Chicago Sun-Times review of
`Come Like Shadows'

November 3, 1999

By Hedy Weiss, theater critic for the Chicago Sun-Times

The title of the Plasticene ensemble's haunting new adventure in nonverbal theater should serve as fair warning. "Come Like Shadows . . ." it declares. And indeed, as you enter the Chopin Theatre you should be prepared to leave this world and enter the darker, more passionate, more brutal sphere of "the other side" of consciousness--a place where repression lurks but primal urges invariably break free.

Think of Edgar Allan Poe meeting Edvard Munch, painter of "The Scream." Imagine Dante trading ideas with Charles Dickens to create a 19th century version of hell. Imagine Victorian melodrama, complete with erotic postcard images. But also recall Shakespeare's theater, with bear-baiting in the pit.

Then listen to the sounds of heavy chains rattling across the floor, of metal sticks clashing in an inhumane urban jungle, of mournfull cries and chimes at midnight, and the scratch of pens on paper as yearning, bedeviled souls scribble furious, unrequited love letters. Pay attention also to the light (and the shadows), as frenzied figures carry votive candles to and fro, and as one woman helps another pull the ties of her corset so tightly she cannot breathe. Watch for men carried on poles like butchered animals, and for another who suddenly appears in deer antlers. They are sacrificial victims all.

Trying to explain precisely what it is that Plasticene does is like trying to recount a strange and deeply troubling nightmare--one that has you in its thrall until you suddenly bolt upright and realize just how far away you have been, and just what a horrifying journey you have taken. As in all of the unique works of "physical theater," the company has developed over the past four years, "Come Like Shadows . . ." pulls you into its world through its sheer visceral power (the sweat and grunts and gasping for breath of the actors), as well as its teasing mix of the hallucinatory and the real. The scenario, always open to interpretation, can be terrifying one moment and bizarrely funny the next. And there is not a single predictable action anywhere along the way.

Dexter Bullard's brilliant, no-prisoners-taken direction is clearly taken as a challenge by his ensemble of seven daredevils whose physical fearlessness is rivaled only by their emotional ferocity. The performers are Guy Van Swearingen (who performs a sweat-inducing aerial duet with a chair); Sharon Gopfert (in various intriguing disguises, as well as a brief nude scene); RaShawn Fitzgerald; Kirsten Fitzgerald; Julia Fabris, Dominic Conti and Mark Comiskey. A phenomenal bunch.

With the audience seated on either side of a narrow rectangular playing space--and each group shielded from the facing group of spectators by an elaborate series of curtains--the actors seem to be on some eerie, invisible treadmill of existence.

Caught up in a raging typhoon of the spirit, each of them seems to be on a quest for some terrible, wonderful and almost entirely elusive thing. Robert G. Smith's dazzling, rhythmically thrilling lighting effects combine with the hugely inventive, cinematic score of Eric Leonardson and Bill Talsma, which is played live. And Miriam Sohn's period costumes add psychic texture to this 70-minute theatrical storm in which few words are spoken but the characters achieve an almost unbearably painful eloquence.