TEATIME AT GOLGOTHA PROP THTR
WHERE Prop Thtr, 3502-4 N. Elston
But unlike the plays in the Rhino fest, which are often never seen again, the works in the New Play festival sometimes move on to productions in other cities. Now in its tenth year, Prop’s fest is tied in to the National New Play Network, which feeds scripts to its 20 member theaters around the country. And both full productions this year–Mark Chrisler’s intelligent, thrilling Teatime at Golgotha and Kestutis Nakas’s Railroad Backward–are rewarding, bringing history, myth, and hallucination into fruitful collision.
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Chrisler, who’s associate artistic director at Prop, presents a heady, wittily self-effacing hour-long fantasy that charms even as it ridicules its own grandiosity. Chrisler partitions the stage into three playing areas, each populated by three characters from a different historical period: Roman soldiers Longinus, Quintus, and Cabral waiting for Christ to die (offstage); 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, his assistant Johannes Kepler, and Brahe’s clairvoyant dwarf servant, Jebb; and present-day nobodies Nicholas, Michael, and Ianthe. For the first 15 minutes or so, as Chrisler jumps from century to century, the three scenarios seem to share nothing except droll absurdity as crises loom. Longinus, the nebbishy philosopher of his group, hopes his friends can help him find a way to make the mind-numbing drudgery of his job–eviscerating recently crucified Jews–less boring. Close to death, Tycho drunkenly forces Kepler to listen to Jebb recite Tycho’s recent dreams in exhausting detail. And Nicholas is so certain he’d make a better boyfriend for Ianthe than Michael that he might just shoot one or both of them. Or himself.
Director Kevlyn Hayes–piloting this debut production for Found Objects Theatre, in conjunction with Prop–keeps Chrisler’s complex vision in sharp focus. For the most part his nine cast members navigate the dense, circuitous text with exacting yet effortless grace. Only Pete Blatchford as Jebb struggled on opening night, making his two especially elliptical but critically important dream monologues nearly opaque.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Teatime at Golgatha.
