 |
|||
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
     |
|
|
|
|||
|
LEWIS AND CLARK REACH THE EUPHRATES: Reviews Chicago Sun-TimesTHEATER REVIEW | 'Lewis and Clark' takes darkly comic look at explorers - Recommend (3)BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic/hweiss@suntimes.com In a program note for "Lewis and Clark Cross the Euphrates" -- a clever, blackly comic, phantasmagorical, graphic novel-like chronicle that stitches together some of this country's more ill-advised historical chapters -- playwright Robert Schenkkan comes clean about his decidedly partisan view of American history. "I have an ax to grind," he confesses. And grind it he does, to the point where even the most devoted liberal might shout: "Enough." Infamous Commonwealth Theatre put itself on the map here several years ago with its madly ambitious, terrifically realized production of Schenkkan's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning epic "The Kentucky Cycle." Now, in a play that gives us the darker side of the fabled expedition led by Meriwether Lewis (Stephen Dunn) and Willliam Clark (Craig C. Thompson) -- who President Thomas Jefferson charged with reporting on the land and waterways contained in the vast Louisiana Purchase of 1803 -- the company again rises to an epic challenge in sheer theatrical terms, even if NO nation's history should be viewed in such simplistic terms. A gifted cast of 11, under the ingenious, polished, fast-paced direction of Chris Maher (with a handsome, malleable ship's deck design by Diane Fairchild), gives its all to the project, and makes the most of the play's first (and far stronger) act. Here Schenkkan gives us the explorers' competitive, sometimes comically rendered good cop (Clark)/bad cop (Lewis) relationship, with Dunn and Thompson truly sensational in their byplay. By the second act, the pair find themselves disconcertingly catapulted into the future -- first to Cuba and the Philippines for the Spanish-American War of 1898, then on to Vietnam and Iraq. All along the way, darker-skinned people (whether Colin K. Jones as the black slave, Laura Rook as Indian maiden Sacagawea or Allen Hope Sermonia as the Asian) get the worst of it, with Carlos Rogelio Diaz deftly impersonating the infamous Iraqi power broker Ahmed Chalabi.
Throughout, liberty and good intentions
invariably end up in suppression and torture. Schenkkan (who will attend a
post-show discussion on May 11) has distorted the map so dramatically that
is has become a useless guide. TimeOut Chicago In this time-traveling allegory of the Lewis and Clark expedition—in which the explorers shift from noble emissaries to the Sioux to collectors of rigged intelligence in Iraq—the road to hell, the Pacific and Baghdad is paved with good intentions. In this 2005 work, Schenkkan, who won a Pulitzer in 1992 for The Kentucky Cycle, takes his butcher knife to the sacred cow of Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” ideals. To make sense of our suicidal miscalculations in Iraq, the playwright suggests, we need to consider whether the seeds of our imperialist dogma were first sown when the founding father dispatched L&C to find a passage to the Pacific, make nice with the natives and takeover their land. Schenkkan sends his Corps of Discovery squad beyond Native American territory to the battlefields of the Spanish-American War, Vietnam and Desert Storm, and summoning cameos from Ngo Dinh Diem to Donald Rumsfeld. Infamous Commonwealth grounds the playwright’s overstuffed, occasionally pedantic treatise with disciplined ensemble acting, direction and design. Craig T. Thompson and Stephen Dunn, as William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, respectively, convincingly convey the two faces of American foreign policy—one naively idealistic (Clark), the other aggressively self-righteous (Lewis). Their Heart of Darkness odyssey is capsized somewhat by Schenkkan’s overloading his conveyor belt of American injustices with one-dimensional caricatures. Sometimes it feels like Lewis and Clark’s Excellent Adventures instead of a strident polemic. Undaunted courage it ain’t, but by the end we know we’re up shit creek, sans paddle. — Craig Keller
|
|||
