Peepshow
International Performance Studio; Facets Multimedia and Goethe Institute

"Solid Chicago players, provide the play with better acting than most such avant-garde efforts in Chicago.. The Gallery space itself, still in the process of construction, is most promising..there's a welcoming lobby in front, and the auditorium, with its bare brick walls and high ceiling, offers a large, open area for staging? - Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune 5/16/91
?This week marks its official return to theatrical use as At the Gallery, a multiarts space whose inaugural offering proudly reeks of Eastern European-flavored avant-gardism" - Chicago Reader 4/18/91


4/18/91 - 6/30/91

Thu-Sat 8p; Sun 3p


"Peepshow' stars lend good acting to avant-garde" - Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune 5/16/91 - "In "Peepshow," we meet once again our old friend of the avant-garde drama, the lusty rebel artist.

Willie, the play's hero, is first seen lolling in a bathtub, a fetus ready to emerge from his mother's womb with a typewriter already attached to his body. Once out, clothed in a dripping wet diaper, he is quickly initiated into the pleasures of language and sex by his nurse, and for most of the following three hours, when he isn't busy pecking away at his typewriter, he spends his time quarreling or coupling on different beds with various wives and mistresses.

In the end, spurned and scorned and ready to die, he returns to the lap of his loving mother.

Written by George Tabori, the veteran European-American playwright and scenarist (and former husband of actress Viveca Lindfors), "Peepshow" was premiered in 1986 at the Transformtheater of Berlin in a production staged by Henryk Baranowski, a Polish director who has resettled in Germany.

Under sponsorship of Chicago's International Performance Studio, Baranowski has now remounted the play at the new Gallery space, at 1543 W. Division St., with a cast of local players.

Baranowski's production design, handcrafted with some ingenuity in the different stage wagons that are wheeled on for the play's 11 scenes, has created some vivid moments throughout the drama, including a scene in which Willie's dying father, moving with the aid of a walker, slowly shuffles off into the darkness.

Solid Chicago players, such as Morgan McCabe as Willie's mother, plus newcomer Jeffrey Frace as Willie, provide the play with better acting than most such avant-garde efforts in Chicago. And an original musical score by Peter Aglinskas adds some richness to the proceedings.

"Peepshow" nonetheless is an obscure yet overly familiar exercise in avant-garde staging, halting and insecure in its delivery.

The Gallery space itself, still in the process of construction, is most promising, however. There's a welcoming lobby in front, and the auditorium, with its bare brick walls and high ceiling, offers a large, open area for staging.

`Peepshow' - A play by George Tabori, presented by the International Performance Studio and directed and designed by Henryk Baranowski, with music by Peter Aglinskas, lighting by Ken Bowen and costumes by Melanie Park. Opened April 18 at The Gallery, 1543 W. Division St., and plays at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday through June. Running time: 3:00. Tickets are $17 to $20, with discounts for students, senior citizens and groups. Call 281-9075.


"On Stage: Eastern European avant-gardism" - Albert Williams, Chicago Reader 4/18/91 - "Peepshow," proclaims an eye-catching red-and-white sign over a doorway on Division near Milwaukee. But it's not what the casual passerby might think.

The door leads into a white-tiled building that was built as the Chopin Theatre in 1918; it retained that identity for nearly 30 years, then in the 1950s was taken over by a savings and loan company. This week marks its official return to theatrical use as At the Gallery, a multiarts space whose inaugural offering proudly reeks of Eastern European-flavored avant-gardism.

Peepshow is a play, and At the Gallery is hosting its U.S. premiere. But according to Henryk Baranowski, who is making his American directorial debut, "Every time [the play is done] is a world premiere." The play, about a young poet's psychosexual conflicts, was written in 1984 by George Tabori, a Hungarian best known in the U.S. for his play Brecht on Brecht and his screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess and Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony.

Baranowski, a Pole who now lives in Berlin and works extensively throughout Europe, previously staged Peepshow in 1986 for his own company, Transformtheater. The current production grew out of acting workshops that he led here earlier this year under the auspices of the International Performance Studio, founded by Nicole Dreiske. (IPS is copresenting Peepshow with At the Gallery's Polish-immigrant owner-developer Zygmunt Dyrkacz.)

Despite its continental antecedents, Baranowski believes the production will have a distinctly local flavor: "In creating this play together, we tried to understand the power between these actors, me, and this text--what moves us together," he says. "These actors are a prism through which I see the city. They are this city."

Baranowski's work is noted for its offbeat use of props and settings; in the version of James Joyce's Ulysses that he staged in Warsaw in January, he flooded the floor of the theater--including the seating area--with four feet of water (the audience sat on oil drums, he says). Most of the action of Peepshow is set on the shaky, exposed metal springs of eight onstage beds. "I don't like stories in theater," he says. "Stories for me are something on the surface." What he's interested in, he says, "are the energies--the relationships which are pushing people to do something."

Peepshow plays April 18 through June 30 at At the Gallery, 1543 W. Division; for more information call 281-9075.

Author
George Tabori (hungarian playwright)

Director
Henryk Baranowski

Performers
Kimberly Bruce, Ellyn Duncan, Jeffrey Frace, Morgan McCabe, Noel Olken, Farrel Wilson, Barbara Barrows

Production
Nicole Dreiske, Peter Aglinskas, Ken Bowen, Melanie Parks, Kit Baker, , Henryk Baranowski, Sheila Ray

Tags: Polish, Theater, , 1991