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Video
of “Things Are Tough All Over” (2006)
Written by Suzan-Lori Parks
Directed by Eric Ziegenhagen
Performed by Brad Smith and Sarah Gitenstein
* * *
Profile in American Theater Magazine, 1999
One of 15 up-and-coming theater artists under 30
Playwright-director-actor Eric Ziegenhagen probably
thinks Ellsworth Kelly is too rococo. Like the abstract painter
famous for his minimalist canvases, the Chicago-based 28-year-old has a
passion for paring away all "inessential elements."
"That means not having a stage manager or a designer," he
explains. "The things that you're taught you must have get in the way of a visceral theatrical
experience."
In the last show he directed -- an adaptation of Beau
O'Reilly's short story "The House on the Lake
by the Woods Near the Ocean" -- Ziegenhagen pushed his philosophy to
the extreme. Almost nothing happened onstage for 45 minutes. To
realize the story, about a woman who goes on vacation with her husband and
hides out in hopes of being left behind, he placed two actors behind the
audience, where they read the text dispassionately into microphones.
Once in a while a woman appeared on stage to drop off a suitcase.
Most of the time, the audience stared at a small pile of junk under
an unchanging blue wash. The effect was inexplicably captivating.
"I had to find a way to dramatize the act of 'listening'
to a story," Ziegenhagen says. "It took a long time to win
the actors over. I had to work to get the inflection out of their
voices, because it can distract the listener from what the sentence is
'about'."
A native of Minneapolis,
Ziegenhagen cut his theatric teeth at the Playwrights Center
before he started producing his tiny, delicate plays on his own. In
1997 he moved to Chicago
after visiting the city and marveling at the sustained critical attention
the most marginal of productions received. He quickly fell in with
the Curious Theater Branch, one of the city's most
innovative and prolific collectives, where he directed the hallucinatory
"The Strange", by Curious co-founder Jenny Magnus.
He describes his brand of theatre as "chamber work"
and recently ventured into solo performance with "Books on Tape."
In this late-night offering, Ziegenhagen sat on a bare stage and sang
original folk songs, including the childlike "Is that Star Wars?"
In between he read aloud "whatever I'd read that week that was
interesting," from short stories to an essay about postage-stamp
design.
Ziegenhagen never spends more than a couple hundred bucks on a
show, preferring to assemble a set out of whatever happens to be lying
around. "It's more exciting to ask, 'How can I possibly do that with
the little I've got?"
* * *
CHEMISTRY
Written by Wendy MacLeod
Directed by Eric Ziegenhagen
Performed by Kristina Martin and John Henry Roberts
Produced by Collaboraction at The Viaduct as part of
SKETCHBOOK
“…The best pieces were ‘Chemistry,’ a
funny piece from MacLeod in which a laboratory scientist can only arouse
his girlfriend when he’s wearing goggles, and ‘Paper
Thin,’ a cleverly structured play by Lindsay Price that deals with
the amusement offered to apartment dwellers by their neighbors.”
-Chris Jones, Chicago
Tribune
“…Wendy MacLeod’s ‘Chemistry,’
directed by Eric Ziegenhagen, is a bit more successful. A vixenish
chemistry professor (Tina Martin) hits on a nerdy lab researcher (John
Roberts) but only finds him attractive when he’s in his
“praying mantis” lab goggles.
(Anyone who’s seen MacLeod’s ‘The House of
Yes’ knows how she excels at making fetishes come alive.) Roberts delivers MacLeod’s zingers
with a priceless deadpan. When the prof asks him if his mother picks out his clothes, he
retorts, “How do you know my mother isn’t cool?” “Is she?” she asks. The monosyllabic answer comes after a
perfectly timed pause, “No.””
-Kerry Reid, Chicago
Reader
SOMETHING MADE UP
Written by Barrie
Cole
Directed by Eric Ziegenhagen
Performed by Julie Caffey, Doug
Stapleton, and Barrie Cole
Produced by Penlight Theater at Lunar Cabaret and Wing &
Groove
“It’s difficult to imagine where Barrie Cole learned to write plays. While most young playwrights work
overtime to excise any hint of ambiguity from their scripts, writing as
though television sitcoms were the pinnacle of literary achievement in
Western culture, Cole revels in the strangeness. She sets the hour-long Something Made Up
in the apartment of a woman who spends every waking minute reading a book
on ventriloquism and a man who tries to convince himself that he’s a
shaman by mixing spices in a bowl.
Although they have nothing in common, occupy separate sides of the
stage, and interact as though they were strangers, the two have rented a
daughter in order to practice being parents. The girl spends most of her time lying
slumped in a corner in her pajamas, occasionally rousing herself to insist
that her would-be parents sedate themselves or report that a hermaphrodite
appeared in a dream and bade her make a radish. But with ingenious subtlety, Cole
transforms her collection of seeming non-sequiturs into a mesmerizing
meditation on family dynamics.
Director Eric Ziegenhagen gives this Penlight Theater production a
gentle, sensual feel, making Cole’s weirdness seem downright cozy. By the time these three misfits learn to
like one another, in the ridiculous but endearing penultimate scene, Cole
has established just how human her particular world can be.”
-Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader
“…Though the production has been well paced and
thoroughly directed by Eric Ziegenhagen, ultimately the play’s
comedy, insight, and two top-notch performances don’t quite come
together.”
-Kelly Kleiman, Chicago Reader
FACTS AND FIGURES
Written and directed by Eric Ziegenhagen
Performed by Anne Fogarty and John Henry Roberts (Chicago)
Performed by Sarah Phemister and
Kyle Christopherson (Minneapolis)
“Theater artist Eric Ziegenhagen is like a world-class
butler. You might swear he
doesn’t do any work at all: when Ziegenhagen directed Beau
O’Reilly’s ‘The House on the Lake
by the Woods near the Ocean,’ he made the audience stare at a nearly
empty stage for a good 30 minutes.
But by the time an evening with Ziegenhagen is over, you realize
that he’s orchestrated a million imperceptible details and made
everything come off without a hitch.
His work has never been more imperceptible than in ‘Facts and
Figures,’ a play he wrote and directed for this year’s
Rhinoceros Theater Festival. A
young unmarried couple find themselves separated for weeks at a time;
she’s an ambitious young executive flying around the country to
various training sessions while he sits home waiting for the next temp
job. The characters spend almost the
entire play on the phone with each other, making idle chitchat, lit by a
single table lamp. Superficially a
play about nothing, ‘Facts and Figures’ is ultimately a deeply
felt inquisition into the nature of loyalty and trust. Ziegenhagen couldn’t have asked for
a better cast than Anne Fogarty and john Roberts, actors who need barely raise
an eyebrow to convey enormous depths.
The last two scenes cover no new ground, but Ziegenhagen at his most
superfluous is better than most artists at their most essential.”
-Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader
“No matter how diverse its performers or how drastic its
shifts in lineup from year to year, the Rhinoceros Theater Festival has
maintained its mission: creating a safe, pressure-free environment for the
development of new works and voices.…If there’s an informal
concept underlying this year’s fest, it might be the beautiful of the
spoken word—of special concern in Eric Ziegenhagen’s
new Facts and Figures, which relies almost entirely on verbal performance
to establish itself.
Sometimes it’s the most modest innovations that make the
biggest statements. In some ways Ziegenhagen’s naturalistic script—a series
of long-distance conversations between two lovers—doesn’t offer
many surprises. He maps out his
characters’ personality quirks in the play’s first 15 minutes,
and in the next hour or so they don’t change much. Nor does it take a psychic to predict the
play’s outcome—given the various roadblocks Ziegenhagen sets
up, the conclusion seems almost inevitable.
But for this playwright the ends aren’t nearly as
important as the means: ultimately it’s Ziegenhagen’s
direction of his script that makes Facts and Figures stand out. He experimented with sensory-deprivation
theater a little more than a year ago with his staging of Beau
O’Reilly’s ‘The House on the Lake
by the Woods near the Ocean,’ placing the speaking members of the
cast behind the audience. He
achieves a similar effect here with a minimalist lighting design: aside
from four dim lights overhead and an equally faint table lamp in one
corner, the stage is dark.
It’s a simple but powerful choice: short of having his actors phone in their performances, Ziegenhagen could
not have come closer to staging actual phone conversation. Though the actors remain visible, their
faces are usually cloaked in darkness, so trying to read their expressions
is an exercise in futility. And as
in ‘The House on the Lake,’
Ziegenhagen has pared stage business to its barest essentials; the only
physical aspects of the performances are simple gestures and nervous
pacing. In effect Ziegenhagen forces
the audience to treat his characters like a pair of disembodied voices, the
lovers so estranged from each other that telephone lines are their only
connection.
Ziegenhagen’s dialogue is
so naturalistic, so firmly rooted in reality, that it’s painful to
listen as his characters use words to hack away at each other, reopening
wounds from their last conversation.
In the hands of a less accomplished pair of actors, the tightly
wound Facts and Figures might have unraveled into another tedious exercise
in one-dimensional performance. But
part of what makes the script so convincing is the remarkable chemistry
between John Roberts and Anne Fogarty.
Roberts as the intermittendly employed
boyfriend manages to add a fresh perspective on twentysomething
apathy. And Fogarty brings an air of
humanity to his eminently more successful girlfriend, an otherwise soulless
management consultant.
The two hold most of their phone conversations seated at the
same table, but no suspension of disbelief is required: the mile-long gaps
and pauses in their exchanges create a greater sense of separation than any
physical distance could.
-Nick Green, Chicago
Reader
With encouragement from David Mamet to bolster his reserve,
young playwright Eric Ziegenhagen bypassed the grant-grubbing process to
self-stage his spare play in the lamplit intimacy
of SpaceSpace.
Wunderkind of sorts, Ziegenhagen has already enjoyed seeing his
Seniority produced off-Broadway at Dramatists Guild’s Young
Playwrights Festival, and possesses an enviable instinct for
make-it-look-easy realism. Facts and
Figures observes a twentysomething couple, Julie
and Chris, two recent grads still loosening the alma-maternal apron strings
and searching for bearings in work and love. Phone exchanges while Julie is away
“training” for a spiffy consulting job (Chris is but a lowly
office temp) out the lovers’ doubts and differing expectations while
playing corporate-speak as metaphor and fetching laughs
(“…it’s not about blind faith and co-depdency—it’s
about troubleshooting”). Kyle Christopherson makes a likably loafy
Chris, and as hot an cool Julie, Sarah Phemister
may just make you wonder where she’s been all your life.
-Laura Sinagra, City Pages
THE HOUSE ON THE LAKE BY THE
WOODS NEAR THE OCEAN
A short story by Beau O’Reilly
Adapted and directed by Eric Ziegenhagen
Performed by Paul Leisen, KellyAnn Corcoran, and SueAnn
Jewers
Beau O’Reilly is a superb solo performer who can turn
every pause and stutter into a dramatic moment. In his own hands even his weakest
material can seem the work of an Olympian intellect. The downside is that you can never tell
how much of an O’Reilly story’s power comes from the actor and
how much from the writer.
Which is a shame, because of the years
he’s developed into a writer of considerable wit and facility. The main virtue of Curious Theatre
Branch’s current stage adaptation of an O’Reilly short story is
that it takes O’Reilly the performer out the equation (he’s
currently touring in Germany), parceling out his words to three actors,
none of whom speak with his trademark gusto, intensity, and hip hamminess.
What we discover is that this touching magical realist stor, about a woman who comes to grips with the failure
of her marriage, doesn’t really need an actor willing to pull out all
the stops to make it soar. All it
needs are performers like KellAnn Corcoran, Paul Leisen, and SueAnn Jewers who are willing to speak their lines clearly,
with a minimum of muss and fuss, and a director like Eric Ziegenhagen who
won’t junk up the production with a lot of extraneous props, lights,
and sound cues. You end up with a
show as good as—or better than—anything O’Reilly’s
Lefty Fizzle could have done on his own.
-Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader
HEAT
A short story by Joyce Carol Oates
Staged and directed by Eric Ziegenhagen
Performed by Sarah Phemister
Produced by Penlight Theater at the Loring
Playhouse (Minneapolis) and Voltaire (Chicago)
“A single voice telling a single story might not sound
like a pleasant hour’s entertainment, even if the story is an account
of a grisly child murder on an oppressively hot day. But this story is authored by Joyce Carol
Oates, who rejects lurid speculation on the facts of the case to describe,
in meticulous detail, the many ancillary personalities affected by the
event. Penlight Theater director
Eric Ziegenhagen likewise allows the material, which is read verbatim,
central focus. Narrator Sarah Phemister makes no attempt to mimic the personalities
she describes but offers her testimony with a stone-faced impassivity that
masks the carefully crafted phrases.
Punctuating her words with carousel-projector slides (included only
for the sake of stage business—the slides are blank), she evokes a
smothering sultriness—no easy task in Voltaire’s gloomy
basement only an hour before midnight—to create a simmering portrait
of small-town horror.”
-Mary Shen Barnidge,
Chicago
Reader
“It would have been perfect to see this play mounted
outdoors, in the thick, strong heat it so evocatively captures. Adapted from the eponymous short story by
Joyce Carol Oates (and premiered here), Heat is an exercise in memory for a
grown woman trying to narrate the decades-old rape and murder or twin
girls. But more than making a
piecemeal story of scattered childhood impressions, Oates creates an
American of small-town rumor, Southern gothic scandal, and hollow
platitudes. The narrator, as played
by Sarah Phemister, is convincingly reticent,
strained, and occasionally shrill as she fights, succumbs to, and battles
again the memories that were gives to her, and those she has had to make
for herself.”
-Cecily Marcus, City Pages
“Heat…is just right in tone, details, and
cadence. It’s a bleak yet
almost painfully rich story of two twin girls who are murdered, and the
effects of the crime on the town’s families. As the narrator, Sarah Phemister uses her steely eyes as if to melt us: Even
in a violent electrical monsoon last week, she held us close, kept us
relaxed in the surety of her storytelling.”
-Kate Sullivan, City Pages
“Heat, by Joyce Carol Oates, is a morbidly engrossing
tale, just the kind of writing at which Oates excels. She has a knack for spinning a tale
that’s repellent even while it demands attention, like a train wreck
viewed in slow motion. She takes
readers through a door bearing the inscription ‘Nothing Human is
alienating to me.’
In Heat, a woman (Sarah Phemister)
reminisces about the deaths of two classmates, twin girls who were murdered
one hot summer when she was a child.
Under Phemister’s languidly
spellbinding narration, a whole picture of a small town emerges, filled
with mystery and all kinds of slightly twisted psychological truths. As she delves deeper and deeper into the
details of the tragic case, she gives more and more away about
herself….Phemister’s compelling
characterization brims with confusion, guilt, and long-buried grief.”
-Erin Hart, Minneapolis
Star-Tribune
…
As actor
BONA FIDE CONVERSATION
Written by Barrie
Cole
Performed by Barrie
Cole and Eric Ziegenhagen
“Writer-director Barrie
Cole creates wonderfully contradictory characters at once playful and
inhibited, verbally dexterious and inarticulate,
intellectually strong and emotionally vulnerable. In the first of three monologues on this
program, “Gasp,” she launches into a formalist deconstruction
of the language worthy of Gertrude Stein, based on counting to 100, only to
have her prose poem shatter to bits when the word “one”
triggers a series of memories about a trip to India. Suddenly we see Cole’s linguistic
brilliance for what it is, just another defense mechanism. In the second piece she begins with a
fairly straightforward text, a witty monologue—performed by Eric
Ziegenhagen—on how to have a bona fide conversation, only to smash
the language into a million ear-pleasing but useless pieces by the end. In top form on the final monologue,
“You and Caroline,” cole intertwines
love of wordplay and her gift for storytelling that I couldn’t tell
you whether the piece was about the adventures of a depressed but
mischievous 11-year-old in her grandmother’s Miami condo or about the
limits of language, exemplified by this tongue-tied by rage-filled
prepubescent, shipped off to her grandmother’s while her parents get
a quick divorce. Not that it really
matters. The joy of Cole’s
work is how comfortable she is in both worlds, the
world of the cerebral poet and the world of the emotionally astute
entertainer.”
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