Turret

Unsettling but fertile ground of Turret: A Red Orchid ensemble members Michael Shannon and Travis A. Knight star in Levi Holloway’s eerie new play – Jerald Raymond Pierce,  American Theater Magazine 5/21/24

It’s hard to tease playwright Levi Holloway’s new play Turret (in a sold-out run through June 22) any better than those words from the man himself. Starring A Red Orchid Theatre ensemble members Michael Shannon and Travis A. Knight, Holloway’s play-which he called “a spiritual cousin” to the horror and thriller genres-welcomes audiences into an underground bunker for an eerie journey, something akin to a mix of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village with Groundhog Day. It’s a work that draws on Holloway’s own experiences dating back to the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in 2020.

“I was feeling pretty claustrophobic, and every day kind of felt like a loop,” said Holloway, who also directs this production.

Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, Green and Rabbit (Shannon and Knight, respectively) are surviving in an underground bunker, hidden away from a mysterious enemy looming just outside their vault door. Days are almost rote, with Rabbit running on a treadmill while Green issues a strange series of cognitive tests: from confirming basic information, like their mission, to trials of precognition and challenges to Rabbit to predict the details of a photo before it’s shown to him. Day in, day out, the same. From there, what starts as a militaristic relationship turns fatherly, and then into something else entirely, as the play progresses and a visitor upends everything.

It is in that first turn, from parental to otherwise, that Turret morphs from the all too familiar feeling of repetition, of being stuck inside during the lockdown days of the pandemic, into something much more personal. In addition to wanting to create a play for Knight and Shannon-whom Holloway called “two of my favorite actors on the planet,” while acknowledging that it’s both “horrifying and thrilling” to work with them-he said he also wanted to speak to the experience of losing his dad, who died around the time he started working on the play.

Bringing things full circle, just as Holloway finished the play, his son was born last December. “He was born on the same birthday as my dad,” Holloway said. “I couldn’t finish the play until that happened, because it changed everything.”

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Holloway decided to direct Turret himself, adding another layer of vulnerability and investment to a show he’s already deeply connected with. A Red Orchid didn’t hesitate, Holloway said, in championing the idea. While Holloway didn’t direct Grey House, the 2019 play that received its world premiere at A Red Orchid prior to a Broadway run in 2023, he said that’s an exception-one of only a handful of plays he’s written that he didn’t direct.

“Collaboration is my favorite thing on the planet,” Holloway said, “but with Turret, I felt a responsibility beyond the script because it’s so personal, and because I could see it at a very high resolution in my brain.”

Shannon lauded Holloway’s ability to mesh his imagination with personal experiences and feelings to create a fertile ground for actors to play in. He hesitated to say definitively, but Shannon thinks it might be his first time working on a new play with the person who wrote it also directing it.

“Levi sees things very cinematically,” Shannon said. “It’s not just about the words or the dialogue or the characters; he has a vision that’s a total vision.”

“The rehearsal process before we moved over was, in large part, an act of faith,” Holloway said. “The challenge is, once you start putting things on tables and things in hands and walls, is the check you wrote going to cash? Everybody is doing their utmost to make sure that we are creating something that is spectacle-driven but intimate.”

Spectacle-driven but intimate: four words that also could have described Tracy Letts’s Bug, a similarly unsettling production that leaves audiences doubting and wondering while managing to be a feast for the eyes and the mind, and in which both Shannon and A Red Orchid figured from its inception two decades ago. Grounded by unsurprisingly outstanding performances, Turret speaks to what keeps artists like Shannon coming back to Chicago: It’s a bold swing that gives artists like him opportunities they might not have anywhere else. Shannon said he values having a space where he and his fellow artists can take risks. A Red Orchid, Shannon explained, has always been comfortable with discomfort-an identity he said makes the theatre company well worth holding on to.

“There’s a lot of theatres that were around when we started out that aren’t anymore,” Shannon said. “The thing about the longevity of this space is that, the longer it’s around, the richer it becomes with its age. So you want to keep contributing to it in order to strengthen that and make sure that it doesn’t disappear.”

Recursion in a post-apocalyptic bunker: Turret is a powerful puzzle box of a play – Karen Topham, ChicagoOnStage 5/13/24

Set in the post-apocalyptic future, Levi Holloway’s riveting Turret is more than the trying to survive the end of the world drama it clearly is on the surface. Below that surface, it is a thoroughly engaging examination of masculinity as well as the need, the desperate need, for some kind of connection with someone else. It is also a puzzle box of a play, in which things may not be as they appear and even death might not be permanent; you will need to watch the entire show to begin to really understand it.

A Red Orchid Theatre’s ambitious production, directed by the playwright at the Chopin Theatre, will blow you away. The sheer size of the production answers the question of why it couldn’t be done at the company’s Wells St. home. Grant Sabin’s bunker-like design overwhelms the stage-and us-with multiple levels, a huge central hamster wheel (actually a home for an often-used treadmill), an upstage hatch-like door that leads to whatever is out there, a decently well-stocked bar, a wall on which to project what is on a computer screen, and even a piano. Combined with Mike Durst’s futuristic lighting and Jeffrey Levin’s intense wall of sound, this is a show that refuses to be ignored and demands your full attention.

Two men-Green (Michael Shannon) and Rabbit (Travis A. Knight)-appear to have resided together in this “turret” since Rabbit was just a baby. (A third, Lawrence Grimm’s Birdy, briefly but memorably joins them in Act Two.) The two are soldiers in a war against an unseen enemy that is constantly trying to breach the turret’s defenses, trying to keep themselves more or less sane with conversation, old music-shades of Fallout-and weirdly outdated technology that makes you wonder just how long they’ve actually been doing this.

The structure of the play is recursive; things keep happening and then happening again, changing incrementally with each repetition. (This is what creates the puzzle box: nothing will make sense in an absolute way until we’ve seen it all, but the tension-and the strange and awkward relationship between the men-is a constant throughout.) The repetitions and echoes allow us to learn more about the characters, especially within a motif that has Green quizzing Rabbit as he runs the treadmill wearing wired headgear that allows the inquisitor (and us) to see his responses as he thinks them. As with everything else here, these quizzes follow the same patterns, though the answers are not necessarily the same; it is in their alterations that we start to see more about who these men are to each other.

Holloway, both as writer and director, is not afraid of dialogue-free scenes. I didn’t actually time it, but I think there was no dialogue at all for at least the first five minutes of the play as we watch the kind of rote, repeated actions that men might engage in just to fill time. The music, too, is repetitive; they play it to stay sane and human, but there is ample evidence that one or both of them have already lost their minds…or even their humanity.

The antiquated technology-Paul Deziel’s computer screen projections have an 80s IBM feel, though there are occasionally filmed moments from the past that most likely are solely within a character’s mind-continues the motif of sameness. Nothing ever changes here. Even the whiskey on the bar seems never to empty. This place might as well be hell. (Maybe it is.)

The performances are all top-notch. Shannon’s Green, the older and more experienced soldier-and father-figure to the younger Rabbit (whose pejorative rank is “pollywog”)-is totally focused on his “mission.” Shannon is a smart enough actor, though, to allow honest emotions to filter through Green’s “commander” facade, humanizing the character enough that even the looped interactions of reality can’t keep us from empathizing with him. Knight’s Rabbit, always desperate to be trusted to go outside and “scout” even with the dangers posed by their enemies and a poisoned atmosphere, is even more tightly wound than Green. There is often the indication that he may lose control…and hints that this has happened to him before. With Birdy, Grimm has a character who has already admittedly lost his mind. (Hiding while watching your wife get literally torn apart will do that.) Unlike the others, he does not need to hold back and can really put it all out there. Birdy shows us where Green and Rabbit are likely to be heading, and it isn’t pretty.

This is not an easy play any more than the situation in which its characters find themselves is a normal one. Through Holloway’s clever script and his cast’s powerful performances, though, there is a lot to examine in this Turret”

Levi Holloway’s Turret is a 21st-century Endgame.  His world premiere with A Red Orchid Theatre is bleak, brilliant, and a little Beckettian – Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader 5/17/24

“If you’ve been looking for the 21st century’s answer to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, your wait is over. Levi Holloway’s Turret, now in a world premiere (also directed by the playwright) with A Red Orchid Theatre, taps into the same existential dread and odd father-son dynamics present in Beckett’s 1957 masterpiece.

Green (Michael Shannon) and Rabbit (Travis A. Knight) are Holloway’s answer to Beckett’s Hamm and Clov, the two men living in a bunker-like setting after some cataclysm has left the world “corpsed.” But while Beckett was opaque on what drove Hamm and Clov (and Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in garbage receptacles) into their claustrophobic world, Holloway’s Green makes it clear early on that there was a war. Just who was waging the war and its causes are unclear, but Green’s side lost. The elder of the two men, Green is clearly the head honcho in the dark world of concrete and thrift store furnishings (including an incongruous spinnet piano) housing them.

Grant Sabin’s multilevel set design impressively fills the larger stage at the Chopin Theatre, where A Red Orchid has moved for the sake of this production, and the fiery furnace at one side adds a suggestion of hellfire, counterbalanced by Mike Durst’s crepuscular lighting design. Jeffrey Levin’s sound design and original music bring in both familiar mid-20th-century hits like Solomon Burke’s version of “I’ll Be Doggone” and the Platters’ “Only You” (the latter in a charming interlude where Green and Rabbit impersonate high school kids at a dance) and an underscore of otherworldly hums and echoes.

But in this universe, deja vu seems to be a driving element. Is Rabbit always the same Rabbit, or is he a series of Rabbits created anew each day? Early on, Green upbraids Rabbit for jerking off to a vintage centerfold. “We’re surrounded by all the yous to come, every day after today. Each one of those yous will look back on this you and have a hard time with what they’re seeing.” So is Rabbit a clone of a clone? (Shades of Caryl Churchill’s A Number.) Or is this Groundhog Day after a holocaust?

I think the same answer applies to audiences who want to cut through Holloway’s demanding and knotty work. Like Beckett, he doesn’t give away easy answers. But like Beckett, he’s also not a self-conscious nihilist or cynic. Just as Hamm asks Clov to share something “from your heart,” Green and Rabbit end each of their endless days with this exchange: “Something kind.” “Something kind back.” They may have lost the actual words of comfort, but not the desire to offer solace to each other. Perhaps, in a corpsed world, that desire is the most we can hope for.”

Review: ‘Turret’ by A Red Orchid is Michael Shannon doing his intense best work – Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 5/13/24

“Levi Holloway and Michael Shannon, a killer combination if ever Chicago theater produced one, have been to the big time and come back, formidable of craft but ever in search of intimate substance. Shannon’s career has taken him from the back room of an Old Town bar to a major Hollywood career and two Academy Award nominations. Holloway’s last play for A Red Orchid Theatre, “Grey House,” went to Broadway last summer.

Both have returned this spring to A Red Orchid, which has accommodated both the needs of Holloway’s dystopian but darkly comic play, “Turret,” and Shannon’s box office pull by moving to a larger space at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

The resulting production is really something: I’ve watched Shannon on stage and screen for some 30 years and this performance is right up there with his best work, especially when it comes to his longstanding ability to dissect masculinity and reveal one of those men who feels deeply but so lacks the language of emotional vulnerability that his communication skills are authoritarian at best and, at worst, bestial.

In the case of Holloway’s phenomenally rich piece of writing, one of many plays and screenplays penned during the panicked pandemic that imagines with notable veracity a scenario where the world no long functions in civilized fashion, those common male failings have a powerful impact on a young person, played by Travis A. Knight with an intensity to match Shannon’s own paternalistic work. Knight clearly is playing a a surrogate son.

Simply put, “Turret” is a searing drama about a loving son and his alcoholic father hidden within a dystopian genre play about two men stuck in an underground bunker when the world above has ceased to exist. Look closely, though, and all of that falls away, as these two actors clearly understand. Love, after all, is the most tested in these kinds of circumstances.

We never entirely find out why the world has ended, except that there has been some kind of war and we are watching the fate of the losers. If you’ve seen “The Last of Us,” “Civil War” or especially “Leave the World Behind,” you will have a flavor of the ambiance: a heavy protective door, anxious looks at the ruinous situation outside, enemies in the trees above, physical and mental things done to pass the time, personal meltdowns, technological meltdowns and a return to the analog.

But Holloway is a far more minimalist writer than the writers of those works and “Turret” is sparse and taut and cagey of divulging information. The two men, Shannon’s Green and Knight’s Rabbit, aren’t short of resources in their bunker and they still have a kind of wacky MS-DOS system to allow them to communicate, especially as Rabbit runs on the treadmill that dominates Grant Sabin’s epic setting. They’re in a pseudo-military relationship, it seems, and Green boozes from the many bottles on the set. They’re a team, heck, an entire world, alternately needy and aggressive, sweet and violent, highly functional and a total disaster for each other.

There’s another rub, too. Someone arrives from outside. The less you know about Birdy, played by Lawrence Grimm, the better, except to know that Grimm, a stalwart of this theater, is doing the best work of his career.

I suspect that has a lot to do with Holloway directing his own work. Typically, that’s not a great idea, but when a vision for a metaphoric landscape is this precise, metaphoric and detailed, it can be desirable for the writer to get precisely what he wants, what he envisages in his head without some other competing vision in the way. This is a heavily scored piece from sound designer Jeffrey Levin, and every beat and bang and thump and piece of music has been thought out with uncommon precision. The level of production here exceeds anything I’ve seen at A Red Orchid these last many years, and that is no small compliment given that theater’s decades of creative achievements.

It hard needs stating that it is not every day at an off-Loop theater you can see an actor of Shannon’s caliber, or one willing to dive so deep for this kind of story in this kind of theater.

The script needs some attention late in the second act, where one major narrative twist doesn’t fully make sense and the sudden advent of shorter scenes throws the production off its otherwise exquisite internal rhythm. But as was the case with “Purpose,” the Steppenwolf drama now likely going to Broadway, that is a minor concern. “Turret” is another example, coming hard upon, of Chicago theater at its very best. You would not want to miss the chance”

A dystopian world is just the tip of the iceberg in riveting ‘Turret’ at A Red Orchid – Catey Sulivan, Chicago Sun Times 5/13/24

“There’s a fair amount of tantalizing ambiguity to interpret in the world premiere of “Turret,” Levi Holloway’s cryptic, vivid survivalist story. Although to clarify, the three-man production from A Red Orchid Theatre is not merely a tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.

Running through June 9 and directed by the playwright, “Turret” is a multi-genre labyrinth that incorporates sci-fi, thriller and horror into a story that depicts the devastation of loneliness, the pull of parental love and that peculiar, unnerving s