Last summer Jamil Khoury erased all doubt: he’s far and away the hardest-working polemicist in Chicago theater. June saw the Silk Road Rising artistic director going after Mary Zimmerman for the “shocking and breathtaking” insensitivity of comments she made apropos of her Goodman Theatre staging of The Jungle Book. In an essay posted on his company website, Khoury damned the “theatricalized Orientalism” of Zimmerman’s oeuvre, the “unexamined white privilege” in her attitudes, and—somewhat mysteriously—the way her thinking echoed “how our judicial system has historically protected rapists.” In August he rebuked Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss with a similar intensity for what he called “Islamophobic and anti-Arab views” contained in her review of a Silk Road show, Invasion! (Full disclosure the Sun-Times and the Reader share an owner.)
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But he wasn’t done yet. Just a few days after l’affaire Hedy, Khoury issued a manifesto calling for an Arab-American theater movement. “We need safe space in which to confront challenges and taboos,” he declared. “And by inviting others to join us in that safe space, including non-Arab Americans, even those we perceive as ignorant or hostile . . . by allowing their opinions to matter, fully and without censure, without admonishment, regardless of how annoying or offensive some of those opinions may be, that’s how we’ll create social and political change.”
The fourth import was Pedro Páramo, an adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s classic “magic realist” novel about a man on an errand to a village of ghosts. The tale was—yes—hauntingly realized at Goodman Theatre’s Latino Theatre Festival by a cast mingling Chicago actors with members of Havana’s Teatro Buendía.
Smokefall In my review of this Goodman Theatre show, I called playwright Noah Haidle the current “king of theatrical quirk,” and I’ll stand by that. He’s a sophisticated wit who mines bizarre conceits (ladder salesmen with a sideline in human hearts, a four-year-old unhappily married to her imaginary friend), playing with their absurdity even as he attempts to draw a melancholy poetry from them. In my experience of his plays, this assertively odd family chronicle marked the moment when Haidle’s quirkiness became a mature vision. No small amount of the credit goes to director Anne Kauffman and a crack ensemble featuring Mike Nussbaum, who capped his 89th year with phenomenal performances in two roles.
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