Theater: Second City, But First Love

Chicago may not always have been receptive to the grandeur of drama, but it has always been a theatrical town--a city of pugilistic journalists and publicity-hunting mobsters, of outrageous politics and a histrionically unruffled electorate. It was probably inevitable, in a city where showmanship has been so much a part of public life, that a feisty, populist stage community would emerge sooner or later. And sure enough, over the past decade, it has, with at least half a dozen companies elbowing their way into national prominence and the best known of them, the Steppenwolf collective, capturing a 1985 Tony Award as the nation's best regional theater. While much of the rest of the American theater seems overrefined, elite and abstract, the Chicago troupes have built an enthusiastic mainstream audience for what many of the artists characterize as "rock-'n'-roll theater," rough-edged, noisy, pulsating with energy, appealing less to the mind than to the heart and groin.

Chicago's troupes honor their forerunners who went on to stardom from the Second City--including the company of that name, which propelled Mike Nichols, among others, to Broadway and Hollywood--but the new generation is holding on fiercely to what they have built back home. Having savored the East and West coasts, they insist on returning to the heartland. Their commitment is yielding a season any city might envy. Last week Danny Glover, the busiest black actor in Hollywood (The Color Purple, Witness, Silverado), made his Chicago stage debut at Steppenwolf's intimate--and perforce uncommercial--211- seat space in Athol Fugard's A Lesson from Aloes. A few blocks away, William Peterson, star of the film thriller To Live and Die in L.A., has rejoined the funky, avant-garde Remains Theater in a portrayal of brainwashing, Days and Nights Within.

James Earl Jones, one of America's foremost classical actors, is appearing at the Goodman Theater in Fences, a new play by August Wilson, author of the Broadway melodrama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Wisdom Bridge Theater, which last year toured in Britain and played a summer season at the Kennedy Center in Washington, this week is reviving a much praised multimedia Hamlet. Directed by Robert Falls (who last month shifted from the artistic directorship of Wisdom Bridge to the same slot at the bigger-budget Goodman), this Hamlet employs a slide show, blues and rock sequences, video monitors and a staging of King Claudius' taking power as a press conference resonant of Watergate. The initial run starred doe-eyed, victim-like Aidan Quinn; he is now appearing off-Broadway in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, and Peter Aylward plays the role, in striking contrast, as a robustly funny bullyboy.