Message to the University Architects: Cafe ECC.

posted by Elizabeth Fama

Istria Cafe enlivens the corner of 57th and Lake Park, despite all odds.

Last week, alumni, parents, and "friends" of the U of C Laboratory Schools got a letter from David Magill, Director, saying that the University of Chicago's Board of Trustees had given the Early Childhood Center (among other Lab projects) the green light.

In my opinion, the Lab campus should not be split into two locations. Nevertheless, the cogs of institutional construction are in motion, and there is probably no turning back. So I'm introducing a challenge to the University and the Lab Schools: use the new Center to enliven Stony Island; resist the urge to plunk an isolated, car-oriented fortress on an already desolate block; create a public eatery and gathering space in the front of the school that will define the new culture of that school.

You read that correctly: I challenge the architects and administrators to incorporate a lovely cafe, right at the streetfront of a nursery through grade 2 school, and to keep it open for nighttime business.

A public cafe would:

1. encourage parents to mingle before and after drop-off and pick-up, thereby discouraging an exclusively "drive-by" use of the building for families (see the Booth Cafeteria at these hours for proof)
2. provide a great meeting place for parents and their children (of all grades) after school (again, see Booth)
3. provide an informal meeting space for teachers (see Booth)
4. give University employees, students, and community members another neighborhood amenity on the east end of campus (see Istria)
5. enliven that stretch of Stony Island, both during the day and after 5 PM.

Numbers 4 and 5 are for the benefit of the neighborhood and the University as a whole. For the Lab Schools, numbers 1 through 3 would go much further toward integrating the two separate Lab campuses and creating a school community than the shuttle buses Mr. Magill plans to operate between the two campuses. Just look at how the Lab Schools have planted their own culture in the Booth Cafeteria -- that's the market in action; that's how the schools' population chooses to socialize.

Naturally there would be security concerns about a public space inside a school with young children. But since they're designing the ECC from scratch, the architects should be able to arrange it so that strangers in the cafe won't have access to the main part of the school. The cafe could funnel into the school through one door, with a permanent security guard stationed there. There could also be alternate school entrances that bypass the cafe entirely.

During the school year, the Booth Cafeteria is full of Lab students, parents, teachers, and administrators, along with other University and community members. The ECC architects should try to mimic that success.

Wait Until Dark @ Court Theater

posted by chicago pop

For anyone who lived in Hyde Park at any point during the last century, the Court Theater's current production of Frederick Knott's Broadway thriller Wait Until Dark may seem strangely familiar. Con-men and break-ins to seedy rental apartments, why set a play with these elements in 1960's Greenwich Village? Woodlawn and 53th Street circa 1987 would have done just as nicely.

In fact, minus two dead bodies in the bedroom and slightly more bohemian neighbors, the two locations might have been interchangeable.

So seeing Wait Until Dark at Ellis and 55th produces mixed sensations of recognition and artifice: this is a familiar tale of mistrust and fragile human connection in an unstable urban environment, a tale of much of inner-city America throughout the postwar period.

And yet the tropes of film noir and theatrical suspense seem to require settings and character types that aren't associated with Chicago's real-life noir: down-and-out screenwriters in Hollywood or fashion photographers in the Naked City. So the neighborhood viewer may bring her own uncatalogued noir recollections to the theater, and experience their eerie reenactment in a different geography and a slightly conventionalized world.

Knott's play is a piece of theatrical craftsmanship, its plot as intricately designed as the cramped set on which it is performed. A chipper, extremely intelligent, and blind housewife is married to a man whose ability to manipulate vision --as a fashion photographer -- is his livelihood, in what might strike some as an improbably virtuous domestic union. As a favor to a stranger, the husband serves as a "mule" and transports a doll full of heroin back to New York where it is to be innocently delivered to its owner.

That doesn't work out, and Susy Hendrix, the blind housewife, is left alone in the apartment with the doll while a small-time hood, Roat, schemes to intercept it with the help of two affable con-men.

Audrey Hepburn as Susy in Terence Young's
Wait Until Dark (1967)

To emphasize Susy's defenselessness, and to amplify our anxiety on her behalf, the first characters to enter the stage, and her apartment, are the two con-men, followed by Roat, who decides that the trio are going to use their wits rather than violence to retrieve the doll. So begins the play-within-a-play, in which the audience from the beginning knows more and can see more than the heroine, who by dint of her charm and intelligence must maneuver herself out of her trap.

I can't recall being as frightened by the action in a theater piece as I was by the climax of Wait Until Dark, which fans of modern psychological thrillers such as Silence of the Lambs must recognize as a significant precedent in terms of technique (a woman and her tormentor trapped in the dark) and effect (terror). Certain advantages of a stage production, such as total control of light and sound, make the physical reality of blindness -- which Susy uses to her strategic advantage throughout the play -- more visceral than is possible on film, making the production worthwhile even for those acquainted with the 1967 screen adaptation.

The cast are all new to the Court. Norm Boucher and Aaron Todd Douglas lend appropriate physical heft -- while remaining likable -- to characters who carry switch blades and brass knuckles, while John Hoogenakker as the sadistic dandy Roat is far more menacing despite his slender frame. Emjoy Gavino as Susy is as remarkable in her physical understanding of blindness as for her ability to make such an extraordinarily intelligent "housewife" as Susy persuasive. Erin and Molly Hernandez share in their portrayal of Gloria, the 9 year old neighbor girl who delivers clever and well-timed comic relief.

The drama is ultimately a contest of wits between Roat and Susy, played out through a set of intermediaries, until the two must finally decide the contest face to face. "You've thought of everything," Roat laments near the end of the final contest. Any Hyde Park PhD should hope they are as quick on their feet and as sharp under stress as the keenly empirical, pattern-recognizing, and strategic housewife from Greenwich Village.

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Wait Until Dark
by Frederick Knott
Directed by Ron OJ Parson

March 5 -- April 6 2009
Court Theater
5535 S. Ellis Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637