Sketchbook/X-Men: First Class (Collaboraction) Compare/Contrast

A sketchbook picture of the X-Men

Last Saturday, I saw X-Men: First Class and Collaboraction’s SKETCHBOOK: Evolution -- both during opening weekend! Since I had caught the fifth installment in the X-Men series earlier in the day, it was weighing on my mind as I sat in the audience later that night in Chopin Theatre. The movie and festival seem ripe for comparison. After all, both focused loosely on the theme of evolution! Below you’ll find my running comparison of the elements in the sci-fi action blockbuster, X-Men: First Class, and the festival of avant garde short works, Sketchbook: Evolution.

Franchise History

If you are unfamiliar with these two franchises, and the Genus: Species format of the titles didn’t tip you off, allow me to clue you in: both X-Men: First Class and SKETCHBOOK: Evolution are part of successful, long-running series. I won’t bother getting into the whole Marvel-ous history behind the X-Men franchise. What’s important to know for the purposes of this comparison is that the first X-Men movie came out just one year before the first Sketchbook festival. Coincidence? Unlikely. But check this out: there have been 11 Sketchbook festivals, and only five X-Men movies! SKETCHBOOK clearly has the upper-hand in terms of output. (And let’s just be honest: X-Men 3 was barely serviceable, and X-Men: Origins? Absolute garbage.)

I haven’t seen any of the earlier SKETCHBOOK festivals, so that’s about all I can say on this subject.

X-Men: C+/SKETCHBOOK: A-

Acting

X-Men: First Class stars the guy from Inglourious Basterds (the one with the unconvincing German accent) as Magneto, and according the IMDB, the voice of Gnomeo plays Charles Xavier. It also features that hot girl from that movie about growing up with an extended family of meth dealers in the Ozarks, except they dolled her up in this one so she actually looks attractive, and so then she forgot how to act? On the other hand, SKETCHBOOK: Evolution stars your freshman roommate from DePaul Theater School, a barista from Intelligentsia who handed you a flyer while you were ordering a coffee and scone, and Steve Wilson’s high school acting class.

I’d say the performance quality in these two ventures was about equal: there were some great performances and there were some amateur performances. Pint-sized theater prodigy Ada Grey was in one of the sketches, and she absolutely stole the show. Ada is six years old, and I’m pretty sure that her theater blog has more followers than Iews You Can Use (but that’s okay, we’re not sweating it, RIGHT GUYS?). And it turns out she’s also a natural performer, too. Of course. WTF. She is six years old! I couldn’t even tie my own shoes when I was six. Honestly, Ada Grey was probably the most evolved thing in the whole festival.

X-Men: B/SKETCHBOOK: B+

Plot

It’s a little unfair to try to compare plots, because SKETCHBOOK: Evolution had like 16 plots, more or less (some of the pieces didn’t technically have “plots”), whereas X-Men: First Class, being borne of a single script, had one plot. But this is as good a place as any to mention “The Franchise,” a sketch that spoofed blockbuster franchises and had me wondering about the eight dollars I’d spent on X-Men: First Class. (For the record, I don’t regret it.) “The Franchise” poked fun at Hollywood’s tendency to recycle successful blockbusters into stale carbon copies, to the point where they fall into the absurd.

Generally, I’d have to say that the storylines present here were mostly uninspired (and I’m talking now about both X-Men: First Class and the majority of the pieces in SKETCHBOOK: Evolution). The stories were entertaining, yes, but the theme is supposed to be evolution here, right? Genetic mutation! Rapidly advancing technology changing the way humans function! Shit like that! There has to be something more original that this incredibly talented theater community can dredge up than a sketch about an iPhone intervention, or a story about a pair of two-dimensional scientists who discover the third dimension. The fifth X-Men installment also suffers from tired ideas that tend to weigh down the action, but that’s Hollywood, so what do you expect really?

Since I’ve been told that I have difficulty managing my expectations, I’m adjusting the grades for “plot” based on the fact that I had extremely low expectations for X-Men: First Class, and perhaps unreasonably high expectations for SKETCHBOOK: Evolution.

X-Men: B-/SKETCHBOOK: B

Special Effects

This is a no-brainer, right? X-Men: First Class obviously takes this one. X-Men’s budget was like a million times SKETCHBOOK’s. I don’t actually know the budget for either of these ventures, but it’s not even a fair fight. So I’ll give SKETCHBOOK: Evolution an A for effort. They had a freaking awesome puppet. And there were some interesting things they tried to do with overhead projectors.

(Could air-conditioning be considered a special effect? SKETCHBOOK gets an F for air-conditioning.)

X-Men: A/SKETCHBOOK: A

Final results

So which should YOU go see, X-Men: First Class, or SKETCHBOOK: Evolution? What do you think I’m going to say? This is a theater site, right? Look, SKETCHBOOK: Evolution closes in just a couple weeks. X-Men: First Class, however, will likely be available in one form or another for eternity. Based on the grade point average I’ve calculated for each of these two events, SKETCHBOOK: Evolution get the upper hand, ever so slightly. But that doesn’t even account for live theater’s limited shelf-life. Once SKETCHBOOK closes, you won’t be able to find it On Demand or on Blu-ray. Go see this show!

X-Men: B/SKETCHBOOK: B+/A-

-Joe Tansino

Cherry Smoke (The Side Project GUEST REVIEWER JOE TANSINO)

One of the actors in this play tried to start a fight with me. He got all up in my face. He might have threatened to tear my throat out. I wasn’t scared, though. I got in my fair share of brawls growing up on the mean streets of suburban Connecticut, and I was 99% I could take him, even though he was bigger than me. I gave him the dead stare, and he backed off. Then he started threatening some other, meeker-looking audience member sitting next to me.

Fish is an animal. I don’t mean that in the obvious sense. No. Fish is the name of the character who threatens me and everyone else in the audience in the first scene of side project’s new production of Cherry Smoke. And I take back what I said. I was scared of Fish. My nerves were already on edge from passing by a tough-looking transvestite on my way from Luzzat’s restaurant to the storefront housing the side project theatre company. Maybe the chicken masala I’d ordered for dinner had stirred my insides and left me feeling a little anxious. Maybe I’m just a wimp. Fish scared the crap out of me, barging into the opening scene like a revved-up cross between Jake LaMotta and Stanley Kowalski on crystal meth. By contrast, the first character we encounter, Emily Shain’s Cherry, is sweet and starry-eyed, with an accent that’s either adorable or annoying, I’m still not sure. Cherry makes obvious her feelings for Fish, but it’s less clear whether Fish reciprocates. Cherry dotes endlessly on Fish, and Fish does tend to be less of a psycho when he’s in Cherry’s embrace.

So there’s Fish and Cherry, and then there’s Fish’s younger brother, Duffy (Peter Oyloe), and his girlfriend, Bug (Jessica London-Shields). And you’re probably thinking, who the hell came up with these names? Well the playwright’s name is James McManus, and he won a Princess Grace Award for this play, so he sure as hell doesn’t need your stamp of approval, least of all mine. Nonetheless, I’m happy to report that Mr. McManus explains in fine form why Fish, Cherry and Bug are all named after foods. He doesn’t bother to explain Duffy, although you get the sense that his dad was kind of a dick and that might have had something to do with it.

Is this Billy Elliott without the ballet? No.

Is it Wild At Heart without the Wizard of Oz? No, not at all. That doesn’t even make sense, really.

Cherry Smoke is an honest work that some people will like. Some people will call it raw and emotional. Some people’s butts might fall asleep.

B

At Home At The Zoo (Victory Gardens Biograph Theater) GUEST REVIEWER JOE TANSINO

I’m fairly certain that there exists an infinite number of parallel universes, each playing out a different, alternative reality based on whether certain things happen or don’t happen. In some of those realities there was no Big Bang or whatever created life on Earth and so those realities don’t really hold much interest for me, because everything is all just black empty space or asteroids bouncing around. Then there are a whole host of realities where dinosaurs never started a nuclear war and wiped themselves out, and so Earth is totally different, mostly just pterodactyls and alligators fighting over monkeys, which never evolved into men because it just didn’t happen for them in this or that particular reality. In another subset of realities, the subset that is really most interesting to me to think about, human civilization is more or less the same as it is right here and now as I’m writing this blog. But in the parallel universe I’m not writing this blog, maybe I’m watching the Jetsons or choking on a peanut instead.

In a nearby parallel universe, I am a dear close friend of Edward Albee, our fifty-some-odd difference in age notwithstanding. Ed and I sit around in his Tribeca loft surrounded by African art, eating peanuts and playing Wii. I say to Ed, “Hey I’ve got this idea to write a play that is basically Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but in outer space!“ and Ed turns to me and says, “Holy Shit, Joe! you just blew my freaking mind, and you know what? I’ve got all these uncashed royalty checks I’ve just been hiding in this solid gold lion’s head, why don’t I just go cash them and commission you to write this brilliant play, and you know, I know some people in the theater scene -- maybe we can get this baby of yours produced some day!” And then of course I write the play, and Ed gets it produced, and I’m an instant success, so I quit my job sweeping up trash at the Port Authority.

This is actually happening in a parallel universe, because every imaginable thing is happening in some parallel universe. Of course there are also lots and lots of parallel universes where I’m dead or where I never even existed, so I don’t sit around wishing that I had another chance to spin the wheel and see where I end up. Because the chance that I’ll actually end up living in the reality where I’m playing Wii with Edward Albee and writing hit plays is actually pretty slim, pretty much nil no matter how you look at it. I’m content to stick it out in this reality, where I can occasionally take in an Edward Albee play, marvelling that this guy is still alive and still actively involved in the staging of his plays.

And so my fiancée and I went to see At Home At the Zoo recently at Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, courtesy of the League of Chicago Theaters Free Night of Theater. I thought it was weird that our seats were way up in the back of the theater even though over half the front section of the orchestra was empty.

But after asking the Saints if it was cool to move closer, we grabbed a couple empty seats up front.

At Home At the Zoo pairs Albee’s first play, the one-act Zoo Story (written over 50 years ago!), with a prequel titled Homelife that Albee wrote in the last 10 years. The Zoo Story is about a well-to-do textbook editor named Peter (deftly played by Chicago native Tom Amandes) who strikes up a conversation with a crazy person in Central Park, gets verbally abused and slapped around, and then [SPOILER] kills him. Homelife takes place just before Peter leaves to go to Central Park. Peter is having a boring conversation with his wife Ann (the classy Annabel Armour) that turns into a discussion about cancer and circumcisions and then their sex life, and then [SPOILER] his wife slaps him.

The first twenty minutes or so of the play had me wondering why I ever found Edward Albee so engaging. My mind started to wander to a parallel universe where I pitch my play idea to Edward Albee, except in this parallel universe he tells me it sucks, that there are too many lightsaber fights and not enough introspective dialogue, and so I murder him with a Massai hunting spear. The dialogue in Homelife is so droll and it’s clear what Albee is trying to do but for Christ’s sake THESE PEOPLE ARE AWFUL.

[SPOILERS] Peter whines that his circumcision is going away and his wife wonders aloud whether she might hack off her tits to avoid ever getting breast cancer. Then things take a turn and the couple start talking about how boring their lives are. Peter is content with their boring lives but his wife apparently wants him to “do” her like a wild animal, which is something Peter is afraid to do. Peter’s explanation for why he is afraid of having rough sex is one of the highlights of the first act. [/SPOILERS]

Somehow, and this is one of the reasons why I love Albee, he starts out with a really mundane exchange between husband and wife and turns it into this graphic, emotional confrontation, and you have no idea how exactly he got from point A to point B. These characters in less capable hands could have ruined the production. Peter and Ann are the sort of dull, loathsome characters that most audience members fear being or becoming, and listening to them blather on endlessly about textbooks and their boring lives is excruciating. It is a credit to Amandes and Armour that they were able to carry the momentum through a trying first act, and I thought the payoff at the end of the act made the suffering worth it.

The second act, the original Zoo Story, follows a similar trajectory. After Peter fails to connect emotionally or physically with Ann and leaves the apartment psychically castrated, he takes his book to Central Park and sits on a nice bench he claims is his own. A seedy character happens on him and starts talking nonsense about the zoo. Peter is too polite to shun the guy, whose name is Jerry, so he ends up listening to Jerry ramble on about his sad life for approximately 46 minutes. And things are going fine until Jerry decides he wants Peter’s bench, which is when the action turns tragic. Marc Grapey, who plays Jerry, deftly skates the line between schizophrenia and charisma, convincingly portraying just the sort of guy I would strike up a conversation with in an isolated part of Central Park.

This is a really great play that reminds me why I try not to strike up conversations with crazy people and that also explains why all the men in my family warned me never to get married.

Go and see this play so that Edward Albee will have more royalty money to give me, and I can finally write George and Martha in Outer Space.

B+

-Joe Tansino

-Anderson Lawfer, Eric Roach

The Comedy of Errors - Court Theatre (theater review by guest blogger Joe Tansino)

In the two years since I started following the Chicago theater scene, I’ve learned a few things about Sean Graney.


First, I’ve learned that Sean Graney hates walls. The mission of his theater company, the Hypocrites, is in part “to strengthen the connection between artist and audience,” i.e. break down walls. Also he loves playing four square, which is really just handball with no walls. The first play I saw Sean Graney direct was an abridged version of Edward II performed Upstairs at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. There were no reserved seats - just a couple of benches that audience members could fight over until Chris Sullivan came along and shoved them out of the way. I found it hilarious that Graney blocked actors in spaces where people would be expected to be sitting during the play. Some theatergoers who were more accustomed to traditional productions were thrown off guard, which I enjoyed because I love seeing people made to feel uncomfortable, especially if I feel uncomfortable too. I learned that theater people have a fancy term for this sort of uncomfortable staging: “promenade.” Graney likes this sort of staging a lot and has directed so many promenade-style productions that he caused Chris Jones to say, “Enough already.” And then Graney went and directed a promenade staging of Oedipus Rex! so it was pretty clear he wasn’t listening or else he just doesn’t give a shit what Chris Jones says.

Second, Sean Graney loves playing with gender roles and sexuality. It’s already been established here that his production of No Exit was a sexed-up exploration of Hell’s vagina. And in Edward II Graney revised the plot by casting the prince as a starry-eyed twink whose downfall had more to do with his advisors’ homophobia than his own unsuitability as a ruler. Most people who have opinions about these sorts of things seem to agree that the play is ripe for this interpretation even if it was not Marlowe’s specific intent to have it staged that way. Is there a more homophobic way to kill a man than by red hot poker in the butt? Yikes. Graney also loves to cast men as women and women as men (N.B.: seeing Kurt Ehrmann dressed up as a courtesan in The Comedy of Errors was worth the price of admission alone).

Third, Sean Graney loves driving purists crazy by smearing foreign matter all over their favorite plays. He did this literally in No Exit and wasted literally dozens of tubes of toothpaste in the process. He removed large chunks of the script from Edward II and Oedipus and modernized much of the language. In reviewing The Comedy of Errors, Chris Jones wondered why Graney didn’t just “write his own fucking play,” then gave it three stars anyway because he was feeling magnanimous.

Based on these things that I’ve learned about Sean Graney and his craft, I had a pretty good idea of what I would experience going into his most recent production at the Court Theater. Maybe if you’re reading this you have a pretty good idea as well. In case you do not, I should warn you that Graney’s Comedy of Errors is a purists’ nightmare.

The Comedy of Errors is about a brother Antipholus and his slave Dromio in search of their long lost twins in a dumpy, unfriendly city. Antipholus and Dromio travel from Syracuse to the hostile city of Ephesus in search of their twin brothers. In order so that the action of the play works, Antipholus’s twin brother is also named Antipholus (of Ephesus), and Dromio’s twin brother is also named Dromio (of Ephesus). Egeon, the father of the master twins also travels to Ephesus in search of his son(s) and is thrown in jail. Throughout the remainder of the play the twin brothers from Syracuse wonder mildly why everyone in Ephesus recognizes them, seemingly forgetting that they’re on a fucking quest to find their twin brothers who both share their own fucking names. Graney and his cast recognize of the absurdity of the plot, and they instill the characters with an awareness of the absurdity that makes the play far more enjoyable than if they just went along with Shakespeare’s conceit.

The Court is a proscenium theater, so the actors aren’t playing “keep the balloon afloat” as you enter. Instead you get to listen to annoying UofC undergrads prattle about their academic schedules before the show begins. The seats are reserved, so you’re trapped. But there are tell-tale signs that this is going to be a Graney bonanza. Garbage skirts the stage. Graffiti covers the set. This Ephesus is a shithole, sharing more in common with Syracuse, New York than with a city of antiquity. At the start of the play this chick dressed up like newsboy rolls out on a scooter and asks the audience, “How y’all doin’?” Gender role reversal: check. Script bastardization: check. Breaking the fourth wall: check. Graney meets expectations here, and if you’re into Graney’s style like I am, you will enjoy this play.

Another thing I know about Graney: he loves his company. Three of the six cast members here are Hypocrites company members, and all six look like they’re having a fun time running around and dressing up in crazy costumes and throwing beer cans. And actually in that aspect Graney does exceed expectations: the breakneck speed of the production, the quick costume changes, the plethora of puns, sight gags and musical interludes - it all had audience members laughing like a pack of hyenas, even the stuffy octegenarians in the front row who maybe didn’t realize what they were getting into.

After the play, an usher tried to stop me and get me to fill out a survey about the play, but I was in a hurry to get to Bed Bath and Beyond before it closed. I rushed out the door without apologizing and promised myself that I would write this review as penance. This is a good play and you should go see it before it closes.

A-