Nightmare on Elms's street

Spend less than a week away from Facebook and you’re likely to miss out on news stories. After spending an extended weekend apart from both Chicago and the Internet, I learned only today that Sunday night, Chicago’s celebrated director and reluctant actor David Cromer picked up a Lucille Lortel Award for his Barrow Street direction of Our Town (which started as a Hypocrites production down in the fabulous cellar of the Chopin Theatre). The staging also won the Lortel Award, which honors off-Broadway excellence, for best revival.

I've personally tried not to draw attention to Cromer in my tenure at TOC, as I don’t want my friendship with him to bias what I write about him. But now that he has nearly 1,400 Facebook friends, I am significantly less important to him, so my mentioning his win is less precarious a conflict of interests.

On a slightly darker note, the other Chicago-birthed American revival that transferred to New York this spring was met earlier today with a resounding thud. In an unexpectedly diverse and lauded Broadway season, not one Tony Award nomination went to Robert Falls’s Desire Under the Elms, famous if at all for its scorching central performance by Carla Gugino and the gauche set pieces, which hang from the ceiling. In case you couldn’t afford the tickets to the Goodman's pre-Broadway engagement, what you missed is a fully functioning rustic cabin that can lift off the stage and hang in the air, and some low-hanging boulders whose scrotal-like quality begs desperately to be included in your post-show conversation. (I personally vote for the theory that all the rocks were meant to subliminally convince us via association that, as the kids would say, Eugene O’Neill rocks.)

Desire marks Gugino’s third New York stage appearance in a row in a Great American Playwright's B-side whose revival is justified by (and marketed via) the presence of recognizable screen actors. (She previously appeared in the Roundabout Theatre’s productions of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall and Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer to reviews that, like those of Desire, implied that she was the best thing about otherwise questionable revivals.) The critical praise in both Chicago and New York was largely showered on Gugino, while the rest of the conversation was devoted to critics either loudly questioning or aggressively justifying Falls’s extravagant experiment.

Either way, the Tony nominating committee, which sees everything that opens on Broadway, has officially weighed in, and while the nomination shut-out probably doesn’t sting as much as the nearly overnight closing of Falls’s American Buffalo last winter, it surely doesn’t help Desire’s case as a credible revival, and will make it very difficult to recoup its investment in a season that boasts so many well-regarded, and now Tony-nominated, straight plays. (Last week it played to houses filled to only 37% capacity.)

What’s interesting about these two revivals is that Our Town was produced by the Hypocrites’ Sean Graney with no intention of an extended life. Because the puckish artistic director has been picking up directing gigs at the biggest venues in town, he handed Our Town to Cromer essentially as an on-the-cheap project that could keep the company busy while he was out. After the critical cheers both locally and from the New York Times’s Charles Isherwood for Our Town, Cromer restaged the show in a commercial production off-Broadway. The Hypocrites got billing but no money, while Cromer moved several of his hitherto unknown Chicago cast members with him and re-cast some of the roles with Chicago-bred actors now working in NYC.

Desire Under the Elms, on the other hand, was produced—in fact vainly over-produced—at the Goodman with the intention of a Broadway transfer (or so this interview with the Tribune's Chris Jones and star Pablo Schreiber's characterization of Chicago as "a trial run" suggested). It featured no breakout or even supporting opportunities for Chicago actors, yet would eventually benefit Falls and the Goodman in both marquee and pocketbook value—assuming that it made good in New York.

Meanwhile, the Goodman’s other potentially Broadway-bound project from this season—Falls held open the Goodman’s door for Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman’s undistinguished Turn of the Century, which not even Tommy Tune’s direction could spruce up into something passable—also eerily exposed a not-ready-to-program-the-Rialto feel at the Goodman. But at least its current ICU residency allowed leading man Jeff Daniels to step out of that show and earn a best actor Tony nomination for the hit play God of Carnage.

Of course, it’s not all gloom and doom for the Goodman this season. The O'Neill festival that was curated around Desire was a spectacular success. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, which got its premiere here in a Goodman co-production with Manhattan Theatre Club, picked up the Pulitzer Prize for drama last month. And this weekend, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘N’ Roll opens under the direction of the Court Theatre’s Charlie Newell, who recently rocked the city’s socks off Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s staggering soul opera Caroline, or Change.

But with no Tony nominations for Desire’s cabin in the sky, it’s difficult to ignore the unintended influence four years next door to Wicked has had on Falls’s Loop residency. If only someone had told him that theatrical success requires more than just a flying farmhouse.