On Stage: Recent

No Longer the Rock of the World
& Dead to the World

Two Plays by Beau O'Reilly
November 27, 2009 – January 3, 2010

Curious Theatre Branch presents two new plays by Beau O'Reilly, featuring fringe favorites Guy Massey, Kelly Ann Corcoran and Kate Teichman, with live musical accompaniment by Jenny Magnus, Sofie Senard and Julian Berke.

In Dead to the World, love-lost, grief-stricken dish washer finds women at every turn: the hotel lobby, the Clark Street bus, the wind-blown trains of East Berlin. No Longer the Rock of the World presents the dead performance artist Walter with a long list of things to work out and people to work them out with.

Despair over what has been lost and won't be recovered dwells side by side with miraculous possibility.... Is O'Reilly aware that he has written little mystery plays for the modern world?—Chicago Theater Blog

RECOMMENDED ...breathtakingly crazy.... Kate Teichman gives a mind- and gender-bending solo performance as a strung-out guy fixated on women, delivering O'Reilly's kaleidoscopic torrent of words with dead-on, slack-jawed cluelessness. O'Reilly's ingenious staging uses only a shop light, a bench, and odd, evocative movement to capture the character's strange journeys and encounters.—Chicago Reader

[Both plays] ably demonstrate O'Reilly's nonpareil knack for anatomizing the dialectics of isolation. In No Longer the Rock of the World, Carol (KellyAnn Corcoran), the grieving widow of a performance artist, confronts her dead husband's brother, Charles (Guy Massey) on the day of the funeral -- a day she has spent curled up in the fetal position listening to the music the dead Walter composed for Elsie, a singer who shared Walter's interest in "two-chord structures." The raw minimalism of the songs, performed live by pianist Julian Berke and singer Jenny Magnus (who alternates with Sofie Senard), enhances the bipolar emotional timbre of the play....

The wounded but vinegary duo deliver verbal sticks of the shiv as they try to unravel the mystery behind the man neither of them fully understood. Corcoran and Massey work the postage-stamp space with spare but effective physical grace, drawing us into their characters' divergent lives.

But Dead to the World is the real knock-out punch. Kate Teichman crosses genders to play a male dishwasher, caught up in an urban landscape where mundane annoyances (the woman down the hall who complains about the music) start taking on nightmare overtones. Ex-lovers (one with "blue veins jumping and beautiful, like a heavenly Etch A Sketch"), sad-eyed women on the bus and a host of other fleeting presences flicker through the story, delivered by the owlish Teichman with a febrile intensity and mordant wit reminiscent of the narrator in Dostoevski's Notes from Underground. It's one of the most haunting and watchable performances I've seen in a long time.—Kerry Reid,
Chicago Tribune

Kelly Ann Corcoran and Guy Massey strike a nice dueling sardonic pair....—Chicago Theater Blog

Guy and Kelly Ann in a scene from No Longer the Rock of the World

Kate in Dead to the World

Beau, Guy, and Kelly Ann rehearse No Longer the Rock of the World