The Arabian Nights
at Goodman Theatre Studio
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Even Chicago theater, at least the theater that gets national notice, has been long on bombast and grit and urban realism–but short on poetry. Which is why Mary Zimmerman was such a revelation. Before Zimmerman became a director she was a poet. And from the beginning, it was her poet’s ear for what Roland Barthes called “the rustle of language” that set her apart from other Chicago directors. While others were trying to re-create the magic of Steppenwolf’s golden age, producing tin-eared shows that aimed to be nastier, dirtier, bleaker, and more realistic (as in Tracy Letts’s 1993 thriller Killer Joe), Zimmerman was taking language-heavy texts like the Odyssey or Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark and weaving them into theatrical tone poems.
Compared to the original production, which burst onto the scene five years ago and gave both Zimmerman and the Lookingglass Theatre Company recognition, this version is full of flaws, tiny flaws that would have undermined a less solid script. Part of the problem may be that this is the third and final stop for the show, which had a nice long run of several months in Los Angeles and a short sweet week recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Though the set looked beautiful and the costumes were still in remarkably good shape, the acting was not. Especially during the first act, when a number of the show’s funniest comic moments failed to earn big laughs because the actors–most notably David Kersnar–were trying too hard.
