Reviews

by Steven Dietz

All Photos By: Jay Westhauser

Founded in 1997 by Sean Graney, The Hypocrites have earned a reputation as one of the most innovative and exciting Off-Loop theater companies in Chicago. Whether performing works by Absurdist and Avant Garde masters or finding new life and relevance in American classics, The Hypocrites surprise and challenge audience expectations of what it means to be a part of live performance.

The Bald Soprano

Mud

Miss Julie

Machinal

Death of a Salesman

Equus

Directing

Alice in Wonderland (The Theater School at DePaul University)
Ubu Roi (Columbia College)
Peer Gynt (Roosevelt University)
The Gas Heart (Lake Forest College-Garrick Players)
Top Girls (University of Chicago)
Big Love (University of Chicago)

Teaching

University of Chicago
Lake Forest College
The Theater School at DePaul University
Columbia College

Contact me here!

ORIGINAL PLAYS:
The 4th Graders Present An Unnamed Love-Suicide (click to purchase)
A 4th Grader kills himself and he leaves a play as a suicide note. The other children of his class are forced to perform his play as a memorial service.

It’s Lonely Out In Space
A wheelchair bound man gets a chance for absolution when his college girlfriend contacts him out of the blue. They meet in a rocket ship-themed bar, and contemplate loss and forgiveness.

Porno
A director obsessed with Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage tries to direct a porn version, because that is the only place he can find funding.

En Mortem
A hipster couple on a road trip to save their relationship meet their doppelgangers at a hotel in the middle of the woods. Sex, drugs and bear attacks.

Several crappy 10 minute plays, ranging from the silly to the mythic.

ADAPTATIONS:
Oedipus, Oedipus At Colonus, Antigone, Women Of Trachis, Philoktetes, Ajax, Elektra.
All of Sophocles’ extant plays (I love that guy.) Written to be performed in an insanely long cycle, but can be done separately.

Miss Julie by August Strindberg
The play is broken into four movements, focusing on broad archetypical, symbolic strokes to inform the inner life of the character, rather than the slow language driven by psychology.

Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
10 actors, keeping the sense of the language. Focusing on the schizophrenic, violent environment of the play.

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen
This is a crazy fun play. I wanted to make a version for four actors, one dude and three women. Not so many monologues as the original, is that good or bad?

Woyzeck and Leonce und Lena by Georg Buchner
The only one missing is Danton’s Death. This Woyzeck is terribly fragmented. Leonce und Lena is terrible silly, and biting. Hopefully, just how Buchner would have wanted it.

Camille / La Traviata by Dumas fils
This combines the opera libretto and music with the original melodrama. This is kind of a mess.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
I wrote a four-person version of the story. It is loosely about a man obsessed with Frankenstein, who creates another man. He is held up in an abandoned hotel then gets visited by Elizabeth from the story, and the drowned girl from the movie. I stole scenes from so many other sources to try and create a literary monster, from Dr. Faustus, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Macbeth, Prometheus Bound, etc.

Tartuffe and The Imaginary Invalid by Mr. Moliere
Moliere is funny! (If he doesn’t rhyme, or ramble on for too long.) Both shows feature heightened contemporary language, hoping to be funny for people today. (And not people who think something can be funny without laughing like an idiot.) Tartuffe not only condemns religious hypocrites, but also condemns people who condemn religious hypocrites. Imaginary Invalid focuses on money and health, but it’s not political.

UPCOMING:
September ‘10: Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare, a six-person adaptation by me at Court Theatre.

October ‘10 Tartuffe by Moliere, adapted by me with Northwestern University.

November ‘10 Possible remount of The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes adapted into a musical by G. Riley Mills and Ralph Covert with Chicago Children’s Theatre.

December ‘10 Pirates of Penzence by Gilbert and Sullivan with The Hypocrites.

March ‘11 Woyzeck by Georg Buchner adapted by me with The Hypocrites.

More Stuff to be announced.

I would love to work for you, I am very friendly and I am a hard worker. Email me
 

The Show

By John Beer

Nov. 26, 2009

The Mystery of Irma Vep, which debuted in 1984, is perhaps the archetypal camp play. Camp, per Susan Sontag, privileges artifice over beauty, style over content—which holds largely true of Ludlam’s lovingly ridiculous spoof of horror movies and Gothic novels. The twist that sets Irma Vep apart from, say, the Annoyance’s lineup is a quick-change structure that enables two actors to play the myriad denizens of Mandacrest, the English manor bedeviled by all manner of monsters. The play becomes as much about the challenges it tosses to its performers as the dark secrets that Lord Edgar Hillcrest (Hellman) conceals from his new wife, Enid (Sullivan).
Those challenges are brilliantly met by this dynamic Laurel-and-Hardy pair. Sullivan, whose massive frame gives Lady Enid an almost architectural grandeur, gets the finest tour de force: He engages in a seemingly impossible back-and-forth between Enid and his other major character, the one-legged servant Nicodemus. Hellman wields a mean hatchet as the murderous maid Jane and, as pith-helmeted Lord Edgar, intrepidly plumbs the depths of Egyptology. While the first act could run at an even more manic clip, Graney directs with a steady hand. In the second act, at moments such as Enid and Jane’s strangely potent dulcimer duet, this Irma Vep achieves a sublime fascination, conveying Ludlam’s affection for his misbegotten sources. And Graney’s audacious closing move adds yet another layer of meaning to this daffily compelling play.

The Show

By Rick Reed

10-13-2004

After spending so much of my free time in theaters over the past five years, I treasure the words, “90 minutes, no intermission.” I treasure them not only because it means I will have a bit of personal time left in my evening, but also because when a production goes over the two-hour mark, it’s often because its ponderous and self-indulgent, the result of a playwright or director too in love with his or her work to think of cutting anything.

Thankfully, The Hypocrites’ powerful and compelling production of Peter Shaffer’s Tony-award winning play, clocking in at around 2-1/2 hours, is not a minute too long. This is a play and a production (with spirited direction from the inspired mind of one of Chicago’s most exciting young directors, Sean Graney) that does superbly what all good theater should do: grabs you in its clutches and refuses to let go. You forget about time. It achieves this feat by giving you a deeply engaging story, characters you can care about (even ones that have done reprehensible things), and a lot to think about after you leave the theater.

By now, Shaffer’s psychological tale of a boy who has inexplicably blinded a stable full of horses and the psychiatrist who unearths the disturbing rationale behind this atrocity is fairly well known, in part because of a 1977 film version starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth, and because of its sensational subject matter. Because this is a sensational story and because, on close reflection, it does have its flaws (the therapy scenes which comprise a big portion of the play are formulaic in their rhythm of build up, revelation, and catharsis that all come a bit too easily), it’s important that its production be put in the care of highly creative people. Happily, the Hypocrites have more than earned that mantle, and they continue to do so with Equus. One is so engaged in the story and the fine performances (mainly from Geoff Button as Alan, the boy at the center of the story, Halena Kays a young girl who ignites Alan’s passions in more ways than one, and Karin McKie as Alan’s beleaguered mother, Dora), that let us see into the hearts and souls of these flawed, but very human characters. J.B. Waterman is the “lead horse”, Nugget, in the show’s sextet of horses and its to Graney and his actors’ credit that these human horses are never self conscious or hokey (which they could be in lesser hands), but sexually charged representations of equine grace and power. We understand, from the chorus’s fine work, Alan’s confused sexual attraction and his quasi-religious worship of the animals. In the role of psychiatrist Martin Dysart, Kurt Ehrmann does solid work, although he could turn down the intensity in spots (only in spots), so that he would have a fuller connection with the other actors on stage (he sometimes employed a faraway, thoughtful look when he should have been reacting to whoever was on stage with him). Minor quibble, though. Ehrmann makes logical choices to making an emotionally charged part real and understandable. It is the psychiatrist’s questioning of the good he actually does with a case like Alan’s and how the case reflects his own life that form the basis of the play and allows its central metaphor (about the value of normalcy in a world where true artistry and passion are in too short supply) to spring elegantly from the boards.

The Hypocrites really deliver here, giving us a show that resonates with intelligence and sparkles with creativity. It’s one of those “don’t miss” occasions people like me don’t often enough get the chance to champion.

The Show

By Chris Jones

October 8 2004, 3:00 PM CDT

Incredibly, some three decades have passed since Peter Shaffer’s once-edgy “Equus” first awakened London and New York audiences to the steamy and sensual fusion of first-time sex, wide-eyed horses, errant parents and filial guilt.

Most of the audience members at the Chicago revival from The Hypocrites weren’t even born when this post-absurdist psychodrama first galloped onto the international theater scene, snagging both a Tony and an unusually broad following in the 1970s.

But thanks to an uncommonly passionate production from the director Sean Graney, those young viewers at the Athenaeum Theatre sat riveted in their seats. This inventive, hyper-kinetic show might — and probably should — become the biggest hit of The Hypocrites’ institutional life.

In recent years, the popularity of “Equus” has waned, due in part to its talky nature, a certain pretentiousness, and a horses-as-Greek-chorus structural device that can become high comedy in errant hands. I can personally attest to that.

But its themes were prescient.

Although taking a cue from Sophocles, Shaffer re-popularized the mystery-drama in which the detective-protagonist must face his own demons to help his client. You can see echoes of this play in everything from the 1984 Clint Eastwood movie “Tightrope” to Thomas Harris’ “The Silence of the Lambs” to “The Sopranos.”

Shaffer was part of an established progressive movement — his final conclusion that violence can be a component of desirable passion recalls what Anthony Burgess said in the novel “A Clockwork Orange” in the 1960s. But when it comes to freeing the form of contemporary drama, “Equus” was a trailblazer without peer.

This is not a script that rewards irony or timidity. And Graney was smart enough here to take a bevy of presentational risks and forge a production in which the stakes are barely removed from life and death. The result is a show that keeps your eyes out on stalks all night.

There’s no question that Shaffer intended Martin Dysart as a far calmer and more introspective individual than the one depicted here by Kurt Ehrmann, an intensely emotional actor who plays the shrink as a man in screaming crisis. It’s not a subtle performance (nor one everyone will admire), but it nonetheless drives the angst of this show in a way that really works. And when Ehrmann shows a softer side with the kid, it has a huge impact.

As Alan Strang, the kid in question, Geoff Button offers a truly splendid performance completely without guile or a single dishonest moment. He’s credibly British, credibly traumatized and credibly empathetic. And if you have all those things in place, you have solved most of the problems of the play.

Halena Kays, meanwhile, is light years away from the typical soft romanticism of Jill as immortalized by Jenny Agutter in the 1977 film version of “Equus.” Kays is perkier, peppier and less sweet. And especially in the famous nude scene, that works too.

The most impressive aspect of this show, though, is the staging. Thanks to a striking original score from Kevin O’Donnell, a deft use of a turntable by Graney and a quietly brilliant piece of physical acting from J.B. Waterman as Nugget the horse, the show’s complex, oft-blown scenes with the horse chorus carry astonishing power here.

When Button’s Alan throws his limp body against Nugget’s, the audience gets a palpable personal sense of the soft, wet, warm, complicated comfort provided by a horse. That’s the core of “Equus,” and I have never before seen it evoked with such sensual authenticity.