pick of the Week - WBEZ Dueling Critics "It is funny, it is beyond brilliant... it’s the best piece you’ll see this year about American politics, the news business, or existentialism."

Critic’s Choice - Chicago Reader 3/1/07 "incisive, subtle performances...nothing short of brilliant"

5 of 6 Stars - TimeOut Chicago 2/22/07 "...spot-on performances by three character actors at the top of their game... dazzling erudite humor [and] haunting resonance" - One of the Top Ten Plays of 2007

One of the books on President Bush's 2006 vacation reading list was Albert Camus' absurdist tale of senseless murder, The Stranger.

In hopes that the French philosopher might shed some light on the recent political clime - or vice versa - Mickle Maher's new play The Strangerer collides several of Camus' works with the first Bush/Kerry presidential debate in 2004.

A murder mystery with the murderers in plain view, it asks one of the most important questions of our day: Why does our president want to kill a lot of innocent people?