“The Good” with Jenny Magnus/Photo: Jeffrey Bivens
RECOMMENDED
“The Good,” the one-woman show created and performed by Jenny Magnus, running through April 21 at Chicago Dramatists, is a new musical work that asks the question, “What is good?” Directed by Stefan Brün, Magnus engages in surreal storytelling that touches on abstract notions of politics, business, morality and wisdom, told through singing and spoken-word poetry backed by a prerecorded continuo on bass guitars overlaid with harmonized vocal accompaniment.
The dreamy atmosphere of the void-like black-box theater and the ephemeral music seduces the attendee’s mind into wandering, but one must stay engaged to fully comprehend Magnus’ philosophical pondering. The flow of the show is loosely dubbed off the writing of Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, and his collection of private notes, “Meditations.”
In “Meditations,” Aurelius writes short, connecting aphorisms about the “how” and “why” of living a fulfilling life; Magnus does the same, with each proposition leading to a conclusion that supports the premises of the next conclusion, and so on. If you space out for a second, you will get lost and must catch up.
If you can maintain focus over the brief forty-five-minute runtime, you will be justly rewarded. Magnus asks more questions about “What is good” than provides answers: “Is not being good the same as being bad?”; “Is it fair to say that goodness is an illusion?”; “What if [the bullshit] can’t be helped?” However, there are some conditional prescriptions: “Is this the cost of doing business? If it all adds up to nothing, you better start to save!” Magnus doesn’t tell us what to do, but asks us to reconsider what we think we ought to do and why we ought to do it.
“The Good” with Jenny Magnus/Photo: Jeffrey Bivens
A recurring theme of the “Red and the Blue” pervades the work. “We see the need; We cannot meet the need… What if we were to tear through the red and prioritize our own comfort… on the edge of choice, of consequence, of using up the blue?” Besides the obvious correlation with contemporary U.S. political ideologies, one could imagine the red vs. blue dichotomy to parallel arguments of egalitarianism over liberalism, or people over profit… The beauty of the metaphor is that it challenges each of us in different ways depending on our own personal politics.
Moments of levity break up the musing, as when Magnus leads a corps of dancers projected on the back wall in the “Secret Shitty Things” dance while asking if people “can be not good but in tiny ways no one might notice.” “I said I want less bullshit,” says Magnus in a humorous compromise, “I didn’t say none.”
“The Good” is as satisfying and frustrating as any great philosophical text, in that it foregoes prescriptions and forces one to confront their own biases, deconstruct their longheld beliefs and then be tasked with doing the hard work of putting them back together; it asks us to think about our feeling and feel about our thinking. Like Plato’s Socrates, Magnus offers us landmarks to guide us along the roadmap toward the examined life, one that’s worth living.
“The Good” is presented by Curious Theatre Branch and runs through April 21 at Chicago Dramatists, 798 North Aberdeen. Showtimes are Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm. Tickets are pay what you can (suggested $20) at curioustheatrebranch.com.
