BALLYTURK: Sinister escapism at St. Ann's

“Human beings can cope with a little more complexity.” This line from Enda Walsh’s 2014 Ballyturk, which Walsh directs for its North American premiere at St. Ann’s Warehouse, encapsulates the playwright’s thesis on Absurdism. In Ballyturk, two men, identified only as 1 and 2, but evocative of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon or Ionesco’s Old Man and Old Woman, are confined to an underground bunker. 1 and 2 make a clown performance of their daily routine: they rise, fold away their murphy bed, shower, dress one another in ill-fitting jumpers, eat microwaved hotdogs, and exercise in an aerobic ritual set to 1980s dance hits.

1 (Tadgh Murphy) is prone to epileptic seizures and sensitive to a pervasive mood of “foreboding.” His defining piece of costuming is a red hurling helmet. 2 (Mikel Murfi) is older, with shock-red hair, a sort of biological helmet. A better clown, 2 encourages 1 to stick to their physical script. 2 seems to intuit that to attempt to communicate with the odd disembodied voices that filter into the basement or to contemplate too closely the mysterious appearance of a marigold in a small spotlight—well, those ways madness lies.

1 and 2’s vocation, the one variable in their variety act, involves creating (or is it remembering?) a pastoral Irish village called Ballyturk. It is unclear whether Ballyturk is drawn from a past outside this basement or originates entirely in the collective imagination of 1 and 2. Either way, their investment in the fantasy is total. On the back wall, a rust colored curtain parts to reveal I's pencil sketches of the village’s inhabitants. 1 and 2 throw darts at the mural of portraits to determine which characters they will include in the day's Ballyturk episode: Cody Finnington and Joyce Drench are pinned. 2 (Murfi) takes center stage beneath a red glowing neon sign that reads “Ballyturk” in Celtic script. He acts out Cody Finnington’s trip to buy skimmed milk at Joyce Drench’s grocery store, while I (Murphy) provides commentary and eerie, distorted sound effects as accompaniment. In another episode, melancholically underscored with orchestral music composed by Teho Teardo, 1 lists dozens of imaginary townspeople while 2 virtuosically assumes a distinct physicality and voice for each. As 1 & 2 dramatize various episodes from daily life in Ballyturk, the imaginary village becomes a veritable world within a world and play within a play.

Ballyturk’s undefined setting and circumstances, narrative cyclicality, and excursions into clowning are straight out of the Absurdist playbook. All evoke existential complexity and the great, meaningless meaningfulness (or vice versa) of life. But unlike the canonic plays of Absurdism like Godot or The Chairs, which are set in landscapes of spare sensory symbolism, designer Jamie Vartan’s design is primarily iconic. Walsh writes that the play is set in “No time. No place,” but Vartan’s box set certainly evokes a time and place, specifically an unfinished 1980s basement. Chipping white paint covers the three concrete walls, which are studded with cheap, wood-paneled cabinetry. Only the height of the cabinets—you’d need a twenty-foot ladder to reach the highest—hints that the setting is less than naturalistic. The basement is a repository for dross—dingy old appliances, an exercise bike and fat-jiggling machine, three-quarters-sized beach furniture, a bag of golf clubs, a cuckoo clock, and goodness knows what else—all of which litters the perimeter of the room, and much of which 1 and 2 incorporate into their daily routine. Vartan’s costuming too—short, colorful shirts, sweat-pants with ankle elastic, and egregiously greying tighty-whities—feels eighties-inspired. But most evocatively, a working record player blasts a collection of 45s of early 1980s British synthpop hits, from Blancmange to Yazoo, in sound design by Helen Atkinson.

The visual and aural references to 1980s culture feel nearly nostalgic. In its design and the exuberant performances of Murphy and Murfi, Ballyturk flirts with reference to a strain of late 1980s buddy movie. We see 1 and 2 as two misfit teens, a proto-Bill and Ted or Wayne and Garth, playing make-believe in a basement. But though Ballyturk is often funny and charming, it is inescapably dark. In the words of 1, “It feels like we may be less of what we were in a place we don’t know wholly now.” 1 and 2, we remember, are full-grown men, not teenagers; they are not passing a long afternoon in a basement, but rather trapped indefinitely in a bunker. Though there are no windows, a lighting change, like a sunset, marks the passage of time. Designed by Adam Silverman, a strong downlight filters through beams in the ceiling, creating a shadow of prison bars on the concrete floor. On Vartan’s set, we see no door, no wings, no exit for 1 and 2.

Ballyturk plumbs complex thematic depths in an aural and visual landscape of complexity. The abundant, often loud design works directly on the audience’s senses and emotions, making the existential questions feel immediate and pressing. If this were all, it would be enough: a frenetically paced, terrifically acted, sensorily lush meditation on the relationships between memory and creation, death and rebirth, fantasy and reality. But Walsh doubles down on his themes, both emphasizing and complicating them, by introducing a new character, 3, who offers both the protagonists and the audience evidence of life outside the basement. The claustrophobic world to which we were becoming accustomed literally cracks apart, as the back wall of the stage splits into a cavernous maw. Capitalizing on the vast depth of St. Ann’s Warehouse, Vartan reveals a warmly lit, grassy expanse beyond. Its sparseness, in contrast to the cluttered interior, suggests both erasure and possibility.

From this dream-space appears 3 (Olwen Fouéré)—a sleek, silver-haired woman in a pencil skirt—calmly smoking her cigarette. With 3’s intervention, the production’s pace slows and the mystery becomes more meta. Ballyturk, 3 suggests, has been an exercise not in creativity or remembrance, but in forgetting a reality too painful to confront. As 1 and 2 question their relationship to Ballyturk and each other, they begin to lose faith in the ability of words to create a world. Walsh explores, by extension, the limitations of theatre itself. 1 laments, “How can I talk about Ballyturk knowing that it’s only ever inside this breaking body and nowhere else? There’s no freedom to it—it’s filling rooms with words, not real life … so how?” Walsh presents us with a fine paradox, a sort of suicide-machine: Ballyturk transports us only to undermine the entire premise of theatre as a vehicle. Is Ballyturk a Ballyturk, or is it a truth beyond?

Lookingglass MOBY DICK invites us to look within

When it comes right down to it, the business of theatre is not so very different from the old fashioned business of whaling. Those called to the theatre, like those called to the sea, rely on keen vision, robust physicality, great resilience, and palpable instinct. They eschew the safety of the shore to pursue something elusive, leviathan, and vital: in the case of the seamen—a whale, perhaps a whale as fearsome as literature’s great white Moby Dick; in the case of the theatre company—a play, perhaps a play as inspired as Lookingglass’s adaptation of Moby Dick, which returns home from a national tour for a second residence on Michigan Avenue.  

Produced in association with The Actors Gymnasium, Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Moby Dick is full of astonishing acrobatics. Adaptor/director David Catlin performs the most impressive balancing act of all. He both distills Herman Melville’s vast, digressive novel to its narrative core and preserves much of the epic’s rich characterization, symbolism, and philosophy.

Simply, Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab of the whaling ship Pequod. Seeking revenge for the loss of his leg, he chases the great, white sperm whale Moby Dick across the Pacific to an inevitable deadly confrontation. Lookingglass tells the tale well, with powerful performances, inventive design, and insistent theatricality. But this production does more. It invites the audience to take ownership of the myth and evaluate, through the lens of our own sympathies and experiences, what exactly it means to chase a great, white whale.

The emotional core of the play is the tension between Nathan Hosner’s stately, charismatic Captain Ahab and his pragmatic first mate Starbuck (played with grim-faced gravitas by Kareem Bandealy). In act one, Ahab seduces the crew and the audience with his idealism and commitment to the higher purpose of hunting Moby Dick. Starbuck’s competing desire to collect barrels of valuable whale oil seems small and commercial in comparison. But as Ahab’s hubris drives him towards madness and the Pequod towards ruin, our loyalties mutiny. Starbuck has ideals too. He cares like a father for the men of the ship, and he dreams of returning home to his wife and young son in Nantucket. Bandealy’s performance is a touching, nuanced portrait of a man torn between love and duty.

Ahab and Starbuck represent two different workplace personalities: the passion-driven leader who defines himself through professional purpose versus the highly competent worker who’s mostly in it to make enough money to provide for his family and enjoy his vacation time. But they represent more than that too, of course. Their conflict reads as an existential parable. Moby Dick is their touchstone for examining human purpose and values.

The audience feels the thrill and danger of whaling when the actors perform daring circus feats in sequences like the lowering of the whaling boats and the typhoon. Micah Figueroa, Javen Ulambayar, and Anthony Fleming III (in a standout performance as Queequeg) dazzle in particular. In these physical sequences, the actors work in chorus, not unison, punctuating the same rhythm with dissonant gestures and attitudes. Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi’s choreography, expertly performed, reveals the characters’ distinct personalities and motives, placing each somewhere on the spectrum from Ahab to Starbuck. One young man is there to prove himself, another because he has nowhere else to go, one for adventure, one out of habit, one out of loyalty. These differences color what, exactly, each character is hunting in Moby Dick.

The audience is not excluded from the emotional stocktaking. “Come, come hither, ye broken and broken-hearted,” sings a chorus of three Fates, calling the narrator Ishmael, the crew of the Pequod, and the audience to begin their voyage. By repeatedly referring to all the human inhabitants of the theatre as the “broken and broken-hearted,” the Fates challenge us all to weigh our successes against our disappointments, our ambitions against our failures, our loves against our losses. Like Ahab, what will we die for? Like Starbuck, what are we living for? In short, what is our own Moby Dick?

Catlin’s major narrative innovation is his inclusion of the three classical Fates, played by Kelley Abell, Cordelia Dewdney, and Mattie Hawkinson. With breath, harmonic singing, and onstage instrumentation, they create much of the play’s aural landscape. They also play various characters and nonhuman entities— Starbuck’s wife, a Nantucket prophet, whales, and the sea itself, to name a few. I was left wondering what the omnipresence of the Fates suggests philosophically. Does fate originate without or within? Does Fate set Ahab in motion, or does Ahab set his fate in motion? Sometimes Fate visits you like the sea, an impartial, elemental force that you cannot control. But sometimes, Catlin implies, we are in conversation with our Fate; it is inescapable only insofar as it is an expression of our own personalities, relationships, and choices.

There’s still more to be gleaned here thematically. Melville's novel explores the difficulty and individuality of visual interpretation. In keeping with his theme, the design team crafts symbolic elements that can take on different meaning in different contexts. Scenic designer Courtney O’Neill flanks the stage with metallic poles that resemble a whale’s rib bones. They function as both ship masts and circus poles, and elegantly locate us in the belly of the beast, onboard the Pequod, and in a theatre, all at once.

Sully Ratke’s costume design also is layered. For example, the Fates’ dripping eyeliner and black lipstick signal, in one scene, a whale’s carnivorous blood-thirst. But in the next, the same makeup markings look pitiful, like the spewed lifeblood of a gentle mother whale. This juxtaposition of woman as villain and woman as victim got me thinking, by extension, about how little agency and complexity are afforded women by a vengeful and patriarchal society that casts them in every role but protagonist.

When Ahab’s Moby Dick (in the form of the Fates) finally arrives at the end of the third act, the audience is quite literally enveloped in the storytelling. I won’t tell you how, but it’s a meta-theatrical climax to a stunning play.

In the five years I have lived in Chicago, there have been as many distinct adaptations of Moby Dick: Catlin’s at Lookingglass, an acclaimed production by Blake Montgomery & The Building Stage, multiple captivating puppet plays by Blair Thomas & Company, the Chicago Mammals’ All Girl Moby Dick, and a parody imbedded within The House Theatre’s Season on the Line. That strikes me as a remarkable number of Moby Dicks! It is possible that this preoccupation is symptomatic of a scene too deep in conversation with itself, but I believe it reveals something about Chicago’s theatrical ethos.

If Chicago theatre makers feel a particular affinity to whalers, it is because they understand the crucial value of process, of allowing oneself to be at sea. Chicago remains a maker scene, a bastion of new and devised work, from its tiny and intensely DIY storefronts all the way up to its Tony-award-winning Equity houses. That Chicago casts a novel of Moby Dick’s immense profundity as its great white whale reflects the great ambition, hubris, and humanity of its theatrical spirit.

I’m leaving this Chicago theatre scene that I admire to pursue a doctorate in NYC. As I set sail, again, I thank my Chicago crew of strange bedfellows turned bosom best friends for the rescues at sea, for the strong draughts (read: Malort) quaffed to strengthen the communal bond, and for all the adventures. It’s been a whale of a time.