Ranked in Chicago Tribune's Top 10 Shows To Watch This Fall

Chicago Tribune 9.7.03 - Michael Phillips & Chris Jones,
'This fall's 10 [Plays] to Watch' :
#1. Balm In Gilead, The Hypocrites at the Chopin Theatre

'Balm in Gilead'

September 15, 2003
By Hedy Weiss - Theater Critic

John Malkovich's production of "Balm" in the early 1980s helped put the Steppenwolf Theatre Company on the national map. So it is only fitting that it is now being revived by the very gifted young director Sean Graney, and his company, The Hypocrites, most of whom were in grade school or even diapers two decades ago. (This fact also accounts for the more punkish look of the current production, with spikey Mohawks replacing Steppenwolf's long-haired hippie style.) Wilson's play also feeds into an obsession of Graney's -- the loss of innocence in a cruel world.

Graney (who doubles as set designer) has assembled a cast of 26 actors and set them down in the confines of a fiery red-walled greasy spoon in New York that aptly suggests a room in purgatory. This is where junkies and dealers, pimps and prostitutes, transvestites, deadbeats and thugs congregate in all their pathetic, drug-fueled, search-and-destroy desperation, and where the naive and weak, the disappointed and lonely, are bound for destruction or desolation. Graney, who has a taste for the absurd, knows how to mix the hallucinatory, the naturalistic and the Brechtian, with the lighting of Heather Graff and Richard Petersen vividly punctuating the action and supplying much needed stops along the way.

The whole story unfolds in one tight 24-hour period, as Joe (Steve Wilson as a most believable sacrificial lamb), a naive young street kid looking to make some money, finds himself fatally trapped in a drug deal at the very same moment he has met Darlene (Niki Prugh), a lost young woman from Chicago whose innocence also hangs in the balance. In the play's second act, Darlene spills out a long, rambling tale of her past relationship while Ann (neat work by Jennifer Grace), a still-pretty prostitute, listens. Running almost 30 minutes, the monologue is a theatrical coup with Tennessee Williams overtones. And Prugh -- in a role that was a stellar showcase for Steppenwolf's Laurie Metcalf -- carries it off with remarkable aplomb, endowing it with a far less ironic tone and a crushing yet offhanded sadness. She is a lovely, emotionally engaging young actress.

Within the all-important ensemble (great fun to watch though at times too high-pitched), many of the actors have a chance to step into the spotlight. Robert McLean is riveting as the junkie who is forever chilled. Geoff Button offers sharply honed observations on loneliness. Vance Smith is first-rate as an addict in freefall. Sean Sinitski is a truly terrifying enforcer. And Samantha Gleistan's glam junkie says little but hints of Courtney Love, just as Sharon Lanza's brooding lesbian character communicates through movement. Danny Belrose's hustler is full of style and energy. And there is nicely demented, spaced-out work from many others in this big, raucous, anything-but-subtle pageant of life on the skids.

RECOMMENDED

Hailed as one of the best directors in Chicago, Sean Graney has a reputation for tackling incredibly difficult plays and turning them into delightful evenings of theater.

Graney's version of Sophie Treadwell's seldom-produced play "Machinal" was one of the highlights of last year's off-Loop theater season.

It was predictable that a director with Graney's ambition and love of unconventional plays would want to tackle the Mt. Everest of alternative American plays: Lanford Wilson's wild, sprawling production about street life in New York City "Balm in Gilead."

Many directors have tried this one and many have gone down in flames as they tried to find order in Wilson's crowded scenes and long, crazy dialogue.

What couldn't be predicted, however, was how great Graney's production would be or how well he could re-create the down and dirty world of the East Village without ruining the tender love story that, believe it or not, lies at the center of the play.

The secret to Graney's success has been the high level of performances he gets out of his ensembles. This goes double for "Balm in Gilead," a play that has no fewer than 26 characters.

Graney coordinates the moves of this huge cast with the grace of a seasoned choreographer and the efficiency of a traffic cop.

Even more impressive, though, is how much he finds in Wilson's script. The play was written in the early '60s, when New York's off-off-Broadway scene bristled with talent.

All the major playwrights of the next two decades, including Sam Shepard, were on the scene. And everyone tried to outshock, outamaze and outdo everyone else. Toward that end, Wilson wrote a play in which five, six, seven characters talk at once. And a play in which things happen all over the place - in the coffee shop, on the street in front of the shop, in adjacent booths within the coffee shop.

Wilson wanted to create moments where the audience suffers from sensory overload, and he succeeds. Now he was not just doing this to show off. These noisy scenes contrast with the quiet romance that blooms between a would-be junky and a prostitute. And when the play is done right, as it is done here, the show touches the heart as often as it assaults the senses.

It helps, of course, that Steve Wilson and Niki Prugh have great chemistry together as lovers, and that each plays these potentially melodramatic characters - Wilson's character is actually on the run from the drug kingpin - with so much subtlety and sensitivity. But then why single out these two when everyone in the show hits the right notes in their performances?

The last time I saw a production of "Balm in Gilead" with as many strong performances as this one was in the early '80s, when I caught Steppenwolf's production of the play. This was the production that helped put Steppenwolf on the map.

Since then, other companies have tried to ride on Steppenwolf's coattails, doing their own takes on the play and hoping things would come out well. Sometimes a production would come close, as Anna Shapiro's did in the early '90s. (She was just a college student then; she is now a director to be reckoned with at Steppenwolf.) More often the results are noisy or sophomoric.

Graney's moving, fast-paced production is neither pointlessly noisy nor sophomoric. It is not for everyone, of course. The number of characters with punk haircuts, not to mention all the transvestites and prostitutes that round out the cast, will give you a clue of what kind of show this is, and whether it is too raw for your sensibilities. But if you are looking for a powerful, more or less uncensored look at the seamy side of life, you would be hard pressed to find a more intelligent, graceful and worthy production than Graney's version of "Balm in Gilead."

"Balm in Gilead"

out of four

By Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader

Lanford Wilson's breakthrough play about junkies, hookers, trannies, and small-time hoods is nearly 40 years old. And as with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, time has dulled its once-shocking evocation of life on society's margins. Yet the piece--which sealed Steppenwolf's reputation as the best ensemble in America more than two decades ago--still has a powerful hold on actors and directors. Sean Graney's nearly perfect staging for the Hypocrites seethes and sings with hopelessness, humor, and the desperate search for drugs, power, and love.

The play opens with a plaintive soul ballad (sung beautifully by Anthony "Rev." Wills Jr.), interrupted by the thunderous, angry entrance of the coffee shop's denizens (Graney's wonderfully cast ensemble includes some skinheads and goths, suggesting an early-80s Lower East Side setting). In a visceral, intelligent choice repeated throughout the production, whenever these lost souls are about to find some peaceful communion with another, they're consumed by the surrounding rage and chaos. As Darlene, the new girl looking for her niche in this dark world, Niki Prugh skillfully negotiates the shift from naivete to despair, and she delivers the play's famous (and famously long) second-act monologue with a mesmerizing simplicity. Steve Wilson as Joe, the dealer who wins and breaks Darlene's heart, seems slightly less assured at first, but by the end he's captured the tragic essence of this lost boy, caught in a game he can never win.

by Sid Feldman, NEWCITY Chicago

America’s awareness of its own drug culture has come a long way since "Balm in Gilead"’s 1964 premiere. It’s strange to think that the turf this play covers, specifically the late-night scene of a New York coffee shop chock full of junkies and hookers, was still shocking when John Malkovich revived it for Steppenwolf in 1980. Over the last twenty-three years, however, drugs and their related problems have become well-worn ground and it is a testament to this play and its playwright, Lanford Wilson, that "Gilead" remains vital and interesting. This play never questions whether drugs are good or bad, but instead explores why people continue to make choices that they know will destroy them. With a cast of almost thirty, seemingly all speaking at once, the audience is nearly steamrollered by the very first scene in this production by The Hypocrites. The rest of act one finds power in both the writing and in the sharp direction by Sean Graney. Whenever the play threatens to get heavy-handed, something stylized or humorous is there to save it. The major problem lies in the second act and Graney, like many directors before him, has failed to solve it. Wilson inserted an agonizing ten-minute monologue, well-delivered here by actor Niki Prugh, that all but kills the momentum of the play. Afterwards, The Hypocrites do well to recover some of the lost energy. Although the set is inventive and adds an element of expressionism that the play calls for, the sight lines are bad from the sides of the thrust stage. Get there early and sit in the center.

   A world of strung-out mayhem explodes in ``Balm in Gilead.'' Its toxic source is revealed in a monologue that comes in the first act of the Hypocrites theater company production of Lanford
Wilson's play. As directed by Sean Graney, the broken heart of ``Balm in Gilead''
bleeds into focus with a character named Fick (Robert Mclean). He's murmuring through an all-night nod, slumped on a stool in an all-night diner. At one end of the diner's grimy counter is the skeletal specter of a woman who is all bones and eye sockets, frantically swatting at invisible bugs. In a vinyl booth, a quartet of mohawked punk kids twitch and jabber in varying degrees of DTs. Oblivious to all of them, Fick, in a sad singsong voice, ponders what it would be like to have friends. He's not talking about anything as ambitious as a soul mate or a life partner. He's merely having a small, wistful reverie on what things would be like if he had a few buddies to listen to him and help him through the shivers.
   But Fick, like the rest of the damaged souls in ``Balm in Gilead,'' has no such companions, nor does he have much chance of ever finding any. He'll feel alone and cold until his next fix. When it wears off, he'll be alone and cold again. He moves in an isolated, vicious circle.
  Although playwright Wilson structures his play around the inherently dramatic coping mechanisms of addicts, the razor wire of truth that runs through ``Balm in Gilead'' is universal: The chill of living as an active addict is extreme, but Needle Park is hardly the only cold climate on the planet.
Loneliness is common as dust. The desire for companionship is primal.
   Graney, a remarkable director capable of peering around angles and into corners that many of us don't even realize are there, has mounted a production of harrowing force. That's especially notable given that ``Balm in Gilead'' is treacherous to produce for several reasons. Chief among them is that there are more than two dozen characters in the cast, most of them on stage all the time, all of them in some phase of drug-fueled decay. ``Balm in Gilead'' demands exquisitely skilled direction and
actors to prevent it from deteriorating into an incoherent frightfest of screaming misfits.
   The Hypocrites company has both the ensemble and the direction to
make the play succeed in all its feral glory. In the intimate Chopin Theatre studio space, Graney has created a claustrophobic, slut-red dive of a diner. The look is wonderful and terrible, a realistic rendition of a home-away-from-flophouse for pushers, pimps and addicts. You can almost smell coagulated pools of grease and grief. You can see the veins throb on characters' foreheads when they start jonesing. Amid clamor fueled by anger, loneliness and futility, Graney freeze-frames the action at various points, creating incongruously poetic snapshots of an ugly, malfunctioning world.
   There are several storylines that emerge from the carefully orchestrated din, but it's the less obvious moments that sear the most indelibly in ``Balm in Gilead.'' Luke Hatten brings a tough dignity to Franny, a transvestite prostitute who frequents the diner and skulks for clients in doorways. Sean Sinitski is as scary as Hitler as the stone-faced enforcer for the local drug lord.
As the heroin addict Dopey, Geoff Button delivers a jittery, disturbing exposition on the need for familiarity and routine, even when the routine is demeaning and mind-numbing.
   ``Balm in Gilead'' plays out against Joseph Fosco's well integrated sound design of passing traffic, sirens and other urban chaos. The pivotal lighting design by Heather Graff and Richard Peterson emphasizes and punctuates key aspects of the production.