KURT JOHNS' PROJECTS
THE
TALE OF THE ALLERGIST"S WIFE at The Apple Tree Theatre
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The Cast
cast | press | photos | director's notes DIRECTOR’S NOTES I recently repatriated to Chicago from New York’s Upper West Side, home of Zabar's, Lincoln Center, 92 nd Street Y, H & H Bagels, and Marjorie and Ira Taub. It is in this neighborhood of astounding cultural overflow that Marjorie has her intellectual and spiritual crisis. OK, she has lost her therapist. In my old neighborhood, this happens to everyone each August, when all therapists go on vacation. But Marjorie has also lost her way. I think Marjorie’s angst and raging desire for fulfillment is recognizable to anyone with a liberal arts education. Maybe I’ve read too much Joseph Campbell, but I think there is a mythical aspect to this play. In every mythology, there is a story about a central character that is “stuck”. There is always an outside force or a mysterious stranger who arrives bearing the gift of "unstuck-ness". In our story, a vision from Marjorie’s past enters her life to give her a swift kick in the intellectual behind. I think there are times when we could all use a fairy godmother…with a large boot. The author, Charles Busch is one of our most beloved drag performers. Marjorie Taub began life as Miriam Passman, a very popular character in Charles’ drag act. As he began writing this play, Charles said, “This was one of the few times I’d looked at my own suburban Jewish director's notes and the people I grew up with… Wouldn’t it be funny to take these Jewish characters and put them in a rather cryptic Albee or Pinter play?” Thus, The Allergist’s Wife was born, a comic play about human foibles, “stuck-ness”, longing, relationships, and metamorphosis. I would like to thank The Apple Tree theatre for putting this play and me in their season. I hope you enjoy watching The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife. ~ Kurt Johns, Director cast | press | photos | director's notes Press Chicago Sun Times review cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Chicago Sun-Times review by Hedy Weiss Confession No. 1: I loathed Charles Busch's satire "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" when it came to Chicago several years ago in a post-Broadway national tour that starred Valerie Harper. And when I learned that Highland Park's Apple Tree Theatre was planning to revive it -- and to tap such exceptional actors as Paula Scrofano, John Reeger, Hollis Resnik and Renee Matthews to devote their time and energy to it -- I thought: What a waste of talent. Confession No. 2: I was wrong. Assemble a cast like the one just listed. Call on Chicago-bred actor-turned-director Kurt Johns (repatriated from New York) to perfectly modulate the play's crass, crazy and gerontologically scatological excesses. Busch's comedy of manners for the "culturati class" of Manhattan's Upper West Side takes on a new quality. Even the title, a twist on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, begins to make sense. The plot is part classic marital farce, part Roman comedy, part diary of a mad housewife, part Borscht Belt routine, part zany update of the mystical Jewish legend of "The Golem" -- and, finally, 100 percent pure middle-brow entertainment with a side of smarts. The Apple Tree production, which opened Sunday night, gets it absolutely right. All that's missing is a Zabar's shopping bag. Busch, who spent much of his career as a drag queen starring in his self-penned plays, believes the most shocking and freeing thing that can happen to this couple is to become part of an orgy -- a menage a trois for the middle class and middle-aged. That is so 1970s. But it's ultimately beside the point. The real moral of the story is that one woman realizes she has built a fortress of family around herself and found refuge in the arts, while the other has tasted the world and ended up rather destitute, and forever self-fictionalizing. Mates onstage and off Not surprisingly, Scofano and Reeger (a couple in real life, as well as onstage) have every beat down pat. She has always been a closet comedian whose demure exterior can easily be set to "explosive"; he is the essence of droll reserve, but when his eyes light up, or he lets one little line slip, it's perfection. As for Resnik, who looks quite smashing, it's worth the price of a ticket just to hear her intone a sentence in Mandarin Chinese (or what passes for it). Charming and seductive, she is a most sophisticated charlatan, and also manages to betray just a hint of neediness. For spot-on timing and Old World, Yiddish-inflected, hard- knocks humor, Matthews is in a class by herself. She possesses the kind of built-in comic metronome they just don't make anymore, and to watch her nail every pause, every gesture and every laugh, is to see a master at work. There is an important fifth character in the play, too -- Mohammed (portrayed winningly by Vishal Patel). The Taubs' intellectual doorman, from an educated Egyptian family, he discusses literature with Marjorie, while also serving as handyman. Busch wrote "The Allergist's Wife" in pre-Sept. 11 New York -- a fact that makes their tender relationship seem all but nostalgic now. cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Chicago Tribune review by Chris Jones "I don't believe this," said the enthusiastic woman brushing
past me at Sunday night's opening of "The Tale of the Allergist's
Wife" at the Apple Tree Theatre. "They gave me my old seats
back." Those of us with eclectic tastes wouldn't want to see Apple
Tree overdoing this kind of thing. But this
theater sure could use a mainstream, popular hit (for one thing, its lease expires
in August and it needs the city of Highland Park to come through
with a new space). Kurt Johns' perfectly
solid production — which
showcases the real-life, old-school, husband-and-wife team
of Paula Scrofano and John Reeger — should serve that
purpose in the coming weeks. Johns' production is well paced...cleverly
cast and it ripples along very pleasantly. And the tricky,
farce-serious tone mostly is pitched about right. "Allergist's" looked
too small and trivial when it played downtown a couple of
years ago as part of a Broadway tour...the piece
looks far more comfortable in Apple Tree's intimate little
space. cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Copley News Service review by Dan Zeff "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" is a sturdy mainstream comedy that originated from an unlikely source, playwright-actor Charles Busch. Before the play opened on Broadway, Busch was known as the king (or perhaps the queen) of campy off-Broadway theater with bizarre comedies like "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom" and "Psycho Beach Party." But Busch showed with "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" that he had a conventional comedy in him, a show about Jewish characters on the upper West Side in New York City that was tailored made for the typical middle-class Broadway audience. The show became a hit in New York and traveled to Chicago a few years ago in a dreadfully coarsened road show version that must have left local patrons perplexed about the play's success on Broadway. The Apple Tree Theatre is reviving Busch's play and restoring most of the laughs that were obliterated by the vulgarized touring production. The show gets its humor from all kinds of in jokes-some about Jewish life and many about literature, including numerous references to Hermann Hesse, perhaps the most unread great writer of the 20th century. The script is also larded with jokes that will probably mean more to New Yorkers than outlanders, like references to Hunter College and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There are also plentiful satirical comments about writers from Thomas Pynchon to Simone de Beauvoir and Charles Baudelaire. This is not a play directed at literary illiterates. Busch never figured out how to properly end the play, so he settled for making the charming and entertaining Lee a kind of villain to give the play a touchy feely conclusion. But until then the laughs are steady, at least for spectators who enjoy bathroom humor, the spectacle of a woman wallowing in operatic insecurity, and one-liners about Judaism as well as famous writers. The Apple Tree cast is filled with familiar names from the top drawer of area performers. Paula Scrofano is superb as the agonizing Marjorie, who is turned around emotional and even sexually by the liberating influence of Lee Green. John Reeger is good as Ira, a slightly self important and self-absorbed man but a still nice guy. Renee Matthews has become the local theater's resident feisty old woman and she does her thing to fine effect as the kvetching Frieda, just another in the long line of domineering and manipulating Jewish mothers on the American stage. Hollis Resnik is outstanding as Lee, who wears her eye-popping lifestyle casually. She makes the character so attractive that her demotion to a plot device bad guy at the end is doubly problematic. Vishal Patel rounds out the cast as the apartment building's Iraqi doorman, a sophisticated man who can comfortably discuss Nadine Gordimer with the frustrated and self-pitying Marjorie. The whole concoction is directed with nice comic sensibility by Kurt Johns. Richard and Jacqueline Penrod have designed the handsome apartment interior. The rest of the designer credits go to Elizabeth Powell Shaffer (costumes), Jacqueline Reid (lighting), and Scott Miller (sound). Well done all round. The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars. cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Stead Style Chicago review by Joe Stead Charles Busch is best known as the playwright and star of such gender-bending comedies as "Psycho Beach Party," "The Lady in Question" and "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom". Six years ago, he turned his efforts on a more commercially accessible yet still edgy comedy, "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife." The play enjoyed a successful run on Broadway and tour with a series of former sitcom stars (Linda Lavin, Valerie Harper and Rhea Perlman). And now the play makes its Chicago area regional premiere with an A-list cast at Apple Tree Theatre. We are asked to sympathize with a bored, depressed, middle-aged doctor's wife with delusions of grandeur. Marjorie Taub is suffering from a mid-life crisis, the death of her trusted therapist and a sudden destructive spree in The Disney Store, where she is branded a "retail terrorist." Her husband Ira is a retired allergist who now focuses his energy on charity, while her elderly Jewish mother Frieda never misses an opportunity to degrade and bully her, while waxing endlessly about her own bowel movements. In her overly educated, unfulfilled life, Marjorie is a catalyst for a complete breakdown. "I have ambiguities you haven't begun to fathom," she tells her husband. It is easy to imagine Busch writing the colorful, larger-than-life Lee as a character for himself. She is the embodiment of all of Marjorie's repressed dreams and desires, and the perfect symbol for a cautionary fable. Director Kurt Johns has at his disposal one of the dreamiest Chicago Equity casts imaginable. Real-life husband and wife Paula Scrofano and John Reeger join with local dynamos Hollis Resnik and Renee Matthews to deliver a riotously paced performance. Scrofano's desperation is as anguished as it is hilarious, with Reeger supplying the benign charm, Resnik the smoldering sensuality and Matthews the angst-ridden guilt. They are a superb quartet (Vishal Patel completes the cast in a cameo role as an Iraqi doorman) that gets the most mileage... The terrific Manhattan apartment setting is another feather in the cap for the accomplished designers Richard & Jacqueline Penrod, and makes the most out of Apple Tree's very small stage. cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Pioneer Press review by Robert Loerzel Let's just say that Charles Busch's play, running now in a highly entertaining production at Apple Tree Theatre, definitely belongs to the "stranger comes to visit" category of stories, in which an outside force arrives to shake up someone's life. This play, a hit in New York, is in great hands in Highland Park, with two of the Chicago area's best actresses playing the key roles. Paula Scrofano perfectly embodies Marjorie's neuroses, mood swings and intellectual striving, while Hollis Resnik is coyly seductive and appropriately mysterious as Lee. The rest of the cast is strong, too: Scrofano's real-life husband, John Reeger, playing Marjorie's do-gooder spouse; Renee Matthews as her exasperating and exasperated mother; and Vishal Patel as the bemused doorman who occasionally pops into the action. The cast, directed by Kurt Johns, achieves a natural yet hilarious sense of humor. Near the end of the first act on opening night, the audience's laughter at each funny moment began to spill over into anticipatory giggles of the jokes still to come. In the end, "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" manages to say some meaningful things about the way we find direction in our lives, but the show is also a very diverting couple of hours. cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Chicagocritic.com review by Tom Williams Apple Tree Theatre in Highland Park once more offers a cute choice, Charles Busch's wacky boulevard comedy The Tale of the Allergist's Wife. This terrific comedy is part NYC shtick with hints of Woody Allen and Neil Simon and part fable that delivers its smart humor through a host of eccentric characters. I liked this show and so will you. The show boasts four of Chicago 's leading performers: Paula Scrofano, John Reeger, Renee Matthews and Hollis Resnik with fine supporting work from Vishal Patel. Director Kurt Johns brilliantly staged the comedy utilizing Richard and Jacqueline Penrod's exquisite Upper West Side apartment set to reach to all three sides of Apple Tree's intimate stage. We see four comedy pros deliver the shows fertile humor with perfectly timed jokes, punch lines and rejoinders. We meet Marjorie (Paula Scrofano in a fabulous emotionally draining performance) ... With her vain but successful retired allergist husband (John Reeger in a nicely underplayed turn) ... Renee Matthews, as the foul-mouthed mother of Marjorie, was a hoot as she nailed one zinger after another as she laments about her bowl movements and exudes her negativity about life and her daughter Marjorie. Matthews sure is a master at dead-pan comedy. When Lee (Hollis Resnik , marvelous as usual), a stranger from Marjorie's childhood, mysteriously appears, Marjorie comes alive as the two share NYC's cultural. Is Lee a phony who name drops constantly and tells tales of meeting and influencing world leaders, intellectuals and pop cultural icons or is she a mythical figure? Judge for your self. It fits since in many fables a character gets ‘stuck' and a stranger appears to show the way. If Lee is an angel, she sure is a horny one who seduces both Marjorie and Ira into a ménage-a-trois in a hilarious scene. As the funny play progresses, we start doubting Lee's intentions. Only the wary Frieda suspects Lee's insincerity but only for a while. The plot twists work and the resolution finds only Marjorie changed as the vague ending leaves open questions. The Tale of the Allergist's Wife is a well written social satire that pokes fun at many pop cultural motifs and beliefs. The outstanding performances from all four actors makes this show a treat. You'll laugh and appreciate the depth of Chicago talent led my Paula Scrofano who once more demonstrates why she is Chicago's most talented leading lady. Recommended cast | press | photos | director's notes Highlights from the Daily Herald Reivew by Barbara Vitello Scrofano. Reeger. Resnik. Matthews. Patel. Five strong actors. Five excellent reasons to check out Apple Tree Theatre’s production of “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” Charles Busch’s satire on Upper West Side denizens suffering from upper-middle-class ennui. The story centers on Marjorie Taub (seamless work by the exceptional Scrofano) a Manhattan intellectual and self-described “cultural poseur” who has an emotional breakdown in a Disney Store after the death of her psychiatrist. The depressed Marjorie retreats to the high-priced, high-rise (an attractive, well-appointed condo designed by Richard and Jacqueline Penrod) she shares with de-voted husband, Ira (Reeger, Scofano’s real life husband). A retired allergist and full-time altruist, Ira, (a nicely understated Reeger who plays the part with befuddled affection), spends his time treating the homeless at his clinic and teaching med students at NYU. Marjorie’s acerbic, overly critical mother Frieda (Matthews, in fine, feisty form) stops by to needle her daughter and complain about her ongoing intestinal distress. And Mohammed (newcomer Patel, who more than holds his own opposite this master quartet), the well-educated, under-employed doorman drops in to help with household repairs and serves as Marjorie’s confidant. A chance meeting with childhood friend, the enigmatic Lee (a charismatic Resnik in a wonderfully ambiguous performance), an absolutely fabulous, jet-setting, Jill-of-all-trades, lifts Marjorie’s depression. But this cast, smartly directed by Kurt Johns, make these caricatures interesting. The key is the ambiguity underscoring the performances — especially Resnik’s. Lee’s mystique makes her sincerity suspect. Resnik’s performance suggests that Lee’s a fraud (albeit a perceptive fraud). But Resnik’s performance, especially her delivery of Lee’s final line, implies other-wise. She may be the genuine article. The fact that Resnik never lets us know for sure makes the character even more compelling and her performance, along with those of the rest of the cast, worth seeing. “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” ~ 3 out of four stars Highlights from the Chicago Reader Review by Jack Helbig In this turn-of-the-millennium comedy, playwright Charles Busch pretends to be on the side of unconventionality and sexual liberation, symbolized by an uninhibited friend who appears out of nowhere to shake up the neurotic, unhappy middle-aged protagonist, Marjorie. Then he spends most of the second act touting the safe upper-middle-class values he skewered in the first. No wonder the play ran for nearly two years on Broadway. Still, Busch gets in some good laughs, many of them based on Marjorie's horrible relationship with her aging mother. This production benefits from strong direction by Kurt Johns and flawless performances by the ensemble. Photos
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