Pierre Corneille's comic play "Illusion" (L'Illusion Comique, 1636), adapted by Tony Kushner, staged at the City Lit Theatre by the Promethean Theatre Ensemble, at 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, Chicago.
Watching this play, similarities came to mind in terms of its witty, playful, elaborate use of language, which is a characteristic feature of Baroque literature. Presumably, this language in its translated form has been somewhat modernized in the adaptation by Tony Kushner. Aside from using such language, the play's theme is universal--distance and estrangement of parent from a child. In this case, a son has run off from a father, who over time grows concerned about his missing son's fate, so he consults a magician to try to discover the whereabouts of his son with whom he has lost contact.
The set of the play is kept spare and simple in this production, limited to three large, triangular blocks, which are moved about a bit in each act and illuminated with different lighting.
One theme in the play is the father's revaluation of his son whom he regarded as a flighty, wild rebel; this attitude is what causes the son to run away from home. The larger issue here is how a parent reacts to a child whose temperament provokes disapproval. In the context of the time, there was certainly much less understanding for a son to oppose a father, for in France, a father could legally have even an adult child imprisoned for disobeying his orders. In effect, the self-righteous parent could always feel in the right, and the father in the play struggles with his sense of moral entitlement.
The magician obliges the father's desire to show him what his son has been doing in life, showing him three phases of his life, notably different phases of love. First, he shows his son in the initial throes of boundless enthusiasm of love, but for an aristocratic woman, which causes a conflict, since the son is a commoner--his father is a lawyer. The son tries to solicit the help of a woman servant and literally brushes off a rival. Seemingly, despite the barrier of social class that separates the wild son from the aristocratic woman he loves, all seems to be turning out for the best, but this seeming success proves to be only that.
In the second act, the pursuit of love has led the son to compromise his principles and himself become a lackey, a yes-man to a self-absorbed lord with a swollen ego. This lord speaks in what sounded like to me with an Andrei Codrescu, a one time NPR writer and wry commentato and immigrant from Romania.) The wild son compromises his ideals in the name of love, to be closer to his beloved.
In the third act, the son is shown as having fallen out of love, unable to live up to any of his fervently made principles of sacrificing all in the name of love.
The audience, along with the father, is the observer of the staged scenes; the play, is thus a play within a play. The play is fairly light, entertaining fare, except towards its end, when a tragic conclusion seems to end it. Is love itself an illusion the magician asks at the end of the play, or is it the only reality of life?
This production was quite well acted by the actors playing the son and servant woman, and it had some timely sound effects and music. The third act, however, was somewhat difficult to follow, in part, perhaps it is because it may have been shortened to make the play fit into a less than 2-hour running time.
If there was any other problem, it was seeing some empty seats, which is not that unusual in a production of a foreign language theatre classic that people may be wary of seeing. Though it cannot boast a Broadway theatre scene like New York's, Chicago has its niche virtue in theatre--the city offers a plethora of small and amateur theatre companies that are willing to risk staging theatre classics.
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