THEATER REVIEW: "Show Your Face!" ★★★½ Through Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; $22-$28 at 312-397-4010 and www.mcachicago.org
Peter Taub's international imports at the Museum of Contemporary Art generally pack the house. Not so Friday night. In all frankness, a collaboration between a Latvian collective of puppeteers and a dance-theater troupe from Ljubljana, Slovenia was always going to be a tough sell. It sounds more like a date night you might see touted on the front page of The Onion.
And not only are Umka.lv (the Latvians) and Betontanc (the Solvenians) unknown quantities to most Chicagoans, their work isn't exactly designed to provide escapist comfort in the January cold.
But it's fascinating.
I can't get the enigmatic and terribly sad star of "Show Your Face!" out of my head, even through the fellow is a puppet without any face whatsoever. Now there aren't many rules or requirements for life as a puppet--you 're free to be pulled by strings or manipulated by hands and it's fine to be wooden or green. But, in general, the possession of some sort of visage, or the symbolic representation thereof, is kind of de rigeur.
Here, you only know the star of the show is there by the shape of his outer garments, even though these remarkable and meticulous artists still manage to take you with this everypuppet on his life journey through a brutal world. And they also manage to make you care about him, as he gets buffeted and tossed around, being as he lacks a face.
There are many metaphors and notions in play here, but none so clear as the way the traumas of this faceless puppet stand in for these intensely engaged artists' collective lack of comfort with a society that has replaced Soviet collectivism with the cult of the individual. The individual face. It's tough, they are saying, when you don't have one.
It's not that they want the old world back. Indeed, there are many images here of the bad old days--the tanks in the streets, the thought police, the bureaucrats, the stomping on individual freedoms. The issue, rather, is what should be the face of the society that has replaced it.
Directed by Matjaz Pograjc, this is sharp, politically engaged, relevant, timely, restless work.
Aside from the rich storytelling--technically simple but visually complex, nonetheless--"Show Your Face!," which is performed in English, is accompanied by a live band. The music is both beautiful and just as haunting as that empty space where, surely, some kind of face, some kind of national identity, needs to form.
Among many lessons here for Chicagoans, this show makes the relentless case that history, compassion, freedom and artists must all be at the center of that decision.