In early September, we attended a performance of Alone at Last by Laughing Stock, Chicago’s premier Commedia dell’Arte theatre, at Ridgeville Park in Evanston. In this post, we’ll share some of the images we captured as part of a test of our new camera, as well as some well deserved appreciation for this theatrical form and the performers who make it.
If the company name sounds familiar to readers of the Traveller, Distant Era previously photographed Laughing Stock’s traditional commedia Over My Dead Body: or, How to Distribute Generational Wealth, two years ago in November 2022.
Here’s a look back at the production images for that show.
And here are the portraits we made for it.
A Walk in the Park
Alone at Last wasn’t an assignment or a gig. We went to the show because we love their work. We also wanted to support our dear friend and collaborator Jennifer Mohr, whose name likely appears in the pages of the Traveller more than any other aside from myself and Elizabeth.
Since Alone at Last took place in the park in daylight and there were no objections to taking photos from the front row, I familiarized myself with the controls and settings on the Canon R5 Mark II and its 24–105mm f/2.8 lens, which brought me close to the action just as easily as it zoomed out to take in the whole stage. As a result, I got to practice and find my way around the new gear while providing a theatre company we love with some images from their show. I was pleased with the new focusing capabilities, which tracked subjects’ eyes across scenes and made capturing action very easy in full daylight.
Photographing the show not only served as the perfect training ground for familiarizing myself with the new camera functions, but I was also honored to provide Laughing Stock with dozens of photographs to promote their future work.
A Personal Note on Commedia dell’Arte
I love this style of work. It reminds me of my roots as a street performer at the Ohio Renaissance Festival in the early 1990s. Partly because of the crazy over-the-top commedia style street plays we did. Partly because of the Renaissance faire acts that surrounded us then—the masks and costumes and stock characters and comedy bits. As kids, we weren’t very aware of the similarities between our silly street bits and commedia, but in hindsight it seems we channeling commedia style performance unwittingly.
We were influenced by the mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I remember being inspired by Benedick from Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, pretentious artists, and The Tick, while looking up to the then-new Swordsmen performers, and all of this amounted to playing Capitano, though I did not know it at the time.
Commedia reminds me of a living Saturday-morning-cartoon world. Characters are vibrant, general, and utterly knowable; their actions are clear. Regardless what happens in the narrative, it’s still like a cartoon and obeys cartoon rules. It’s an optimistic world, a larger-than-life world. Even in the grimmer, political neo commedia I’ve seen by The Conspirators, sinister, apocalyptic dread is accompanied by clown makeup, rim shot, and cymbal. It might be deadly serious, but it still exists outside the bounds of this reality. We can still laugh, no matter how dark it gets.
The Laughing Stock shows I’ve seen have been bright and fun; there’s never the sense that anything awful will happen in them; they’re sub realities that offer a blissful break from this world’s complications and its sorrows. Escape, in the necessary sense. Or, as Laughing Stock puts it:
Laughing Stock Theatre creates and performs substantive, high-quality Commedia dell’Arte that spectacularizes the mundane and delights our audiences.
The Company
I love what Laughing Stock does and have been so happy to capture their work. Check out Laughing Stock’s work and mission on their website, and check out their company here.
Alone at Last featured: Claire Proepper, Jennifer Mohr, and Shea Lee, with closing thanks from Martin Downs.
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