Chautauqua! soldiers on

Chautauqua!, the National Theater of the United States of America’s postmodern recreation of oratory spectators of the late 1800s and early 1900s, continues to tear up the provinces after premiering in New York over a year ago.
Touring the show would seem tricky, since entire tracts of it need to be rewritten in order to connect it to the Chautauqua tradition of community outreach and revival-meeting intimacy. Local celebrities and scholars are brought in to speak. Local musicians provide the soundtrack and travelling music. There’s instruction in the history of the immediate area where the show is being done.
It’s also essential that a high level of camaraderie, familiarity and comfort is built up. It needs to be a stronger than usual audience/performer connection, because when the Chautauqua! show starts to deconstruct and transmogrify before your very eyes, you feel that the communal understanding which you’ve just been privileged to gain is being snatched away from you.
It’s a breathtaking feeling of growth and loss. When NTUSA presented Chautauqua! on the Long Wharf mainstage last year as part of the 2010 International Festival of Arts & Ideas, I was thunderstruck, and stayed in that numb daze for the rest of the week. Chautauqua! was easily the most important piece of theater I saw last year.
Boston got a taste of Chautauqua! at the ICA Theater last weekend. While the Boston Globe critic didn’t appear as bowled over as I was (context, I suspect, may be everything—the ICA is an avowed experimental stage, while the Long Wharf and A&I can just as often skew traditional as anything else, so there’s more of an opportunity to shock and amaze), the show appears to holding up nicely. It moves to Maine for a single show on April 6, then to Mass MOCA for another one-nighter on April 9.
Meanwhile, the National Theater of the United States of America is readying its next major production, the original pastoral romance The Golden Veil, for a spring 2012 premiere in the troupe’s native New York City.