| In a conversation with House Theatre of Chicago's Executive Director and Oz playwright Phillip C. Klapperich, Northlight's Mara Mihlfried finds out the value of a name, how Oz is like Oepidus, and what led The House "over the rainbow."
Mara Mihlfried: With such prominent adaptations of The Wizard of Oz already in existence, what is unique about The House's production?
Phillip Klapperich: Our Oz is definitely darker than the MGM, but it's much closer in tone to the original Baum novel. Dorothy plops down in Oz at the top of the show and is immediately given a new name by the inhabitants of Oz: Dorothy Witchslayer. This is an identity Dorothy is not comfortable with and it runs contrary to everything she believes about herself and her identity. I've treated the trio of companions as realistically as I could, really playing with the ideas of their flaws and trying to make them live those flaws: Scarecrow is very brainless, the Lion is very scared, and the Tin Woodsman is as heartless as we could possibly get away with. Toto is played by a human actor with a little stuffed dog that he manipulates like a puppet. But the actor is in full view and his presence adds a layer of depth to the relationship between he and Dorothy that you couldn’t get with just a puppet or a real dog.
We learned of the Chicago production of Wicked a few weeks after I started working on the Oz script. At first we were worried that people would be "Oz-ed out" by the time our show opened, but we realized that at less than twenty bucks a ticket we weren't really competing with Wicked in any real way, and that the dollars they spend in advertising could only help us by increasing the presence of Oz in the community's consciousness.
MM: You authored both The Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz and House’s first bonafide hit, The Terrible Tragedy of Peter Pan. Do you have a fondness for presenting traditional children's stories in a new way?
PK: I would say yes, I do have a fondness for presenting traditional stories in a new way. The Oz adaptation was born out of a very mercenary sort of mindset, where we – we being Nathan Allen, House Artistic Director, and I - had a desire to put up a show that had a built-in audience in much the same way Peter Pan had four years ago. In the cutthroat world of Chicago off-Loop theatre, a title that potential customers already have a relationship with is a very valuable thing. Our Peter Pan project was born of a similar desire to produce a new work of theatre that could build off of people’s perceptions of a well-known story, turn it on its ear and hopefully leave the viewer with a deeper appreciation for a story they thought they already knew so well.
That covers the business reasons, but I'm a writer, too, and though they came a little bit after the fact, there were also artistic considerations I wanted to address.
Some of the greatest pieces of literature in history were not written as original works by the authors. From Sophocles to Shakespeare, the really great writers have taken stories that were present in the folklore and history of their communities and gave them new life on the stage with new insights. Oedipus Rex uses the ancient (even then) story of Oedipus, a story that Sophocles knew would be familiar to his audience, and then he dramatizes a small part of the story, leaving all the backstory and exposition up to the memory and imagination of his audience. I'm certainly not claiming to have written anything approaching the greatness of Oedipus, but I did set about the work with this idea in mind, that I would take a story well-embedded in the collective consciousness and try to bring a new insight into its meaning and its endurance in the popular culture.
MM: Though it's not a "musical" in the traditional sense, music is an important element of the show- how is music used to help tell the story?
PK: The Tin Woodsman is a bit of a troubadour, he has some songs he sings in a very presentational way, with a microphone and back-up band that come out on stage for the song. The show overall is sort of Brechtian, in that the scenes don't necessarily flow together seamlessly, characters take a few minutes to present part of the story directly to the audience. There's a tango number between the Witch and the Wizard. I like using the word "maximalist" to describe the style – each section is told in the most entertaining way possible, whether it fits into the world of the play or not.
MM: What are you looking forward to about remounting Oz at Northlight?
PK: I'm excited to bring our work to a new audience and hopefully win over some new fans. But that's the Executive Director talking again. I'm really interested in trying to bring our community aesthetic to a new location as well. When we were talking about making the deal to come to Northlight, BJ wondered if we thought we'd be able to translate the raw energy that exists in the Viaduct because of it's hip grunginess and intimate size into a larger, more traditional space. I'm excited for that challenge because as we grow, hopefully we'll get more opportunities to present our work in other venues, and it is going to be very important for us to figure out how we can translate that energy and community feel.
MM: What three words would you use to describe The House Theatre of Chicago?
PK:Story, Catharsis, Community. |
