The Chicago White Sox have long had a question mark at their second base position and that was made worse this week with the injury to utility infielder Danny Mendick.

Mendick, who had been the Sox de facto starting shortstop while Tim Anderson was on the injured list, had been playing well. The expectation was that he would slide over to second base with Anderson returning.

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In February, teenage Chicago indie rockers Dwaal Troupe contributed a tender, dusty tune called “Everyone Forgot but You” to Porcelain Songs, a 30-track compilation made by fans of enigmatic Swedish indie-rock project Weatherday. The musicians involved in the comp put it together via Discord, a messaging app and social-media platform that allows young fans to incubate closed communities dedicated to their favorite artists—hence the comp’s subtitle, A Weathercord Compilation. The number of Discord users on the Weatherday server is relatively small (fewer than 800), at least compared to, say, the Grimes server (Pitchfork reported more than 15,000 members). But Porcelain Songs illustrates the intensity and breadth of Weatherday’s cult among other musicians: the comp features electronics-spiked pop-punk from British-Lithuanian duo Flyovers in Patterns, wispy ambient by Polish solo project Starshy, and experimental collages from Portland artist Goth iHop. 

It’s difficult to make sense of Porcelain Songs without having heard the solo project that inspired it—the arena-size ambition, cheeky experimental flair, and beguiling intimacy of Weatherday’s lo-fi recordings create an aesthetic umbrella expansive enough for all the comp’s disparate sounds to fit beneath it. Helmed by a multi-instrumentalist who goes by Sputnik, Weatherday has so far dropped only one full-length in its brief career, 2019’s Come In (Porcelain Music). The album’s soaring songs tie together shoegaze fuzz, quasi-symphonic flourishes, postpunk gloom, and posthardcore rushes. Sputnik’s shabby, earnestly yearning vocals give the project its defining character by helping corral these components into a coherent sound. In just a few years, Come In has become an urtext for emo’s emerging fifth wave, giving young musicians permission to break rules that inhibited earlier generations. Last year, U.S. indie label Topshelf, a crucial fourth-wave emo outlet, dropped a double-LP reissue of Come In, and the whole run of 2,000 sold out—if you want a pristine copy, be prepared to pony up $100 on Discogs. Earlier this year, Weatherday collaborated with Seoul fifth-wave emo artist Asian Glow on the Weatherglow EP, whose polished, concise songs express both artists’ desire to reach for the stars.

Weatherday, Michael Cera Palin, Weatherday, Oolong, Elton John Cena, Sat, 7/2, 7 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $16, $13 in advance, 5+

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In February, teenage Chicago indie rockers Dwaal Troupe contributed a tender, dusty tune called “Everyone Forgot but You” to Porcelain Songs, a 30-track compilation made by fans of enigmatic Swedish indie-rock project Weatherday. The musicians involved in the comp put it together via Discord, a messaging app and social-media platform that allows young fans to incubate closed communities dedicated to their favorite artists—hence the comp’s subtitle, A Weathercord Compilation. The number of Discord users on the Weatherday server is relatively small (fewer than 800), at least compared to, say, the Grimes server (Pitchfork reported more than 15,000 members). But Porcelain Songs illustrates the intensity and breadth of Weatherday’s cult among other musicians: the comp features electronics-spiked pop-punk from British-Lithuanian duo Flyovers in Patterns, wispy ambient by Polish solo project Starshy, and experimental collages from Portland artist Goth iHop. 

It’s difficult to make sense of Porcelain Songs without having heard the solo project that inspired it—the arena-size ambition, cheeky experimental flair, and beguiling intimacy of Weatherday’s lo-fi recordings create an aesthetic umbrella expansive enough for all the comp’s disparate sounds to fit beneath it. Helmed by a multi-instrumentalist who goes by Sputnik, Weatherday has so far dropped only one full-length in its brief career, 2019’s Come In (Porcelain Music). The album’s soaring songs tie together shoegaze fuzz, quasi-symphonic flourishes, postpunk gloom, and posthardcore rushes. Sputnik’s shabby, earnestly yearning vocals give the project its defining character by helping corral these components into a coherent sound. In just a few years, Come In has become an urtext for emo’s emerging fifth wave, giving young musicians permission to break rules that inhibited earlier generations. Last year, U.S. indie label Topshelf, a crucial fourth-wave emo outlet, dropped a double-LP reissue of Come In, and the whole run of 2,000 sold out—if you want a pristine copy, be prepared to pony up $100 on Discogs. Earlier this year, Weatherday collaborated with Seoul fifth-wave emo artist Asian Glow on the Weatherglow EP, whose polished, concise songs express both artists’ desire to reach for the stars.

Weatherday, Michael Cera Palin, Weatherday, Oolong, Elton John Cena, Sat, 7/2, 7 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $16, $13 in advance, 5+

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The Chicago Blackhawks need a new head coach. They have been bad for a long time and a new direction is much needed. Jeremy Colliton was a horrible replacement for Joel Quenneville and Derek King was clearly not the guy in the long term.

Now, there are reports out there that they are going to hire Luke Richardson to be the next head coach. Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff reported it on Twitter. This is huge news for the Blackhawks as they are headed in a new direction as a franchise.

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Siah Berlatsky just graduated this month from ChiArts, but though she’s taking a gap year before college, the 18-year-old playwright-director-actor isn’t letting the grass grow under her feet. In August, she’ll be part of Artistic Home’s outdoor developmental series, “Summer on the Patio,” with her Elizabethan-style gender-bending rom-com, Malapert Love, which she also directs. (“Malapert,” a favorite word of William Shakespeare’s, is both adjective and noun, meaning “saucy,” or “an impudently bold person.”) Berlatsky’s play, in which six characters (and a foul drunkard named “Phischbreath”) scheme and (sort of) duel as their hidden affections are revealed, nestles in repertory alongside those of internationally known writers: David Ives’s Venus in Fur and Jez Butterworth’s The River.

Malapert Love
Sun 8/7-8/28, Artistic Home studio, 3054 N. Milwaukee, 7 PM; theartistichome.org, free

I caught up with Berlatsky (daughter of Noah Berlatsky, a longtime Reader contributor) the day after her ChiArts graduation to find out how she ended up being the youngest playwright onstage in Artistic Home’s history, and how being both trans and a fan of Shakespeare combined to help create her play. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Kerry Reid: Your play has a lot of fun with the ridiculous comedic tropes of unrequited love and the lengths people go to when in its throes. What was the inspiration for the story?

Siah Berlatsky: It’s very inspired by Shakespeare. I first started writing it when I was 15, 16 years old and really just starting to experiment with and explore my gender identity and my sexuality and what that meant to me. Shakespeare has, for as long as I can remember, been a huge inspiration to me. The first Shakespeare play I did was in seventh grade. I played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve interacted with Shakespeare for a long time, and I’ve always adored all of the tropes and the stock situations that are used in those plays to sort of advance the language and the poetry. And obviously the queerness and the homoeroticism has always really interested me. So really what the play started out as was that I wanted to make a response to a Shakespeare comedy specifically with all of those tropes that I love so much and make it a more explicitly modern piece.

In terms of coming out as queer and trans, did you find that process easier by being in a high school for the performing arts? 

Definitely. ChiArts has been a particularly accepting environment for that. Most of the people that I know there are trans. But it’s not just at my high school. I know lots of other people from lots of other schools that have been very accepting and supportive.

What was the journey with this play? Was it a class project that kind of just kept going? 

It started out just as purely a hobby, sort of a passion project thing. I would write it on the bus or the train to and from school on my phone. I didn’t really think that anything would ever come of it. I was just a kid experimenting with art. But there have been a lot of teachers and mentors [at ChiArts], especially Kathy Scambiatterra [artistic director at Artistic Home] who took notice of it and felt that it could be a professional production. 

How is the Summer on the Patio program set up and have you started working on the show?

It’s basically a festival with three different plays, with three completely different teams in a very strict process that just really emphasizes the relationship between the actor and the text. We’ve just begun rehearsals. We had our first table read last week and we’ll be performing every Sunday in August.

What are some of the things you’re hoping the rehearsal process might bring out for you and the play?

With theater, there isn’t any insight that is deeper than seeing the play fully performed. You don’t really get to see what the finished product is until you have actors and audience in a space. I’m really just excited to see the work as it was meant to be—viewed and interacted with. Already, I’ve gotten a lot of insights just from the few table reads and I’m just hoping to see more of that, see what works and what doesn’t, to make it the best play that it can be. And hopefully have it produced in the future.

Who are some of the playwrights that  you’ve looked to for inspiration aside from Shakespeare? 

Definitely more classical playwrights—Oscar Wilde and Chekhov are the two whose style I think I enjoy the most. Oscar Wilde, particularly, although, you know, one hopes that my career doesn’t go quite the same way his did. [laughs] But I just love his voice. I love the satirization of cishet societal norms. The way that he does that, I admire greatly. Among more contemporary playwrights, I think probably my favorite would be Tarell Alvin McCraney [Ms. Blakk for President]. I just think that the work that he’s doing in elevating queer voices and the sophistication, the control that he has over his settings and his characters is really brilliant. And definitely something that I aspire to.

What are your future plans?

Well, so right now, I’m looking at taking a gap year. I have a lot of projects that I have to sort of attend to at the moment. Hopefully I would like to go to college in New York or Chicago and pursue a degree in either dramatic studies or English or something that will forward my writing and get me new connections in theater spaces to hopefully branch out, where and with whom I’m producing plays.

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“My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”

Laurence Olivier’s quippy response to Dustin Hoffman’s story of how he stayed up three nights to fully inhabit the sleepless state of his character in the 1976 thriller Marathon Man may be the most oft-cited example of the absurd ends Method acting came to in America. But that anecdote, if Hoffman is to be believed, is misunderstood, if not apocryphal. Apparently Hoffman was staying up nights partying to get over a breakup and Olivier’s advice was given in sympathy rather than criticism. This is but one of the many myths and legends defanged, contextualized, or outright refuted in Isaac Butler’s scrupulously researched but eminently readable biography of an acting philosophy that dominated the 20th century—and continues to exercise influence on stages and screens of every size and shape to this day.

As with so much that has come to be thought of as uniquely American, the Method was born elsewhere. Konstantin Stanislavski established the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in 1898 with his partner, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, in response to a hidebound style of acting codified throughout Europe. Exaggerated declamatory speech was favored over realism. Sets were barely an afterthought and rehearsal and refinement of craft were unheard of. Theater was not a place to explore everyday events, and an actor’s own life was not a source to be inspired by. 

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
Bloomsbury, hardcover, 501 pp, hardback $27, softcover $16.20, bloomsbury.com

Stanislavski sought to change that. His greatest ambition, defined and redefined endlessly over decades, was for an actor to inhabit their role from the inside. The Russian word for this idea is perezhivanye,which is often translated as “living the part,“but is more like some kind of special empathy, or maybe a living through. Whatever it is, the road to get there would be fought over mercilessly by every practitioner and acolyte who came into contact with it.

Not unlike a cult, adherents of Stanislavski’s “system” began debating and reinterpreting it even within its first years. Vsevolod Meyerhold starred in MAT’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, the first successful mounting of a play—now an unquestioned classic—that was considered the most notorious flop of its day. But Meyerhold left and established his own experimental, highly Symbolist style of theater soon after. Other early students like Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Richard Boleslavsky would do the same. The door Stanislavski opened by exploring everyday behavior and psychology seemed to lead to different rooms for every individual who opened it.

It was Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, another Stanislavski veteran, who established the first outlet for his gospel in the U.S. in 1922 with the American Laboratory Theatre, following a well-received MAT tour that featured revivals of The Seagull and other mainstays of the company’s repertory. At the time the American theater scene was in its infancy and hopelessly beholden to the same 18th- and 19th-century conventions prevalent in Russia decades earlier. Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner—perhaps the most recognized exponents of various styles of the Method—all spent time at the Lab school. And not unlike Stanislavski’s first followers, each founded their own church devoted to worshipping the master’s teaching in seemingly contradictory ways.

Butler is able to explain the various techniques, exercises, and approaches of acting from the inside because he lived it as an aspiring actor in his youth. He describes having to walk away from the practice after feeling chewed up by the intense inward exploration required under some of the Method-related systems his teachers espoused. Indeed, oftentimes, these acting exercises resemble experimental psychotherapy rather than preparation toward any kind of public performance. Each teacher comes off like a charismatic cult leader and many decisions by actors and directors to leave one group and join another read like personal, emotional betrayal.

Somehow this collection of intense, often troubled individuals, through harrowing, sometimes utterly ridiculous strategies, established a way of emoting that became the standard in the U.S., both on stage and screen. It is the movies, of course, that did the most to mainstream the Method in the persons of Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Robert De Niro, et al. But the Pandora’s box that Stanislavski hammered together around the turn of the 20th century continued to unleash personalized angels and demons for anyone who unlocked it. While one actor might insist that personal traumas are crucial to unlocking authentic emotion in performance, another favors obsessive research into a character’s profession or physical gestures. It’s no accident that even the man who started this revolution insisted on putting quotation marks around his “system,” because it was an ever-changing process, never to be truly codified or finished.

The stickiest criticism of the Method, one that goes all the way back to its nascency in Russia, is that it favors the actor over the play (or movie). By working by themselves apart from the text or their colleagues, they become the entire show and detract from any bigger picture. This is clear in movies where costars come from different schools. Watching Tilda Swinton in 2007’s Michael Clayton, for instance, is jarring because whatever it is she’s doing is in an entirely different universe than everything and everyone around her. To me, she’s the only reason to watch that film, but that only points up that production’s failure rather than Swinton’s incredible skill.

In his introduction, Butler calls his book a biography rather than a history—even though his subject is a school of acting rather than a person. I think he’s right to make that distinction, though his subject is really a many-headed Hydra-like creature, spawning new appendages quicker than anyone could hack the old ones off. He ends with the thought that though the Method inspired a lot of questionable personal behavior and often led to excess, it will always remain in the actor’s quiver. There’s just no putting this self-absorbed genie back in its bottle.

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Siah Berlatsky just graduated this month from ChiArts, but though she’s taking a gap year before college, the 18-year-old playwright-director-actor isn’t letting the grass grow under her feet. In August, she’ll be part of Artistic Home’s outdoor developmental series, “Summer on the Patio,” with her Elizabethan-style gender-bending rom-com, Malapert Love, which she also directs. (“Malapert,” a favorite word of William Shakespeare’s, is both adjective and noun, meaning “saucy,” or “an impudently bold person.”) Berlatsky’s play, in which six characters (and a foul drunkard named “Phischbreath”) scheme and (sort of) duel as their hidden affections are revealed, nestles in repertory alongside those of internationally known writers: David Ives’s Venus in Fur and Jez Butterworth’s The River.

Malapert Love
Sun 8/7-8/28, Artistic Home studio, 3054 N. Milwaukee, 7 PM; theartistichome.org, free

I caught up with Berlatsky (daughter of Noah Berlatsky, a longtime Reader contributor) the day after her ChiArts graduation to find out how she ended up being the youngest playwright onstage in Artistic Home’s history, and how being both trans and a fan of Shakespeare combined to help create her play. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Kerry Reid: Your play has a lot of fun with the ridiculous comedic tropes of unrequited love and the lengths people go to when in its throes. What was the inspiration for the story?

Siah Berlatsky: It’s very inspired by Shakespeare. I first started writing it when I was 15, 16 years old and really just starting to experiment with and explore my gender identity and my sexuality and what that meant to me. Shakespeare has, for as long as I can remember, been a huge inspiration to me. The first Shakespeare play I did was in seventh grade. I played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve interacted with Shakespeare for a long time, and I’ve always adored all of the tropes and the stock situations that are used in those plays to sort of advance the language and the poetry. And obviously the queerness and the homoeroticism has always really interested me. So really what the play started out as was that I wanted to make a response to a Shakespeare comedy specifically with all of those tropes that I love so much and make it a more explicitly modern piece.

In terms of coming out as queer and trans, did you find that process easier by being in a high school for the performing arts? 

Definitely. ChiArts has been a particularly accepting environment for that. Most of the people that I know there are trans. But it’s not just at my high school. I know lots of other people from lots of other schools that have been very accepting and supportive.

What was the journey with this play? Was it a class project that kind of just kept going? 

It started out just as purely a hobby, sort of a passion project thing. I would write it on the bus or the train to and from school on my phone. I didn’t really think that anything would ever come of it. I was just a kid experimenting with art. But there have been a lot of teachers and mentors [at ChiArts], especially Kathy Scambiatterra [artistic director at Artistic Home] who took notice of it and felt that it could be a professional production. 

How is the Summer on the Patio program set up and have you started working on the show?

It’s basically a festival with three different plays, with three completely different teams in a very strict process that just really emphasizes the relationship between the actor and the text. We’ve just begun rehearsals. We had our first table read last week and we’ll be performing every Sunday in August.

What are some of the things you’re hoping the rehearsal process might bring out for you and the play?

With theater, there isn’t any insight that is deeper than seeing the play fully performed. You don’t really get to see what the finished product is until you have actors and audience in a space. I’m really just excited to see the work as it was meant to be—viewed and interacted with. Already, I’ve gotten a lot of insights just from the few table reads and I’m just hoping to see more of that, see what works and what doesn’t, to make it the best play that it can be. And hopefully have it produced in the future.

Who are some of the playwrights that  you’ve looked to for inspiration aside from Shakespeare? 

Definitely more classical playwrights—Oscar Wilde and Chekhov are the two whose style I think I enjoy the most. Oscar Wilde, particularly, although, you know, one hopes that my career doesn’t go quite the same way his did. [laughs] But I just love his voice. I love the satirization of cishet societal norms. The way that he does that, I admire greatly. Among more contemporary playwrights, I think probably my favorite would be Tarell Alvin McCraney [Ms. Blakk for President]. I just think that the work that he’s doing in elevating queer voices and the sophistication, the control that he has over his settings and his characters is really brilliant. And definitely something that I aspire to.

What are your future plans?

Well, so right now, I’m looking at taking a gap year. I have a lot of projects that I have to sort of attend to at the moment. Hopefully I would like to go to college in New York or Chicago and pursue a degree in either dramatic studies or English or something that will forward my writing and get me new connections in theater spaces to hopefully branch out, where and with whom I’m producing plays.

Read More