INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL
In this year’s International Theatre Festival, the third so far, certain weaknesses have begun to emerge. It has become apparent, for instance, that festival directors Jane and Bernie Sahlins share a pronounced weakness for epics. The Sahlinses helped bring an eight-and-a-half-hour Nicholas Nickleby to Chicago in 1983, and now they’ve made marathons a sort of signature for the festival–most notably with the 1988 English Shakespeare Company production of “The Wars of the Roses”: a cycle of seven history plays running from Richard II, through three Henrys, to Richard III, which took only slightly less time to see than it took for the wars themselves to be fought.
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All that being so, Theatre Repere’s The Dragons’ Trilogy must have played like a sweet dream to Jane and Bernie–combining, the way it does, epic length and sprawl with gorgeous visual language, strong physicality, and a gentle, New Vaudevillian sense of fun. This show embodies the quintessence of the Sahlinses’ Theatre Festival taste.
Wong also has a son, Lee, who has yet to marry and produce the heir old Wong desperately wants to see before he dies. Before he can even allow himself to die.
This is definitely a vision worthy of an epic. But like I say, the terms in which it’s given are anything but heroic. The loves and losses incurred by three generations of essentially average folks don’t in themselves evoke the grandeur of History and Fate. At least not over a period of about six hours they don’t. Even Arthur Miller realized he couldn’t let Willy Loman’s tragedy take more than two.
