When Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, one character in Refuge Theatre Project’s Chicago premiere production of the musical Lysistrata Jones asks, do you think he imagined it would be performed thousands of years later…and parodied? The thought may not have occurred to the Greek comic writer, but the reality is that it has been performed and parodied again and again, and the latest example can be found, because Refuge has a history of site-specific projects, in an Edgewater gymnasium.
This version has Lysistrata as a cheerleader at the fictional Athens College, where one young intellectual complains about the mixed metaphor of the school’s mascot (“Athens Spartans: two completely different city-states”) and where the school’s basketball team has not won a game in 33 years. The current version of the team is so utterly complacent with the notion of losing that they merely go through the motions of playing, “Laying Low” as one song has it, the highlight of their evening not the game itself but the after-party where they can hook up with their girlfriends.
Enter the new girl, Lysistrata Jones (Mary-Margaret Roberts), also known as “Lyssie J,” who is determined to “change the world” and put an end to both the complacency and the losing streak. She convinces the girlfriends of the players to join her in the school’s first-ever cheerleading squad and then, when that doesn’t spur the boys on to victory, she convinces them to withhold sex until the team wins (“give up giving it up”).
Douglas Carter Beane’s Tony-nominated book has the story narrated by the Goddess Hetaira (the name reflects a high-class courtesan in ancient Greece, and Hetaira does spend significant time in this play as the Madame of a brothel), who both tells the story and occasionally manipulates the action. As Hetaira, Gina Francesca is a compelling presence: her beautiful, powerful voice unfolds from her glowing body (draped in a costume by Brian Duncan, whose work throughout the show is excellent) and she simply takes over every scene she is in, as a goddess should. Her brothel scenes are among the play’s highlights, as she helps the girls put their boyfriends in their places with a sense of amused ennui that declares I’ve seen this a million times but I want to help anyway. (Typical exchange: “You’re the M. Night Shyamalan of madames.” “I see horny people.”)
Roberts, too, is a remarkable young actress. Small and certainly not imposing, she nonetheless dominates the stage as her character does her classmates. In songs like “Change the World” and “Where Am I Now?” she shows amazing vocal strength as well as acting chops: the former is an attempt to create a movement, and the latter is a plaintive ballad asking what happens now? after everything seems to have failed. Roberts is stunning in all modes, as she is in non-singing moments as well: her interactions with both the basketball player Mick (Collin Sanderson) and the nervous liberal uber-brain Xander (Kaleb Van Rijswijck) show many different shades of emotion in very brief scenes, probably the finest being when she accidentally insults Xander in frustration and immediately realizes what she has done. Her face washes through several levels of regret before calling after him.
Sanderson and the rest of the basketball players have a lot of fun here both in the stylized “games” and in their relationships with the girls, though Sanderson comes off as just too nice a guy to be as smarmy as the script sometimes wants him to be. Van Rijswijck explores his geeky side with a pure joy: he seems willing to try anything, and often does. (His robot dance is a highlight.)
In fact, every member of this production is extraordinarily well-cast, which is critically important to its success not merely because of the characters but because of what they are asked to do. The husband-wife director-choreographer team of Justin Brill and Shannon VanDerwerker has experience on Broadway, and it shows: the direction is crisp and characters carefully cultivated throughout the play, and the choreography is simply among the best I’ve seen at this level. VanDerwerker puts her talented dancers through some pretty heavy paces, and they shine.
About the only thing that I can complain about here is the sound. Designer Isaac Mandel has done everything he possibly could, I suppose, to mitigate the obvious problems of staging a musical in a gym. There are acoustic panels on the walls and sound-absorbing fabric panels as part of the set. The twin speakers are state of the art and all performers are mic’d. Still, it is a gym, and ultimately you have to put up with a loss of fidelity, an irony for the company that won three Jeff Awards for its production of High Fidelity, but not really a problem. The same is true with lighting, though Collin Helou and Jennifer Kules have come up with a hyper-minimalist lighting plot that somehow conveys precisely the emotional effects each scene desires. Don’t ask me how; I couldn’t tell you. But it works even though it shouldn’t.
Lysistrata Jones is, overall, simply a joy, and if you have the chance to see it you absolutely should. It may not be the same as ending the Peloponnesian War, but still, Aristophanes would be proud.
Lysistrata Jones is now playing at Unity Lutheran Church gym (presented by Refuge Theatre Project), 1212 N. Balmoral, until November 19. Tickets are available from Refuge Theatre Project. Find more information about current plays on our Current Shows page and at theatreinchicago.com.
