Season on the Line - Three Stars! - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 9/24/14 - "What the cult Canadian TV show "Slings & Arrows" did for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival — and for resident classical theaters in general — so Shawn Pfautsch's "Season on the Line" aims to do for small Chicago theater companies.

The very fun new show at the House Theatre of Chicago is partly a satirical takedown of familiar local influence peddlers and creative types and partly a revealing exploration of artistic neuroses and midtier insecurities. But this three hour, 20 minute navel-gaze mostly is a startlingly frank and expansive meditation on a theater company that once was the flavor of the month but now finds itself struggling to maintain its position in a middle-aged display case, fearful it has become opportunistic, stale and otherwise soft to the scoop.

Sure, the names have been changed to protect the not so innocent. (In the story, we're watching the Chicago's Bad Settlement Theatre Company.) But this show, which achieves a level of self-examination few would undertake, took considerable guts.

Some will doubtless argue that "Season on the Line" is self-indulgent inside-baseball. They have a case: The travails of being a long-established but not yet fiscally or creatively secure Chicago theater company are, inarguably, of particular interest only to a small subset of the population. But I'm of the view that the NBC show "Smash," which dealt with the creative process on Broadway, was a failure mostly because it obsessed about mainstream appeal far too much for its own good and thus killed off its own truth.


Specificity, even of the arcane sort, can produce great comedy and art, assuming the characters are either lovable or detestable enough. And in its best moments, "Season on the Line" both has such characters and becomes the frequently amusing, genuinely vulnerable story of just how darn hard it can be to do what you love doing and pay the rent, which is hardly a problem confined to those who practice theater in Chicago

The premise is that we are watching the unfolding of an entire season at our struggling Chicago theater company, beginning with an adaptation of "The Great Gatsby," moving on to Lanford Wilson's "Balm in Gilead" and ending with a blowout, hyperexpressionistic version of "Moby-Dick." The backstage traumas and post-show reactions to each of these productions get their own act. To some extent, each act is in the style of one of the shows (a la "Slings & Arrows"), although the whole piece is very much in the thrall of the Herman Melville opus.

It's probably not overstating things to say that the writer of this review is cast as the whale.

That may be my considerable ego talking; the world has many critics. Still, much of the show is concerned with the relationship of the company with a particular, now middle-aged critic, one who works for the biggest newspaper in Chicago, one who supported this company in its early years but has been less admiring of its work as the years have gone by (although he has become no less pretentious in his writing style) — and one who dispenses star ratings, frequently resorting to infuriating, spiteful, box-office-killing half stars.

One of this critic's most infuriating habits is to bring up the past. At one point, when the entire cast heads to their mobile phones to read the review for "Balm in Gilead," they start out smiling as things sound promising, only to feel the weight of the sharpest arrow in this critic's quiver: "I was privileged to see the Steppenwolf Theatre production in 1981."

He also has a habit of showing up to the final preview, rather than the opening night, claiming that bigger theater companies command his attention on other nights. So it is surely apropos that this review is, merely by coincidence, based on the last preview performance of "Season on the Line."

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that watching this show, especially the scene in a bar (well-acted by Sean Sinitski) where a beer-sporting critic meets a lowly young actor (Ty Olwin, an engaging narrator) and bares his self-loathing soul about the inhumanity of his job, was a profoundly unusual and rather unsettling experience for me. It was not that I felt taken down so much as, well, known. And what critic likes to feel known by those he or she covers?

For the record, I don't really know Pfautsch personally, although such distinctions are, in the universe of this show, absurd, there being nothing more personal than the art for which one is not amply compensated.

"Season on the Line" is not only about the relationship between artist and critic: There is plenty of skewering of Captain Ahab-like artistic directors (courtesy of the dead-on Thomas Cox) who undermine every production in a company's season, except their own esoteric projects, which swallow the budget like a whale (The Building Stage, by the way, really did do an off-Loop "Moby-Dick." Twice). There is much about fights between set and lighting designers, competing for attention and with the capacity to easily kill off each other's work. There is stuff about the annoying company member who gets a TV show and swaggers back into town (Shane Kenyon has that down), demanding to be cast in all the wrong roles.

But the main takeaway is that while worrying about some idiot's judgment can kill a theater company, theater artists forever are trapped in a paradox where the idiot can dictate success, and thus gets inside their heads and kills 'em off. Quite a conundrum.

The best material, and there is a lot of good and really funny stuff, is that edgy, gritty, dangerous content. At times, director Jess McLeod's production, although likable, just is not gritty enough. If you're going to go to these places, there is no point in demurring nor embracing the sanctuary of stereotypes. Go for the jugulars folks, and bare your own.

And be ready by the final preview" .  

 

 

Season on the Line - Tony Adler, Chicago Reader 9/25/14 - "Theater professionals are going to love the shop talk that saturates this new play by Shawn Pfautsch, but its smart pleasures are open to everybody. A tale of obsession and disaster built on America's most revered tale of obsession and disaster, Season on the Line follows the crew of the good ship Bad Settlement Theater as they attempt to wrangle Moby-Dick to the stage. Their Ahab is Bad Settlement’s intimidating artistic director, Ben Adonna; their white whale Arthur Williamson, a powerful theater critic a la Frank Rich whose make-or-break potency comes to haunt Ben's every move. Jess McLeod's sharply articulated production fills the House Theatre of Chicago stage with vivid characters, from the big, inscrutable galoot of a set builder (Christopher M. Walsh) to Ben's bizarre guru (Tiffany Yvonne Cox), who looks like Diana Ross and talks like Oprah's unhinged sister. Thomas J. Cox's Ben is so gracefully built that you never quite notice that he's turned from a big personality into a monster until it's too late. Ty Olwin is just the right amount of wide-eyed as Bad Settlement's Ishmael. The 200-minute running time may sound long, but I can't imagine what I’d cut"

 
Season on the Line - Kris Vire, TimeOutChicago.com - "In a way, the House Theatre’s latest plays like an enjoyable American take on Slings and Arrows, the brilliant Canadian TV dramedy whose three seasons each tracked a season of on– and offstage drama at a Stratford-like festival. Playwright Shawn Pfautsch’s snapshot of a season at the fictional Bad Settlement Theatre Company follows the foibles of producing theater on a much smaller budget. Yet Pfautsch’s piece also does double duty as a kind of mirror of the season’s final production. Which means it’s a stage adaptation of Moby-Dick in the form of a comedy about a theater doing a stage adaptation of Moby-Dick. Got that?

Don’t worry, it’s easy enough to follow. Our way in is an unnamed narrator—don’t call him Ishmael—who gets hired as assistant stage manager for the season despite being a total theater noob. Through his voyage, as relatably embodied by actor Ty Olwin with fresh-faced enthusiasm, we vicariously experience the highs and lows of creating theater and meet an assortment of loose Melville analogues as backstage types as the company embarks on productions of The Great Gatsby and Balm in Gilead. Using his characters as stylized archetypes the way Melville employed the crew of the Pequod, Pfautsch playfully, and largely successfully, conveys the joys of discovery in rehearsal and the adrenaline-fueled thrill of real-time backstage problem-solving.

Maggie Kettering is dead-on as the level-headed, put-upon stage manager Starbuck—er, Day Starr. Marika Mashburn and Andy Lutz are terrific as the ship’s mates, distinctive directors of their respective shows-within-the-show, and the introduction of Sean Sinitski as the critic whose judgment is awaited with bated breath is a brilliantly staged surprise. (That there’s only the one critic who matters suggests that Bad Settlement isn’t a Chicago-based company, clearly.)

The piece’s Ahab is artistic director Ben Adonna (Thomas J. Cox), monomaniacally obsessed with his season-concluding adaptation of Moby-Dick. In the early scenes he'll phone into production meetings from his writing room, or blow in like a hurricane through another director’s rehearsal. As his show gets nearer, he alienates and annoys everyone in the company, cannibalizing resources from other productions to pay for his own. Pfautsch’s metaphor falters a bit with the third-act reveal of the true nature of Ben’s white whale. Or perhaps not, illustrating as it does that Ben has lost all perspective, forgetting why he set sail in the first place".

Season on the Line - GapersBlock.com - " House Theatre warns its patrons in advance that its new production, Season on the Line, is "an epic love letter to the American theater." And it is indeed a love letter. A big sprawling messy exuberant love letter, sealed with a big wet kiss.

The play, written by House ensemble member Shawn Pfautsch, takes us through the tribulations, artistic and economic, of the Bad Settlement Theatre Company, based somewhere in or near a big city with an influential theater critic. In a fit of authenticity, House has even provided Bad Settlement with business cards and a website, badsettlement.org.

This three-hour epic (plus two intermissions) is Shakespearean in its ambitions. The show takes us, act by act, through the company's current season, opening with a rousing success in its diverse reimagining of The Great Gatsby (3-1/2 stars from that critic). In act 2, a less successful Balm in Gilead opens to a 1-star review and an abbreviated run. But Season on the Line revolves around the artistic director's obsession with producing a great new version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick as the season finale.

Thomas J. Cox plays artistic director Ben Adonna with passionate levels of ego, madness and budgetary neglect. He is, of course, Bad Settlement's Captain Ahab. He envisions his Moby Dick production as "a memory play--not historical fiction. Ishmael is a survivor, one that has dealt with survivor's guilt, anger, and post-traumatic stress disorder."

Director Jess McLeod, in her House debut, does a terrific job in choreographing this madness, from production meetings to rehearsals to performances, after-parties, set construction and the final striking of the set. (Because of budget exigencies, Ben decides to use one set for the whole season. Thus the Moby Dick set will serve for both Gatsby and Gilead. To complicate matters, he brings in a new dramaturg (Tiffany Yvonne Cox), who insists Moby Dick is the sacred text of the Baha'i faith.)

Fortunately, we are guided in this voyage by the nameless narrator, Ty Olwin, whose musings mirror those of Melville's Ishmael. He has just joined Bad Settlement as the new ASM (assistant stage manager) because "I answered a want ad for an Assistant Stage Manager. I showed up like a wolf-child at the door, with no idea what language these people were speaking." Bad Settlement gives him his theater education.

The theater critic (Sean Sinitski), whose praise the company yearns for, is Arthur Williamson, who may represent Ben Brantley of the New York Times or an influential Chicago critic. He first appears in a white suit, spotlighted in the audience. He leaves his seat to narrate his reviews as the casts find them posted online. After the Moby Dick opening, dressed in "civilian clothes," he appears at the theater bar and talks with the narrator. They exchange views about theater and theater criticism. The critic says,

"Look, there's only three kinds of shows. There are the shows you hate -- from the first cue to the final blackout, they're a complete waste of time on every level. They're actually very rare. Almost as rare as the great shows -- the shows that keep you fascinated from beginning to end. But 95 percent of the shows I see are the third kind. Not great, not terrible. You sit there wondering: how could it have been better? Was it the writing, the direction, the casting? What was good, what was bad? .... When I go on record about how I feel about the work, do I play up the promise, knowing a lot of people will go on my recommendation and be disappointed, or do I gently pan it, knowing that I'm practically punishing the company ledger? It's an impossible thing to do right."

You will also receive a theater education, if you are not a theater junkie already, or a former English lit major. The play is packed with theater jargon and literary references. Pfautsch's script is well written and very funny, and the theater and literary jokes fly by.

The actors, all 18 of them, do an inspired job of moving the three acts along briskly. Among many fine performances are Olwin as the Ishmael-like narrator, Cox as the director and Andy Lutz as Peter Trellis, actor and Gilead director. The multi-talented Danny Bernado is charming, graceful and funny as Kaku, playing many Bad Settlement roles. Maggie Kettering is excellent as the stage manager, as is Abu Ansari as a Ugandan actor who is cast as Gatsby and provides a voice of reason throughout the play.

The show is set in the pool room of a dilapidated motel. Lee Keenan's scenic and lighting design manages to transform the large open space into backstage, performance and party space by having the cast move large props and furniture in and out as needed. Izumi Inaba's costume designs manage to dress all three productions with creativity. Kevin O'Donnell's sound design adds the right aural touches". - Nancy Bishop, www.GapersBlock.com

Season on the Line - Erikka Mikkalo, StageandCinema.com - "Have you ever heard of Bad Settlement Theatre Company? Well, don’t worry about it if you haven’t. Up until the opening of House Theatre’s production of Season on the Line, this off-off-off-Broadway theater company only existed in the imagination of playwright Shawn Pfautsch, whose new work celebrates the theater as it deconstructs it. If you look at Bad Settlement’s web site (created for this show with astounding authenticity), you will see that Moby Dick is one of three plays they are producing this season. Pfautsch artfully transposes this famous fish tale via Bad Settlement into an über-Brechtian delight (as Pfautsch’s invented theater critic Mark Williamson might pen) as we watch production meeting, rehearsal, performance, party, and closing. While English majors and those with theatrical experience may particularly relish the in-jokes and literary references that appear throughout, this show will no doubt entertain veteran and neophyte alike. Here’s hoping non-theater folk—who may watch theatrical allusions fly over their head—will get the same kick I did from watching this art-imitates-art experience.

Real-life designer Lee Keenan (set and lights) brings Bad Settlement’s home—the derelict pool room of a dilapidated hotel—to life in all its pathetic glory. The company’s Artistic Director Ben Adonna (Thomas J. Cox) accelerates from passionate dedication to obsessive psychosis as he pursues his own White Whale: the approval of the aforementioned critic, played with a winning combination of drollness and pomposity by Sean Sinitski. Ty Olwin is pitch-perfect as the ingénue narrator/Ishmael, a first-time assistant stage manager gaining his sea legs.

Under Jess McLeod’s direction, the winning cast’s vibrant characters turn on a dime through a rapid-fire chain of scene changes. Christopher M. Walsh appears as the enigmatic set builder and “whaling consultant” from the Azores; Maggie Kittering is frighteningly accurate as the tightly-wound stage manager; and Abu Ansari plays a Ugandan actor (Muwangi Ndwaddewazibwa) who is among the most professional of the Bad Settlement cast.

The script is a particular star, providing plenty of comic turns: A sound designer is told to go from sea shanties to Mahler, and a profoundly annoying guru asserts that Moby Dick is a sacred text of the Bahá’i faith. The political provocation and perpetual penury of independent theater appear in full force: The same set is to be used for Bad Settlement’s entire season, which begins with Gatsby (no doubt a nod to Gatz, Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the novel in its entirety); and all the props for Balm in Gilead are dumpster-dived. The innocent Narrator gets one of the biggest laughs of the evening when he innocently asks, “You don’t get to paid to act?”

In a conversation with the narrator, the critic explains that there are three kinds of theatrical performances: The infrequent utterly and irredeemably bad; the frequent middling shows that he has to decide whether to praise or condemn; and the rare great. I can state with confidence that Season on the Line is one of the great" -

Season on the Line - Katy Walsh, TheFourthWalsh - "Playwright Shawn Pfautsch tells the tale of one man’s obsession with a whale.   No, it’s not Captain Ahab but it is “Moby Dick.”  The man possessed is the artistic director of Bad Settlement Theatre Company.  Pfautsch dissects the inner-workings of a theatre company.  As Bad Settlement attempts to produce three plays for its new season, the revered artistic director (played with palpable intensity by Thomas J. Cox) fixates on the final play.  His creative infatuation becomes all-consuming as he seizes other play’s resources for his project.

Pfautsch’s play is clever.  The dialogue is sharp.  The characters are distinct.  Under Jess McLeod’s slick direction, the terrific eighteen member cast smoothly transition from scene to scene.  McLeod takes us behind the curtain to see a play’s operating system.  Ty Olwin (Narrator) and Andy Lutz (Peter) amusingly show the importance of a quick wardrobe change.  In another scene, the unflappable Maggie Kettering (Day) illustrates the essential yet thankless job of a stage manager.  Later, an affected Lutz portrays the zaniness of a director in rehearsal.  The glimpse into the construction of a theatre season is interesting.  Seeing conception to production to cast party gives us an intimate look at all the creative forces at play in a play.  It’s definitely the insider’s perspective.  And the audience members laughing hardest are the theatre community itself.

I’m perplexed with an ongoing quandary.  I keep asking myself:  Is this the theatre season of the inside joke?  Already in the 2014-2015 season, art is less about imitating life and more about imitating art. The Hypocrites mounted their 12 hour Greek adventure.  Sideshow gave the audience the bird with their Chekhov adaptation.  And now The House exposes the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of a play.  All these current efforts have a clubhouse feel.  The exclusive vibe generates a new creative elitism.  The shows aren’t about entertaining the public.  They are about entertaining the theatre community.

Pfautsch uses a narrator and a critic to help the audience connect to this underworld of lighting cues, ticket sales and actors’ interpretations.  An effervescent Olwin introduces the theatrical procedures and the passionate human foundation that provide the structure for the show to go on.  And the outstanding Sean Sinitski (Arthur) delivers sharp-tongued critiques of these plays’ openings.  For two of the plays, the theatre company is reading the review on their phones. Sinitski’s pompous tone is really their interpretation of his intent.  Later, in an exchange with Olwin, a vulnerable Sinitski is struggling with how he will review “Moby Dick.”  He perfectly illustrates the theatrical Catch-22!  Theatre should be innovative art to generate tickets sale.  Without the public’s support, a theatre company will cease to exist.

I highly recommend SEASON ON THE LINE for actors, designers, directors and playwrights. You are the target audience and will be hysterically entertained.  I somewhat recommend SEASON ON THE LINE for the general public.  Your engagement will be similar to watching a painter paint or a writer write. You will be amused for a while but you won’t completely get the inside jokes.  And this exclusion will reinforce why some of us prefer to experience the art after it has been created" -