RECOMMENDED
The recently opened Stars and Garters Theater, located at 3914 North Clark in the ground floors of two adjoining Tudor Revival apartment buildings (the former home of the Otherworld Theater Company), is a storefront alone on an otherwise commercially barren stretch of Clark Street. It is neither Wrigleyville nor Lakeview, neither Uptown nor Graceland. It is somewhere in between, an expanse of road crowded with an abundance of gas stations, in homage to what it is used for: to get somewhere else.
The theater’s lobby is small. A seating area with low-slung benches and stilted cocktail tables blends into a windowless ticket office. A narrow bar (paid for by ticket instead of cash) crowds the hallway to two gender-neutral restrooms. The entrances to the theater’s stages open on either side of this liminal space: the Mainstage and Rouge Room. The Rouge Room is a small black-box theater with chairs arranged in a semi-circle around an open stretch of floor. The Mainstage is, predictably, more traditional, with tiered seating and a raised stage crowded with whatever props suit the night’s performance. I found myself in the latter on Thursday, October 30, for Chicago-based theater and performance collective The Conspirators’ interpretation of “Duck Soup”—a 1933 Marx Brothers comedy (which this writer has not seen) adapted for the stage by director Wm. Bullion and playwright Sid Feldman.
The Conspirators, which comprise much of the cast’s eleven members, “work exclusively in a neo-commedia style called ‘The Style,’” a mode of performance which employs “grotesque makeup and costume, stylized movement punctuated by percussion, audience address and malevolent satire.” Excluding facial hair, every actor’s face is painted eggshell white, and each step made or hand raised is exaggerated by a mimicking snare drum or slide whistle. The effect is that of unseriousness. It is a natural manner to employ when adapting a film born from that period in which the term “slapstick” originated. But the audience must remember that despite “The Style”‘s seeming comfort in this genre, and how natural such an unnatural approach to comedy may feel, it’s a method employed by The Conspirators regardless of subject matter. No matter whether an adaptation concerns the work of the Marx Brothers in 1933 or the Brat Pack in 1985, the result will be the same: painted faces, percussive steps and asides to the audience.
“Duck Soup” opens cold, like gazpacho. A worker with a bindle thrown over his shoulder enters the stage alone and, in perhaps the only silent moment of the show, sings a ballad about abandonment, lovesickness and betrayal at the hands of one’s own country. Wearing an unmistakably red “Make Freedonia Great Again” baseball cap, he slowly removes it from his head and, wielding its underside, asks the crowd for money. The percussionist beside the stage, whose snares and cymbals add the “style,” remains largely idle, allowing a show which is almost entirely humorous to begin on a serious note. This moment lasts a minute, perhaps two, before the stage is quickly crowded with many more white-faced actors who begin to sing the national anthem of the nation in which the play is set: Freedonia.
The remainder of the show’s eighty-two minutes is consumed by a feud between the president of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly and Ambassador Trentino, a diplomat from the bordering country of Sylvania. President Firefly, a former television tycoon with an expected lack of restraint in his speech, has recently been installed as Freedonia’s leader at the behest of the fabulously wealthy, recently widowed Freedonian heiress, Gloria Teasdale. Firefly and Trentino repeatedly offend one another through a lack (or excess) of cordiality, but the crux of their quarrel centers around their mutual desire to wed (and share in the newfound wealth of) Mrs. Teasdale. A woman as masculine in her features as her pockets are deep, Trentino and Firefly find a way to look past her lack of beauty for those non-physical attributes that can make a man fall: money, power and a bit more money.
A president with a background in entertainment offending foreign adversaries (and often threatening war) is a low-hanging analog to our current politics. And, though I am almost certain “Duck Soup” was chosen for adaptation by The Conspirators in 2025 due to those parallels, the collective blends contemporary politics with the 1933 plot in a manner that never strays into the realm of lecturing, that place antithetical to comedy where humor takes a backseat to “importance.” There are no moments when the audience is compelled to rise in applause, no compliments to the cast’s bravery. The play is better for it—the obvious is never called out because it does not need to be. “Duck Soup” being adapted for the stage at this time is commentary enough.
The audience requires no introduction to realize the parallels, other than existence in our country and a pair of working ears or eyes. The occasional reference to the present day slips in—President Firefly waxing on Tylenol’s adverse effects in a Kennedy rasp, a cabinet member snapping photos of a folder garishly labeled “War Plans” with reference to Signal chats—but always with enough restraint (and accompanying brevity) that each anachronism contributes to the humor rather than distracting from it. President Firefly yells, “Yes, Uber for two,” whenever he exits the stage with his son, and the audience laughs because they have been trained to expect such purposeful disregard for historicity.
What makes “Duck Soup” turn, however, is not the wit of each joke told, but rather the delivery by a cast as adept at producing laughter as any in Chicago. An audience member quietly told me after the show’s conclusion that “There was more laughter in there than a Second City show,” and, despite the theater’s much smaller size, I have a hard time disagreeing. The actors portraying President Firefly (Mitchell Jackson), Ambassador Trentino (Vi Burnette) and Gloria Teasdale (Hayden Hartrick), exert such effort, physical and vocal, in bringing their characters to life and ensuring each moment of the play at least has the specter of humor that the white paint on their faces has nearly melted away in sweat by the play’s end. There is not a moment void of comedy, word spoken without accent, or step taken without accompanying percussion. The effect is a riotous, fast-paced comedy the likes of which should draw people to the theater and nowhere else. The thrill of “Duck Soup” could not be captured on the screen. Its eighty-minute length seems entirely too short and long—short because the laughter never stops; long because how are the actors able to keep it up for so long?
“Duck Soup” being the first performance by The Conspirators I’ve had the pleasure to see, it is unclear what effect the show’s reliance on pre-written source material has on such a violent style of comedy—whether a pre-determined script funnels their chaos into digestible theater or what I saw on Thursday night could be even more grandiose if a plot was written explicitly with the cast’s talents in mind. What I do know is that with a writer and director as talented as Wm. Bullion and Sid Feldman appear to be, and a cast as multi-faceted as that of “Duck Soup,” it will be difficult for them to put together a performance that fails to entertain.
The Conspirators’ “Duck Soup” runs through November 23 at Stars & Garters, 3914 North Clark. Tickets are $30, available at conspirewithus.org.
