November’s closing in on Thanksgiving, and a happy chunk of Chicago’s theater community is gathered round a big table at the Guest Quarters Suite Hotel on Delaware Place east of Michigan Avenue. Here are Eric Simonson from Steppenwolf Theatre, Russell Vandenbroucke from Northlight, Larry Sloan from Remains, and Steve Scott from the Goodman. The Next Theatre’s Harriet Spizziri is present; so are Richard Fire from the Organic, Mark Richard and Kelly Nespor from City Lit, and Christine Dunford–a real trouper, hobbling in on crutches–from Lookingglass. Steppenwolf movie star John Mahoney is sitting beside one of two visiting directors from the BBC, assuming the role of host by virtue of his preternatural jolliness.
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Jenkins and Theocharis have been brought in to lead the Chicagoans through two days of workshops designed to help them realize their scripts on the radio. There’s a studio session promised for later in the day. But right now the directors–who claim to have overseen 1,000 BBC productions apiece–appear to be interested mainly in making the whole business seem a little more friendly. Well, one of them does, anyway: while Jenkins is evidently comfortable with Loewenberg’s concept, Theocharis rebels every so often, announcing his distrust of a successful marriage between theater and radio, worrying that theater conventions will sully radio’s formal purity, actually cheering (“Hear, hear”) when Larry Sloan talks about using Marconi’s medium to achieve effects unachievable onstage.
Happily, Kozicki and his director, Michael E. Myers, decided against that idea. They chose to give Albert the humanizing gift of language instead. A taste of it anyway. Albert’s still no Hamlet; he’s mostly on a par with Lenny from Of Mice and Men or the glass-jawed Argentinean boxer in The Harder They Fall. But at least he no longer has to dribble to express himself.
The solution was to let the beast speak.
