Kate Zambreno

Lisa Rothschiller, director of Defiant Theatre's "Cleansed," written by the recently deceased playwright Sarah Kane, flips open Jane magazine to a fashion spread of exquisitely bound blindfolded models posing in a white padded room. "What's wrong with a little self-restraint?" the header reads.

She's planning on adding the photos to a working collage in "Cleansed"'s rehearsal room, of images that resurrect the spirit of the play's vividly brutal warscape that Rothschiller calls "a cross between a concentration camp, a college university and a mental hospital."

What are disturbing images of straightjacketed women doing in a fashion magazine? "Fashion, I guess," Rothschiller laughs. Fitting, because there's nothing more fashionable nowadays than a Prozac-popping Patty Duke who does time in an asylum like it's Club Med. Last year's "Girl Interrupted" put a box-office price on pain and made emotional fragility damn sexy.

And if you're a young tortured artist with one foot perpetually off the cliff, once you're a suicide your career can turn white-hot. Since Kane, a young British playwright, committed suicide two years ago at the age of 28 after a life-long struggle with depression, she's never been more fashionable. "She killed herself, and people now go, 'oh, I guess it really was like that inside her head,'" says Rothschiller, whose directing debut out of graduate school was "Phraedra's Love," Kane's re-working of the Greek myth.

Kane never enjoyed critical acclaim, although her five controversial plays made her immensely popular and earned her a firm place in the British canon. Although Kane's works are painfully poetic, tapping into the personal through the political, summoning up the cruelly visceral sufferings of love and war, her shocking stage images of severe violence and sex obscured her talents.

The 1995 debut of her notorious first play, "Blasted," was hysterically reviled by critics. Most famous was London critic Jack Tinker's shuddering over "this disgusting feast of filth" and nicknaming her "the rape girl." Of "Phraedra's Love," one British critic wrote, "It's not a theatre critic that's required here: it's a psychiatrist." Of "Cleansed," the same critic again retorted, "Kane is incapable of creating depth of character or moving an audience. She'd much rather kick us in the guts."

"It was very vicious, and very personal, and very gender specific." Rothschiller says. "You have to wonder, if this had been a 23-year-old man, if the reviews would have been the same." Many local critics who saw Defiant's "Phraedus' Love" had the same adverse reaction, although there were more glowing reviews than in London.

But now, postmortem, almost everyone has changed their minds, with London's Royal Court remounting all of her work in May and a wealth of buzz generated around the American premiere of "Cleansed."

Rothschiller's thrilled that Kane is finally getting the respect she deserves. But, "I guess there's a part of me that feels superior because I've always loved her," she says. "I just think her work is so good that it should stand by itself without involving her personal life."

And even many of those who now embrace her still don't get the cathartic power of her writing. "She was so incredibly sensitive to the suffering in the world, I think," Rothschiller says. "We read about Rwanda, and it's a place far away, but to her it might as well have been going on in her living room. That's how deep and immediate her access was to suffering around her."

"Cleansed," a modern-day "1984," was supposedly based on the quote "being in love is like being in Dachau." It tells the stories of society's undesirables, a gay couple, a mental patient, a grieving sister and her ghost brother, who struggle under the cruel, unrelenting torture of the sadistic and vicious Angel of Death-like warden, ironically named Tinker, after the London Times critic. Because "he has that same power, deciding who's going to live and who's going to die," says Rothschiller.

In "Cleansed," the hope of love still blooms underneath grim oppression, rapes, sadistic science experiments, the unlivable brutality. "It very much has this '1984' thing of can love provide freedom from oppression or is love what really cages you in?" Rothschiller says.

Despite Kane's demanding stage directions, like having people fall from great heights, cutting off hands, sunflowers popping up on the stage, and rats carrying feet away, Rothschiller's biggest challenge was finding a way to portray the brutality. "What was important to me is that the oppression is real enough to make the fight against it and the fight to love and the fight to remain a caring human being lovely and heartbreaking enough," she says. "If you totally soft-serve all the violence and make it arty and palatable, with ribbons coming out of the wrists, I think that's a cop-out."

Or a fashion spread.

(2001-03-22)

Also by Kate Zambreno

BRANDING ANNOYANCE
Asked by Second City owner Andrew Alexander to take his improv schtick to the Strip, Napier departed in late February to direct a group of nine bandits in the new Second City venue in Bugsy's Celebrity Room at the Flamingo Hotel. But never fear, the mild-mannered yet mischievous Napier, who's become a Chicago improv icon, isn't ditching us for good.
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ENTERTAINING DON HALL
It was the most amazing prank on Earth, or at least in the Chicago theater scene. The year was 1995, and, under the auspices of a traveling avant-garde German clown troupe called Die Hanswurste (translated, "Jack Sausages," or, explains Hall, "basically an idiot who knows nothing but thinks they do"), four improvisers from Chicago made audiences leap through flaming hoops.
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GOING APE
Thursday night on the LSD and there it is -- a giant purple gorilla, perched on the front stoop of one of those swanky drive residences.
(2000-11-23)

EAT ME
Finley is back in Chicago, where she was born and got her start, to promote her new collection of writings "A Different Kind of Intimacy," and she is in love with the irony and just plain art of it all: where she has been, how she's arrived, especially reading at the Borders set by the backdrop of Michigan Avenue and the cheesy Victoria's Secret music from next door.
(2000-11-16)

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