All a-‘Gog’ over experimental theater

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Michael Salinas, (left), who stars in "The Gog/Magog Project," confers with Jason Lindner, the playwright.

Updated: January 24, 2012 9:24PM

So, you say you hate the kind of performance-art thing where you walk into a theater and see an actor in a cage who has voluntarily imprisoned himself in the name of art so he can illuminate your empty bourgeois life with his brilliance?

Then you’re going to love Wilmette playwright Jason Lindner’s “The Gog/Magog Project,” which opens Feb. 1 at the Steep Theatre in Chicago and basically makes fun of that whole business.

Maybe. Kind of.

“Part of the reason I was attracted to this piece is that it does the experimental theater/performance art thing and makes fun of it at the same time,” said director Brant Russell, a Winnetka native who went to New Trier at roughly the same time as Lindner. Lindner graduated three years earlier, in ’95, so Russell’s only memory of him was that “he could grow a beard in, like, one lab period.”

Lindner, who moved back to Chicago two years ago after earning his MFA in playwriting at Yale in 2002 and spending eight years in New York. There he performed with a French clown troupe and wrote adaptations of “Frankenstein” and “Alice in Wonderland” for a movement-based troupe and had a number of plays produced across the country.

Change of art

“ ‘Gog’ is,” he said, “in many ways, a satire of experimental theater and that sort of thing. It could be described as a cautionary tale about the evolution of an artist, who starts out feeling like the king of the world, teaching life lessons to all the people around you — then eventually realizes what folly that is. And how dangerous that can be.”

Essentially, “Gog/Magog” (which has been produced at Yale and in New York, Los Angeles and in England) is the story of a legendary performance artist named Alexander Gog, who sends out a grant proposal in which he offers to imprison himself in a theater for one year and perform one new piece each night (plus a matinee performance Sundays).

A shadowy government agency agrees to fund the project, and then finagles the contract to obligate Gog to perform year after year, subsisting only on banana-flavored Moon Pies, until his death 15 years later.

Audiences will encounter Steep Theatre ensemble member Michael Salinas in a cage going over notes supposedly left behind by Gog after his death, but is that true? Or is he, in fact, Gog himself, merely performing one more show in his ongoing incarceration?

The reality of the show is meant to be a bit ambiguous, Lindner said, as well as a bit pretentious.

“The initial idea for the show came from a conversation I had with friends, when I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to be locked in a theater and perform whatever we wrote each day in an evening show?’ Then I thought, ‘What an obnoxious, self-indulgent, pretentious idea,’ ” he said, laughing.

Showing reality

Then, recalling how he wrote the play as part of his MFA program during a cross-country trip on an old portable typewriter: “What could be more pretentious than that? From there, the idea became, what would happen to somebody who really did try to do that? What would be the logical extreme?”

“I’ve never in the past been super-wild about plays about theater,” said Russell, whose affiliation with Steppenwolf Theatre includes assisting playwright Tracy Letts during the production of the Tony-winning “August: Osage County,” here and on Broadway. “But I think if he were alive today, this is the sort of play Beckett would be doing. It tackles significant issues via theater, such as self-respect and privacy and entrapment.”

Russell added that, “Of course, it’s also kind of hilarious from the perspective of the theater artist, because over the course of 75 minutes you watch this guy devolve from a pretentious but hopeful and capable performer to an insane, suicidal pile of nerves. Which is where most theater artists start out and end up.”