Free will in dark times - Chicago Reader

TUTA Theatre originally planned to present Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s solo play (with audience participation) Every Brilliant Thing as part of their two-show summer season, in repertory with Celine Song’s Tom & Eliza. Huy Nguyen was slated to star. They instead substituted Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit—also a solo with audience participation, and also performed by Nguyen.

At least, he was there opening night. But if you go (and there are plenty of reasons to check it out), don’t expect to see him. Soleimanpour’s play (which was last produced locally by now defunct Interrobang Theatre Project in 2018) specifically calls for a different actor to perform the piece each night. And they don’t see the script until it’s handed to them right at the top of the show. As Soleimanpour writes in his first two instructions for the actor, “1. Do not see or read the play beforehand. 2. Prepare an ostrich impersonation.”

I like Every Brilliant Thing, but we did just have a lovely production of that show at Writers Theatre last November. And just as I found that production, in the days after the election, helped create “a room for us to collectively think about what lights our way when it feels like the entire world is blinding us,” so too does White Rabbit, Red Rabbit feel very of the moment—even though it was first written in 2010 (April 25, 2010, according to the script).

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
Through 8/11: Sun–Mon 7:30 PM, TUTA Theatre, 4670 N. Manor, tutatheatre.org, $20-$60

Soleimanpour is an Iranian playwright who was denied a passport by the Iranian government for several years after refusing military service. (He now lives in Berlin.) White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has been translated into over 30 different languages and performed all over the world by men and women alike, in theaters small and large. I don’t think that’s just because it’s a presumably low-cost production (the stage directions just call for a chair, a table, two glasses of water, and a ladder), or that the different-actor-every-night casting creates a gimmicky sense of intrigue.

Although it’s not overtly political in its narrative (this isn’t a biographical documentary piece about life in Iran), Soleimanpour’s play hinges on questions of free will, cooperation versus competition, and maybe hope versus hopelessness. That TUTA is staging it just as the U.S.’s fraught relations with Iran (to put it euphemistically) are again in the spotlight is happenstance. The reason White Rabbit, Red Rabbit works is that it dances with absurdity (cheetahs who become ostriches who attack a rabbit at a theater in a circus) while treating the stakes with absolute seriousness. And for those of us who feel like we’re trapped between absurdity and apocalypse, there are many moments of painful/funny recognition studded throughout the one-act show.

Nguyen, a company member at TUTA, comported himself admirably at Monday’s opening, especially with making the tricky distinctions between the authorial voice of Soleimanpour and his own interpolations. (The script actually does call for the actor to call the playwright a “fucking terrorist” for requiring that ostrich impersonation, to be followed by an explanation that it’s the author’s words, not the actor’s. Got it?)

Several times, Nguyen stopped to explain, “This is me,” and as the central parable of the rabbits in the play unfolds, it becomes more obvious that the device is as much about defending individuality in authoritarian constructs as it is about clearing up narrative confusion. Other actions emphasize giving us our own voices and viewpoints beyond the words on the page as read by the actor. An audience member (the same one who plays a rabbit) takes notes. We are given Soleimanpour’s email and urged to send comments.

“I’ve always had this dream of writing something which makes me free,” Soleimanpour’s script tells us at one point. “I’m 29 as I write this, full of hopes and energy. But I’m not free. Not enough to travel. . . . I have to be careful while I’m writing, walking, talking, and drinking. It’s the rules of the circus.”

As we walk the high wire in our own deadly national circus, with our safety nets shredding more and more each day, TUTA’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit asks us to think about the rules and how we might upend them.