Dido, Queen of Carthage

Maybe it’s because it’s performed in a Chicago Park District field house, but Dido has the feel of a high-school theatrical, albeit an ambitious one. Seldom produced (and read only slightly more frequently), Marlowe’s play mixes gods and mortals, destiny and desire, Baroque poetry and battle scars in an epic vision of tragic love. It’s a tall order. Perhaps Camenae was longing to return to familiar territory—it mounted Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus a few years ago—but it’s not clear why it wanted to tackle this particular work.

Sure, Dido provides a pretty meaty female lead role, which fits with Camenae’s woman-centered agenda. But can one really view the heroine’s lovelorn suicide as an act of heroism? That central premise never quite plays, and neither do some of McGuire’s unorthodox casting choices, such as putting lumbering, bearded Jason Bone in the role of Jupiter’s boy lover, Ganymede. If she wished to overturn expectations, why direct the burly actor to play a mincing stereotype? McGuire makes other tactical errors. Her choric interpolations from Virgil’s Aeneid bring the action to a halt and put the players’ passions at a distance. Her uses of dumb show and dance demonstrate potential—particularly in Aeneas’ recounting of the Trojan horse story—but they’re hamstrung by a lighting design that fails to support the varying levels of reality. As the lovers, Bennett and Schnitger show some skill with marathon-length speeches, but as a whole, the ensemble comes off as hammy and clumsy.—Kay Daly