Belly of the Beast
BELLY OF THE BEAST, ‘COYOTE’ ELECTRIFY
Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; Jun 17, 1985; Sid Smith, Entertainment writer Chicago theater, which has managed to wow the theatrical capitals of London and New York in recent years, can now add this country’s political capital to the list.
To open engagements at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts here, as Wisdom Bridge Theatre and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company did Friday and Saturday, respectively, is as close as you can get in America to a command performance. Not surprisingly, they showed themselves off splendidly.
Although curiosity was high about Steppenwolf’s “Coyote Ugly,” directed by John Malkovich, it was William L. Petersen’s gut-wrenching portrayal of convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott in Wisdom Bridge’s “In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison” that really blew them away.
“It’s quite simply the most painful and moving theatrical experience you are likely to have all year,” wrote Hap Erstein in the Washington Times
The openings attracted the attention of the national press as well. Jack Kroll, the veteran and well-respected cultural writer for Newsweek magazine, said Petersen’s performance was masterful.
“I thought it was one of the most powerful productions out of an American regional theater that I’ve seen in a long time,” Kroll said. “It’s one of those rare pieces that add to your awareness of life in your culture and your society.”
As for Lynn Siefert’s “Coyote Ugly,” Kroll said, “I liked it. You seldom see something that’s truly crazy. And it was really funny, a piece of crazy Americana with its own nutty sweetness.”
Kroll also said that Malkovich is a marvelous director and that Laurie Metcalf, who plays one of the wacky members of an incestuously wacky Southwestern family in the show, is one of the most wonderful actresses in America today. “The entire cast in this is sensational,” he said.
The Times’ Erstein echoed Chicago critics by lauding the performers and Malkovich’s direction while finding weaknesses with the play. “One can see why Steppenwolf gets acclaim by watching this production,” he said, “but one wishes they would select better plays to show off their talents.”
(David Richards, drama critic for the Washington Post, preferred to withhold comment until his reviews run in Monday editions of his newspaper.)
The engagements were arranged by Peter Sellars, the wunderkind director of the American National Theater at the Kennedy, and funded by AT&T, which contributed $500,000 for the visit.
When AT&T offered to sponsor regional theater appearances at the Kennedy this summer, Sellars took the opportunity to showcase Chicago, which he presently regards as the scene of the most dynamic theater in the country.
“Belly” opened Friday in the 250-seat Free Theater and will play through June 29. (There is no admission charge for the theater.) “Coyote Ugly” bowed Saturday and plays through July 6 in the larger 450-seat Terrace Theater.
The festival continues later, when Steppenwolf sends a production of David Rabe’s “Streamers” to the Free Theater July 24 through August 11 and Wisdom Bridge brings “Kabuki Medea,” its Japanese-style adaptation of the Greek tragedy, to the Terrace Theater July 10 through Aug. 4.
Sellars, who hopes the Chicago festival will serve as a srpingboard for regular showings of regional theater at the Kennedy, was typically exuberant and unrestrained in his enthusiasm.
“When the folks with Steppenwolf and Wisdom Bridge first got out of college, they didn’t say, ‘Oh, dear, how will we get jobs?’, ” Sellars told a sizable gathering of theater company members, visiting Chicago supporters and AT&T officials at a lavish sit-down dinner in the Kennedy’s Rooftop Terrace restaurant after the “Belly” opening.
“They struggled with little money for 10 years and built work that can now hold its own anywhere in the world,” he continued. “What we saw tonight from Bill Petersen and his cast members and director Robert Falls was not just an overwhelmingly committed and courageous evening of theater . . . we also saw impeccable technique, sheer Laurence Olivier technique.”
Falls was particularly pleased that Wisdom Bridge’s Washington debut involved a play with such political overtones. “From the beginning, Peter and I agreed that the Kennedy Center should be in part a place for exchange and debate among people who can affect social change in this country,” Falls said. “During previews, several senators saw the play and said they planned to spread the word. Hopefully, we’ll be artistically presenting some of the problems of prison life to people who can do something about it.”
The Wisdom Bridge crew, against objections raised by Kennedy Center operators, insisted that the bright orange, comfortable seats in the Free Theater be removed. In their place, the center installed backless wooden bleachers, which fit in with the jailhouse set and made the 90-minute program deliberately more uncomfortable to watch than usual.
Nevertheless, the packed audience applauded enthusiastically after Friday’s performance, eliciting two curtain calls.
Saturday, “Coyote Ugly,” with a new, more compact set created by Kevin Rigdon from his original, looked excellent in the spacious Terrace Theater. The crowd broke into applause several times during the performance and frequently howled at the onstage antics, whether it was Metcalf chewing on an actual raw fish head or Moira Harris dousing her bosom with water.
“Some people may like these plays and others may not,” said Roger Stevens, chairman of the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center. “But whatever the feeling, I think we’ve shaken you up.”
BELLY OF BEAST’ RETURNS, ITS POWER UNDIMINISHED
Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; Apr 15, 1985; Sid Smith, Entertainment writer; A revival of Wisdom Bridge Theatre’s 1983 production of “In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison” is playing at the Ivanhoe Theatre for two weeks, before a tour that will include stops at drama festivals in Glasgow and London.
Once again, it stars William L. Petersen as Jack Henry Abbott, literary genius and killer. Once again, it is devastating theater. Every time this program is played and finished, to borrow from W.B. Yeats, a terrible beauty is born.
What has been said before must be repeated. Petersen’s Jeff Award-winning portrayal is extraordinary, because he so completely becomes Abbott. The stutter, the sibilant Southern accent, the paranoid nervous gestures, the sad mispronunciations of a natural scholar who, imprisoned most of his life, learned words such as “macabre” and “delicatessen” only through reading.
Add to that Petersen’s courageous catalogue of visceral theatrics. The way he bangs his head repeatedly and mercilessly into a metal cabinet when a prison guard coldly announces the death of Abbott’s mother. Or the way Petersen drops his pants when re-creating a childhood beating and then curls up on the floor, a battered fetus. Or the way he rages at top volume against the injustices of prison life only to relive with muted wonder the moments spent carving out another man’s insides.
But beyond the electrifying external technique is the indescribable way, from the very first moment when he storms onstage and fixes the audience with a defiant gaze, that Petersen demands his hearing. It seems to stem from everything from his sly, intermittent eye contact to his bone-chilling commitment to the role. In any event, no matter what intellectual distance or glib analytical trick you employ, it’s hard to doubt that Abbott is there, and that we, the audience, are on trial.
To that purpose, Petersen gets great help from the text and the superb quality of the production. The script, restructured by director Robert Falls from an earlier adaptation of Abbott’s writings by the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., is a combination of Abbott’s grim story and moments from his trial, one that smoothly hops through time and space with effortless efficiency.
Unabashedly didactic, the text nevertheless asks as many questions as it answers. Here was a great mind treated like an animal all his life and, in a flood of unwanted celebrityhood, released into a world in which he couldn’t possibly function. The whole tragedy indicts our notions of rehabilitation and justice.
Theater is rarely this powerful, and perhaps that’s OK. I don’t think we could take this sort of thing very often.
BEAST MAKES ITS MARK ON LONDON
Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; May 24, 1985; Richard Christiansen, Entertainment Editor
The American Festival in Britain, a month-long mixed bag of theater, dance, music and the visual arts, reached one of its peaks Thursday night in a 135-seat theater far removed from the mainstream of London commercial theater.
The occasion was the opening of Wisdom Bridge Theatre of Chicago’s production of “In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison” in the studio of the Lyric Hammersmith theater in west London.
William L. Petersen, whose powerful portrayal of convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott began sensationally in 1983 in Wisdom Bridge’s home base at 1559 W. Howard St., had already scored a fresh success in Europe with “Beast” earlier this month at the Mayfest in Glasgow, Scotland; but Thursday night, his triumph in the small, stuffy Lyric studio was altogether extraordinary.
For Michael Billington, highly respected critic of The Guardian, Petersen’s portrayal was “an amazingly uninhibited piece of acting, an incredibly powerful work that showed all sides of the man.”
Billington called director Robert Falls’ production “memorable theater, which lets the audience make its own moral judgment,” and he termed the play “a really substantial event” in the American Festival’s varied programming.
Irving Wartle, theater critic of The Times, wrote that the performance was “played at white heat and at point blank range,” with Petersen’s portrayal outstanding as “a revelation of human nature.”
Sheridan Morley, critic for Punch and the International Herald Tribune, noted “the incredible animal intensity of Petersen’s acting, an intensity we can’t even approach in England.”
These comments, typical of the critical reaction that has greeted the play here, are backed up by the strong audience response the production has received. The show did turn-away business in its two preview showings; and the opening night audience, which included most of the major London critics and several Chicago ones, greeted the performance with a storm of applause.
With that type of response, and with such impressive reviews, “Beast” is certain to sell out in the small studio for the rest of its run through June 1.
Already there is talk of bringing the production back to London for a month-long run opening July 4 in the Lyric Hammersmith’s 537-seat mainstage auditorium. In addition, Falls and Jeffrey Ortmann, Wisdom Bridge’s executive director, have received feelers from the Gate Theater in Dublin and the Edinburgh Festival to tour the show there, as well.
All that, however, will have to wait until “Beast” completes its previously scheduled dates on June 29 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. But the mere talk of these possible European engagements is proof of the impact Wisdom Bridge and its vigorous brand of muscular Chicago theater has had in this first European excursion.
The Chicago-ization of Great Britain has not stopped with “In the Belly of the Beast,” either. At the Albany Empire Theater, another venue several miles distant from London’s theatrical center, the Joel Hall Dancers are performing through the end of the week.
