Nov. 20--Art is never experienced in a vacuum. It morphs according to context. It reinvents itself with the changing mental state of the viewer. However much you try to wall off a painting, quieten the external din for an opera, or close the doors of the movie screening room, art always is experienced in terms of what is happening in the world beyond.
Insecure artists with controlling personalities often try to pretend otherwise, or manipulate conditions. Smarter artists just throw their creative wares, if not their very souls, out into the world, knowing they have little or no control over how their work will be experienced. Will it seem self-indulgent -- perhaps offensively so? Or will it offer balm for those in pain?
Take, for example, what happened to me last weekend, when I was slated to see five separate pieces of theater in and around Chicago. It was a busy weekend.
Late on Friday afternoon, Chicago time, news broke of a series of attacks in several cultural venues of Paris -- at the Bataclan concert hall, in neighborhood restaurants and at an international soccer game. Some 130 people were killed and more than 300 people were injured, some critically. The Islamic State extremist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, took responsibility for the attack. Paris was not, of course, the only incidence of violence in the last few days. A Russian jetliner was downed on Halloween. Beirut, Lebanon, suffered a double suicide bombing Nov. 12.
But for the few hours before I walked into the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, the news was all about Paris. I'd dropped my young son off at a school dance much earlier that evening, so I had sat alone in my car on Fullerton Avenue and listened to CNN for close to two hours. I was heartsick. I've always loved Paris and Parisians, ever since I first hitchhiked my way there.
Friday night was John Logan's "Never the Sinner," a play from the 1980s about the 1920s Chicago killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, genteel and highly articulate young murderers whose apparent lack of human empathy fascinated the young Logan. What makes murderers tick is a legitimate and hugely popular field of artistic inquiry -- from "The Silence of the Lambs" to "Dexter." But when you have just been overwhelmed by news of so many innocent victims, of audience members or diners, just like yourself, it is striking how resistant you suddenly become to any study of the psyche of a killer.
You find you don't care. You don't want to hear about their psychoses. You just want them put out of business permanently. You can't think about them -- only about what they destroyed.
In the case of Leopold and Loeb, the victim was the teenage boy Bobby Franks, whose biography is not a big part of Logan's play. I suddenly felt like this was the great omission of a play I've known and admired for years. Suddenly, the lives of Leopold and Loeb, the subject of page after page of coverage in this very newspaper in the early 1920s, felt irrelevant. Where was Franks? He was the one who mattered.
This nauseating feeling -- which overwhelmed me on Friday night -- is not the most ennobling of human emotions nor, in my view, the best root for a long-term solution to our global problems. But it's unavoidable in that instant. As most victims of a violent crime, or family members thereof, will confirm, "Never the Sinner" felt shockingly deaf to the moment -- a moment that the artists involved could never have anticipated. This is why I think CBS was right to reschedule two suddenly inappropriate episodes of "Supergirl" and "NCIS Los Angeles" this past week. To let them air would be as unfair to the artists as to the viewers. Victory Gardens did not have that luxury.
The other thing that happens in these moments after terrorist attacks is that you suddenly become sensitized to the bizarrely intimate relationship dramatic storytelling enjoys with shock and violence. When the world suddenly seems unsafe, you feel every sound cue, every screech and jolt. They seem on the side of the killers, not the victims. You crave calm and the possibility of transformation -- which put me in mind of why Mary Zimmerman's beautiful "Metamorphoses" was such a hit in New York in the weeks and months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was a reflective piece about dealing with sorrow and moving gently forward, sadder but also wiser. It was what was needed.
The following afternoon I was in Skokie, watching "You Can't Take It With You," a classic comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, all about Bohemians dropping out in Manhattan. It's a fun piece but it, too, felt out of touch with the moment. It was not so easy to fall about laughing; the characters seemed self-indulgent. When life is removed en masse, you find yourself with a deeper understanding of how any life, even a dull one, is preferable to life being removed entirely, at a concert on a Friday night.
On Sunday afternoon, I saw "Fulfillment" by the provocative playwright Thomas Bradshaw, who has penned a kind of modern tragedy about an African-American lawyer brought down by a combination of a hostile environment and his own self-loathing. The show is full of sex -- although sex this particular weekend did not feel particularly shocking, for it is just sex, it is not death.
Plays like "Fulfillment" deal with ambition and self-actualization; First World problems, you might say. Bradshaw asks us to ponder a well-paid law-firm associate hung up on not making partner. Well, any other weekend, sure. Happy to go there. On this one, you kept thinking, he is at least alive.
That night I saw Samuel D. Hunter's "Pocatello," a play about sad souls in a small city in the American West. This is a very beautiful play, actually. It is a lament for how all of the economic and culture action has moved to the world's cities, leaving smaller communities, and the people therein, adrift. Hunter is suggesting that these communities -- small, caring, interdependent, tranquil -- deserve better. It was hard not to become emotional. This weekend, "Pocatello," or at least the "Pocatello" of a better America, felt like a place it would be nice to live. Away. Remote. Safe.
Except that such safety is mostly illusory, because you simply cannot tell where the danger lies, especially if it is close to your own bosom.
I've left one show for last. My Saturday night in Hyde Park.
In that community -- where Leopold and Loeb once roamed -- Court Theatre is producing Aeschylus' "Agamemnon," a play that actually concludes with an execution-style murder tableau, bloody bodies flayed and displayed. Generally with Greek tragedy, wherein such tableaux are ubiquitous, these finales are shocking affairs -- reminders of past brutality and a constituent part of dramas which were, when you get down to it, all stories about the clash of barbarism and our earliest attempts at some semblance of civility and democracy.
These visions of death are usually the cascading result of past sins, often dating far beyond the beginning of that particular drama, the consequence of the misdeeds of prior generations who failed to understand the capacity for violence to ricochet. You usually feel chronological remove -- like you're staring back at the past, at a horrific moment from which humanity has moved on, at great cost to the many who have fought on the side of democracy and freedom and enlightenment and human rights, in bloody war after bloody war after bloody war.
But on Saturday morning, I'd stupidly watched Internet video from the Bataclan concert hall. I'd seen stills of the scene. All I could think about as Clytemnestra stood guard over her victims -- Agamemnon and Cassandra -- was how close that contorted theatrical picture looked to the real ones I'd seen just that day. There was just less blood and fewer bodies at the Court, and the actors could, after the curtain, get up, bow and go about their business.
This weekend, "Agamemnon" functioned as a useful reminder that the struggle between barbarism and civilization is far from over.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
