Red Scare
Seeing a Second City show during the troupe’s first 15 years was a little like joining Alice on a trip through the looking glass. Founded in December 1959 in reaction to the Eisenhower era, when a false complacency masked social divisions, the Old Town-based comedy cabaret reflected a clear-cut line between mainstream and alternative cultures. Later its comic sensibility evolved from hip drollness to rowdy rebellion. In the years of civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate, Second City’s running theme seemed to be: Things are fucked up. Let’s stop pretending they aren’t and try instead to figure out why they are.
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This isn’t to say that Red Scare, the new main-stage production, and From Fear to Eternity, in the smaller E.T.C. space, aren’t funny. They’re packed with crisply timed physical comedy as well as smart, sharp dialogue. But they’re not just funny. Red Scare in particular has dramatic passages as strong as anything in a “straight” play and songs as intelligent and well sung as any in a contemporary musical. And while comedy dominates–this is Second City, after all–it transcends the shock-jock cynicism director Mick Napier has sometimes employed in the past, aiming instead for a riskier kind of humor that doesn’t always culminate in punch lines. In the innovative long-form structure of this bold piece of conceptual theater, a seemingly random stream of events develops into a dreamscape of a divided America. Depending on your frame of mind, the show either demands your attention or invites you to submit to its hallucinatory flow.
When: Open run: Tue-Thu 8:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 and 11 PM, Sun 8 PM
When: Open run: Thu 8:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 and 11 PM, Sun 8 PM
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Brosilow.
