THE DRESSER
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Herr Hitler is making it very difficult for Shakespearean companies!” rages Sir, an aging thespian who’s attempting to mount King Lear during a World War II air raid. (Isn’t that just like an actor, to take the narrow view?) Set in Great Britain in 1942, Ronald Harwood’s 1980 The Dresser uses the war as a backdrop for the struggle and slow collapse of one member of a breed now virtually extinct: the independent actor/manager, the grand performer/patriarch who cares for and despotically rules over his traveling company. Harwood’s Sir must battle air raids, rationing, blackouts, a lack of young, able-bodied actors, and his own exhaustion. As the play opens his grip on sanity is tenuous at best, and he relies on his dresser, Norman, to nurse him, loverlike, through the worst. Slavishly Norman washes out the great man’s tights, jollies him out of black depression, gets him into the proper costume, points him in the right direction, and gives him a shove from the wings.
Today’s theater companies, particularly the non-Equity ones, have very different concerns, though many may still count fatigue and poverty among their troubles. There is no lack of young actors but rather a surfeit. Theaters compete with each other and with high-tech films and television rather than bombs and blackouts. With upwards of 175 productions to choose from in the Chicago area, audiences are often scarce. And so a merely competent production of this well-known play just won’t do.
