Taking a radical approach to experiencing live theater, Southern Gothic now playing at the Windy City Playhouse through July removes the barrier of distance between the action and the audience. It’s not a new idea, but immersive theater remains a groundbreaking concept and one many audiences would love to see emulated.
Built around a solid storyline, a young couple is throwing a birthday party for the husband’s sister are setting the stage for a night of emotional intrigue. Ultimately eight couples will make up the festivities. Set in 1961 Ashford Georgia, physical aspects of the play have the look and feel of a southern version of Leave It to Beaver with so much French rolled hair, strands of pearls and post war order. Most of the couples have an intimate knowledge of one another. Some are holding secrets. Others are surreptitiously plotting to achieve prestige and power. The rest are simply struggling to survive but can’t afford to show it. Written by Leslie Liautaud and directed by David Bell, it’s a soap opera in microcosm where the façade of good manners can’t hide the deception proliferating just below the surface.
Using a house-like structure with four rooms, all built within the theater as the stage, the audience is cued to join the party when Ellie (Sarah Grant) opens the side door. The gesture is a signal to come inside and the audience complies by climbing the steps and entering like wary cats. Before that, they looked on through the home’s windows from the outside as Ellie and her husband, Beau (Michael McKeogh) tidied the house and prepared appetizers for the party. Once the audience joined them, they became invisible guests. The goal of this technique according to Amy Rubenstein, the play’s Artistic Director and Co-Creator is “to give our audiences a new theater-going experience, breaking down the barriers between audiences and performers in exciting ways”.
It’s a bold conceit to invite the audience onto the set while a play is going on and one that works sensationally well here. Complete with a functioning front door and a realistic back yard, the sense of authenticity is keen as well as the notion that what you’re experiencing is a kind of hyper-reality.
There’s a full-size kitchen, living room, dining room, and bathroom with plenty of action going on in each one of them. Limited to 28 people, the audience is encouraged to move around and see the play unfurl and progress from different vantage points. You’re not intended to see and hear everything in every space. Southern Gothic is structured in such a way that the trajectory of the plot remains consistent in every room.
Creators have also made it possible for you to stay seated in one spot if you like. But it would be like going to a real party and remaining stationary in one place. You lose dynamism and much of the collective energy of the event. If you just stayed in the living room watching Suzanne’s (Brianna Borger) pretentious antics you might miss Lauren (Christine Mayland Perkins) back Ellie against the kitchen sink with a ruinous threat. Or if you never leave the dining room, you’d miss hearing who was intentionally undermining the financial well-being of the party’s hosts.
Perhaps to suit the style of the production, characters are vivid and starkly drawn. Charles (Brian McCaskill) enters the party with a huge deficit when most of the audience witnesses his humiliating and abusive behavior toward his wife at the rear of the house before coming into the party. His behavior doesn’t improve much once he’s inside.
Over Tom Collins cocktails offered to the audience after the play, an effort to stimulate conversation following the performance, a woman confided how every female in audience wished they could get their hands on Charles to teach him a lesson. Her comment was visceral enough to let you know she wasn’t entirely joking.
Proximity in this environment can add so much to one’s investment in both the characters and the plot. Sometimes you’re standing directly behind an actor during a scene. You’re close enough to smell their cologne and see the full purpose in their eyes as they portray someone else’s life. If you’ve never acted before and will never do so, you get a human sense of what it is to perform in a profession built on creative craftsmanship.
When champagne is offered by the hosts to the other actors, stage monitors brings trays of champagne to the audience. You can eat the chips on the table or help yourself to cheese and crackers. For the most part, spectators were too intent on following what was unfolding in front of them to care too much about the food.
And, set in the south as it was, creators made sure to inject a racial component when one of the guests brings along his girlfriend of color. Cassie (Ariel Richardson) is much like the rest of them. Well educated, polished in the social graces, and a professional working as a journalist for the local paper. The impeccability of her breeding however doesn’t deter the slurs being spoken out of ear shot in the kitchen.
With its whiffs of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf hanging in the air, the drama and intrigue may have been far greater than you’d experience at a typical middle class birthday party. But even in some of the most sedate gatherings, underlying rivalries, jealousies and perilous secrets can still fester. Southern Gothic brings them to the surface and ultimately reminds us how common they are.
Southern Comfort
Windy City Playhouse
3014 Irving Park Rd.
773-891-8985
Closes July 29th
