Nice Things Said (Theater)
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
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."