The Critics will be screened Friday and Saturday, February 18 and 19, at the Gene Siskel Film Center
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Seeing so many plays and writing so much about them had distorted my sense of perception; my world had narrowed and become increasingly self-referential. My standards had become less and less related to the so-called real world and more and more related to other shows I had seen. It seems significant to me that though I saw a fair amount of great theater in the 90s, most of the shows I remember best from that decade are ones I didn’t review, and paid to see—August Wilson’s Two Trains Running at the Goodman; Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants at Steppenwolf; Ionesco’s The Killer at Red Orchid; Christopher Cartmill’s “Light” plays at Bailiwick; a Bailiwick Director’s Festival production of the Lanford Wilson one-act The Family Continues directed by Jennifer Markowitz and starring Joey Slotnick.
I don’t think mine was or is a universal problem—a fair number of my former fellow critics continue to write about Chicago theater with passion and conviction. But the circularity and insularity of my existence had worn me down. I’d lost the excitement and wonder I felt going to theater in my teens and early twenties, a period when I could say that shows like Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George, and John Olive’s Killers changed my life.
I first met Jim at Beat Kitchen during a party held by Subnation, the alternative arts and culture magazine I edited in the mid-90s. I had been working on a feature article about Chicago filmmakers such as John Covert, Steve James, and George Tillman Jr., and Jim and I started talking about movies. A half-hour into the conversation, Jim was asking me if I’d consider wearing colored contact lenses for It Crawls Inside Me, a low-budget movie he’d soon be working on (luckily, he never asked again). At the end of the party I drove him home, and he was singing along with Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio” blasting out of my car stereo.
As for the film of The Critics, I’ll leave its assessment to others. In print, I’m sure I could find a thousand words with which to savage or praise it quite convincingly; either way, I’m glad that’s not my job anymore.
