Dynamic groups

David Cromer’s production of Kirk Lynn’s Cherrywood, featuring four dozen storefront actors putting on a house party in the tight confines of Mary-Arrchie’s space, jettisons traditional concepts of character and dramatic structure in favor of capturing a particular sense of community. It’s unlike anything else on Chicago’s stages. Or at least it was, until Laura Jacqmin’s self-produced Dental Society Midwinter Meeting opened at Chicago Dramatists. Jacqmin’s six performers flip back and forth between relatively anonymous characters and group narration to convey the experience of a dental convention beset by scandal. Seized by the collective spirit of these productions, our Theater staff convened to consider their implications.

JB: One thing that comes across from both plays is how refreshing it can be to give up the focus on individual characters. It allows for different kinds of concerns than more traditional plays, and it creates a wholly different kind of energy onstage.
KV: I agree. While both allow individual cast members moments to shine, our concern story-wise is the evolution of the group. We’re sort of deprived of protagonists.
JB: You might think that would make things boring or confusing. But the playwrights produce a strong sense of movement and mostly keep us clear about where we are and what’s going on. That’s more true of Dental Society: Jacqmin gives us lots of detailed narration, while there’s plenty in Cherrywood that doesn’t make sense at first.
KV: And yet despite the lack of individual characters, both plays have a similar concern at heart: the ability and responsibility of individuals to effect change within a group. While Dental Society doesn’t directly address political issues the way Cherrywood’s budding utopian commune does, it’s hard not to read both as microcosms of American politics.
JB: Exactly. And it’s interesting that Dental Society winds up much more skeptical about change. Cherrywood has its dark undercurrents of violence and cultishness, but it does seem to see problems as fixable and change as possible—that everyone’s potentially a werewolf, and a werewolf working for good. The dentists want to do the right thing but end up slipping back into bad daily patterns, like patients who won’t floss. The fact that the more hopeful play comes from the Bush years, and the more skeptical one was written recently, is striking.
KV: Do Cherrywood’s fantasy elements—the Werewolf Factor—imply that the kind of collective improvement its characters naively wish into being is a fantasy itself? Perhaps the first-person-plural narration of the dentists is more grounded in reality. It implicates us in the dentists’ failed attempt to “be a part of the solution.” “We” are the change we seek, after all.
JB: I’d put the Werewolf Factor more on the side of imagination than fantasy, though of course that’s a tricky line to draw, and all that milk does suggest an infantile quality. But Dental Society, too, suggests that play and the imagination can do more than rational planning to deal with a group’s trauma. At least, that’s how I understand the contrast of that terrific karaoke scene with the whiteboard wielding of the school-government types.
KV: Group play is more effective than groupthink? I can get behind that. The plays’ loose narrative structures, as much as the narratives themselves, go a long way toward engaging my imagination.
JB: I’m with you there. A place where this kind of collective enterprise has always been central is long-form improv (when it’s good, I mean!). The atmosphere of both these pieces isn’t too far from that: the sense that anything could happen, the way themes and parallels slowly emerge, the palpable trust among the ensemble members. Plus they’re both quite funny!
KV: Perhaps they Harold a new trend.

Cherrywood and Dental Society Midwinter Meeting close this week.

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