Articles in – Role Playing
Role Playing: Noir films gave Justine Turner model for shadowy dame in ‘Dreadful Night’
Interview: Funny thing about film noir, says Justine C. Turner, who plays a sultry, sexy 1940s type in Don Nigro’s play “City of Dreadful Night” at The Den Theatre: It brought women out of the shadows, and made them multi-dimensional. “That’s the really great thing about my character. Anna is complicated. She’s both Madonna and whore, not just one or the other but good and bad at the same time,” says Turner, who tuned up for the defining noir style of “Dreadful Night” by watching Ida Lupino films from the 1940s.
Role Playing: Anish Jethmalani plumbs agony of good man battling demons in ‘Bengal Tiger’
Interview: The play is called “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” and while there is indeed a tiger in it – dead for most of the story, wafting in and out of view as an existential ghost – our sympathies are not with the spectral creature but with a real man, an Iraqi gardener brought to heartbreaking life by Anish Jethmalani at Lookingglass Theatre.
Role Playing: Gary Perez channels his Harlem youth as quiet, unflinching Julio in ‘The Hat’
Interview: One of the most appealing, indeed endearing, performances to be seen on Chicago theater stages this season is Gary Perez’s quietly philosophical, yet vaguely dangerous turn as Julio, the gay cousin and one true friend in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play “The ______ With the Hat” at Steppenwolf. Perez credits director Anna D. Shapiro with framing Julio as worldly-wise and possessed of a Zen-like calm, the one really centered character in a collection of loose cannons.
Role Playing: Kamal Angelo Bolden sharpened dramatic combinations to play ‘The Opponent’
Interview: A round of boxing lasts three minutes. That’s about how long it takes Kamal Angelo Bolden, as a spunky young boxer who’s all speed and dreams in Brett Neveu’s “The Opponent,” to redefine the phrase “physical theater.” But Bolden says his knockout performance in the ring at A Red Orchid Theatre was the easy part. The challenge was getting the dreamer right.
Role Playing: In wheelchair, Jacqueline Grandt explores paralysis of neglect in ‘Broken Glass’
Interview: Except when she crashes to the floor, Jacqueline Grandt spends the full length of Arthur Miller’s “Broken Glass” at Redtwist Theatre in a wheelchair or resting in bed. Yet every night, Grandt says, she leaves the theater physically exhausted.
Role Playing: James Ridge thrives in cold skin of Shakespeare’s smiling serpent, Richard III
Interview: He’s the very devil in the guise of a cherub, this smiling and murderous Richard III embodied by James Ridge in the American Players Theatre production of Shakespeare’s royal tragedy. Ridge’s duplicitous Richard echoes Lady Macbeth’s cold counsel to Macbeth in his own bloody quest for a crown: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.”
Role Playing: Baize Buzan hones the steel spirit of a brash Irish lass in ‘Cripple of Inishmaan’
Interview: Baize Buzan knew she had the right slant on the feisty, egg-smashing Helen in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “The Cripple of Inishmaan” when she heard, distinctly from the audience at tiny Redtwist Theatre: “That awful girl is here again.”
Role Playing: Stephen Ouimette brews an Irish tippler with a glassful of illusions in ‘Iceman’
Interview: It is Harry Hope’s grumpy largesse that fuels the pipe dreams for the drunken inhabitants of Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh.” And Harry, says actor Stephen Ouimette, who portrays the tragi-comic Irish saloon keeper in the Goodman Theatre’s production of “Iceman,” is one complicated lush.
Role Playing: Ian Barford revels in the wiliness of an ambivalent rebel in Doctorow’s ‘March’
Interview: He’s just making it up as he goes along, the Confederate turncoat portrayed by Ian Barford in Steppenwolf Theatre’s current production of “The March.” That’s what Barford likes about his opportunistic character called Arley. And in a sense, the actor says, he’s doing much the same thing on stage from night to the next, trying to track the pitch and roll of a soldier who’s trying to find his own meaning.
Role Playing: Chuck Spencer flashes a badge of moral courage in Arthur Miller’s ‘The Price’
Interview: Chuck Spencer relishes poking through the piled clutter during his first long, solitary, silent minutes on stage at the beginning of Arthur Miller’s play “The Price,” at Raven Theatre.
Role Playing: Rebecca Finnegan finds lyrical heart of a lonely woman in ‘A Catered Affair’
Interview: So perfectly does Rebecca Finnegan blend her painful lyric pauses into the narrative flow of “A Catered Affair,” at Porchlight Music Theater, that you scarcely notice she has ramped up from speech to song. Then the swelling power of that voice grabs you, and you realize you’re watching something special: an accomplished actor who’s also a genuine singer.
Role Playing: Bill Norris pulled the seedy bum in ‘The Caretaker’ from a place within himself
Interview: The scruffy creature with darting eyes who calls himself Davies looks like his last bed was a cardboard box on the street. He is the elusive but palpably real character at the core of Harold Pinter’s play “The Caretaker,” now on the boards at Writers’ Theatre, and he’s brought to wheedling, calculating life in a masterful piece of acting by Bill Norris.
Role Playing: Diane D’Aquila’s twice regal portrait as lover-monarch in ‘Elizabeth Rex’
Interview: Diane D’Aquila, who brings Queen Elizabeth I to regal and vulnerable life in Timothy Findley’s “Elizabeth Rex” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, says acting in this gripping, keenly honed production “is a like a dance out there, and it’s scary as hell.”
Role Playing: Dean Evans, in clown costume, enters the darkness of ‘Burning Bluebeard’
Interview: His clown suit, a bit tattered and soiled with soot, looks like it once might have been pure white. But the character Dean Evans plays in the Neo-Futurists’ production of “Burning Bluebeard” is decidedly dark, one might even say spectral.
Role Playing: Dan Waller wields a personal brush as uneasy genius of ‘Pitmen Painters’
Interview: Actor Dan Waller describes himself as a simple guy who values friendship and the respect of his peers. That makes him a close kin to the North England coal miner, revealed as gifted artist, he portrays in Lee Hall’s play “The Pitmen Painters” at TimeLine Theatre.
Role Playing: City boy Michael Stegall ropes wild cowboy in Raven Theatre’s ‘Bus Stop’
Interview: Michael Stegall, who looks and sounds every inch a ropin’ cowboy in the Raven Theatre production of William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” grew up in the West. No surprise there. But wait a minute. Not that West. The 6-foot-3, 23-year-old actor hails from Palm Springs, CA, where the buffalo do not roam.
Role Playing: Brent Barrett’s glad he joined ‘Follies’ as that womanizing, empty cad Ben
Interview: At the center of Stephen Sondheim’s acerbic musical “Follies”stands Benjamin Stone, worldly, rich, the envy of his old acquaintances gathered at this reunion of theater folks. Ben is all of that, and one more thing — miserable. Veteran actor Brent Barrett offers a candid analysis of the self-centered cad and womanizer.
Role Playing: Sadieh Rifai zips among seven characters in one-woman ‘Amish Project’
Interview: Actor Sadieh Rifai thought Jessica’s Dickey’s play “The Amish Project,” at American Theater Company, would be a pretty straight-forward one-woman show. The plays is based on the 2006 shooting of 10 school girls in Pennsylvania. Rifai would be switching among seven characters, but she didn’t see that as a big deal. She was in for a big surprise.
Role Playing: Kirsten Fitzgerald inhabits sorrow, surfs the laughs in ‘Clybourne Park’
Interview: Actor Kirsten Fitzgerald portrays two very different characters amid the hurlyburly of “Clybourne Park, the double-edged drama by Bruce Norris now playing at Steppenwolf Theatre through Nov. 13. She’s a grieving mother in 1959 and a self-interested lawyer 50 years later.
It’s a theatrical tour de force that Fitzgerald likens to acting in two different plays the same night.
Role Playing: Janet Ulrich Brooks on nailing the style of a wily Russian in ‘A Walk in the Woods’
Portraying an experienced arms negotiator during the 1980s missile crisis for TimeLine, Brooks manages to be sly, funny and serious — in precisely accented English she learned from an interview with a Russian opera star.
