At a moment in American history when words chronically fail, Trap Door has chosen to update Ettore Scola’s wordless 1983 film, Le Bal, which dealt with 50 years in the history of France. Covering nine decades of American history asynchronously, starting with the 1980s, the house music soundtrack puts us clearly in Chicago, but after that, the decades and locales fly by in a cascading medley of costumes and movement in director Stephen Buescher’s adaptation.
Le Bal
Through 6/20: Thu–Sat 8 PM, Sun 6/7 and 6/14 3 PM; Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, 773-384-0494, trapdoortheatre.com, $32 (two for one Thu)
Removing words causes attention to shift to motion, props, and setting. The stage is bare but the back walls are covered with chairs, clothes, signs, luggage, and bric-a-brac, behind hanging curtains that are pulled down and double as shrouds, banners, and bindings. Each item is used to help illuminate whatever era is being evoked through the actors’ action. The seven-member ensemble, which devised the play, takes turns playing lovers, workers, cops, protestors, soldiers, and revelers, never lingering long in any one time or place.
The scenes depicted will all be familiar to anyone with even a cursory grasp of the country’s history but the cumulative effect is elegiac rather than critical or celebratory. The feeling I was left with was of something coming to an end, which is a feeling many are stuck on these days in this place. As a tribute to a moment in history, few words would have been as apt.
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