Immersive meets the absurd in The Terror Cotta’s THE OSTRICH

The Terror Cottas is an experimental playwright-driven theatre group, and the historic North Mansion in Berger Park serves as an experimental theater for playwright Wendy A. Schmidt’s The Ostrich. The play is an absurdist, immersive experience that involves the Wright Brothers’ inexplicably living out of time and their collision with a small town called Ostrich, that has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a collective love of ostriches.

It opens on the front stoop of the mansion, where the mayor, Incandescence Groane, played with warmth by Shellie DiSalvo, announces that her beloved town of Ostrich, Indiana has been chosen by none other than the Wright Brothers to be the site of a new airstrip. The townspeople are all delighted at this sign of Progress, and even more delighted when the Wright Brothers themselves (Pete Wood and Donaldson Cardenas) arrive to give a speech, as if they’d just walked out of 1915 and onto the stage. Wood and Cardenas do a great turn as old-timey gentlemen. Wood is grandiose and cheerful, sporting an “evil” curled mustache, and Cardenas is a deceptively gentle mastermind. Once the announcement is made, the audience is invited into the house. The action unfolds mostly in the three main rooms of the home. The front room is appropriately covered in kitschy ostrich-themed art, as it is The Ostrich Feather, a bed and breakfast run by the mayor, while the other rooms serve as whatever the scene calls for, be it an airplane, a park, a beach or a front porch.

Each scene takes place in a different room – the audience is directed to each new scene by a tour guide. This makes for a new meaning to the term theater in the round, since every scene is viewed from a different angle, and the actors walk in and out, and even occasionally interact with the audience as if they are fellow townspeople. The plot is relatively straightforward, once you grasp that the Wright Brothers somehow exist as men of the early 19^th century in a town that has Amazon, HBO and woman-owned businesses. The Wright Brothers have been given carte blanche by the residents of Ostrich to choose land for their airfield – a thing everyone is convinced will put sleepy, quaint little Ostrich on the map. The brothers choose a back field belonging to Chuck (Jorge Salas), the brother of Incandescence and an unflappably cheerful guy. Unfortunately for Chuck, he had plans for that field – and it holds a tree shaped like an ostrich, the town’s pride and joy.

The misfortune doesn’t stop there. This play is about the destructive power of blind faith in progress. Each town member pays an increasing cost to welcome the Wright Brothers in and in the end, all they do is lose. There are some unexpected twists and turns as the story gets darker, with one huge, hilarious departure near the middle when the townspeople put on a play about Thanksgiving that somehow becomes a gun fight between Christopher Columbus and two self-important eagles (played by the very game ensemble members Ellen Adalaide and Jonathan Crabtree). After an evening of increasing silliness and a mounting feeling of unease regarding the Brother’s motives, the ending is a little abrupt – in fact, applause in the outer room was how we knew the show had ended at all. This led to a feeling of discomfort that I suspect was the playwright’s goal all along.

The combination of absurdity, surrealism and walking from room to room makes for a memorable evening. Experimental theater, according to the Terror Cottas, should: challenge audiences to think about life and themselves in a different way, expand the possibilities of the medium to keep it fresh and effective, speak to audiences of their particular moment in time in a way that artistic work from the past cannot, and nurture the audience’s ability to experience their present reality aesthetically, as opposed to experiences approved for inclusion in museums or histories. Frankly, The Ostrich does just that. If you’re looking for an evening of experimental theater that doesn’t involve sitting still for a few hours, this show is a great place to start.

Somewhat Recommended

Reviewed by Alina C. Hevia

May 2 – 17 at the Berger Park’s North Mansion, 6205 N.Sheridan. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:00pm. Run time is 100 minutes with no intermission. There is an Industry performance on Monday, May 12 at 7 p.m. Tickets are on sale for $5 – $10 at www.TheTerrorCottas.org

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.

Dive into Chaos with Curious Theatre Branch’s Premiere, THE INFINITY PLAY

Paul William Brennan’s The Infinity play opens innocently: two characters in black, on a black stage, argue over who gets to speak first. It reads as a take on the random symbols we use to order our lives: A or B, 0 or 1 – or is it O or I? It’s a silly set up that devolves into a sillier, circular argument.

What follows is nine more scenes, each with two players, and each devolving further into chaos, betrayal, dissent and madness. None of the scenes are interconnecting, and none of the players seem to have a relationship with any other, but there is a common theme of circular, hopeless argument while characters try desperately to beat each other in games that have no winner. Each scene grows wilder and more destructive, until the stage resembles a junk heap, with props from each scene strewn about and occasionally recycled.  By the end, the actors are literally digging through the piles to find what they need. The cast seems larger than necessary for a collection of two-person scenes, it could have been done with a cast of only four, but all ten of them perform admirably. There is so much passion, so much yelling-in-faces, so much confusion and disagreement, and so many barely sensical conversations, that their commitment is the only thing the audience can really hold on to. The overall sense of bewilderment only grows as the play progresses. It begins with something to say about the hopeless, desperate scrambling in circles we humans do with each successive generation but then falls prey to its own complaint: the chaos heightens till there is nowhere for it to go and ultimately ends in one character’s attempts to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Actress Maya Odim has a particularly soft and soothing voice that helped bring the room down collectively from the chaos that had been whipped up over the course of the evening.

The highlight of the night was the mostly seamless jumping from pre-recorded content played on a screen hanging from the middle of the stage, to live video on the same screen from a camera moved about the stage by the actors, and the actual, live-action play going on in real time. In some scenes, the actors even interact with the pre-recorded content, eliciting several laughs and a nod to the careful choreography that goes into that kind of move. The videos were often artfully edited and added considerably to the events going on onstage, sometimes as commentary, and sometimes as a continuation of a particular story line.

Ultimately, if you’ve ever wondered what that old stoner adage “time is a flat circle” would look like as a play, this is as close as I think you could get. Absurdist, experimental, and surreal, the Infinity Play reminds us that no matter how much we might try to correct the mistakes of the past, all we are really doing is making more of a mess.

Somewhat Recommended

Reviewed by Alina C. Hevia

Presented at the Jarvis Square Theater, 1439 W. Jarvis Ave. in Chicago.

Tickets for The Infinity Play tickets are on the “pay what you can” model, suggested rate is $20.00 and can be purchased at CuriousTheatreBranch.com

Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 5pm. Run time is 110 minutes with no intermission.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.