The Strange
at the Lunar Cabaret
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As many of her Curious Theatre Branch cohorts and she herself have done in the past, Magnus begins with an ethically charged question–can we share our darkest impulses with others, or are we solely responsible for our own ugliness?–and creates an unstable environment in which overworked minds labor through it. The minds here belong to two unnamed characters, a desperate, self-loathing woman (Magnus) and a psychologically insightful young girl (Amy Warren). They meet when the woman stumbles drunk into the girl’s bedroom in the middle of the night. Neither knows the other. Perhaps the woman is a guest of the girl’s parents, but Magnus intentionally obscures the events leading to this unlikely encounter. From a conventional standpoint, this ambiguity would be bad playwriting; most authors would spend their first ten minutes trying to shore up the logic behind the meeting. But illogic–or at least randomness–is part of the effect of estrangement Magnus is after, as two characters clinging to the precipice of sleep try to make sense of their predicament right along with the audience.
The woman has wet herself, but when the girl attempts to ease the adult’s embarrassment, the woman unleashes a torrent of cynical bombast, declaring that she has no interest in being nice. Soon the woman climbs into the girl’s tiny bed, lying there like a pile of bones dropped from a great height. The girl scrambles out of the way, stands across the room staring at the intruder during an excruciating silence, then whispers, “You’re ugly.” She seems to be searching for her voice, trying to find her own authority. “I’m not impressed by you,” she insists.
The Strange is a hard play to leave behind, for it resonates from the shadowy recesses of the psyche. The world these artists create has the kind of towering hyperreality we experience only at three o’clock in the morning–upon awakening in a cold sweat.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): The Strange theater still by Christopher Dimock.
