'La Luna' is a work of sensory delights

By Michael Phillips, Theater Critic
Chicago Tribune

August 8th 2005

In covering Chicago theater, much of which operates on a mixture of justifiably healthy ego and low-grade insecurity — that's what a life of glittering poverty does to you — the Chicago theater press tends to rave about an awful lot, every week. It's good for business. And a lot of the raving comes from a place of genuine enthusiasm, on this side of the boosterism divide, as opposed to the other, cheaper, darker side.

Yet we do the excellent work no favors when we oversell the pretty good work. I'm here to tell you that a truly excellent company, one that happens not to be from Chicago, is back in town for its third consecutive year. It's the experimental troupe from Katowice, Poland, Teatr Cogitatur, which made its American debut two years ago at Wicker Park's Chopin Theatre.

Through Labor Day weekend the company is performing two of its brief, densely packed works in repertory. On Aug. 19, "Aztec Hotel" begins its return engagement. A beautiful meditation on angels and humans, it played the Chopin in 2003 and earned a place at the top of that year's theatrical achievements.

Last weekend a Teatr Cogitatur production dating from 1998, "La Luna," opened at the Chopin. It's a work of sensory pleasures, as well as a certain amount of puzzlement — what I'd characterize as the right kind, the kind that works on your subconscious in mysterious ways.

It begins with someone in a wedding dress, face hidden behind an ancient copy of Le Monde, swaying to a waltz playing on accordion. The person lowers the newspaper, and the face is that of a glowering male demon played by Maciej Dziaczko, with the company since 1995. At one point in "La Luna" this fine actor executes a dance in which he appears to be a Slinky engulfed in flames.

"La Luna" originally carried the title "Tribute to Expressionists," and unfolds as a series of dreams depicting artists either in the throes of creation, or the anguish of falling short of their visions. Four rectangular diorama-like boxes serve as stages within the stage. In one, we see a writer at a decrepit typewriter, spewing an unknown substance into the carriage. Later, with each keystroke, a feather wafts from inside the guts of the machine. Dali would be proud.

Here, the artist's lot has a 75 percent chance of ending badly. Three suicides later Dziaczko, who also plays a sculptor, reappears in the guise of a jazz trumpeter playing at a club called La Luna. He alone escapes the clutch of his death-muse.

"La Luna," all of 45 minutes long, isn't a story as much as it is a sequence of exquisitely crafted vignettes. The piece isn't overtly political, although we hear a woman speak of "the secret agents' silent steps." The music by Tomasz Kalwak and the light and sound by Bogdan Smiganowski and Alicka Chrzanowska combine echo-chamber polkas, train whistles, the sounds of dripping water and other fragments, brilliantly.

My memory of "Aztec Hotel" is that it's somewhat more accessible and theatrically buoyant than "La Luna." Both, however, are remarkable in their imagistic, mist-shrouded ways. While remarkable work happens on Chicago stages all the time, let's face it: Some of it's more remarkable than others.

mjphillips@tribune.com