“He was local, wasn’t he?” a talent agent says about a second-rung stand-up comic in Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play Comedians. It’s a devastating put-down, “local”–a dismissal of an entertainer who knocked ’em dead on his home turf but couldn’t raise a chuckle off it.
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Thus it is that a multinational, multiracial group of theater folk have been gathering in the basement of a Hyde Park church for the past few weeks to rethink Comedians for Chicago in the 90s. A bunch of black, Latino, and white American actors and actresses have come together in workshops to remake a play whose original characters are all white males; guiding the process–and being guided by it–are the playwright, a white Englishman, and the director, a white South African named Barney Simon, who will stage the play for Court Theatre. The first phase of the workshop process has been focused not on Griffiths’s play–which was given a first-draft Chicago-flavored rewrite by comic Aaron Freeman–but on letting the actors learn to be funny, just like the characters in the play do.
Ramirez’s monologue deals sardonically with Latino stereotypes. “They declare war on drugs. How’s a guy supposed to make a living?” he asks at one point. Later he speaks of a Latino woman who borrows from George Bush’s economic rhetoric after shooting her spouse: “My husband’s not dead,” she says to the cops. “He’s just making a slow recovery.” He winds up with a long rap about dating from the driver’s seat of his automobile.
The British writer is making an effort to absorb the feel of the city on walking tours that have taken him from Maxwell Street to Wrigleyville to the southwest side. “Now I’ve got to go away with what I’ve learned about Chicago,” says Griffiths. “I’ve got to go and write the fucking thing.”
