Images: 
Total Rating: 
***
Ended: 
July 14, 2019
Country: 
USA
State: 
Illinois
City: 
Chicago
Company/Producers: 
Lifeline Theater
Theater Type: 
Regional
Theater: 
Lifeline Theater
Theater Address: 
6912 North Glenwood Avenue
Genre: 
comedy
Author: 
Philip Timberlake adapting Jane Austen novel
Director: 
Elise Kauzlaric
Review: 

When your stage floor measures a mere 28 X 30 feet, you build UP, crafting scenic designs incorporating staircases, ladders, and sometimes even ski-slope-steep slides. When your play is a Regency romance by no less a luminary than Jane Austen, however, the skin-tight breeches and narrow ankle-length skirts of period fashions impair the athletic gymnastics necessary to navigate such terrain. Additionally, the number of actors required by the convoluted plot all occupying the same level not only escalates the risks of stumbles and collisions, but does nothing to solve the problem of unseen backstage shifts in positions to facilitate entrances by different doors.

So what do you do? What Emma director Elise Kauzlaric has done is to assign each character a defining voice, stance and accessory—a soprano shriek and fluttery fan for a fashionable dowager, for example, or a walking stick, stooped posture and baritone growl for a gruff old patriarch—enabling a mere five players to assume roles with no more than a change of facial expression or vocal range. Once the audience acclimates to the conceit under operation, a conversation conducted by three separate people, all played by one actor (with the aid of a dress dummy as a silent participant), presents no difficulties in comprehension. 

Despite its tiny facility (a former electric station) and tiny budget, Lifeline Theatre's originality and imagination at adapting big stories to small spaces has been a gift to the residents of Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood for over a quarter of a century. Why such industry hasn't received the recognition it deserves beyond the boundaries of its home city remains a mystery.

Critic: 
Mary Shen Barnidge
Date Reviewed: 
June 2019