Theater

Let us consider, for a moment, the elusive Michael Shannon in his natural habitat: the cramped storefront stage of a A Red Orchid Theatre, the company that he helped found and to which he frequently returns. Shannon has made a thriving career in Hollywood as a thinking man’s villain, with his looming frame and bug-eyed intensity injecting eldritch weirdness into many a stock character. But to see him flopping joyfully about in this remount of Eugene Ionesco’s Victims of Duty is to see a man truly at home. Too often, the movies keep Shannon pent up in a cage performing tricks. A Red Orchid lets him roam free. When Hollywood celebrities do plays, there’s usually too much ego on display for anything genuine to get through. The star has to be presented as a star, and the rest of the work suffers. Though Shannon has maintained a reputation as an actor’s actor, it’s inspiring to watch him blend into this stellar ensemble. Actors Karen Aldridge and Guy Van Swearingen, who starred alongside Shannon in the original 1996 production, get just as much shine. Van Swearingen is a former Red Orchid artistic director, and Aldridge is an accomplished stage and screen actress in her own right—in many other shows, she’d be the headliner. The script for Victims of Duty is the kind that makes a critic stare blankly at their computer screen, flummoxed by the task of writing actual English sentences to describe it. Ionesco was one of the 20th century’s leading absurdist writers, and this early pl

This surface-level bio is more interested in musical fan service than actual insights, but the music, and its star, are top of the line