The Decline of the International Theatre Festival
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There were signs from the start that this year’s festival hadn’t caught much of the theatergoing public’s attention. The low-key opening-night performance, Jardin de pulpos by Mexico’s Taller del Sotano at the Wellington Theater, played to a less than full house. Perhaps the festival’s most anticipated work–Alan Ayckbourn’s new play Communicating Doors, which opened the next evening–proved to be a weak effort from one of Britain’s important play-writing talents, and one festival source indicated that ticket sales for the production’s two-week run fell well below expectations.
Many of the festival’s other presentations suffered from a pretentiousness that could have turned off a number of potential theatergoers: Dogtroep’s mostly nonverbal, plotless Camel Gossip III; Marga Gomez’s meandering monologues; The Persians, performed in Greek with no translation. Only Gate Theatre’s production of Juno and the Paycock delivered a solid evening of theater of the more traditional sort. Nevertheless the daily newspaper critics raved about almost every production, throwing around the words “perfection” and “terrific” with reckless abandon. Ironically, the incessant hype ultimately may have backfired if the public bit once or twice and decided the product didn’t live up to the critics’ claims.
The news is in from auditions for the long-awaited Chicago production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and it isn’t heartening. Only three Chicago actors–Barbara Robertson, Philip Johnson, and Kate Goehring–wound up in the cast of eight. The remaining five actors were selected from among those who auditioned in New York: Peter Birkenhead, Reg Flowers, Jonathan Hadary, Robert Sella, and Carolyn Swift. The decision wouldn’t necessarily merit such note if Angels coproducers Robert Perkins and Rocco Landesman hadn’t announced at a press conference last March that the production would be cast in Chicago. If the producers had any uncertainty at that time about casting, it centered on finding a local actor to play villainous attorney and AIDS victim Roy Cohn, a role that ultimately went to Hadary. Everyone knows the business of choosing actors to fill roles in a production is highly subjective, but a couple of sources familiar with the casting efforts here were at the very least skeptical of the assertion made by Perkins last week that every attempt had been made to put suitable Chicago actors in every role. Earlier this week one longstanding local casting agent said several Chicago actors who seemed ideal for certain roles in the show weren’t even called in for a first audition. One factor in the final choice was no doubt the show’s director, New York-based Michael Mayer, who, not surprisingly, is not as familiar with Chicago’s acting talent as he is with New York’s, said a source in the casting business. All other things being equal, Mayer may have been more inclined to go with a New Yorker over a Chicagoan. This factor, of course, raises the question of how things would have gone had Michael Maggio ended up with Mayer’s job.
