‘Life’s gone by’

             Kareem Bandealy, left, stars with Kate Fry in "The Cherry Orchard"
                    (Liz Lauren/Goodman Theatre)

     “Just another production ...” Robert Falls lied Monday night, in front of friends, colleagues and family at the dinner in his honor before opening night of “The Cherry Orchard,” his last play in 36 years as artistic director at the Goodman Theatre.
     OK, “lied” is strong — overly dramatic, if you will. I can’t see into his heart. Falls, no doubt, did approach the Anton Chekhov classic, as he claims, with professional aplomb, as the most recent of the countless theatrical endeavors he guided over the nearly half-century that he has blazed as the brightest star on Chicago’s theatrical scene.
     But forgive me if I insist that the man who pulled the pin on Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” in 2018 to resist Donald Trump steamrolling American life didn’t just shrug, close his eyes and pick “The Cherry Orchard” because his finger stopped its blind dance over the Cs on his bookshelf. This is a puzzle box; there are messages hidden here.
     “Life’s gone by,” says Firs, the aged peasant. “It’s like I never lived it. All gone now.”
OK, maybe not so hidden. Chekhov labeled his last play, written as he was dying, a “comedy.” Falls certainly provides farce aplenty, with Yepikhodov’s pratfalls and squeaky boots. Still, that’s passing comic relief in a play that includes a dead child, coldly spurned romantic gestures and a theme of facing the debts of the past that seem more 2023 than 1904.
     “Can’t you hear the voices of all those dead souls bought and sold by your family?” Trofimov, the “mangy moth-eaten student” demands of the maudlin aristocracy. “You’ve all been corrupted by it. ... If we want to live in the present, we have to atone for our past and break with it.”
     But breaking with the past can hurt. While hesitating to summarize the plot of a Russian play — the names tend to blend together — I think I can get away with saying when “The Cherry Orchard” opens, the aristocratic family is bankrupt and their estate is about to be sold. Lyubov, the grandiose matron of the family, and her entourage have returned from her self-imposed exile in Paris, where she has blown through the last of the money.

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Flashback 1993: "People screamed for help, clinging to ledges"

Sun-Times file photo

      This Sunday the Sun-Times is running the latest in my periodic series on the paper's 75th anniversary. It's how we covered fires and disasters, and touches upon the Paxton Hotel fire, 30 years ago last month. This is the story I wrote from the scene.

     There were faces at every window. 

     When Tower Ladder No. 10 pulled up to the raging fire at the Paxton Hotel just after 4 a.m. Tuesday, firefighters at first couldn't take the time to try to fight the fire. The windows of the Paxton were filled with people, screaming for help. Some were clinging to the ledges. 

      "We used the tower ladder basket, just scraped along the side of the building, took the people in, then brought them in and laid them down on the ground and went back up for more," said Raymond Hoff, the company captain. 

     In order to set up their ladders, firefighters had to step over the bodies of those who had already jumped. One man knotted several sheets together and lowered himself down, falling the last few feet and hurting his elbow. Some first threw mattresses out in an attempt to break their falls. 

     Many were hurt critically, including 22-year-old Leslie Matthews, who jumped from an upper floor with her 4-month-old baby, Jalesa, cradled in her arms. The baby was not hurt. 

     Firefighters raced to cut the burglar bars that trapped some residents in ground-floor apartments. Del Clark, a longtime Chicago radio newscaster, was trapped in his apartment at the back of the hotel. He sat at his barred window, shouting to the firefighters, but they couldn't hear him over the noise. Finally he thrust his arms through the bars and, waving them frantically, caught the attention of firefighters, and was saved. 

      The uninjured who were displaced by the fire — some naked, others weeping, some without shoes, others in their underwear — were comforted by Red Cross workers, who guided them to an out-of-service CTA bus, pressed into duty as a temporary shelter. 

      "I was supposed to move in two weeks," said resident Terry Zeszut, 46, who lost everything he owned. "I have to call the movers and cancel." 

      Zeszut was among several residents who simply stood on the sidewalk, grimacing in the early morning cold and drizzle, wrapped in thin blue Red Cross blankets, watching. Many of the 130 residents of the hotel were elderly, some wheelchair-bound, and they stared out from behind oxygen masks, dazed and wide-eyed with shock. 

      From across the street, they were viewed by the well-heeled residents of area condominiums, along with early-morning dog-walkers, who stepped out of their buildings to watch the fire. High winds stoked the fire, forcing it through the roof, which pancaked onto the floors below. 

     At 8:30 a.m., more than four hours after firefighters first arrived, tongues of orange flame shot 10 feet out of one corner of the building, and four aerial towers shot huge streams of water into the building. Dirty water came flooding out the front door. Burning embers soared over the street, and nearby cars were smeared with soot. 

     At times, the smoke on La Salle became so thick that only the emergency lights on the fire trucks, pulsing and strobing and cycling back and forth, could be seen through the blinding brownish-yellow haze. The smoke set off alarms at nearby buildings, where silhouettes of the curious could be seen, watching the blaze from high above. 

      The roofless brick shell of the Paxton Hotel, with its ornate yellow facade and quaint urns rimming the top, did not collapse, however. As the fire was gradually brought under control, firefighters used axes and gaffs to break out the window frames to allow litters to be brought in to carry out the bodies. A police squadrol pulled up close to the front of the hotel, forming a discreet shield with a ladder truck. A policeman began pulling on white rubber gloves. 

      Contributing: Tom Seibel, Dan Lehmann

      —Originally published in the Sun-Times,  March 17, 1993 

We can’t say we haven’t had practice

Sun-Times file photo

     “Queer” used to be a slur. Then gay people took the word back, claiming it their own, as a sort of general term for the whole rainbow-hued subculture in all its freedom and fabulousness.
     My first thought, learning that Chicago has snagged the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was that this is a good way for us to similarly reclaim both the adjective “Democratic” and the noun “Chicago” and make them a little less battered than they have been of late.
     For years Republicans have been trying to turn “Democratic” into an all-purpose insult by chopping off the ending and pretending that the problems facing cities are there because they tend to be run by Democrats, when it’s the other way around: Cities tend to go Democratic because they have problems that need to be addressed, not chuckled over. Thus, Democrats.
     This is a chance for Chicago, the poster child for urban woes, to marry itself once again to the party that for too long has seen its mantle of patriotism and efficiency stripped away, and by those bumbling shambolically toward treason.
     First, a few ground rules. This isn’t our third Democratic National Convention, though that might be the default assumption. It’s our 12th, having been the host in 1864, 1884, 1892, 1896, 1932, 1940, 1944, 1952, 1956, and of course 1968 and 1996.
     That 1932 convention is worth remembering not just because it led to the rare defeat of a sitting president. Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first candidate to show up at a convention to accept the nomination (the habit had been to sit on your front porch and feign indifference), and he did it by arriving in a shiny silver Ford Trimotor, making him the first presidential candidate to fly in an airplane, arriving to promise a “New Deal” for America.
     Otherwise we have the twin bookends of 1968 and 1996 as guides. The first was a catastrophe that hardly needs explaining — masses of shaggy-haired protesters battling police. While the cops rightly get blame for that, the disaster was set in motion by City Hall. In trying to keep protests away from the site of the convention, the International Amphitheater, Richard J. Daley ended up pushing it onto Michigan Avenue. The 1968 convention might have transpired differently had Daley not spread the combustibles that the cops ignited.

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Flashback 2013: "Measure for Measure" delivers jolts

Photo by Liz Lauren/Goodman Theatre

     Robert Falls bids farewell as creative director of the Goodman Theatre with "The Cherry Orchard," which opened Monday night. In honor of this transition, I'm featuring a few columns inspired by his work over the years. I've been marveling his plays since "Hamlet" at Wisdom Bridge in 1986. Many were shocking. But none were more so than his 2013"Measure for Measure." The audience didn't quite riot; but they wanted to.

     If you asked me to start naming Shakespeare plays off the top of my head, I think I would avail myself pretty well.
     There’s “Hamlet,” of course, and “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet” (telling that I would start with the tragedies — I’m a sucker for tragedy).
     What else? The histories — “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “Henry IV” (parts 1 and 2), “Henry V,” “Julius Caesar.” And the comedies — my least favorite category — “As You Like It,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Taming of the Shrew,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Merchant of Venice,” which nobody thinks of as a comedy, anymore, but was originally intended to be.
     And then the obscure plays — “Titus Andronicus” and “Timon of Athens” and such.
     I could probably scrape up a few more, but you get the idea. The point I’m crawling toward is that I’m familiar with Shakespeare, and have seen his plays by the dozens, going back to Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, up to the American Players Theatre in Wisconsin, to our own underappreciated Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier.

     Yet, despite this familiarity, until a few weeks ago I could have squinched my eyes and listed plays until I turned blue and never gotten to “Measure for Measure.” I hope that doesn’t make you think less of me. Before the Goodman Theatre announced it was putting on the play — it opens this Monday — I never heard about it, never thought about it and even hours before going to a preview Thursday, didn’t have the foggiest what it is about.
     “What is it about?” my wife asked, as we got ready to go, with perhaps a bit of what-am-I-getting-myself-into dread.
     “A bit with a dog and love triumphant,” I guessed, quoting “Shakespeare in Love.”
     Completely wrong.
     Which means I had the benefit of seeing the play as a complete blank slate, expecting nothing, knowing nothing, and in my ideal world you’d set this column down right now and go see it, solely on my recommendation, then finish reading this, the way I at times rush to Hedy Weiss to explain what I’ve seen.
     Not exactly a spoiler alert — I’m not the spoiler sort. But even knowing a shock is coming lessens the shock; you expect it.
     And with this new production, there will be many moments when you think, “So, is THIS the shock that so rattled Steinberg’s windows?” No, it’s not. Patience. It’s coming.
     The shock of what happens onstage was magnified, for me, by the shock that I was shocked at all. I don’t do shock. Shock, like being offended, is for amateurs and the old.
     Besides, we have learned to expect shock in plays directed by Robert Falls. Some consider that a flaw, but I find it invigorating. He peels the velvet glove off the iron fist of sex and horror that pulses through Shakespeare and then jams it, unpadded, into your face.
     Thus Ophelia, hiking up her skirts and rubbing herself in his “Hamlet.” Thus Gloucester’s eyes not only plucked out — as the Bard intended — but ending up sizzling on a restaurant line grill in “King Lear,” the whole thing set in a dissolving Eastern Europe dictatorship, the opening scene spoken by characters standing at urinals, doing their business, their backs to the audience.
     That was tights and ruffs and declaiming “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a bare stage with one hand folded atop another compared to the opening minutes of Falls’ “Measure for Measure,” a Boschian, neon-lit hellscape, half “Taxi Driver,” half Ed Paschke’s early work come to life, a loud, dirty, overwhelming set piece (“Did you see that guy masturbating?” my wife asked, on the drive home. “No,” I said, “I was focusing on the stripper.”)
     Falls always shocks other people — the groundlings, the timid, the life-averse, those whose idea of tragedy is Bambi’s mother dying. Me, I collect Bob Falls shocks the way a lepidopterist collects butterflies — with zeal and appreciation: This is the stuff that upsets others but I find magnificent; a shock, yes, but in a good way, your shirt ripped open, the paddles applied and the tired old heart given a revivifying jolt, part of Falls’ lifelong rescue of Shakespeare from the rolled R crowd, returning it the alive thing it was meant to be.
     But this shock is truly shocking — a lady at the after-play conversation Thursday described it as “grotesque” and I didn’t argue with her. I’m not saying Falls was wrong. He’s right. It took me a while to see it. Not until the next morning, really, when I realized that, as the shock unfolded, my mind formed an alternate narrative — where I thought he was going — that was trite, ordinary and banal.  

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 17, 2013

‘I’m glad I got HIV’

Antonio Cox

     This story came from chasing a bogus New York Post story about armies of homeless people living at O'Hare airport. It turned out they weren't there — just another sensational, make-Chicago-look-like-a-hellhole exaggeration. But in establishing that, I reached out to Heartland, and while I had them on the line, I pointed out that the paper would love to do something about the work that they do...

     Antonio Cox is not ashamed. He doesn’t mind if you know his full name, see his photo, are aware he was homeless on the streets of Chicago and slept in Grant Park. Nor is his medical status a secret.
     “Four or five years ago, I got really sick and got diagnosed with HIV,” he says. “The doctor was really scary: You might die, your medications might not work.”
     But drugs to keep HIV infection from manifesting itself into AIDS do work, astoundingly well, although they have a nettlesome requirement common to medications: You have to take them.
     Which can be a challenge even for those who have jobs and homes and ordered lives. For those on the street or unemployed or coping with mental illness, remembering to take their medicine can be a challenge. That’s where organizations like Heartland, which introduced me to Cox, are important. We met in their Uptown clinic, on Lawrence Avenue.
     Some 20,000 Chicagoans live with HIV, according to the Chicago Department of Health. About two-thirds have what is known as “viral suppression,” meaning there is no detectable virus in their bodies.
     To achieve this, Cox takes just a single pill a day — Triumeq. Not too long ago Cox would have to take up to 18 pills a day.
     “It’s always changing,” said Dr. Firas Mahdi, senior manager of clinical operations at Heartland. “It changed five years ago when they started to produce one pill with three medications combined; it was easier for everyone.”
    My view of HIV was formed in the 1980s, when AIDS was a death sentence, and for that reason I imagined just knowing you have HIV, even under control, would be a burden. Cox, 34, doesn’t view it that way at all.
     “I’m glad I got HIV,” he said, contrasting his former life with his family in Palatine with now, enfolded in the embrace of social services. “I’ve been surrounded by these angels, I got an apartment during the pandemic. I’ve gotten the best care, I have beautiful teeth because of their dentist. I could go on and on. I could care less that I have HIV, the only thing that I care about is that I’ve been among these beautiful people. Most of the time I forget I have HIV.”

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Happy E-Day!

  

     It's Easter, again. Being a full-service columnist, I should come up with some Easter content, for those who celebrate. Though I'm at a disadvantage, having never observed the holiday myself, beyond gobbling what Easter candy strays within reach.

     In the past, I did not let this gap in my upbringing stop me from taking a swing at Easter. Two brief posts, then, from when the column filled a page and was made up of little items. 

OPENING SHOT

     Happy Easter! Do you know a good way to kill bunnies? Because I've got them --my lawn sometimes looks like that old Teletubbies TV show with scatterings of rabbits gazing stupidly back at you.
     I never minded before — cute wittle bunny wabbits, right? Until now, with spring in early bloom, I made my initial survey of the yard and garden, noting happily the fat pink scoop magnolia blossoms opening, the yellow breaking out on the forsythia, the daffodils daffodilling.
     And where was my vinca, flats of which I've been planting for the past two or three years, as ground defense against weeds? "Vinca," I called sweetly, "Oh vinca?" It was gone. All gone. A few stubs of nothing.
     "Rabbits," said the woman at Red's Garden Center. "They're bad this year."
     Well I can be bad, too. My first thought was to sit on the back deck with a pitcher of lemonade and a shotgun across my knees. Maybe scatter some carrots as bait.
     But my house backs up against the Northbrook Village Hall parking lot, and the concussive shotgun blasts, not to mention my bloodthirsty cries of glee, would no doubt draw unwelcome police interest, and they might misinterpret the situation.   
     So what? Poison? Blow gun and poison darts? Small coils of anti-rabbit concertina wire? I loved that vinca, with its dark glossy little leaves; it must be avenged. How do the experts do it?
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 16, 2006

     Editor's note: the vinca is long gone. The rabbits remain, in abundance. Or their great-great-grandchildren, rather.

Ask the Jewish ethicist

Dear Jewish Ethicist:

     Easter is Sunday, and I don't know what to do — should I give my kids hollow chocolate bunnies and let them color eggs? Or would that be wrong? All their friends have fancy Easter baskets and we feel left out. Help!

Signed,

Hankering for Peeps.

Dear Hankering for Peeps:

     You bring up a dilemma. On one hand, we love our children and hate to deny them anything fun, and to this end violating the basic tenets of faith seems a small price to pay. On the other, we feel uncomfortable casually taking up the trappings of someone else's religion.
     As well we should. Holidays are rewards to the faithful for their ceaseless adherence to a creed. While you might be forgiven for palming a few malted milk ball eggs at work on the sly, if you indulge in your own faux Easter party, you're taking a victory lap you are not entitled to, skimming off the colorful pageantry while ignoring the meaning. That puts you in the same league as Madonna and her red string and gang-bangers with their stars of David and all the other people who thoughtlessly pin medals on themselves that they did not earn.
     Jews who dye eggs with their kids — or put up Christmas trees — are like people who crash a wedding reception. They don't know the happy couple, and they weren't invited, but they can't bear to miss a swell party so end up in line to the buffet.
     Resist if you can.
     Or, if you just have to dye eggs, wait for a few weeks — it isn't like Christians own the idea. Decorate them in May. Or is there a reason you need to do it now?

Signed,
Neil "Somebody Had to Say It" Steinberg

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 25, 2005

Works in progress: Jonathan Eig

Martin Luther King Jr, by Joseph Stein (National Portrait Gallery)

     If I had to point to the most significant writer in Chicago today, it would have to be Jonathan Eig. His books send ripples across the country and world. The highest compliment I can pay is that his books are enjoyable even when I have no interest in the subject, such as Al Capone ("Get Capone") who normally I can't cringe away from fast enough, or Lou Gehrig ("Luckiest Man"). His book on G.D. Searle developing Enovid ("The Birth of the Pill") is an unexpected journey through the struggle of women to control their reproductive health, and his most recent book on Muhammad Ali ("Ali: A Life") was a key contribution to scholarship on the most important athlete of the 20th century.

     Next month, he offers an even more ambitious biography, "King: A Life." It reads like a novel, in that I could not put it down, being treated with an unending stream of fascinating details and character studies. The New York Times called it "monumental," though that is completely backwards: the book isn't an enormous edifice, but something far better: it's fine-detailed and human.  EGD asked Eig to pull the curtain back a bit on the process, and he kindly obliged. Take it away, Jonathan: 

     I remember the moment I told my kids I wanted to write a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. We were eating dinner. The girls were 13 and seven, an eighth grader and a second grader. They both firmly opposed the idea. King was boring, they said. Luckily, I didn’t listen to them. Today, those kids are 19 and 13, a college sophomore and an eighth grader. And the book is done. It publishes May 16.  

     I sometimes wonder who’s learned more in the past six years, me, or my kids? Thanks, CPS!
     I know I’ve learned a lot. I got to meet King’s close childhood friends, his Montgomery barber, his Dexter Baptist Church organist, and the list goes on. I hung out with Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis. I even managed to get Mavis Staples to sing to me over the phone.
     I often look back and think about all the questions I didn’t ask in my career. I met Dizzy Gillespie and never asked him about Charlie Parker. I met Phil Rizzuto and didn’t ask him about Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, or Mickey Mantle. You might reasonably ask at this point what the hell I did ask them, but let’s not go there…because, for once, I got it right. I recognized that I had the chance to interview dozens of people who knew Martin Luther King Jr. – that I might be the last biographer with the opportunity – and I jumped at it.
     So, what did I learn? You’ll have to read the book (please!) to get the full picture. I learned King chewed his fingernails. I learned he had a dog named Topsy. I learned he suffered so much from depression that he had to be hospitalized several times. I learned the FBI’s assault on King was much crueler than I had known, and that Lyndon Johnson deserves a heavy portion of the blame. I could go on.
     But the biggest thing I learned, probably, is that the man had more courage than I ever could have imagined. He dared to believe he could follow the call to serve God and that a divided nation and a violent world might be repaired, that we might finally get past our racism, our materialism, and our militarism. He believed people might be united, that humanity might make genuine spiritual progress. And he was willing to risk his life to prove it.
     I know I’m getting a little emotional here. But King does that to me. Even now, after six years.
     If you read the book, I hope you’ll see why.
     Maybe my kids will overcome their skepticism some day and read it, too.