Baal the Great
For a smaller theater, a major intersection in the culturally unspoiled Pilsen is a kind of Xanadu. For most of the tenants of the Podmajersky spaces surrounding Eighteenth and Halsted, the same is true: Accessibility and, for lack of a less eyebrow-raising term, existential authenticity are non-combative assets here.
hile the craving for drama doesn’t often take me, I don’t have to journey far to satisfy it if it does. Just a quick journey out my backdoor, across an Escher-like zigzag of ill-lit porches and stairs, and I’ve arrived at EP Theater’s front door—which is, at least architecturally speaking, actually the back entrance (EP’s front, facing Pilsen’s Halsted, bears a sign directing you to “Enter in Back”; the phrase has become something of a symbolic tagline for the boutique theater). Of course, the show-going strangers to the community must traverse the street corner where Eighteenth Street first hits Halsted and twists into a serpentine bight south, just before it vaults east under the Dan Ryan Expressway. For a smaller theater, a major intersection in the culturally unspoiled Pilsen is a kind of Xanadu. For most of the tenants of the Podmajersky spaces surrounding Eighteenth and Halsted (These are “spaces” more than apartments), the same is true: Accessibility and, for lack of a less eyebrow-raising term, existential authenticity are non-combative assets here. Pilsen takes its name from the Czech city Plzeň, located in Bohemia; and the community blossoming in East Pilsen is indeed refreshingly bohemian.
Sitting at this Southside crossroads, EP Theater therefore remains generally unscathed by the conventions familiar to the bobo theatergoers that tend to condense further north. It is foremost an experimental performance space and theaterhouse, but it has also recently begun to provide artistic outreach to youth in the community. In the three-and-a-half years I’ve resided in my current space above EP, I have noticed a seemingly ever-changing cast of characters – a pluralistic mix of artist-types – lingering with Parliaments and PBR in the gravelly parking lot that sprawls behind our building. Yet the one constant for EP is Executive Director Jason Ewers, who envisioned the theaterspace and struck ground here back in the autumn of 2005, when he was still a student at Columbia College. Now twenty-six, Jason is a long-legged and skinny blond, who, though often looking a touch hung-over, manages his business of collective artistry with seemingly impossible deft. I had the pleasure of making some conversation with Jason beyond our typical, neighborly chitchat while he tidied the lobby before a show this week. The identity and quantity of EP’s actual residents is a bit unclear, I gathered, but Jason seems to have always been the welcoming type anyway and embraces the state of flux that he calls “vagabond surprise.” The two other constant bodies are Brad Nagle and Craig Cunningham, who, within the roughly defined roles of Marketing Director and Artistic Director (respectively), complete the ensemble. Craig finds original plays to produce, and Jason and Brad, as they tell me, “make it happen.”
This is the final week for their current show, a new production of Bertolt Bretcht’s Baal, and their most ambitious yet: a haunting and uninhibited spectacle of poetry, intoxication, and eroticism. These three are the lifeblood of Baal, the self-annihilating artist who brazenly annotates each of his irredeemably reckless actions with his poems and musings. Although Jason admits the mere script of the play presents a “story full of holes,” it is ultimately the “raw insanity” that drew him and his crew to Brecht’s first work. With the same amount of money and the same breadth of talent on stage, Jason realizes they could have put up The Crucible and received a greater financial return, but that’s obviously not what EP, or Brecht for that matter, is about. One can have a lot more fun with Baal, and it seems to have been a particularly apt vehicle for the cast and crew to test their artistic limits.
The production itself was a successfully dark and fantastic thing to behold. With his only friend Ekart (Shawn Pfautsch) at his side, Baal indefatigably devours women and drains barrels of corn brandy. We hear him envy the endless sky; we watch him exhaust the bounds of the earth; and, as he achieves his state of terrene rapture, we see him confuse emptiness for fullness and great heights with great lows. With the migrainous dissonance between the world in the play and the world in reality, Brecht keeps our attention rapt while keeping us safe from forgetting that we are watching a performance.
