EDWARD GOREY'S DISPIRITED DIVERSION FOR CHRISTMAS
Take two Gorey tales, the glumly delirious results of an attempted
Christmas Carol adaptation; weave in the poker-faced gigantism of writer
Sean Graney at his broadest; add the physically engaged, pictorial
storytelling of director Halena Kays; and you get a fair idea of this
absurd little holiday treat.
The material defies much further description. Several apparitions guide
cipher Edmund Gravel through a series of deadpan gothic tableaux, but
except for some polite mockery of the master's well-intentioned
didacticism, Gorey's riff is otherwise tangential to the Dickens
classic. Revisiting a favorite device, Graney sets the play within
another, heightening the oblique whimsicality of every vignette; Kays
fleshes out the framing bits to convey an illusion of amateurism while
maintaining a firm hand on the wandering narrative. Aaron Cedolia brings
a twitching hilarity to his supercilious narrator, and the supporting
players stud their performances with comic tics. Steve Wilson is all
twittish charm as Gravel, and Matt Miller embodies baffled exasperation
as his taciturn giant-insect companion, Bahhumbug. Playing a bunch of
precisely overdone spirits, Eric Thomas Roach nearly steals the show.
It's cheerfully bad, utterly meaningless stuff; but in the words of
Gorey himself, "If you're doing nonsense, it has to be awful."
--Brian Nemtusak, Chicago Reader (12.5.03)
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At a time of year when many theaters are giving audiences a hearty dose
of tradition and holiday cheer, the Hypocrites are doing the opposite,
with its first ever holiday-themed show, "Edward Gorey's
Dispirited Diversion for Christmas."
Sean Graney, the Hypocrites' artistic director, has adapted for the
stage two of the American author/illustrator's dark and surreal stories,
both of which highlight a contemporary confusion about what the holidays
mean to each of us and how they should be celebrated. "We have no
idea what [Christmas] is about," admits Graney, "but it is a very
important part of our lives [and] we just want to figure out what it
means."
Edmund Gravel, the central character in Gorey's "The Haunted Tea Cosy,"
and "The Headless Bust," is trying to find his place in society during
the holidays. In "Tea Cosy," loosely inspired by
Charles Dickens' classic holiday story, a Bahhum Bug joins Gravel on
journeys led by three Christmas spirits. Whereas Scrooge's adventures
have a definite purpose, Gorey creates a series of what he calls
"affecting," "distressing" or "heart-rending" scenes best described as
non-sequiturs. "Headless Bust" picks up as the New Year approaches with
Gravel and the Bahhum Bug taken on another trip. Gravel can't learn
anything from his journeys and so is forced to look inside himself. The
message of the books and of this adaptation, Graney says, is that "to
find meanings in the holiday you have to find meaning in yourself."
Graney translated the two books for the stage as an amateurish Christmas
pageant. "We are being loyal to his books, but we're
performing the performance of his books, so we're being
meta-theatrical," Graney says.
The entire project Graney describes as an attempt "to figure out what
it means to have a Christmas pageant for a godless, ironic and
existentialist society." Director Halena Kays, a Hypocrites ensemble
member who is also artistic director of Barrel of Monkeys, a theater
group that stages the often nonsensical stories written by Chicago
Public Schools students, didn't hesitate to stage such an odd holiday
offering, which includes a dreamlike second act where actors manipulate
dolls to act out Gorey's illustrations. "This is similar in strange ways
to
Barrel of Monkeys because there's a lot of absurdity to it and you have
to embrace it."
The show's costumes, sets and staging mirror, with intentionally varying
degrees of success, Gorey's gothic drawings. "The pictures are a gift,"
Kays says. "They're beautiful, so you copy them, and you look like you
know how to stage a play." The play is a comedy that toys with
theatrical conventions but it's not staged only for laughs, says Kays.
"It's not that we're cynical, disaffected youth making fun of the
holidays so much as really, honestly, trying to find meaning."
-By Jenn Q. Goddu, Special to the Tribune (11. 28.03)
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Edward Gorey has long been known as the creator of those archly ominous
little black-and-white drawings of Victorians in distress -- figures
that have taken on an extended life, whether as the distinctive
trademark of the PBS "Mystery!" series, as the inspiration for Christmas
cards with a distinctly anti-fruitcake bias, or as the source of quirky
dramatic and balletic stage adaptations.
The latest theatricalization of the
illustrator-storyteller's work comes in the form of The Hypocrites'
hourlong frolic "Edward Gorey's Dispirited Diversion for Christmas," now
in the intimate first floor studio space of the Athenaeum Theatre. It is
a blending of two Gorey stories -- "The Headless Bust" and "The Haunted
Tea-Cosy" -- that have been adapted by Sean Graney and directed by
Halena Kays in ways that are giddily playful at times, but too often
undermined by a surfeit of campiness.
Framed as a little series of gothic
vaudeville vignettes narrated with just the right dyspeptic edge by
Aaron Cedolia, the show (which features a neatly designed, heavily
draped proscenium and a nicely detailed little winter interior courtesy
of Graney) is at its zany best whenever the four members of the
Impassioned Amateur Women's Drama Club are onstage.
Dressed in their prim white blouses and
long skirts, with heaven-sent smiles that belie their decidedly more
randy proclivities (we learn, quite quickly, that their skirts are often
swept above their heads for a well-known purpose), the Impassioned
Amateurs perform some of the more demented versions of traditional
holiday carols you will hear this season, including a manic and
altogether memorable rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." The
spirited quartet -- Amanda Putman, Birgitta Victorson, Stacy Stoltz and
Jennifer Grace -- are an unabashed hoot, one and all.
Graney uses the unhinged goings-on in
Gorey's tales to explore why we are simultaneously so bent out of shape
by the whole holiday season, and still so desperate to cling to its
rituals. And while the characters are Victorian in their role-playing
they are very much identifiable as timeless types, with Edmund Gravel
(Steve Wilson) as the geeky outcast who throws a big party. The
insectlike Bahhumbug (Matt Miller), and an annoying spirit, played by
Eric Thomas Roach, tip the balance into the overdone category.
Nevertheless, there are those Impassioned
Amateurs -- as well as a human fruitcake -- and they, alone, are worth a
brief encounter.
-by Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times Theater Critic (12.8.03)
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