Review: ‘Attempts on Her Life’ is a confounding non-play, with candy — welcome back, TUTA
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It is perhaps telling that theater companies attempting risky, edgy, provocative work increasingly find themselves looking to the not-so-distant past. Specifically, the 1990s, an era when playwrights like Sarah Kane and Howard Barker, scribes disillusioned by pervasive political moralizing of all stripes, wrote richly evocative and surrealist works that asked audiences to bathe themselves in language and feeling without knowing, exactly, what was transpiring.
Martin Crimp was certainly of that number and he’s the writer that the venerable TUTA, a long-standing Chicago experimental theater company that has plowed that field for years in concert with Bucktown’s Trap Door Theatre, has chosen for its post-pandemic return, this time to a storefront space in Chicago’s Ravenswood Manor neighborhood.
It’s a most welcome return. I’m very glad you are back, TUTA. The scene has been the more impoverished for your long absence.
The wacky, crazy show in question, performed for your pleasure by an all-in cast under the direction of the highly skilled avant-guardist, Aileen Wen McGroddy, is “Attempts on Her Life” from 1997.
This is one weird deconstruction of a play. I have the script on my shelf and it’s near incomprehensible on the page, more like some kind of experimental choreopoem than a traditional play. There is no designated set and no conventionally recurring characters with specific lines (who needs ’em?). There is dialogue but it can be split up very much as the director so chooses. The one name in the play that sticks with you is Anne, sometimes known as Annie, sometimes as Anya or Annushka, even through you don’t actually see her and even though she is an epic shapeshifter. But people of all kinds sure do talk about, and to her. She is an objectified symbol of something, we quickly discern. Of what is open to the reader’s own mind and eye, but we certainly seem to be watching a work about the commodification and exploitation of human anguish. By artists, critics, society at large.
Crimp has written here 17 different scenarios, maybe connected, maybe only connectible on an individualized basis. Either way, McGroddy leans into the degree to which Crimp is deconstructing the theater itself: the cast knows it is performing a play, telling the audience that the scene is just a scene, coming and going through the same entrance as the viewers, even to the street outside. At one point, sparkling wine and candy is served, even though there is no intermission relief. And you can pick one of three preferred ticket prices!
I hadn’t seen a Crimp play in years prior to Sunday and I just soaked the whole thing up, enjoying myself and watching the fine cast of Bide Akande, Clifton Frei, Amy Gorelow, Mikayla De Guzman, Felix Mayes and Seoyoung Park throw themselves into this insane stuff on a scorching Sunday afternoon with the “L” train rattling by, jumping around from humor to horror and halfway back again. This is not exactly a commercial endeavor, given that TUTA has only 24 seats available for each performance.
If this is your thing, you will know who you are. If so, you are in secure hands here.
Crimp is still at it, by the way. In 2019, he wrote a play called “When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other.”
Never, apparently.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Attempts on Her Life” (3 stars)
When: Through July 14
Where: TUTA Theatre, 4670 N. Manor Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Tickets: $20, $45 or $60 at www.tutatheatre.org
