3rd Review!

The reviews keep coming in for my new show: No Darkness Round My Stone, playing at Trap Door Theatre in Chicago. For all the info - please visit: www.trapdoortheatre.com

This review is taken from Chicago Stage - critic: Venus Zarris

No other theater can consistently suspend reality to create overwhelming and oftentimes-otherworldly atmosphere, usually before the action or dialogue even begins, like Trap Door Theatre. To say that they are the foremost purveyors avant-garde theater in Chicago is to understate this portal to alternate realms. Hidden down a narrow walkway, next to a bar, behind a restaurant, on a side street in Bucktown is a black trap door that opens into the extremes of theatrical imagination. You could drive by it and easily miss this purgatorial paradise of the sublime surreal.

Trap Door Theatre presents the English language premiere of No Darkness Around My Stone, by French Playwright Fabrice Melquiot. This macabre and melancholy dreamlike tale of grave robbers provides a perfectly eerie adult prelude to the Halloween season. But don’t expect vampires or werewolves. Instead, you will find a room full of corpses dealing with unrequited longing, obsessive desires and love.

Director Max Truax takes this complex fusion of hyperrealism and surrealism and creates more emotional connection than can be found in many straightforward scripts. The humanity of the characters is reduced to raw, desperate, intimate, funny and urgent exchanges as the corpses animate, collapse and then reanimate, creating scenes that tell a story more concerned with emotion than with a linier narrative.

The intense interaction between the audience and the production comes by way of a created atmosphere that is so tactile; it stays with you after you leave. There is nothing familiar about the setting but the emotional truth of the characters is completely compelling and evocative.

Communicating this script requires a visionary director helming a brilliant cast. Kevin Lucero Less is particularly outstanding, displaying charming humor and vulnerability as the grave-robbing brother Ivan. In addition to the startling performances, the incredible deign team is completely in tune with creating this abstract and suggestive reality. Set designer Ewelina Dobiesz and lighting designer Richard Norwood create perhaps their most amazing work to date. Sam Lewis and Jesse McCabe’s sound design accents this creation beautifully and the costume design, by Beata Pilch and Sir Iris Bainum-Houle, and ghostly make-up design, by Zsofia Otvos, complete the dark illusionary magnificence.

No Darkness Around My Stone is a spellbinding, poignant, chilling and profound mix of existential destitution and sweet tenderness. Do not miss this unique opportunity to experience a challenging, chilling, peculiar and incomparably haunting production.

4 STARS out of 4 STARS
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

(A SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING AVANT-GARDE THEATRE)

The bold or delicate delivery of surreal theater is as complicated as the execution of a complex piece of classical music.

Music, by the sheer nature of itself, is an abstract proposition for our brain to process. The stringing together of tonal variation, deliberately or randomly, to create an auditory phrase of notes by definition is something that should be very difficult to digest and yet, for most people, music is instantly accessible and, whether favorable or not, very evocative.

Abstract visual art has a similar effect. Oftentimes we may not understand the composition of the work or the intention of the artist and yet something, perhaps the colors or the objects rendered, strikes a chord and we are moved.

But abstract theater, in general, meets greater cerebral opposition. Because we have stricter preconceived notions of human behavior and interaction, when these notions are violated by unpredictable, taboo, or irreverent actions or mind throws up walls and the traffic of incoming messages to our brains comes to a screeching halt.

We want reasons, explanations for behavior. If we don’t immediately understand we feel stupid, unsafe and we disconnect, fixating on the point of confusion instead of allowing the moments to simply sink in like an unfamiliar tune or a lavish explosion of color on canvas.

I challenge you to take this marvelously macabre play in like a melancholy melody from a haunting and foreign location. Not a foreign country, but rather a beautifully bleak suspension of reality, inhabited by longing, love, desperation, desire and moments of irreverent humor.

Don’t try and figure it out, let it wash over you. The pieces will fall together. The moments will engage you and you’ll come away compelled by something deeper than the satisfactory safety of standard theater.