Argonautika | Lookingglass Theatre Company
WHERE Lookingglass Theatre Company, 821 N. Michigan
WHEN Through 11/26: Tue 7:30 PM, Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM
By Albert Williams
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This is the world of Argonautika, writer-director Mary Zimmerman’s engrossing retelling of the saga of Jason and the Argonauts. Zimmerman and Lookingglass Theatre made a big splash in 1990 with their version of Homer’s Odyssey, and eight years later they turned the stage of the Ivanhoe Theater into a wading pool to retell Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They plunge into the waters of Greek myth again with this evening of theatrical poetry. The plot is ancient, but the theme is eternal: the human urge to explore uncharted worlds, to seek treasure and territory, to spread our civilization and our seed despite danger and disaster. Jason’s saga resonates with other classic fantasy adventures: Galahad’s quest for the Holy Grail, Dorothy’s for the wicked witch’s broom. It also calls to mind Alexander the Great and Leif Eriksson, Christopher Columbus and the Crusaders, as well as more recent examples of nations’ clumsy efforts to impose their religious beliefs and political will on others.
Even with this bleak message, Argonautika celebrates the sheer pleasure of theatrical make-believe. Instead of dazzling special effects, Zimmerman and her design team offer simple, stylized images. Daniel Ostling’s set, suggestively lit by John Culbert, at first seems a plain wooden platform running down the middle of the theater. Gradually a network of catwalks, ladders, doorways, and trapdoors is revealed, representing not only the Argo’s deck but the entrance to Hades, a spring inhabited by the nymph who lures Hylas to his doom, and a dark grove where an unsleeping dragon guards the Golden Fleece.
Schonberg and coauthors Alain Boublil and John Dempsey have mined Morgan Llywelyn’s novel Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas for the tale of 16th-century rebel leader Grace O’Malley, who resisted English invaders and pleaded the case for Irish autonomy in a private audience with Queen Elizabeth I. But the prosaic libretto, with its formulaic love triangle and two-dimensional characters, squanders the story’s potential. Grania (powerhouse belter Stephanie J. Block) is feisty, her lover staunchly faithful, her husband sexist and boorish, and her English nemesis arrogant and epicene. Elizabeth is the only character to display even a hint of complexity, but she and Grania don’t meet for two and a half hours–and when they do, they retreat behind a screen. Maybe it’s just as well, given Linda Balgord’s painful, wobbly soprano as the queen.
