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Review: Paramount Room
The Hideout is one of Chicago's more curious rock venues, presenting live music in a space that’s one part Elks Lodge, one part Uncle Dan’s rec room. But the strangely homey, lived-in space lends depth to Walkabout Theater’s “site-specific” production of Mark Guarino’s “Overnight Lows,” an insomniac tale set in a seemingly familiar but subtly off-kilter world.
Extracting drama from everyday locales is Walkabout’s bread-and-butter; the company previously examined mundane daily rituals in a laundromat (“Psycho-So-Matic”) and executive washroom scheming in bathrooms around the city (“Downsize”). “Overnight Lows” transforms the club into three different sets: a garden apartment, a bar and something resembling purgatory. The throwback aesthetic paired with subtle design touches serves the production's narcoleptic tone. In a room seemingly inspired by Twin Peaks, the work of “Visual Environment Designer” Angela Tillges reminds us of a David Lynch dream world. If only they’d found a script worthy of this attention.
The alarm clock is stuck on 3:55 and Chuck (Seth Bockley) and Sarah (Alexandra Blatt) are navigating a dream where the laws of nature and daily obligations are skewed. For close to an hour, Chuck and Sarah unpack their post-coital baggage. He tells us how he got fired, she explores, with the help of a not-so-mysterious couple, why she withholds trust. She can't trust him, but she can't stop calling a Dr. Laura-esque radio host (a blunt and amusing Justine Serino) whose tough love philosophy barely elevates human urges above those of monkeys. As they piece together their fragmented, overlapping memories, Chuck and Sarah gain clarity, if not relief.
The setting is unique. Guarino’s disoriented, cyclical structure intrigues, pulling us between various states of consciousness with moments of wit (Chuck: “I called work and asked for me.”) But the story and its monotone characters rarely rise to the level of the technique. If we were sharing a drink with these folks, we’d lose interest in their stories after 10 minutes. If this play were one of The Hideout’s live offerings, it’d be a five-piece with a catchy hook and a compelling single or two, but not much staying power.
Overnight Lows, presented by Walkabout Theater, is at The Hideout, 1354 West Wabansia, Mondays and Tuesdays at 7 p.m. through August 14. Tickets are $10 and reservations are recommended. More information at www.walkabouttheater.org.
Photo by Stephan Mazurek
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From the Chicago Tribune
THEATER REVIEW
'Overnight Lows' raises the bar for on-site theater
By Chris Jones
Tribune theater critic
July 17 2007, 4:43 PM CDT
Before anyone gets overexcited (including me), let's stipulate that this is an account of an hourlong play for $10 about relationships, staged in the back of a bar in Chicago's prosaic North River Industrial Corridor.
But there's a proud tradition of such endeavors in this city. And this is one evocative tavern and one provocative show.
I've wondered for years about the Hideout — an ancient, vulnerable, wood-frame hostelry almost suffocated by the steely bulk of the City of Chicago's nearby fleet-fueling station. Although I hesitate to make such a revealing and malleable confession, I've mostly driven down this industrial section of West Wabansia Avenue on the way back from Home Depot. I've peered curiously and thirstily inside, and I've perused its music listings in the papers, but I'd never been through the door.
Before Monday night's world premiere of the Walkabout Theater Company's "Overnight Lows," the owner of the century-old Hideout, a schoolteacher named Tim Tuten, delivered a passionate and strangely moving little lecture on the demise of the culturally eclectic Chicago tavern, wherein tired blue-collar workers would clink glasses with intellectuals, and radicals would hold poetry readings or debates in the rear. In that spirit, Tuten's joint welcomes plumbers and welders, and also hosts rock bands in the back. He knows which side his bread is buttered on. "We're separating you play people," he said, ruefully. "You're on Monday and Tuesday nights."
Clearly, though, Tuten was pleased as punch to have Walkabout — a well-regarded Chicago troupe known for wandering about the city in search of the apt venue for its shows — in his eclectic public house. So he should be.
"Overnight Lows" is the work of the writer-slash-music-journalist (and Hideout regular) Mark Guarino. Guarino is beginning to get national attention, and you can see why. Set in a garden apartment in Chicago, his little play shows us a couple in bed together who wake up at 3:55 a.m. and find one fateful night turning into a weird mélange of their entire personal lives, past and future.
The prose is rich, evocative and strange (it reminds me of David Milch's work for HBO). And whenever you think you've got the play figured out, it wriggles deftly out of your grasp and into the realm of dead parents, late-night radio confessions and the other detritus of a lonely Chicago night. But the play also is never pretentiously oblique. You feel that you recognize the characters. You invest.
Kristan Schmidt directs this thing superbly. Despite seemingly crippling limitations, she melds a complex and emotionally powerful environment. Heck, Schmidt can do more visually with a real window and a couple of footlights than some directors can manage with a whole plethora of theatrical toys. The staging — a classy and dramatic blend of real and fake environmental elements — is superbly crafted. And the performances by (especially) Alexandra Blatt, Seth Bockley, Mike McNamara, Sara Minton and Jim Schutter are all smart, adroitly scaled and, in their deftly understated, back-of-the-bar way, haunting.
cjones5@tribune.com
"Overnight Lows"
When: Through Aug. 14 (Mondays and Tuesdays)
Where: The Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave.
Running time: 1 hour
Tickets: $10 at 312-458-0556
Copyright © 2007, The Chicago Tribune