Gary, home companion

In between directing the Broadway premiere of the Oprah-produced The Color Purple (plans were just announced for a 2007 Chicago run) and the new musical The Boys Are Coming Home for the American Music Theatre Project at Northwestern, the ubiquitous Gary Griffin is back for a stint at his home base, Chicago Shakespeare, with Georges Feydeau’s seminal farce A Flea in Her Ear. Given his dual residence and his history dating back to projects with Pegasus Players and Famous Door, we started by asking him an always-irritating New York/Chicago question.

Time Out Chicago: Chicagoans (including us) love to gripe whenever a show here is cast with New York actors. Yet no one in New York complains when you take Felicia Fields from Chicago and give her a great Broadway role like Sofia in The Color Purple. Do we place too much importance on casting locally?
Gary Griffin: People that come [to Chicago] get us to look at our work in new ways. I understand not wanting to lose work, but I think it’s important that we’re constantly being fed by new thought. Sometimes when I cast out of town, it wasn’t from the belief that I couldn’t find anyone here. It’s that this was someone I really wanted to work with. But I think in the theater, we all complain about something.
TOC: Do you have a different approach when you’re directing a commercial show as opposed to a nonprofit?
GG: You know, everything has limitations. And frankly, I’d be much more frightened if there weren’t limitations. Limitations are what make you do your work well, I think. It’s when you have to maneuver. So commercial’s another kind of limitation. But it’s your way of honoring the limitation and doing your best work. It’s like when you have $1,000 to do a play, you figure out how to do the very best things possible with that. I do think it’s interesting that [in] the commercial world, I have many fewer conversations about money than I have in the not-for-profit world.
TOC: I promise this is my only Oprah question. Did she give you notes?
GG: She gave me two notes that I remember, and they were both related to the character she played [in the film]. It was very far along before Oprah [came on board]. Which in my mind is the perfect time for her to join the process, because we had the show, and she was able to become involved with a lot of information of what the show was going to be.TOC: What’s the most money a theater ticket should cost?
GG: God, I don’t know how to put a price on it. There are things I would have been happy to have paid $500 for. When I go to the opera and I look in the pit, I don’t mind paying $150. Because I know what it takes to create that. And I really appreciate that there are that many violins. But at the same time, what does it mean on Broadway for a show to have eight people in the cast and still be charging the same as the show next door, which [has a higher] weekly running price?
TOC: What would Feydeau be writing about now?
GG: I think Feydeau would be having a marvelous time. Clearly he thought the bourgeoisie and the repression in that class was hilarious. And potentially dangerous. I think he’d be writing about the Christian right.
TOC: Why should we see your play?
GG: I think farce is a very unique kind of comedy. I think we all think we know what it is, and I will [include] myself in that as well. But I think it’s an extremely rare animal. And what we mostly know of it is a watered-down, mostly vulgar form. And I think here is a chance to see the master. Feydeau was a brilliant architect of theater. He was a genius, and I think that can make you nuts, too. Feydeau went crazy. He was put in an asylum. He thought he was Napoleon III.

A Flea in Her Ear opens Monday 20 at Chicago Shakespeare. See Resident companies.