Vivid backgrounds 'Dolly West's Kitchen' latest show to incorporate lobby
by Hedy Weiss
Theater Critic,
published January 25, 2009
At TimeLine Theatre, you invariably get two shows for the price of one.
On the mainstage, of course, there is a play or musical with a very specific connection to history. It could be a drama about the birth of Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood, or about the angst-ridden relationship between German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, or about the exuberant spirit of New York's Depression-era mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia.
Or, as is the case of the play that opens this weekend -- Frank McGuinness' "Dolly West's Kitchen" -- it could tell a tale of life in the Republic of Ireland during World War II, when the country declared itself "neutral," and when the arrival of several British and American soldiers at a County Donegal home erupts into chaos.
But it is the theater's second "show" -- the one mounted in the lobby of TimeLine's home at 615 W. Wellington, in the heart of the Lake View neighborhood -- that gives the company an extra edge. With each new production it has mounted since 2000, the theater has created an elaborate display that puts the work onstage in greater perspective. Members of the audience -- at intermission, or before and after the performance -- can be found clustered around the glossy panels that supply intriguing background information for the play. Earlier this season, with its production of "Tesla's Letters," TimeLine went one step further, transforming its lobby into a miniature Serbian museum that functioned as an extension of the play's set.
These artful lobby displays are the handiwork of the production's dramaturg or chief researcher (in the case of "Dolly," it is Becky Perlman) and a gifted graphic designer, associate artist James Keister (by day a marketing manager for Six Flags theme parks), who has been on board with the project from the start.
As TimeLine's marketing director Lara Goetsch recounted recently: "The lobby exhibits began about eight years ago when the theater staged 'Not About Nightingales,' Tennessee Williams' tale of prison life in the Deep South. We borrowed the display created for the Circle-in-the-Square production done in New York and that display was such a hit that the theater decided to make it a tradition."
"The idea with these displays is to create something intensely visual that will spark discussion among theatergoers who are all reading it and looking at it together," said Perlman.
"This play focuses on Dolly -- an independent-minded Irish woman in her mid-30s who goes quite against the grain in that she is college-educated, unmarried, a non-practicing Catholic and has just returned from Italy, where she had a restaurant," she said. "We needed to explain some things about the Irish defense forces, the republic's military and about the choice of neutrality that came about because the republic was still so young and the Brits were still viewed as an enemy. Yet there was a friendliness to the Allies: Children from Northern Ireland were evacuated to the republic for safety, and medics and nurses offered help. So it was complicated."
As dramaturgs do, Perlman collected all her research -- archival photographs, background articles and the rest -- into a big binder for use by the actors, director and designers of the show. That material also went to Keister.
"I first homed in on the motifs of the period, on the typefaces, design style and colors that would be true to the time," Keister said. "But this is no stereotypical drama about Ireland. There are no kitschy trinkets on the set. So what I evoked in the panels was the Irish countryside, the seaside, a classic house with a great thatched roof and an old church. The play also deals with attitudes toward homosexuality at the time, with the makeup of the defense forces, and several Irish poems and songs are in the mix, too."
