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Letter Purloined
Reviews, Previews, Interviews

Reader

Windy City Times

"Critic's Choice" in The Reader

My brain hurt after this show, but I've never felt so good about falling into a state of utter confusion. David Isaacson's smart, funny script is divided into 26 chronological segments, performed in a different randomly determined order each night. (His scenes--like the holes in an ingeniously designed golf course described in the show--are all "welcoming" enough to be first and dramatic enough to be last.) The characters are three couples: a poet king and psychoanalyst queen, a left-brained detective and her right-brained military husband, and a police superintendent who strives to create order and her mischief-making courtier spouse. Diametrically opposed, each partner cancels the other out, obviating any search for meaning. The story concerns a stained handkerchief (think Othello), a stolen letter (think Poe), and the slaughter of unnamed innocents (think Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadzic). All these elements and many others percolate together to produce Theater Oobleck's tasty stew, studded with moments of hilarity; especially rewarding are Heather Riordan's queen, Isaacson's king, and David Kodeski's Ogai ("Iago" backward). A rotating set allows the couples to regularly appear in bed, while Erica Erdmann's costumes are cleverly timeless. --Laura Molzahn

Windy City Times

Theater Oobleck shows defy easy description or categorization. This one, the umpteenth script David Isaacson has penned for the Ooblie Babies over 17 years, combines shards of Shakespeare, pieces of Poe and fragments of Freud to develop a mocking literary and political fantasy that parrots Pirandello (a coincidental, or perceived, effect rather than intended, I believe).

If I've confused you or scared you away from Letter Purloined, let me assure you it's fun, funny, clever, and quixotic; a theatrical conceit in 26 scenes, each assigned a letter of the alphabet and performed in random order at each performance (although the opening performance did not seem random, so well-rehearsed were the sound cures and scene transitions, and so timely were the climactic moments). Essentially a comedy, Letter Purloined draws heavily on Shakespeare's Othello and Poe's Detective Dupin Stories to create the seemingly-bland King Navodar and his claustrophobic court: Queen, general, special prosecutor (spawned in a test tube and raised without parents or family), ambitious Iago-like prime minister (David Kodeski, well-known to the GLBT community) and the minister's police chief wife.

Each has a secret, a peccadillo or king and an agenda which are played out in various betrayals, tricks, bedroom games, deceptions and acts of violence some of which involve a handkerchief and/or stolen and forged letters. Isaacson comments on contemporary geo-politics as well, but the political content-touching institutionalized brutality, collateral damage and international policing-is weak tea compared to the more obvious satires of literature and psychoanalysis.

You'll get more of the script's references if you've had a liberal education and you follow the news, although there's plenty of entertainment in the largely (but not entirely) understated performances. Dressed in Erica Erdmann's quirky yet stylish court costumes, the six veteran players exhibit impeccable timing, subtle variation, sharp focus and grotesque charm-some of it played directly to the audience- in a comic strip-like play composed almost entirely of two-character scenes. First among equals are Heather Riordan as the queen who's also a psycho psychoanalyst, and Colm O'Reilly in a really clever turn as General Cassio. a living Casio keyboard, who communicates entirely through humming in the manner of various musical instruments (he speaks in only one scene). Cassio is an inspired idea.

Indeed, the musical choices for Letter Purloined, not all of them hummed by Cassio. are a pleasure in themselves, linking the 26 scenes with original recordings ranging from Bert Lahr to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sam Cooke to Queen to Ray Charles.

Letter Purloined has quiet intellectual authority and astute theatricality in a self-consciously simple package that really isn't simple. Perhaps it's more a lovely objet d'art than flash of theatrical energy-more sustained reaction than nuclear theater-but that's Theater Oobleck's signature.

- Jonathan Abarbanel

"Recommended" in New City

As plays inspired by French theory go, David Isaacson's "Letter Purloined" employs an admirably light touch. Isaacson's put "Othello," Edgar Allen Poe and Lacan into a blender, and then put the results into another blender: each performance of "Letter Purloined" features a new arrangement of the play's twenty-six scenes. The ultimate effect owes as much to the Oulipo as to post-structuralism. It's a play primarily about play, which leaves its evocations of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia feeling out of place. Unlike the shadows of the Holocaust in Georges Perec, for instance, the Yugoslavian material functions only as one more element to riff on, leading to a thin, "only Kofi Annan can save us now" response to real horror. That caveat aside, Theater Oobleck's production is frequently captivating, full of nice touches like the color-coding of quilt to costume. And the variable structure allows both serendipity, as scenes that mirror one another happen to fall sequentially, and disorienting surprises. Oobleck's no-director rule leads to wide variations in the performances: Isaacson's malevolent King Navodar and Kat McJimsey's inquisitorial Ordina most successfully embody the cartoonish spirit of the play, though Colm O'Reilly's turn as Cassio, able to communicate only by mimicking a toy synthesizer, has a sad and strange dignity. - John Beer

"Critic's Pick" on WBEZ

My choice is "Letter Purloined" by Theater Oobleck. Theater Oobleck has been around for over 15 years. It is one of our more cutting-edge theaters, that does - not commercial work - experimental work

They have written an original play in 26 scenes, each of which is assigned a letter of the alphabet, and they perform them in random order each time.

Now the thematic essence of the piece, "Letter Purloined:" they have taken some Edgar Allan Poe - he wrote a short story called "The Purloined Letter" - and they have also have taken substantial chunks of "Othello," in which a purloined handkerchief is a crucial element. And they have mixed these up to create - if you can believe it - a fresh, politically relevant piece about today, about power politics - now still set up as a king's court, but you can read it as a contemporary power ensemble of any kind.

It's not a fancy production, but it's very, very enjoyable. It's fresh, it's witty, it is the "Letter Purloined" by Theater Oobleck, being performed at Live Bait Theater until February 11.

--Jonathan Abarbanel

Preview from Chicago Tribune

Poe: Take your pick
Oobleck, Steppenwolf both stage his dark tales

By Kerry Reid
Special to the Tribune
Published January 13, 2006

Theater Oobleck members David Isaacson and Mickle Maher have worked together on and off for two decades, from their undergrad days in Ann Arbor, Mich., through their long association with Oobleck. Both playwrights are opening productions this winter based on the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. But both deny discussing in depth the 19th-Century master of dark fiction until sitting down together at a coffeehouse in Evanston for an interview.

"This is our first conversation about Poe, ever," claims Isaacson. His "The Letter Purloined" is based in part on Poe's "The Purloined Letter," and opened this week with Theater Oobleck. "Lady Madeline," Maher's new chamber musical based on "The Fall of the House of Usher," with a score by Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman, opens as part of the Steppenwolf for Young Adults series in February.

Mysteries of unknown conversations aside, the authors' two productions appear to be quite different.

For one, "The Purloined Letter" is often considered Poe's strongest contribution to the then-nascent art of detective fiction, while "House of Usher" is his masterpiece of horror and the shadows of the mind. For another, it's hard to imagine two Chicago theater companies more removed from each other than Steppenwolf and the nonhierarchical Oobleck, known for its smashed-up texts and producing plays without a director. Third, Maher's piece is mostly straight adaptation, though it's written from the point of view of the title character (who is silent in Poe's original)--while Isaacson's play is a melange of Poe, Shakespeare's "Othello" and indicted Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadzic.

Still, "Letter" and "Usher" are unmistakably Poe stories.

"They're all about closed spaces in which mysterious things happen that shouldn't happen" says Maher of Poe's work. "Or shouldn't be able to happen."

Isaacson brings up Poe's gift for creating characters who complete each other, and in doing so show parts of the human psyche in stark relief. "Roderick and Madeline are twins," he says. "But the minister who is the adversary in `The Purloined Letter' is very much a twin of Dupin, the detective. The minister is both a poet and mathematician, and a big deal is made of that. Dupin is also a combination of the creative and the analytical. They both think the same way and that is why Dupin is able to solve the mystery."

Music plays a prominent role in both pieces, as well.

"Roderick is a composer," says Maher. "So sound and music immediately play a big part in the text." In the show, Roderick, who can only listen to certain kinds of stringed instruments, creates fantastical music with his guest, just as he does in the story. Maher was tapped for the project after Steppenwolf's Pluess and director Jessica Thebus decided that they wanted to do a musical with dark overtones--it was "The Cabinet," Maher's hit adaptation of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" for Redmoon in spring 2005, that made him their first choice to write the script. He notes with a laugh that "`Lady Madeline' is a variation on `The Cabinet.' That was told from the point of view of the zombie. This is also told from the point of view of the zombie."

Madeline emerges at the end of the story after being entombed alive by her brother.

In "The Letter Purloined" Colm O'Reilly's Cassio (based on the character in "Othello") communicates only through music, running through a repertory of tunes that includes Sam Cooke's "You Send Me" and snippets of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Isaacson himself plays Navodar, a despot king. Though he started the play several years ago in part as a response to the Bosnian massacres, "The Letter Purloined," with its emphasis on hidden sources and manipulated intelligence, is current again today with references to debates about U.S. policy in Iraq.

Here's an audience guide to seeing the two shows:

CHEAT SHEET TO THE STORIES:

"The Purloined Letter" (1845) is one of three Poe stories featuring Parisian detective Auguste Dupin. Dupin receives a visit from a police prefect who is trying to recover a letter stolen from the royal chambers by a government minister.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) contains Poe motifs such as a gloomy isolated house and a protagonist whose mania borders on insanity. The hypersensitive Roderick and his near-catatonic twin sister Madeline often are interpreted as two halves of one personality--a split reflected in the crack running down the exterior wall of their house.

WHO WILL LIKE THE PLAYS:
"Purloined" has members of the audience help create a random order of scenes in the play, a device borrowed from the Neo-Futurists, as fans of "Too Much Light" will discover. Also, Poe and Shakespeare scholars will enjoy ferreting out the references.
"Lady Madeline" is part of Steppenwolf's Theatre for Young Adults series; the weekday matinees are reserved for students, with weekend performances open to the public (appropriate for teens).

MOST CHILLING MOMENT:
"Purloined": In a therapy session, her royal highness and Freudian therapist Queen Diri hears of body parts found from a "slaughter of the innocents" ordered by her husband Navodar. The oblivious queen keeps referring to the account as a dream.
"Lady Madeline": The opening, with Madeline tearing open her coffin, should be enough, but the most mind-bending moment in Maher's adaptation occurs during a flashback to Roderick and Madeline as children on the lawn of the house, looking up at themselves in the nursery window.

Interview from The Onion

By Kyle Ryan

This month has reinforced the contrasting nature of Chicago’s theater scene. At the ritzy Cadillac Palace Theatre, there’s Little Women, a traditional musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel. But up north in Wrigleyville, at the intimate Live Bait Theater, there’s Letter Purloined, a deliberately confusing, non-linear comedic mystery by Theater Oobleck. Each night, the six-member cast performs the play’s 26 scenes in random order, but Letter Purloined would be challenging even performed chronologically: One character speaks by humming melodies, and writer David Isaacson (who also plays King Navodar) fills the play with rapid-fire ideas taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter,” Shakespeare’s Othello, and the life of Bosnian war criminal/poet Radovan Karadzic, among other things. The result could be the year’s most inventive local production. Isaacson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about tyrannical poet-kings, the Neo-Futurists, and having too many cooks in the kitchen.

The A.V. Club: This whole play is an amalgam of ideas. How did it come together?
David Isaacson: The character that I play is based on Radovan Karadzic. One of the things that interested me about him was that before he became the Serbian ruler of Bosnia, he was both a poet and a psychiatrist. He tended to tell his psychiatrist friends that he was Serbia’s greatest poet, and he would tell his poet friends that he was Serbia’s greatest psychiatrist. His wife was also a psychiatrist, so that’s how I came up with the idea of a queen who’s a psychiatrist and a king who’s a poet. Then once I started thinking about poet-kings, I was led toward Shakespeare, because Shakespeare always writes about kings who also happen to speak in poetry… so that’s one of the reasons that the language from Othello fits into it. All the poetry that my character speaks is actually lines from Othello. So that was the starting place, and another starting place was the idea of mixing up order. I had seen a couple plays that the Neo-Futurists have done, and of course they’re famous for mixing up order.

AVC: Letter Purloined definitely has a Neo-Futurists feel.
DI: Especially because I’ve cast one current and two former Neo-Futurists in the show. It definitely has a Neo-Futurist feel to it in many regards—it’s definitely inspired by them.

AVC: It’s similarly challenging, too, and not just because of the order. One character, Cassio, only speaks in melodies.
DI: The point isn’t getting what songs he’s doing; it’s more like getting the emotions of the characters and the emotional content of the music. It’s not so important for us that people get the chronology of what happened, but just get an overall sense of it. Almost, the point is not getting it, because sometimes things are very hard to get.

AVC: It seems like that would be tough for the actors. What snags did you hit in the process?
DI: There’s an ongoing debate about whether we should always act each scene the same, no matter where it came in the chronology that evening, or whether we could add some variety or nuance to our performance based on what the audience had already learned. Do you play a scene kind of dark or more serious as it comes to the end of the play, even though maybe on another night you would play it lighter because it comes earlier in the play? That was an interesting snag that we’ve never fully resolved.

AVC: That’s the kind of thing a director could decide, but Oobleck doesn’t use a director. How does that work?
DI: What happens with a director is, what you see on stage comes in large part from a single point of view. When you work without a director, it’s much more an amalgamation—of six points of view, in this case. In a play that’s going to be performed in a new order every night, that somehow seems more appropriate, because the play will take on a new essence every night.

AVC: Don’t you ever have too many cooks?
DI: Absolutely. There are rehearsals when we go home and everyone has agreed to disagree. A lot of organizations work by consensus, and it makes it harder, and it makes this process longer. When you work with a director, it’s a more efficient process, and it can be very rewarding, but working with Theater Oobleck brings different kinds of rewards.

AVC: You were one of Oobleck’s founding members. How has your writing style changed since the troupe formed?
DI: I would say that the voice has matured to some degree, and I don’t mean that necessarily as a compliment. The earlier plays certainly tended to be a bit more rambunctious and more physical than this play. This is the most intimate play I’ve ever written; it’s mostly scenes with just two people talking. I think that 17 years ago, I would have been scared to write such a play—and I guess I’m still scared to write such a play. But there you have it, I’ve written it.