OFFBEAT: Shakespeare Theater's 'Madness of King George' a spectacular spiral of intrigue

My favorite play in Chicago. No doubt about it.

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There are times when the audience winces or even feels the temptation to want to look away during the compelling unfolding of events in Chicago Shakepeare Theater's riveting production of "The Madness of George III."
These natural temptations serve as further proof of the sheer brilliance of the performance by three-time Tony Award nominee actor Harry Groener in the title role of a monarch on the verge of mental collapse at a time when medical science had little to offer the treatment of physical ailments, let alone, abnormalities of the intellect and reasoning.
Masterfully written by Alan Bennett, the Laurence Olivier and Tony Award-winning playwright of "The History Boys," this three-hour, one intermission dramatic masterpiece is directed by Penny Metropulos and runs through June 12 at the Courtyard Theater at Navy Pier.
Edge of the seat intrigue and amazingly ideal production values result in a story that quickly seems to swirl about as the audience is on the edge of their seats feeling compassion, confusion, sympathy and even moments of humor while absorbing this fascinating time of history.
"The Madness of George III" explores one of the most politically charged periods of Great Britain's history into a surprisingly heartfelt human story about loss-of mind, body and power.
The 13 Colonies of the "New America" have just been lost as King George III descends into madness and is forced to submit to his doctors' myriad 18th-century medical treatments, his personal and political affiliations are threatened.
Watching the descent of his father are his two sons, the thoroughly entertaining Richard Baird as the Prince of Wales and impish actor Alex Weisman as his brother the Duke of York.
But at the core of this story of royal intrigue are the King's relationships with his devoted Queen Charlotte, played by the ever-amazing Ora Jones and his closest advisers, who endure uncertainty as England's ruler struggles to remain in control of his own person and his government.
Readers might recall Bennett also received an Academy Award nomination for his 1994 cinematic adaptation of "The Madness of George III," which won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction, and starred the late Nigel Hawthorne as King George III and Helen Mirren as Queen Charlotte.
Actor William Pitt is a strong and encaptivating stage force playing the prime minister torn between serving the people, his government and a ruler who has left a lasting impact on himself and many others.
Other members of this incredible, capable cast include Kevin Gudahl as Captain Fitzroy, David Lively as Thurlow, Brad Armacost as Dr. Baker, Patrick Clear as Dr. Warren, William Dick as Dr. Pepys, James Newcomb as Dr. Willis, Steven Pringle as Papandiek and Patrice Egleston as Lady Pembroke.
And look for South Holland native and actor Kevin Cox, delivering an amusing and carefully balanced performance as Braun, one of the king's footmen.
Scenic Designer William Bloodgood provides a perfect, transforming set for the story to emerge, while the costume design by Susan E. Mickey is stunning.

CST's - The Madness of George III

Like I said - go to the chicago Shalespeare Theatre and see George III from Alan Bennett.
Harry Groener plays the King George and he is great.
Here is an article about the actor.

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Published on WBEZ (http://www.wbez.org)

The method in Harry Groener's madness

Laura Molzahn May 18, 2011

Harry Groener is passionate about being analytical. To prepare for his role as the king in CST's The Madness of George III, he read seven books—including one focused on the king’s 15 children. Or was it 16? Either way, he says, “If you look at the dates, that’s almost one a year!”

Alan Bennett’s 1991 play hews to the historical record, right down to the three bumpers of spa water George III drinks at Cheltenham, Groener says, in an effort to cure what ails him—probably porphyria, a disease discovered a century later. Cycling through all the character’s inexplicable, excoriating physical and mental afflictions, this Tony-nominated veteran of Broadway, television, and film manages to establish the character’s bedrock decency.

“George III has been demonized,” Groener says, “made into the crazy king who happened to be crazy during the American Revolution. But no, this was way after that, in the winter of 1788, 1789. The fact that they lost the colonies was something he could not bear till the day he died. Parliament was what he had trouble with. He wasn’t the one who said about the colonies, ‘Oh, they’re just misbehaving, treat them like children and give them a spanking and let’s not hear anymore about it.’ There are references to him saying, ‘Is there any way that we can resolve some of the grievances?’”

The so-called mad king, Groener says, “wanted to set an example to the country—a moral example, a religious example: be good, be honest, be honorable. Be true to your wife, monogamous—and he was.” Groener describes the king’s relationship with the German-born Queen Charlotte (a wonderfully warm Ora Jones) as “sweet, because it isn’t the norm, right? You get married, you don’t necessarily love the person, but your duty is to marry and have children to continue the line. Once you’ve done that, and have a few sons, you’re more or less done.” Not George III, apparently.

Nattering on about his favorite subject, Groener says: “He was very well educated, of course, but he also educated himself. He loved going to talk to the farmers, he loved talking about agriculture, of course he loved pigs—he loved pigs! He could exhaust you because he was so energetic and could just talk and talk and talk about ANY subject. This was before he was ill. When he was ill he would talk for hours and hours and hours. Some of it was nonsense, some of it wasn’t. And he was aware of the fact that something was going terribly wrong. He did hallucinate. The physical symptoms started first, and then they went to affect his mind.”

“We can all sympathize with the pain this person is going through,” says Groener. “And I think we can all relate to the caretaking theme. Penny Metropulos, our director—both of us were very, very well aware. She’s going through it now with her husband and her mother-in-law, and my wife and I’ve just gone through years of it, with friends and with our parents. I’m sure that at least 25 percent of the audience, if not more, on any given night are going through that at this very moment. The dealing with this person who’s becoming incontinent, and no one was equipped to deal with that—certainly not Charlotte, certainly not the sons. It was left to the doctors, the equerries, to deal with this man and his condition.”

“I loved reading about this, it really is fascinating,” says Groener. “A lot of it, you just have it in the background, it’s peripheral—you can’t play it, but you just have it back there, and it grounds you, so that when you look at these people you have a little bit more information about who that actor represents. For me it just gives it more weight, it colors it more, it fills in the blanks.”

Outgoing Tide on the Northlight Theatre in Skokie

Critics are raving about The Outgoing Tide! - and they are right.
We were at the reading last year (not with Rondi Reed) and it was already great. Deanna Dunagan was suberb and we hope to see the result later. now this year we really made it. And it was great. A sad but beautiful play.
We had the chance for a small talk with the director B.J.Jones. He was very friendly and pleased that we came back a year later.

Since we also met chris jones and hedi weiss during the symposium here are the reviews:

The Outgoing Tide' at Northlight:
Play about end-of-life issues shows Mahoney at his finest
by Chris Jones
Chicago Tribune
May 24, 2011

★★★½

Gunner, the memory-challenged central character in Bruce Graham's new play "The Outgoing Tide," is slowly losing his grip on the ebbs and flows of life. But whereas it must be tempting to play an elderly man suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's, or severe dementia, as a timid, nervous fellow, there is not a hint of that in John Mahoney.

Mahoney - whose performance in director BJ Jones' superb world-premiere production is, I think, the best work I've ever seen him do on stage - understands that the agony of suffering from progressive memory loss is not best reflected theatrically through trepidation and confusion. On the contrary, it is best expressed through strength. Only then do we understand what is being lost.

And thus, in a display of robustness that one does not typically associate with this most genial of actors, Mahoney shows us a proud, flinty man for whom the loss of lucidity is entirely intolerable. It is an exceptionally moving performance that hones in on one thing that family members dealing with loved ones in this all-too-common situation too little understand: the importance of dignity and personal pride.

"The Outgoing Tide," which is set on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, is, at its core, at exploration of how such a man as Mahoney's Gunner - forceful, well-prepared, a father, a husband, a kidder - can live with a seriously diminished mental capacity, and whether he is within his rights to not want to live with it at all. It is a very tightly focused piece about a family of three. Rondi Reed plays Peg, Gunner's earnest, straight-talking wife, and Thomas J. Cox plays his son. Events take place on a day when Gunner has called up his son and asked him to visit. Gunner wants to tell him about a plan to provide more for his family, and also to put himself out of his own increasing misery.

If you're in anything approaching this situation - with your parents, partner, or self - I think you'll instantly recognize how Graham zeroes in on recognizable truths.

There is the leadership vacuum that occurs when a powerful patriarch can no longer remember to wear his pants. And Cox carefully shows us the travails that come when a mild, only moderately successful middle-aged man must suddenly assert himself with his far stronger father, a relationship that is clarified through flashbacks that Jones interweaves beautifully into the action. There is the way that your parents' aging often hits you when you're least prepared to deal with it; you're stuck, perhaps, in a stressed-out slump of diminished career expectations and dealing with kids and a troubled marriage of your own. There are those tantalizing moments of normalcy, when you convince yourself that things are getting better or, at least, no worse. And, most moving of all, there is the impact of an aging parent on his or her spouse and the fundamental changes that take place, rarely for the better, in a relationship that may stretch back 50 years or more.

Which brings me to Reed. This is a quiet performance that's wholly the equal of the extraordinary work being done by Mahoney - and by Cox, for that matter. But there's something in its reticence, its truly agonizing reticence, that has been living with me since. As penned by Graham, Peg would rather get up from the table whenever anything being said around that table is painful. As she bustles around, rarely looking anyone in the eye, Reed submerges her famously forceful personality inside a woman whom we see, over a couple of hours of stage traffic, must finally try and face something. It is quite something to watch.

Gunner's desire not to live in a reduced way sends this play off into the thorny debates surrounding many end-of-life issues, which, in the final analysis, I find less interesting than the nuanced and very personal crises being forged by these actors. The play needs, I suppose, the dramatic tension posed by Gunner threatening to do one final, all-enveloping thing. But I confess to some resistance to that; in real life, when we are faced with the possibility of such loss, our tendency is to try and delay or soften it, rather than treat it as an all-or-nothing issue. That human impulse gets short shrift here in the interests of dramatic stakes.

But in terms of acting and directing, nothing whatsoever gets short shrift. This is a trio of towering performances, made all the more intense by the sense that any tower can, eventually, be toppled.

Read the review on chicagotribune.com>


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Two Tony winners, perfectly paired in ‘The Outgoing Tide'
BY HEDY WEISS
Chicago Sun-Times
May 24, 2011

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There is a special timbre to an audience's laughter of recognition, and it was fully audible throughout Sunday's performance of "The Outgoing Tide," the Bruce Graham play now in its world premiere at Northlight Theatre.

There also is a special sort of pleasure that infuses a production in which two veteran actors, who have long since put a high gloss on their craft, get to play opposite each other. And you certainly can feel that as John Mahoney and Rondi Reed, each a Tony Award winner, give an informal master class in acting as they play a couple that has been married for 50 years and is now trying to negotiate the volatile currents of the end game.

The storyline in Graham's play is an increasingly familiar one these days as people live longer and must deal with the onset of Alzheimer's and other care-intensie diseases. There are decisions to be made - by the afflicted person who still can make them, by the aging but healthy spouse who clearly will need help caring for a deteriorating partner, and/or by the adult children of such a couple - a baby boomer already in full midlife mode. And invariably that classic question will arise: Whose life is it, anyway?

Graham has crafted a skillful, punchy piece that careens expertly between the painful and the comic, features a number of laugh-out-loud one liners (delivered with equal aplomb by Mahoney and Reed), and very deftly incorporates some elements of surprise. And director BJ Jones, along with the ideally cast Thomas J. Cox (whose wiry build and gaunt face suggests he easily could be Mahoney's son), captures the play's shifting moods ideally, putting its many other concisely limned themes (the father-son relationship, the plight of the only child, generational shifts in attitudes about marriage), into sharp relief.

Set on the patio of a wood shingle cottage on Chesapeake Bay (Brian Sidney Bembridge's handsome architectural set is down payment worthy), the play begins as Jack (Cox), pays a visit to his "old school" Irish Catholic parents, and finds himself caught in the middle of their opposing choices.

Gunner (Mahoney), well aware he is losing his mental faculties, is fiercely resistant to the sort of assisted living facility his exhausted and frightened wife, Peg (Reed), wants to move into. And he has his own dramatic alternative plan in mind - one that would insure the futures of both his wife (with whom he has a loving but prickly relationship), and his son (a father of three, now in the process of a divorce). As Gunner puts it, he has "loose ends" to tie up, and he knows time is running out.

Mahoney, whippet thin, fast-talking and sly, expertly captures the brutal frustration inherent in advancing Alzheimer's, while also suggesting the innate irascibility and cruelty Gunner was capable of as a younger man. Reed is wonderfully transformed in this role - determined and feisty, but softer than usual, and lighter of voice, so that she truly suggests Gunner's youthful emory of her as his working class Grace Kelly. And Cox deftly suggests that Jack is very much the product of his parents' long-running emotional tug of war.

Read the review at suntimes.com>

Tennessee Shakespeare Festival

The Tennessee Shakespeare Festival is at a critical juncture. Between last year's flood, this year's tornadoes, and an economy that seems mired in molasses, fund-raising for the festival has been more than challenging.

This year, I'm making a personal plea to the LD.com family to support this year's festival in any amount you can--$5 buys paint, $25 gets a costume, $100 pays an apprentice salary for a week (believe it or not--and I exploit them like 3rd World sweatshop workers, too.) $500 pays an Equity actor's salary, per diem, pension, health and welfare for a week.

Anyone donating will get a recent autographed 8x10 of me (actually taken within the last year!), and my eternal gratitude. Anyone donating $500 gets lunch at the Cracker Barrel with me, this summer or in the future. (Group donations count, but please have one designated donor.)

So please help if you can--as you all know, this festival is a dream near and dear to my heart. I'm hoping we can all look back in a few years and say, "Look what we did!"

To donate simply visit http://tennesseeshakespearefestival.com and simply click "donate".

Love to all,
Lane

if you are

in chicago right now go and watch the madness of george third from aln bennett. great play, great acting in the shakespeare at navy pier.

i also liked ratoun and die at victory gardens.

what else is on ?
mandrake at red orchid - funny and originell

the hot l baltimore at steppenwolf. strange play. i dont get why they did it.sorry.

the gospel according toj james at victory gardens. good but too long. they should cut one story but they wont.

the main actor andre .. is very interesting in person. we were at the premiere and today ont the symposium.
more later.

Chicago

Published on WBEZ (http://www.wbez.org)

Chicago: Theater capital of America - past, present and future?

Kelly Kleiman March 14, 2011

It’s easier to look back on an historical moment than to realize that you’re living in one. What if the past fifty years of Chicago theater have been not just fun and exciting but actually constitute the equivalent of Elizabethan England or post-Civil War New York–that is, an instance of the ultimate flowering of the art form?

That’s precisely the theory behind Columbia College Chicago’s decision to host a scholarly symposium on what we’re all right in the middle of. “Chicago: Theatre Capital of America–Past, Present, Future,” scheduled for May 18-21, will bring together scholars from across the country to debate how the Chicago theater renaissance got its start in the late 1950s, what factors caused it to flourish, how influential Chicago theater has been on the art as practiced around the world, and what will be necessary to keep it alive and well and living in our back yard.

The scholars–from Harvard, the University of British Columbia and the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in London, among many others–will share panels with Chicago theater practitioners.

The presenters’ roster is a who’s who of Chicago theater, from Martha Lavey of Steppenwolf to Terry McCabe of City Lit to Paul Barosse and other members of the late lamented Practical Theatre Company, which dissolved when its players were swept en masse onto Saturday Night Live.

Panels will address the question whether Chicago’s legacy of African-American theater actually outstrips that of the Harlem Renaissance; the role of various training entities, from Second City to Hull House; the varying experiences of playwrights, directors, performers and critics; and on and on.

Says planning committee chair Albert Williams, a Columbia College faculty member and long-time chief theater critic of the Reader, “There will be discussions of the economics of the industry–Valuing the Art, People First, with [Writers Theatre Artistic Director] Michael Halberstam, [is] also known as Pay Your Actors a Decent Wage. And [there’s] another panel called Patron Experience, because you’re not just doing [theater] for yourselves but for people who paid money to be there.”

Williams stresses that the symposium is open to the public. “Presuming that people love theater as fans, they will learn a whole lot more about Chicago theater. They will get to rub elbows with leading theater practitioners in Chicago, and also former Chicago theater professionals who may be coming back.”

The conference is awaiting confirmation of participation by Chicago veterans such as Joe Mantegna, Regina Taylor and Terry Kinney. “[Mantegna] said he’d love to do it if it works with his schedule,” said Williams.

Further details to come.

More Olivier Awards

Hallo, sorry for the lack of my post. RL - you know.

Here is the fb site from the Awards. Check out more photos.

http://www.facebook.com/OlivierAwards

I will go to chicago later this months to a conference. So it should be possible to post more than.