Review: A intimate ‘Passion' from Blank Theatre Co.
Based on both a novel and a movie, 'Passion' is the story of a soldier, Giorgio (Evan Bradford), who we first see making love to Clara (Rachel Guth), a beautiful married woman. But when he gets posted to another town, Giorgio becomes involved with Fosca (Brittney Brown), the cousin of his commanding officer, an obsessive, hyper-intense woman disfigured by epilepsy and capable of love on a level that Giorgio had not previously conceived as even humanly possible.
Among myriad other exquisitely detailed observations, 'Passion' offers Sondheim's most explicit declaration of the existential imperative to love.
'Loving you is not a choice, it's who I am,' sings Fosca, Later on in that lyric, typifying the thesis of the whole show, she describes how the act of loving, although more painful than joyous, helps her define her reason for being. In this show, loving does not mean subjugating oneself but using it to find purpose. It's all with Sondheim's lifelong thesis that the only things that truly outlive you are children and art.
'Passion' is, to say the least, a very tricky show. Fosca is an especially difficult role; I remember, from some 18 years ago, how much it challenged Ana Gasteyer at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. And even by the standards of Chicago's storefront spaces, this one is very small, a match for this theater company's budget. Director Danny Kapinos has Clara and Giorgio initially making love on a fixed slab, a nod to the opening tableaux Sondheim desired. But then he gets stuck with it all night long, and the rest of the cast have to keep stepping out of its way.
In general, my view of Blank's plucky work in town so far is that its artistic leadership has to find ways to produce these musicals in ways that depart more radically from traditional stagings and that match both their spaces and the young talent they're able to recruit. Here, something simpler and even more concert-style would have sufficed; the show struggles with a backdrop that it wants to be variously firm and translucent, but the audience is simply too close to pull that off, so the requisite fluidity is hard to feel.
All that said, there's also much to enjoy from Blank this summer. The standout performance here is from Bradford, an excellent young performer who does a great deal with what can be a thankless role of dubious empathic appeal, given that he finds himself torn between an affair with a married woman and a woman to whom Giorgio finds himself superior. But Bradford actually forges quite the likable guy and, especially when joined by Guth, a lovely singer, the sound that comes from the stage is quite rich. I feel like I can tell when the members of the Church of Sondheim are present off-Loop, and they were Thursday night, and they demonstrably approved of what they were hearing.
Brown throws herself courageously at Fosca and her work is unstintingly honest and vulnerable. Musically, she gets some of the way there, no small feat. But her Fosca is a tad too, well, conventionally appealing, for the show fully to work. The show is structured so that Giorgio has first to overcome what can only be described as revulsion in order to arrive at the realization that to be on the receiving end of the most intense love imaginable can mean you start feeling it back yourself.
Review: 'Passion' (3 stars)
When: Through Aug. 10
Where: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Tickets: $15-$35 at www.blanktheatrecompany.org
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Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Review: A intimate ‘Passion' from Blank Theatre Co.
Most of the great Stephen Sondheim musicals flowed from notions conceived by others. But creating 'Sweeney Todd' as a musical was Sondheim's idea and so was 'Passion,' his intense 1994 collaboration with James Lapine, now on very intimate view from Blank Theatre Company in the tiny downstairs studio within the Greenhouse Theater Center in Lincoln Park Based on both a novel and a movie, 'Passion' is the story of a soldier, Giorgio (Evan Bradford), who we first see making love to Clara (Rachel Guth), a beautiful married woman. But when he gets posted to another town, Giorgio becomes involved with Fosca (Brittney Brown), the cousin of his commanding officer, an obsessive, hyper-intense woman disfigured by epilepsy and capable of love on a level that Giorgio had not previously conceived as even humanly possible. Among myriad other exquisitely detailed observations, 'Passion' offers Sondheim's most explicit declaration of the existential imperative to love. 'Loving you is not a choice, it's who I am,' sings Fosca, Later on in that lyric, typifying the thesis of the whole show, she describes how the act of loving, although more painful than joyous, helps her define her reason for being. In this show, loving does not mean subjugating oneself but using it to find purpose. It's all with Sondheim's lifelong thesis that the only things that truly outlive you are children and art. 'Passion' is, to say the least, a very tricky show. Fosca is an especially difficult role; I remember, from some 18 years ago, how much it challenged Ana Gasteyer at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. And even by the standards of Chicago's storefront spaces, this one is very small, a match for this theater company's budget. Director Danny Kapinos has Clara and Giorgio initially making love on a fixed slab, a nod to the opening tableaux Sondheim desired. But then he gets stuck with it all night long, and the rest of the cast have to keep stepping out of its way. In general, my view of Blank's plucky work in town so far is that its artistic leadership has to find ways to produce these musicals in ways that depart more radically from traditional stagings and that match both their spaces and the young talent they're able to recruit. Here, something simpler and even more concert-style would have sufficed; the show struggles with a backdrop that it wants to be variously firm and translucent, but the audience is simply too close to pull that off, so the requisite fluidity is hard to feel. All that said, there's also much to enjoy from Blank this summer. The standout performance here is from Bradford, an excellent young performer who does a great deal with what can be a thankless role of dubious empathic appeal, given that he finds himself torn between an affair with a married woman and a woman to whom Giorgio finds himself superior. But Bradford actually forges quite the likable guy and, especially when joined by Guth, a lovely singer, the sound that comes from the stage is quite rich. I feel like I can tell when the members of the Church of Sondheim are present off-Loop, and they were Thursday night, and they demonstrably approved of what they were hearing. Brown throws herself courageously at Fosca and her work is unstintingly honest and vulnerable. Musically, she gets some of the way there, no small feat. But her Fosca is a tad too, well, conventionally appealing, for the show fully to work. The show is structured so that Giorgio has first to overcome what can only be described as revulsion in order to arrive at the realization that to be on the receiving end of the most intense love imaginable can mean you start feeling it back yourself. Review: 'Passion' (3 stars) When: Through Aug. 10 Where: Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes Tickets: $15-$35 at
Chicago Tribune
25-07-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Billie Jean' at Chicago Shakes is a straightforward account of a champion's story
In the final few minutes of 'Billie Jean,' the new play with Broadway aspirations at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, we follow Billie Jean King and her spouse, Ilana Kloss, the South African former tennis player. King, one of the most extraordinary living Americans and once (frankly, still) one of the most famous women in the world, came fully out of the closet relatively late in life, and the scenes involve King's loving but traditional Southern California parents accepting the lesbian couple. Those moments are deeply emotional and, quite frankly, beautiful enough in their simplicity to bring a tear to the eye. Chilina Kennedy, the Canadian star who plays King, is finally allowed a chance to breathe and Callie Rachelle Johnson, who plays Ilana (among others), is one of those performers capable of creating a character to whom one inherently warms. King has come home in all the ways we all crave and the gravitas and challenges of her journey feel at once familiar and extraordinary. In a world seemingly bereft of heroes and heroines, these last few minutes send the audience out on a genuine high. I wouldn't normally talk about the end of a show like this, but this hardly is a spoiler for any tennis fans who have followed King's career. More importantly, this script and production would be so much better if more scenes took their time to land emotionally and felt the same way. Biographical shows about very famous, and very impressive, living people are tricky. The writer inevitably wants to please and hail the subject, who holds the keys to her own life, having been there. As we've seen with many Broadway jukebox biographies, even if the subject doesn't want a hagiography (and I can't imagine that the famously honest King did), that doesn't mean she won't get one. There's also commercial motivation: No one coming to a play about Billie Jean King is looking for something that does not celebrate her achievements. So it's easy for the authorial voice to blur with the subject, and that is what happens here, a bit too much. Supporting characters, many of whom remain overly one-dimensional, are seen through a singular lens. On some levels, that's fair enough. We can read whose name is on the marquee. And why not celebrate the struggles and triumphs of such an icon? Given that King is now 81 years old, it's also likely that generations of Americans are less than fully aware of all she achieved and I can see mothers, especially, taking their daughters to this show and saying, 'See?' The piece is also a celebration of the multi-decade LGBTQ struggle, and of the LGBTQ community as a whole, especially since it includes King's full-throttle support of the pioneering transsexual player Renée Richards (Murphy Taylor Smith), tacitly distinguishing King from, say, Martina Navratilova on that issue. All of the above are valid reasons for a piece of biographical theater. But I also think plays, even plays about a person as virtuous and courageous as King, also have an imperative to challenge and surprise their audiences. You don't get other points of view here on anything, at least not beyond the appearance of various stereotypical obstacles to King's progress. So when the play, say, posits the Australian player Margaret Court mostly as a villain, one cannot help but wonder what she would have had to say, given the chance. The same is true of Larry King (Dan Amboyer), who is a confusing and underwritten presence here, kinda supporting the heroine one moment and behaving like the classic controlling dude the next, so as to fit the overall narrative in which his influence must be vanquished for full self-actualization. I wonder what he would have said, too. Plus, human lives like this one are long, and they can feel that way when plays precede chronologically. 'Billie Jean' sets itself the task of exploring its subject from girlhood through emergent doubles accomplishment, through her astonishing list of singles titles at Wimbledon, where she thrived, to her complicated but abiding marriage to Larry, through the famous 'Battle of the Sexes' match with Bobby Riggs to the scandal involving King's relationship with Lenne Klingaman's wacky Marilyn Barnett (who filed a palimony suit against King in 1981), to King's work to create the Virginia Slims tournament (and by extension the WTA tour), to how the media treated her to her admirable philosophies of life to her impact on Venus Williams (Courtney Rikki Green). Along the way, it heralds many of King's views of sports and life, including her conviction, rare among professional athletes of all stripes, that 'pressure is a privilege.' King's life has, to say the least, been amply documented. For decades. So for those of us who have followed tennis, we already know about her astonishing 39 Grand Slam titles and her unstinting advocacy for women's tennis, especially the need to persuade the tennis establishment that women deserved to have a place to play, equal and fair compensation, and to be recognized and understood not just for their looks or as amateur curiosities but as some of the world's greatest professional athletes. And, of course, we also know what King achieved in tennis also (eventually) crushed barriers to women in other sports from golf to soccer. 'Billie Jean' tells its laudatory story very capably, thanks in no small part to a very energized and fluid production from director Marc Bruni. The show does not feature actual tennis (beyond a few stylized arm movements and sound effects), nor does it get into the tennis weeds at all; 'Billie Jean' actually never really explores what made King so good at the game besides chronicling her determination and love of winning. Some sense of her formidable technique surely would help round out the picture. The show also glosses over her first singles title, which seemed strange to me, but then there's a lot to cover in such a life. The battle with Riggs also zips by, presumably since the show well knows it already was the subject of an excellent movie. At times, it feels like you are watching a staged Wikipedia entry, frankly, given all the narrative interjections from the eight-person ensemble, not all of which are needed. But at others, playwright Lauren Gunderson's skills with poetic language really kick in, the text takes more risks of style and form and Kennedy, who is superbly cast in this difficult role, handles everything anyone hurls her way with aplomb. I'm sure many of King's fans will love this piece, which is set on a revolving tennis court set designed by Wilson Chin, but I hope the next draft deviates a little more from the straight race through an incredible American life and sits longer with the beating heart of its most human of subjects. That, after all, was Billie Jean King's actual secret weapon. Review: 'Billie Jean' (3 stars) When: Through Aug. 10 Where: Chicago Shakespeare's Yard Theatre on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Tickets: $73-$134 at 312-595-5600 and
Chicago Tribune
23-07-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Billie Jean King on today's tennis, the media and a new play at Chicago Shakespeare about her life
'Billie Jean' is the name of the new play by Lauren Gunderson now in its world premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. This show about the tennis great Billie Jean King is currently in The Yard on Navy Pier through Aug. 10, and then is widely expected to have a life beyond Chicago. King spoke to the Tribune in a telephone interview just after returning from the All England Lawn Tennis Championships, better known as Wimbledon, where she sat next to Princess Kate in the Royal Box for the women's singles final and watched Iga Świątek defeat Amanda Anisimova by a score of 6-0, 6-0. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Q: That final was quite the wipeout. A: Świątek was amazing. She couldn't even get through the qualifier last time. But you know, we don't have two dominant players anymore. It used to be Steffi (Graf) and Monica (Seles), or Chris (Evert) and Martina (Navratilova). Now on a given day, any of the top 200 women can beat any of the others. Q: The women's game has come a long way. A: I put on the tennis channel and I can't believe all the cities we are in now. We've really been the leaders in women's sport since the 1970s. The Ladies Professional Golf Association was founded a year before the Women's Tennis Association but we've eclipsed them. Q: Could you have beaten Świątek or Anisimova when you were in your prime? A: No. My brother played professional baseball for 12 years. Our parents taught us both that every generation gets better. I them to be better. When we women signed our first one-dollar contract, we wanted three things: a place to compete, to be appreciated for our accomplishments and not only for our looks, and to be able to make a living playing the sport we love. Now you see all the other women's sports people are starting to invest in. My former husband and I used to own the Chicago tournament. I've been involved in Chicago for a very long time. Q: You still have your place here, right? A: I do. Q: Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz also played an amazing match. A: They did. Italy and Spain right now have the best male players in the world. And Jannik is such a great guy. You could not ask for a more thoughtful, smarter human being. He walked all the way over as we were leaving Wimbledon and introduced himself to my entire group, one by one. He didn't have to do that. There really has been a changing of the guard with Sinner and Alcaraz and all the others. I've been through six generations of players now. And don't forget the Italian woman, Jasmine Paolini. She loves to perform. Q: You are very easy to talk with. A: I have always talked to the media. When younger players complain about doing so, I've always said, 'Have you ever thought that this is how these people make their livings? And that if you don't talk to them they might lose the job they are in?' No players ever answer yes to that. I always say you have to know the business you are in. I could come up with other names for you to interview if you like. Q: Most athletes don't look at things that way. A: True. Most players also have no clue how much things cost. The top players are just starting to understand they should run their own businesses, not just get money from endorsements. I've invested in sports since 1968. Q: Now Chicago gets to see a play about you. A: When the producer, Harriet (Newman Leve), said she wanted to start in Chicago, I said that's fantastic. Aside from the apartment, I am so invested there. Q: This is not your first go-around in terms of dramatizations of your life. There was the movie, 'The Battle of the Sexes,' about your beating Bobby Riggs. A: We are still friends with Emma Stone (who played King). She married a great guy we love. She had a baby. The baby loves tennis. Did you know tennis was the healthiest sport in the world? They've done research. Q: I can believe it. A: I still love to hit balls against the wall. Q: I can believe that too. So you are involved in this play? A: Are you kidding me? We've been involved. I've met all the actors. I've made suggestions. Lauren (Gunderson) has done a really great job. Q: Chilina Kennedy, a musical star I've seen many times, plays you. A: I want her to sing. She's so talented. Q: Plays about sport can he hard unless you have incredible actor-athletes. Tough to pretend to play like you did. A: Sure. But this play isn't about tennis as much as it is about life. It's off the court that matters here. It's about my trying to figure out my sexuality. I think it's a great platform for the community. Tennis is a part of it, of course. But for me, it's really about the audience so that when they leave they are inspired by something. I hope they can derive something from it that makes their lives better. I think it expresses my journey through the thick and the thin. We've all been going like a bat of hell. Of course. It's about women's sports.
