Unsettling but fertile ground of Turret: A Red Orchid ensemble members Michael Shannon and Travis A. Knight star in Levi Holloway's eerie new play - Jerald Raymond Pierce,  American Theater Magazine 5/21/24

"I don't think it's a horror play. It's much stranger than that."

It's hard to tease playwright Levi Holloway's new play Turret (in a sold-out run through June 22) any better than those words from the man himself. Starring A Red Orchid Theatre ensemble members Michael Shannon and Travis A. Knight, Holloway's play-which he called "a spiritual cousin" to the horror and thriller genres-welcomes audiences into an underground bunker for an eerie journey, something akin to a mix of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village with Groundhog Day. It's a work that draws on Holloway's own experiences dating back to the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in 2020.

"I was feeling pretty claustrophobic, and every day kind of felt like a loop," said Holloway, who also directs this production.

Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, Green and Rabbit (Shannon and Knight, respectively) are surviving in an underground bunker, hidden away from a mysterious enemy looming just outside their vault door. Days are almost rote, with Rabbit running on a treadmill while Green issues a strange series of cognitive tests: from confirming basic information, like their mission, to trials of precognition and challenges to Rabbit to predict the details of a photo before it's shown to him. Day in, day out, the same. From there, what starts as a militaristic relationship turns fatherly, and then into something else entirely, as the play progresses and a visitor upends everything.

It is in that first turn, from parental to otherwise, that Turret morphs from the all too familiar feeling of repetition, of being stuck inside during the lockdown days of the pandemic, into something much more personal. In addition to wanting to create a play for Knight and Shannon-whom Holloway called "two of my favorite actors on the planet," while acknowledging that it's both "horrifying and thrilling" to work with them-he said he also wanted to speak to the experience of losing his dad, who died around the time he started working on the play.

"My dad was a big horror guy, introduced me to horror," Holloway explained. "We loved films like The Thing and Alien, and the way those films wear the jacket of a thriller, of horror, but at the heart of them, they're about something really personal."

Bringing things full circle, just as Holloway finished the play, his son was born last December. "He was born on the same birthday as my dad," Holloway said. "I couldn't finish the play until that happened, because it changed everything."

It's perhaps no surprise, then, that Holloway decided to direct Turret himself, adding another layer of vulnerability and investment to a show he's already deeply connected with. A Red Orchid didn't hesitate, Holloway said, in championing the idea. While Holloway didn't direct Grey House, the 2019 play that received its world premiere at A Red Orchid prior to a Broadway run in 2023, he said that's an exception-one of only a handful of plays he's written that he didn't direct.

"Collaboration is my favorite thing on the planet," Holloway said, "but with Turret, I felt a responsibility beyond the script because it's so personal, and because I could see it at a very high resolution in my brain."

Shannon lauded Holloway's ability to mesh his imagination with personal experiences and feelings to create a fertile ground for actors to play in. He hesitated to say definitively, but Shannon thinks it might be his first time working on a new play with the person who wrote it also directing it.

"Levi sees things very cinematically," Shannon said. "It's not just about the words or the dialogue or the characters; he has a vision that's a total vision."

Speaking in the week before tech, Holloway said the rehearsal process was exciting, and that he and the actors were crafting moments together and sniffing out parts that could be deepened or cut. But as we spoke, it was clear that he and his team knew that the next phase would be the most challenging part of the process. And now that I've seen it onstage, I can see why: From the dual-level bunker to the plentiful projections, from an imposing furnace off to one side to a treadmill dead centerstage where Knight has likely already run a marathon since the show has opened, Turret incorporates many physical elements that simply had to be imagined in the rehearsal room.

"The rehearsal process before we moved over was, in large part, an act of faith," Holloway said. "The challenge is, once you start putting things on tables and things in hands and walls, is the check you wrote going to cash? Everybody is doing their utmost to make sure that we are creating something that is spectacle-driven but intimate."

Spectacle-driven but intimate: four words that also could have described Tracy Letts's Bug, a similarly unsettling production that leaves audiences doubting and wondering while managing to be a feast for the eyes and the mind, and in which both Shannon and A Red Orchid figured from its inception two decades ago. Grounded by unsurprisingly outstanding performances, Turret speaks to what keeps artists like Shannon coming back to Chicago: It's a bold swing that gives artists like him opportunities they might not have anywhere else. Shannon said he values having a space where he and his fellow artists can take risks. A Red Orchid, Shannon explained, has always been comfortable with discomfort-an identity he said makes the theatre company well worth holding on to.

"There's a lot of theatres that were around when we started out that aren't anymore," Shannon said. "The thing about the longevity of this space is that, the longer it's around, the richer it becomes with its age. So you want to keep contributing to it in order to strengthen that and make sure that it doesn't disappear."

Recursion in a post-apocalyptic bunker: Turret is a powerful puzzle box of a play - Karen Topham, ChicagoOnStage 5/13/24

"Recursion is "the process of defining a function or calculating a number by the repeated application of an algorithm." The more you repeat it, the more refined it becomes. By its nature, a recursive structure can make a play feel circular...unless you look deep into its soul.

Set in the post-apocalyptic future, Levi Holloway's riveting Turret is more than the trying to survive the end of the world drama it clearly is on the surface. Below that surface, it is a thoroughly engaging examination of masculinity as well as the need, the desperate need, for some kind of connection with someone else. It is also a puzzle box of a play, in which things may not be as they appear and even death might not be permanent; you will need to watch the entire show to begin to really understand it.

A Red Orchid Theatre's ambitious production, directed by the playwright at the Chopin Theatre, will blow you away. The sheer size of the production answers the question of why it couldn't be done at the company's Wells St. home. Grant Sabin's bunker-like design overwhelms the stage-and us-with multiple levels, a huge central hamster wheel (actually a home for an often-used treadmill), an upstage hatch-like door that leads to whatever is out there, a decently well-stocked bar, a wall on which to project what is on a computer screen, and even a piano. Combined with Mike Durst's futuristic lighting and Jeffrey Levin's intense wall of sound, this is a show that refuses to be ignored and demands your full attention.

Two men-Green (Michael Shannon) and Rabbit (Travis A. Knight)-appear to have resided together in this "turret" since Rabbit was just a baby. (A third, Lawrence Grimm's Birdy, briefly but memorably joins them in Act Two.) The two are soldiers in a war against an unseen enemy that is constantly trying to breach the turret's defenses, trying to keep themselves more or less sane with conversation, old music-shades of Fallout-and weirdly outdated technology that makes you wonder just how long they've actually been doing this.

The structure of the play is recursive; things keep happening and then happening again, changing incrementally with each repetition. (This is what creates the puzzle box: nothing will make sense in an absolute way until we've seen it all, but the tension-and the strange and awkward relationship between the men-is a constant throughout.) The repetitions and echoes allow us to learn more about the characters, especially within a motif that has Green quizzing Rabbit as he runs the treadmill wearing wired headgear that allows the inquisitor (and us) to see his responses as he thinks them. As with everything else here, these quizzes follow the same patterns, though the answers are not necessarily the same; it is in their alterations that we start to see more about who these men are to each other.

Holloway, both as writer and director, is not afraid of dialogue-free scenes. I didn't actually time it, but I think there was no dialogue at all for at least the first five minutes of the play as we watch the kind of rote, repeated actions that men might engage in just to fill time. The music, too, is repetitive; they play it to stay sane and human, but there is ample evidence that one or both of them have already lost their minds...or even their humanity.

The antiquated technology-Paul Deziel's computer screen projections have an 80s IBM feel, though there are occasionally filmed moments from the past that most likely are solely within a character's mind-continues the motif of sameness. Nothing ever changes here. Even the whiskey on the bar seems never to empty. This place might as well be hell. (Maybe it is.)

The performances are all top-notch. Shannon's Green, the older and more experienced soldier-and father-figure to the younger Rabbit (whose pejorative rank is "pollywog")-is totally focused on his "mission." Shannon is a smart enough actor, though, to allow honest emotions to filter through Green's "commander" facade, humanizing the character enough that even the looped interactions of reality can't keep us from empathizing with him. Knight's Rabbit, always desperate to be trusted to go outside and "scout" even with the dangers posed by their enemies and a poisoned atmosphere, is even more tightly wound than Green. There is often the indication that he may lose control...and hints that this has happened to him before. With Birdy, Grimm has a character who has already admittedly lost his mind. (Hiding while watching your wife get literally torn apart will do that.) Unlike the others, he does not need to hold back and can really put it all out there. Birdy shows us where Green and Rabbit are likely to be heading, and it isn't pretty.

This is not an easy play any more than the situation in which its characters find themselves is a normal one. Through Holloway's clever script and his cast's powerful performances, though, there is a lot to examine in this Turret"

Levi Holloway's Turret is a 21st-century Endgame.  His world premiere with A Red Orchid Theatre is bleak, brilliant, and a little Beckettian - Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader 5/17/24

"If you've been looking for the 21st century's answer to Samuel Beckett's Endgame, your wait is over. Levi Holloway's Turret, now in a world premiere (also directed by the playwright) with A Red Orchid Theatre, taps into the same existential dread and odd father-son dynamics present in Beckett's 1957 masterpiece.

But Holloway (who won raves locally with the world premiere of Grey House in 2019 at A Red Orchid before it opened on Broadway last year) isn't offering a mere palimpsest of Beckett. He's also providing an absorbing, confounding, and sometimes anguishing portrait of how parents (or parental surrogates) can pass down generational trauma to their offspring-even if they're apparently among the last people on earth.

Green (Michael Shannon) and Rabbit (Travis A. Knight) are Holloway's answer to Beckett's Hamm and Clov, the two men living in a bunker-like setting after some cataclysm has left the world "corpsed." But while Beckett was opaque on what drove Hamm and Clov (and Hamm's parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in garbage receptacles) into their claustrophobic world, Holloway's Green makes it clear early on that there was a war. Just who was waging the war and its causes are unclear, but Green's side lost. The elder of the two men, Green is clearly the head honcho in the dark world of concrete and thrift store furnishings (including an incongruous spinnet piano) housing them.

Grant Sabin's multilevel set design impressively fills the larger stage at the Chopin Theatre, where A Red Orchid has moved for the sake of this production, and the fiery furnace at one side adds a suggestion of hellfire, counterbalanced by Mike Durst's crepuscular lighting design. Jeffrey Levin's sound design and original music bring in both familiar mid-20th-century hits like Solomon Burke's version of "I'll Be Doggone" and the Platters' "Only You" (the latter in a charming interlude where Green and Rabbit impersonate high school kids at a dance) and an underscore of otherworldly hums and echoes.

At the play's beginning, Rabbit is running on a treadmill surrounded by a large metal ring, wearing some sort of electronic device attached to his head for several moments. When Green finally engages Rabbit, he begins asking his apparent protege/underling a series of questions that feel like part of a daily ritual: Did you dream? What is your name? What is your rank? What is your mission?

Rabbit's answers aren't voiced by Knight but rather projected on the walls; as are, later on, videos of Green and a child version of Rabbit sitting at a table having conversations that echo those we have heard previously. (Paul Deziel's projections design captures both the retro nature of the computer equipment Green uses and glimpses of the mysterious vastness lurking outside Rabbit and Green's hideaway.)

Perhaps the most poignant and revealing question Green asks is, "What country remains?" Rabbit's answer ("You. Me.") sets up the tangled web that binds them. It's the "universe of two" envisioned by Kurt Vonnegut's protagonist in Mother Night (also set in a world beset by terror, destruction, and uncertainty).

But in this universe, deja vu seems to be a driving element. Is Rabbit always the same Rabbit, or is he a series of Rabbits created anew each day? Early on, Green upbraids Rabbit for jerking off to a vintage centerfold. "We're surrounded by all the yous to come, every day after today. Each one of those yous will look back on this you and have a hard time with what they're seeing." So is Rabbit a clone of a clone? (Shades of Caryl Churchill's A Number.) Or is this Groundhog Day after a holocaust?

If you like straightforward sci-fi explanations for a dystopic world, you won't find them here. But the resonances with other works that I found in Turret should not be construed as evidence that Holloway's vision is derivative. Sure, postapocalyptic landscapes populated by a father and child aren't exactly new (hi, Cormac McCarthy). But, to my mind, what separates and elevates Holloway's story is the underlying sorrowful sense that no matter what Green thinks he's doing to protect Rabbit, he's going to fail. Over and over again.

That fear of failure-as a father, a friend, a leader, a human being-is the real enemy facing Green. And fear of failing our loved ones, whether in times of deep global distress or just in the course of daily living, is perhaps the most universal feeling humans share. At one point, Shannon's Green, ruminating on the loss of a pet, observes, "They show up, and they don't know you, but they need you. So you give them what they ask for. Feed, bathe, teach, be there. But they always leave. And you always lose." It seems pretty clear he's not just talking about a cat.

Shannon played an anguished father plagued by apocalyptic visions so memorably in Jeff Nichols's 2011 film Take Shelter. More recently, he directed the film version of fellow Red Orchid ensemble member Brett Neveu's Eric LaRue, about the parents of a kid who shot up his school confronting their own guilt. Here, he brings a choleric and resigned air to Green. He's the weary hard-drinking "shellback" to Rabbit's "pollywog" (old naval terms designating sailors who have crossed the equators and those who haven't). Knight's Rabbit, filled with both febrile tension and young-man-in-a-hurry derring-do, provides a compelling contrast.

The balance between them is upset in the second act with the introduction of Lawrence Grimm's Birdy, another survivor who has been talking via ancient chat links with Green earlier in the play. Clad in a bearskin over a dingy tuxedo, Grimm's character is loquacious, filled with stories about Dmitry Belyayev's experiments at domesticating silver foxes and with barely concealed envy at the closeness shared by Green and Rabbit. His recitation of all the small, mundane things he misses about his slaughtered wife is a gut punch.

I'm not going to pretend to fully comprehend all that happens in Turret. But it's a rich and absorbing, and surprisingly funny, creation of a world that is simultaneously familiar and horrifying, comforting and cold. Which mirrors what "home" means for a lot of people in our preapocalyptic timeline. And it's brilliantly performed by Shannon, Knight, and Grimm-all members of A Red Orchid Theatre's ensemble doing some of the strongest work I've seen onstage from them.

Early on, Rabbit gives Green a Swiss army knife for a birthday present. "It is a knife. But that's not all it is. That's just one part of it, and not the most important part at all," he tells the man who may or may not be his father.

"What's the most important part?" Green asks.

"That's up to you," Rabbit replies.

I think the same answer applies to audiences who want to cut through Holloway's demanding and knotty work. Like Beckett, he doesn't give away easy answers. But like Beckett, he's also not a self-conscious nihilist or cynic. Just as Hamm asks Clov to share something "from your heart," Green and Rabbit end each of their endless days with this exchange: "Something kind." "Something kind back." They may have lost the actual words of comfort, but not the desire to offer solace to each other. Perhaps, in a corpsed world, that desire is the most we can hope for."

Review: ‘Turret' by A Red Orchid is Michael Shannon doing his intense best work - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 5/13/24

"Levi Holloway and Michael Shannon, a killer combination if ever Chicago theater produced one, have been to the big time and come back, formidable of craft but ever in search of intimate substance. Shannon's career has taken him from the back room of an Old Town bar to a major Hollywood career and two Academy Award nominations. Holloway's last play for A Red Orchid Theatre, "Grey House," went to Broadway last summer.

Both have returned this spring to A Red Orchid, which has accommodated both the needs of Holloway's dystopian but darkly comic play, "Turret," and Shannon's box office pull by moving to a larger space at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood.

The resulting production is really something: I've watched Shannon on stage and screen for some 30 years and this performance is right up there with his best work, especially when it comes to his longstanding ability to dissect masculinity and reveal one of those men who feels deeply but so lacks the language of emotional vulnerability that his communication skills are authoritarian at best and, at worst, bestial.

In the case of Holloway's phenomenally rich piece of writing, one of many plays and screenplays penned during the panicked pandemic that imagines with notable veracity a scenario where the world no long functions in civilized fashion, those common male failings have a powerful impact on a young person, played by Travis A. Knight with an intensity to match Shannon's own paternalistic work. Knight clearly is playing a a surrogate son.

Simply put, "Turret" is a searing drama about a loving son and his alcoholic father hidden within a dystopian genre play about two men stuck in an underground bunker when the world above has ceased to exist. Look closely, though, and all of that falls away, as these two actors clearly understand. Love, after all, is the most tested in these kinds of circumstances.

We never entirely find out why the world has ended, except that there has been some kind of war and we are watching the fate of the losers. If you've seen "The Last of Us," "Civil War" or especially "Leave the World Behind," you will have a flavor of the ambiance: a heavy protective door, anxious looks at the ruinous situation outside, enemies in the trees above, physical and mental things done to pass the time, personal meltdowns, technological meltdowns and a return to the analog.

But Holloway is a far more minimalist writer than the writers of those works and "Turret" is sparse and taut and cagey of divulging information. The two men, Shannon's Green and Knight's Rabbit, aren't short of resources in their bunker and they still have a kind of wacky MS-DOS system to allow them to communicate, especially as Rabbit runs on the treadmill that dominates Grant Sabin's epic setting. They're in a pseudo-military relationship, it seems, and Green boozes from the many bottles on the set. They're a team, heck, an entire world, alternately needy and aggressive, sweet and violent, highly functional and a total disaster for each other.

There's another rub, too. Someone arrives from outside. The less you know about Birdy, played by Lawrence Grimm, the better, except to know that Grimm, a stalwart of this theater, is doing the best work of his career.

I suspect that has a lot to do with Holloway directing his own work. Typically, that's not a great idea, but when a vision for a metaphoric landscape is this precise, metaphoric and detailed, it can be desirable for the writer to get precisely what he wants, what he envisages in his head without some other competing vision in the way. This is a heavily scored piece from sound designer Jeffrey Levin, and every beat and bang and thump and piece of music has been thought out with uncommon precision. The level of production here exceeds anything I've seen at A Red Orchid these last many years, and that is no small compliment given that theater's decades of creative achievements.

It hard needs stating that it is not every day at an off-Loop theater you can see an actor of Shannon's caliber, or one willing to dive so deep for this kind of story in this kind of theater.

The script needs some attention late in the second act, where one major narrative twist doesn't fully make sense and the sudden advent of shorter scenes throws the production off its otherwise exquisite internal rhythm. But as was the case with "Purpose," the Steppenwolf drama now likely going to Broadway, that is a minor concern. "Turret" is another example, coming hard upon, of Chicago theater at its very best. You would not want to miss the chance"

A dystopian world is just the tip of the iceberg in riveting 'Turret' at A Red Orchid - Catey Sulivan, Chicago Sun Times 5/13/24

"There's a fair amount of tantalizing ambiguity to interpret in the world premiere of "Turret," Levi Holloway's cryptic, vivid survivalist story. Although to clarify, the three-man production from A Red Orchid Theatre is not merely a tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.

Running through June 9 and directed by the playwright, "Turret" is a multi-genre labyrinth that incorporates sci-fi, thriller and horror into a story that depicts the devastation of loneliness, the pull of parental love and that peculiar, unnerving strain of deja vu that hits so hard it makes you question the soundness of your mind and memory.

Featuring A Red Orchid ensemble members Michael Shannon, Lawrence Grimm and Travis A. Knight, "Turret" will startle your eyes and bend your brain.

Don't dally if you want tickets: Shannon's program bio doesn't mention his Oscar nominations ("Revolutionary Road," "Nocturnal Animals"), but when the big screen/Broadway/"Boardwalk Empire" veteran shows up in a Red Orchid cast, you can safely assume tickets will be in high demand. Wisely, A Red Orchid has moved "Turret" from the company's tiny, hallowed Old Town space to West Town's roomier Chopin Theatre.

But it's not Shannon we see first when the lights come slowly up on an image straight out of a Michael Crichton novel. Amid a crackling buzz that sounds like twitching live wires, a dim figure running on a treadmill emerges from the cinematic murk (tremendous work by lighting designer Mike Durst and sound designer/composer Jeffrey Levin throughout).

We're in a circular bunker that's all stark lighting and harsh, metallic edges. There's a surreal, nightmarish quality to everything. Rabbit (Knight) is wearing a halo of wires that squiggle up from his skull like electrified hair, giving the impression he'll be sucked into a massive ceiling fan if his frantic pace falters. His scalp, we eventually see, is plugged into a computer that allows him to communicate telepathically.

Lurking in the shadows like a mad scientist is Green (Shannon), who asks the questions and runs the computer. To Rabbit, he's a father figure, commanding officer and prison warden.

Their "conversation" - projected on the bunker's rounded walls in a font that evokes the AOL chat rooms of the 1990s - fills in the jagged pieces of their circumstances. There's been a global catastrophe. Rabbit and Green might be the only survivors. They live according to an "edict" they repeatedly recite: They are a country of two. Their allegiance is to their country. Their mission is to hold their position until reinforcements arrive. They don't know if that will ever happen.

Between their haunting treadmill sessions and Pong-like computer games (Paul Deziel's projections are strikingly retro, as you'd expect in a destroyed world), Green and Rabbit sing and dance to 1950s crooners. When they awkwardly embrace in a dance, "Turret" highlights the essential sweetness of genuine human connection.

But even then, an edge of ever-present violence cuts through the refuge/killing field that set designer Grant Sabin manages to render both bleak and homey. The music can't erase the blazing, clanking furnace in the turret, a crematorium-sized oven that feeds on animals and people alike.

Rabbit and Green's affectionate, combative relationship is also defined by ongoing, harrowing diminishment: Both men are slowly forgetting their words - particularly the words used to evoke or capture human emotion. "Something kind," Green will say between arguments about whether Rabbit can leave their turret. "Something kind back," Green responds. It's an eerie depiction of mental decline prompted by isolation.

Their "country" of two grows by a third when Birdy (Grimm) makes his way to their bunker, sporting a bearskin cloak over a battered tuxedo. In those two garments, costume designer Myron Elliott captures both the savagery of the current world and the tattered remnants of the world that's been all lost.

As the dynamic in the turret shifts with Birdy's arrival, Holloway's dialogue twists toward an unexpected threat. Annihilation could come from within the turret as well as without. Like werewolves beneath a blossoming moon, the trio in the bunker virtually reek of something bestial, monstrous and barely contained under a mask of human skin.

The all-star cast here packs Holloway's words with tension and vigor, crafting a verbal puzzle that shifts and mutates, ultimately leaving questions that will swarm through your brain long after the curtain call.

Shannon moves from glowering, ruthless authority to playful affection with riveting intensity. Grimm delivers both comedy and chaos with equal impact. Monster or mortal, Knight's alternately endearing and unnerving Rabbit has charisma to burn.

In turns, ominous, humorous and flat-out weird, "Turret" is a star turn for everyone involved".

In ‘Turret,' Michael Shannon's Return To Chicago Theater Offers A ‘Puzzle Box' Of A Play - Gwen Ihnat, BlockClubChicago, 5/14/23

Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon stars in "Turret," an enigmatic stage production from A Red Orchid Theatre, which Shannon co-founded in the early '90s. 

"WICKER PARK - Theatergoers searching for easily tracked plotlines and a tied-up ending may be stymied by "Turret," an enigmatic but dynamic local production that opened last week and is already selling out performances.

The world premiere from A Red Orchid Theatre company is being performed through June 9 at Chopin Theatre, 1573 W. Division St., and stars Oscar nominee Michael Shannon, Travis A. Knight and Lawrence Grimm.

Levi Holloway, who wrote and directed "Turret," has been a Red Orchid ensemble member since 2019. He said he started working on "Turret" in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic.

"I think the pivot everybody was making was like, ‘How do you make art right now? I never intended for it to be produced during the pandemic, but it was certainly influenced. So is claustrophobia part of it? For sure."

"Turret" is tricky to write about because there are a lot of unknowns from the start of the play that gradually unfold over the next two hours and 15 minutes, and the discovery is part of the (thrilling) process for the audience.

Holloway offered a vague synopsis: "It's about a couple of guys who are in a bunker underground. And we don't know when, and we don't know where: We just know that they seem to be soldiers. And that something terrible has happened outside. And that terrible thing wants to get inside. So their great want is to keep safe, and to hold for reinforcements."

Some major life events informed Holloway's creation of "Turret," he said.

"Even though I wouldn't want gender and its constructs to shape the play, I certainly was interested in my own relationship with my boyhood and my manhood and the transition between the two. Especially as those things are connected to my relationship with my dad and my brand new relationship with my brand new son, [who] oddly has the same birthday as my dad, who passed when I started writing this."

That parallel brought up interesting questions for Holloway to explore in the play. "It's definitely about boyhood, and manhood, and parenthood, and son hood, and brotherhood," he said.

Grimm added, "It's this odd dance of intimacy that feels particularly male to me, which is around wanting to connect and wanting an opportunity to be closer, but not being able to ask for it articulated."

The two men in the bunker are Rabbit and Green, portrayed by Knight and Shannon, making a triumphant return to Chicago theater. A tertiary third character, Grimm's character, Birdy, "is someone who's out there in the wild woods in the Pacific Northwest trying to survive," Holloway said. "So when these two worlds intersect, crazy stuff happens."

All three actors are Red Orchid ensemble members. Shannon and Grimm were two of Red Orchid's original founders back in 1993.

Shannon said the production of "Turret" reminds him of his early days in Chicago theater, which has shaped his current career in Hollywood.

"Particularly when I started out back in the '90s, there was something just refreshingly non-commercial about it. I mean, it wasn't like you were trying to crank out some sort of product in order to pay the bills, or whatever. Nobody was making any money, and nobody was getting high off the hog or anything. But you could exist in the zone that was kind of outside the grind [of] our capitalist society, where you could actually just be in this kind of imaginary dimension, and, and explore very complex and difficult questions and not worry about whether there was a result that pleased people. It just didn't bother me back then. Maybe there wasn't a line around the block for these esoteric little productions, but we got to do them, regardless. And it was those experiences that helped me become the artist that I am now."

Turret" continues Red Orchid's tradition of thought-provoking, not-easy-to-unpack theater. The set's stark but fascinating bunker becomes somehow ripe with possibilities as the play taps into universal questions of identity and connection, buoyed by phenomenal use of technology that makes for an intense, intimate experience for the audience.

Knight said "Turret" offers "an opportunity to see humanity in different scenarios and circumstances that we could potentially relate to. And I think Chicago does a really great job of making that kind of intimate and authentic theater, engaging and relatable, and inclusive.

"Who are we when our backs are against the wall?" Knight said. "And what are we looking for in our relationships with others? I think those are some of the questions that people might ask themselves after watching our play that is full of extreme circumstances and situations with these two people, hunkering down from the threat that's outside. But there's also a lot of heart and vulnerability in this play, which is what I think drives a lot of humanity every day."

Shannon added: "Levi uses the term ‘puzzle box.' It has a lot of questions and it's never exactly what you think it is. It's always changing. And to me that's exciting to do and it's the kind of stuff I like to watch. So I think people will be active participants in it, and everybody will have their own version of it. And that's a precious thing."

Shannon also said that the organic, evolving experience of live theater remains a huge draw for him.

"You have to have an agreed-upon thing; at bare minimum, the audience will see X, Y, and Z. But then the extra, hopefully every night, is the surprise. You surprise yourself, or you surprise each other. You don't ever want to be not paying attention or looking out for that. Because that's where the real gold is."

It adds up to a bombastic experience that may leave the audience shaken, but with a ton to ponder following a performance that's hard to forget.

"I think it would be impossible to walk out of here without some questions," said Grimm.

"I hope all the answers are on stage," Holloway said, "But if they're not, I encourage the audience to find their own."

Michael Shannon is back to searing, in-your-face Chicago theater at A Red Orchid - Courtney Kueppers WBEZ, 5/8/24

Hollywood's go-to character man has a star turn in a world premiere of "Turret" - from an ensemble he says is still "willing to go anywhere and try anything."

"Everyone wants a piece of Michael Shannon. The venerable character actor has been booked and busy in recent years as Hollywood's de facto supporting man, appearing in everything from Showtime's "George & Tammy" alongside Jessica Chastain to "Nocturnal Animals," for which he earned his second Oscar nomination.

But now he's back in Chicago - and that's hardly an exaggeration. Even though he lives in New York and commutes back there on weekends to see his daughters, Shannon has once again found his way back to A Red Orchid, the small theater company in Old Town that he helped found more than three decades ago.

"Red Orchid is where I became an actor," Shannon says. "At this point, I don't really come back [to Chicago] unless it's for Red Orchid."

For the next several weeks, he's starring in "Turret," a new play, in a role written with him in mind: a grizzled soldier in a bunker, in the wake of a war that nearly eliminated humanity. It's the type of show A Red Orchid is known for, and it was written and directed by ensemble member Levi Holloway, whose play, "Grey House," ran on Broadway last summer.

At a rehearsal nine days before previews opened, Shannon enters the eclectic, tchotchke-filled Chopin Theatre and a chorus of "Hi, Mike!" echoes through the room. Shannon, who is 49, is tall, but not imposing. He walks with an off-kilter gait and, as Holloway put it, wears a sort of world weariness on his face.

In "Turret," Shannon's character Green is training his apprentice, Rabbit (Travis A. Knight), in hopes of someday being able to bring their species back from the brink, although the prospects look bleak. The two-story set looks like a silo that's been sliced open. It's here that Green and Rabbit live, train their minds and bodies, and play games of cribbage.

Brooding and authoritative as Green, Shannon approaches the character development process like a beat cop, Holloway says - dogged in his hunt of honesty.

"He might squint a little bit and work on a moment, and then because of his pursuit of the truth, that moment can become very stripped down to its essential qualities," Holloway says.

Getting Shannon in a Red Orchid show is not as simple, logistically, as it used to be. Kirsten Fitzgerald, the company's artistic director, said the actor works hard to not make it overly complicated for the company because he knows their resources are limited - but he's in high demand and getting on his calendar takes considerable pre-planning and sometimes, creativity. For example, "Turret" was originally slated to open a week earlier, but another project was added to Shannon's schedule, so the team moved the production back - something they're able to do as a smaller theater.

"There are a lot of people who want his talent in the room," Fitzgerald said. Most recently, reports have Shannon attached to a new historical thriller about the Nuremberg trials, along with Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.

But for right now, Shannon's focus is on the stage. "Turret" is being staged at the Chopin in Wicker Park - the first time the company has ever opened a show outside their own space. In part, that's because Shannon's name is on the program.

"The question we had to ask is, well, can we fill that space? It has twice as many seats as