Brantfest!, Zeppo Theater Company, at the Athenaeum Theatre. Since the 1993 debut of Lovely Letters, Chicago playwright George Brant has forged a tidy little reputation for comedy. He began with parodies of popular entertainments but in 1997 turned to biographies and adaptations of literary classics, most of them clocking in at a comfortable 90 minutes or less. “BrantFest!” includes four of his works.
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Headlining is the world premiere of The Royal Historian of Oz, a biodrama; Brant plays L. Frank Baum. “If you came hoping for the story of a drunkard, drug addict, or adulterer, I am bound to disappoint you,” Baum cautions, then recounts the career of a sickly boy whose fanciful tales made him an icon to children around the world. We learn that the flagship Oz volume was to be called The Emerald City until a superstition regarding jewels in book titles forced a change. That Dorothy was conceived as the daughter that Baum–who had four sons–always wanted. And that floods of mail from juvenile readers sustained the sensitive man through good times and bad. Nor does Brant sugarcoat the latter–illness and Baum’s misguided ventures frequently plunged his family into poverty.
Flanking these two shows are revivals of the 1997 Three Men in a Boat, an armchair version of Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 best-seller detailing an excursion on the Thames, and the 1996 Night of the Mime, parodying the child-and-her-pet genre. Both feature some of the original players (notably Joseph Wycoff as a would-be sailor and George Fuller as the gentle mime), offering audiences who missed the earlier productions an opportunity to rectify their mistake.
