Teenage Dick
by Mike Lew
Directed by Brian Balcom
Theater Wit
(Macgregor Arney and Courtney Rikki Green)
What happens to live theater in a pandemic? Close the theater. Go home. Send everyone home. Pay everyone. Theater Wit adapted swiftly and impressively to this current reality, recording the final live performance of Teenage Dick, and offering it for personal at-home viewing.
We did not attend the theater, but we sat at home in our living room and played a recorded performance. Mike Lew’s play, here in its Chicago premiere, is a contemporary spin on Shakespeare’s Richard III, set at Roseland High, where Richard is junior class secretary. He’s bullied for his disability; he wants acceptance and love. In an important early scene, Richard details the lesson of Machiavelli’s The Prince; over the course of the play, we watch as he (tragically) tries to claim his own power.
Teenage Dick could be described as a play about a disabled boy in a high school. He is bullied, he falls in love; the girl he loves is cyber-bullied. There is a plot and a crisis and a climax and more action than I could process from my living room couch. And yet, it was moving to see the audience there in attendance, if just once - to know that this play, after weeks (months) of preparation - would not go on. Theater is community and like democracy that way - it does not work in isolation. It is transience, as Sarah Ruhl put it, and that is the beauty. The people gathered here today with you for this performance today - that moment, those moments won't exist again.
Lew’s play isn’t really about a disabled kid. It’s about a kid who is lost and longing and wanting something solid; and it’s about a world wherein that can so easily go wrong and become wholly tragic.
Macgregor Arney is wonderful in the lead role, as are Ann (Courtney Rikki Green) and Tamara Rozofsky as Buck. It was exciting to see bodies of all types and abilities represented on the stage; how rare this is.
(Macgregor Arney and Tamara Rozofsky)
Lew's plot, which I won’t spoil here, is inspired by Shakespeare. The plot shifts here take precedence over character and relationship. I found myself wishing the play had stayed longer in the realm of inspiration - as meditation or homage - and not felt tied to Aristotelian structural imperatives.
Of course, it is possible that the spectacle of the script makes more sense from the vantage of a live audience. Spectacle is wholly different when mediated through a screen. We are less implicated, somehow.
I want more theater like this - available this way - but I would be remiss to say that I did not feel the lack - did not feel with more intensity how essential the audience member is to the creation of a performance.
And as with everything now, we have to notice the silver linings: the most beautiful moments here occur at a dance, where Richard and Ann connect most beautifully. We danced along in our living room - something we could not have done at the theater.
(Macgregor Arney and Courtney Rikki Green)
