NIGHT SAFARI / THE OLD COUNTRY / THE STRETCH
Steppenwolf NOW
Through October 24, $20
www.steppenwolf.org
During the pandemic lockdown, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company has presented a series of outstanding online presentations, including the Christmas audio play Wally World, the illustrated fairy tale Red Folder, the sizzling two-character drama What Is Left, Burns, and the royal chatfest Duchess! Duchess! Duchess! In preparation for its return to live, in-person theater next month with a revival of longtime company member Tracy Letts’s 2006 play, Bug, in which two people meet in an Oklahoma motel room, Steppenwolf NOW is giving us a tasty apéritif with a trio of three virtual works by Letts, available on demand through October 24. Here in New York City, the three online plays whet our appetite for the Broadway debut of Letts’s The Minutes, which begins previews at Studio 54 in March.
Rainn Wilson plays an unhappy tour guide in online Night Safari (photo by Robert Benavides)
Night Safari stars Rainn Wilson as Gary, a guide leading an evening tour at a zoo. Introducing the first animal, he notes, “In captivity, the Panamanian night monkey is monogamous and lives about twenty years. In the wild, they are not monogamous, and their life span is cut roughly in half. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself. The Night Safari frowns on editorializing.” But that’s exactly what he does as he takes the visitors to see the aardwolf, the boreal owl, the slow loris, and the paradoxical frog, discussing aspects of their lives that relate to his own failed existence as he slowly grows more ornery, harried, and withdrawn. “What’s so great about sociable animals, anyway?” he asks.
Wilson is a hoot (cue the boreal owl), delivering the monologue, which was first performed by John Gawlik in 2018, in black-and-white, standing in front of a bare wall where his shadow lurks; he is part stand-up comic, part criminal posing for his mug shot. Director Patrick Zakem and DP Robert Benavides photograph him from multiple angles, zooming in on his face or scanning the side of his body, intercutting color photos of the animals along with home movie footage. The thirteen-minute film is a reminder that humans are part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same trials and tribulations as other living creatures, except we tend to be more aware of our triumphs — and failures.
Tracy Letts’s The Old Country is reimagined as a virtual puppet show (photo by Christopher Rejano)
The Old Country, from 2019, begins with atmospheric establishing shots that situate us inside a diner made of papier-mâché and clay, from a spinning dessert tray to ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles to a pile of dirty dishes. Two old men sit at a table, clearly puppets controlled by visible black cords. “That was a damn good sandwich,” Ted (William Petersen) tells a soup-slurping Landy (ninety-seven-year-old Mike Nussbaum), who shortly replies, “I’ll feel safer when we’ve left this deadly place.”
Over the course of ten minutes, they share memories and complain about how things are today. “This isn’t grumpy old man talk,” Ted says. “There’s a principle, right? A scientific principle that explains why everything turns to shit.” Of course, it is grumpy old man talk, but he’s not necessarily wrong, either. Zakem makes you forget you’re watching puppets as they discuss food, sex, the waitress (Karen Rodriguez), and mold spores, their lives now dominated by their aging, death taunting them with every cup of coffee.
Tracy Letts keeps a lookout for life’s twists and turns in The Stretch (photo by Anna D. Shapiro)
Pulitzer and Tony winner Letts takes the acting reins in The Stretch, a fifteen-minute monologue from 2016, directed by Tony winner Anna D. Shapiro and set at the 108th running of the $1 million El Dorado Stakes; Shapiro has helmed several of Letts’s plays, including August: Osage County, Mary Page Marlowe, and Man from Nebraska. The hotly contested race becomes a metaphor for life as Letts, playing the announcer, calls the event, featuring such horses as My Enormous Ego, Bold Defender, a Horse Called Man, Wudjacudja, Hold My Beer, Fata Morgana, and Canadian Navy, leading to such exclamations as “A Horse Called Man appears angry and confused, then retreats in impotent rage,” “Whistlin’ Pete seems completely focused on Sweet Sweet Sue,” and “Here comes My Enormous Ego!”
Something wholly unexpected happens at the finish line, and soon the announcer is delving into humanity’s failings, sharing doom and gloom about the future of all living creatures, prognosticating on interdependence and impermanence while a lullaby plays on the soundtrack. Letts, who has appeared in such television series as Homeland and The Sinner, such Broadway plays as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All My Sons, and such Oscar-nominated films as Lady Bird and Ford v. Ferrari, goes from hyped up and excited to measured and foreboding as he essentially turns his binoculars on himself and the human race.
“These plays share at least one thread: a world off-kilter,” he explains in a program note. “But since I wrote these pieces, the actual world has undergone some hair-raising transformations, which have cast mysterious new light on these plays. They feel very much like stories for 2021.” The Stretch feels particularly relevant now, a gripping accounting of what our lives have been like since March 2020, with no finish line in sight.