Matt Hawkins featured in Time Out

Gotta love this. We're not the only ones in the Matt Hawkins fan club!

Arabian Nights at Lookingglass

From Chris Jones's review from the Tribune:

"At the start of “The Arabian Nights,” Mary Zimmerman’s thrilling Chinese box of nested Middle Eastern stories, we encounter the embittered, brutal, merciless King Shahryar. He has a knife at a young woman’s throat.

To quieten the king’s restless soul and save her life, this young woman frantically starts spewing forth stories—1,001 nights of sad, funny, moral, smart, silly, satirical, repeatable and ultimately redemptive yarns of Baghdad, its quirky denizens and colorful environs. These interlocking yarns dance in their visually gorgeous frames—intruding, delighting, imposing and, by the end of a couple of hugely engrossing hours, universalizing.

And all the time, that knife is that young woman’s throat, threatening to topple the fountainhead of this landscape of the imagination.

The memory of this extraordinary piece of Chicago theater has stayed with me since its seminal first production in a then-scruffy section of Belmont Avenue in 1992—long before Zimmerman got gigs at the Metropolitan Opera, David Schwimmer snagged a sitcom named “Friends” and Lookingglass got its spiffy, city-sponsored digs on the Magnificent Mile. It was the time of the first Gulf War, when Iraq’s cultural identity, thanks to both its merciless dictator and the needs of his Western antagonists, had been rendered in the media and the halls of goverment as a hostile, homogenous antithasis of light, art and freedom. By reminding everyone of our shared cultural roots—and by demonstrating the Arabian heritage of humor and wisdom—Zimmerman and her young, just-graduated cohorts seemed—almost alone—to be pulling back a black veil and letting in the humanity.

Well, you can’t go back. “Arabian Nights” is not what it was on that heart-stopping night in 1992. It is better.

The multi-ethnic actors—some from that same cast, some new—are more mature and thus probe deeper. The text, honed and published in the intervening years, is richer. The new production, which has already been acclaimed at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and deserves to end up on Broadway—is sharper, faster, more polished, more exciting. It’s also more present and spontaneous—the great Andy White tells his stories with delicious improvisational applomb—as if everyone intuitively understands that great storytellers constantly adjust their narratives, based on how they land with an audience.

I think the brilliance of this piece, which is Zimmerman’s most theatrically complete and perfect creation, can be seen in that first moment, when Louise Lamson’s bright-eyed Scheherezade starts spinning her life-preserving stories for Shahryar, now played by Ryan Artzburger, an actor who somehow simultaneously capures a brutal core, a sad heart and a vulnerable soul. Scheherezade’s scared little sister, movingly played by Heidi Stillman, looks on, willing the stories to overcome violence.

This is a wholly accessible, earthy, whimsical, sensual show with none of the narative pretensions or precious stagings that often afflicts work of this type. Full-blooded actors like the macho Usman Ally and the emotionally resonant Allen Gilmore convey some deep truths, but not at the expense of fun.

But this is high-stakes fun. It always feels like both life and freedom are at stake. Nothing involving Arabian nights has ever been simple.

Fiddle's Memorial

Went to Kansas for Fiddle's memorial service.

NYC, Exit the King

In NYC for work, and saw the amazing Exit the King with the amazing Geoffrey Rush. Wow!

















For New York Times review click here.

Alumni Weekend

It's alumni weekend, and once again, my job is to carry the banner of the Social Sciences Division!