The Wedding (TUTA) *remount*

Have you ever heard of this company, TUTA?
You probably have and were like, "What the hell does that stand for? I can't go see a show by a company with some goofy acronym, there just aren't enough hours in my life to spend them on an acronym-having-ass theatre company."

Well, good sir, today is your lucky day because I will now reveal to you what TUTA stands for.
Ready?
The Utopian Theatre Asylum.

You can see now why they go by TUTA because it is ultimately less confusing, and since most of their audience doesn't speak English because they are all from Sarajevo, nobody knows what it means anyway.

TUTA is now doing a remount of "The Wedding", what some considered the greatest production in the history of Chicago Theatre.
I mean, last year it was on every Top 10 list including ours, even though we didn't see it. That's how good it was.

I finally went to see it last weekend, and let me tell you, a lot of what they said is still right.

The Wedding is one of Brecht's more goofy plays about a wedding literally falling apart in front of our eyes. Now, the play is, of course, dated and a lot of the lines don't make very much sense, but that's the breaks when you want to do a translation of a hundred year old play.

So, the script is sort of meh, but what makes this show so super great and the Top Play Ever Made is the cast. They are all so smart, and just fucking perfect at their respective parts.

Now since this is some crazy Eastern European theatre company, I'm sure they workshopped it for 6 years before they made it to a play, but let that be a lesson to the rest of you. Workshop a play every now and then, and don't just throw up the first dumb thing you think of.

There's an actor in town who is about to be added to my beautiful Triumvirate of Glory.
Do you remember who is in it? There is John Taflan, Dan Granata and Rob McLean, and now it will be made a Diamond of Excellence with the addition of Trey Maclin.

I bet you don't know who Trey Maclin is yet, but you will, because he is more talented than everyone you have ever met combined.
Maclin plays the husband who is watching his home and life fall around him, and he does it with such great skill and humor, it's hard not to just recommend the show on him alone.
But if that wasn't enough, the rest of the cast is outstanding, too.

Well let's see. There's the unflappable Jaqueline Stone as the wife. She plays this slutty little jerk that is impossible not to love/hate.
This guy named Kirk Anderson, who works all over town, plays the Father just right.
You know what? Everybody is great.

The play sometimes has the feeling of a Sean Graney play without Sean Graney. Which is to say, it's an old play given a new life and radical staging, but it's missing that sense of danger that Graney brings. The feeling that the actors could literally tear apart the theatre. So maybe what I'm saying is that it's a little too measured for the amount of destruction we see happen to our heroes.

But all in all, the critics were right, and you won't find a better show to see right now in town.

Go see it and tell The Utopian Theatre Asylum we sent ya!


A

-Anderson Lawfer, Eric Roach