The Cast
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Martie Sanders (Ata) gratefully makes her Apple Tree debut with Criminal Hearts. Martie recently starred as Haley Walker in the one-woman play Bad Dates (Madison Repertory) and prior to that had a thrill portraying the legendary Mae West in dirty Blonde (Madison Repertory). Other favorite roles include: the nasal-voiced Lina LaMont in Singin' In The Rain (Theatre at the Center); Janis Joplin in Love, Janis (Royal George); Jenny Diver in Three Penny Opera (American Theatre Company); Hero in Much Ado (Chicago Shakespeare); five women in Cooking with Lard (Lifeline); three male archetypes in Anton In Show Business (Human Race); and the title roles in both Little Joe Monaghan (Thirsty Theatre); and Lapin! Lapin! (Bailiwick). On film, Martie is the romantic lead in the independent feature The Unspoken (Warrior Films). Martie also writes and performs solo monologues with the Sweat Girls (www.sweatgirls.org) Later this summer you can see Martie in Sweat Etiquette and in The Big Adventures of Little Women when she returns as a featured soloist in Live Bait Theater's Fillet Of Solo Festival. For their criminal hearts, Martie dedicates this show to her public defender gal pals - Marijane, Ruth, Mi-Julie, and Peg.
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Candace Taylor (Bo) teaches Acting at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts. She has taught acting, voice and directed at the University of Colorado, Southern Methodist University, SUNY/Albany, the University of Delaware and the University of Tennessee. As an actress, Candace has most recently appeared as Lady Macduff and Hecate at Milwaukee Shakespeare Theater and in Yellowman at Denver's Curious Theatre. Among others, she has directed productions of Arcadia, Love's Labor's Lost, Flyin' West and On the Verge. Candace served as dialect coach for Indiana Repertory Theatre's Intimate Apparel and … A Young Lady from Rwanda and is a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. She has a BS in Speech/Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA from the Professional Theatre Training Program at the University of Delaware.
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Kurt Johns (Wib) is the Associate Producer at the Apple Tree Theatre where he directed the critically acclaimed IRON earlier this season. Kurt was nominated for a 2006 Jeff Award for directing THE WATER COOLERS at the Lakeshore Theatre. Last season he directed the popular TALE OF THE ALLERGIST'S WIFE and received a 2005 After Dark Award for directing VINCENT IN BRIXTON. Apple Tree audiences remember him in THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM and Booth in ASSASSINS (Jeff nominated). Kurt appeared on Broadway in ASPECTS OF LOVE and CHESS, directed by Trevor Nunn. He was Enjolras in the First National Tour of LES MISERABLES. In Chicago, Kurt appeared in SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and SHE ALWAYS SAID PABLO at the Goodman Theatre. He played Hildy in WINDY CITY (Jeff nominated), Baron Felix in GRAND HOTEL, Che in EVITA and Harold Hill in THE MUSIC MAN at the Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre. Kurt received a Jeff Award for GRAND NIGHT FOR SINGING at the Drury Lane Theatre. Kurt took on writing and producing credits for THE NOT MIKADO, and performed the role of KoKo. Kurt founded ARTZTEK LLC, which provides tech and Internet services to the arts world. Kurt received the Local Hero Award from Alliance of Resident Theatre of New York for his service to not for profit theatres.
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Jonathan Wagner (Robbie) is very happy to be making his Apple Tree debut. Jonathan was most recently seen understudying Chicago Shakespeare's How can you run with a shell on your back, performing the role of Ari. Recent credits include: Keep Ishmael (A-Train) with White Horse, Madame X (Merivel) with AlleyCat Productions and The People vs. Friar Lawrence (Mercutio) with the BoarsHead Theatre. When Jonathan is not grifting in Highland Park, he teaches at Second City Training Center, provides the voice for the American Bar Association's acclaimed “Litigation Podcast,” and serves as the music director for the Chicago Improv Festival. Jonathan has also written three musicals, and will bore you with details about all three on request.
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cast | press | photos | background | tickets
Press
Pioneer Press feature
Copley News Service review
North Shore Magazine feature
Pioneer Press review
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Highlights from the Pioneer Press feature by Catey Sullivan
Jane Martin's plays are invariably as intriguing as her (his? their?) identity. Nobody -- at least nobody who has ever talked publicly -- knows who the playwright is. That's extraordinary, when you consider that Martin -- or rather "Martin" -- is the author of almost two dozen full length plays and one-acts and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her 1994 gem "Keely and Du."
But for director Ray Frewen, now knee-deep in rehearsals for the Apple Tree Theatre production of Martin's "Criminal Hearts," the playwright's identity isn't as important as the play itself.
Martie Sanders is surprised by Candace Taylor, a con-artist who breaks into her room at the start of Apple Tree Theatre's "Criminal Hearts."
(Dan Luedert/Staff Photographer)
"The one thing that has always fascinated me about Jane -- whoever he or she is -- is her take on the inner workings of the female mind. It's astonishing, and it's one of the reasons her plays work so well," he said.
Power play
Frewen should know. About a decade ago, he was featured in Apple Tree's production of "Keely and Du," a slicing and unexpectedly funny story about a zealous pro life couple who kidnap a pregnant woman and hold her captive so that she can't have an abortion.
With "Criminal Hearts," Frewen is immersed in another Martin play with two radically different women at its center. Bo is an African-American con artist described in the stage directions as "a grifter in good times, a burglar in bad" for whom truth "is the least of her worries." Ata is an upper middle class, agoraphobic, hypochondriac white woman who has a very clear, very finite sense of right and wrong. A messy divorce, a posh apartment stripped down to a stack of empty pizza boxes and a stack of soda cans and a meeting at gunpoint, and "Criminal Hearts" takes off into a relationship drama/comedy unlike any other.
The gun changes hands, victim and victimized flip-flop and truth becomes fluid in a piece that is, at its heart, about trust.
"I love the description of Bo that Martin gives," said Frewen, who makes his Apple Tree directorial with "Criminal Hearts." "The whole idea of truth being the least of her worries -- she has this almost amoral setting on the surface, so you never really know if she's telling the truth or not. It's a shifting surface."
As Ata, actor Martie Sanders is -- like Frewen -- a veteran of Jane Martin works, having performed in three roles in a Dayton, Ohio production of Martin's send-up of the theater, "Anton in Show Business."
"The writing is wonderful," she said of Martin's plays. "What I really like is that Martin doesn't shy away from getting political, but she doesn't bonk you over the head with it or take an absolute stand."
Carefully unbalanced
"And the characters are never predictable," she added. "Every time you think you've got a character nailed, they do something that's completely in keeping with the person, but totally unexpected. It's like you're on a Tilt-a-Whirl, where you're constantly being kept off balance. You think you're going in one direction, and then you find yourself going somewhere else."
The female-centric nature of "Criminal Hearts" didn't pass unnoticed when Frewen signed on to the project. "Being a man directing this piece about two very strong women, I thought about that a great deal at first," he said. "What I've found is that I'm kind of sitting back and letting the actors inform me more than I usually do. I don't have the degree of preconceived notions about exactly how things should be that I usually do. I'm kind of like, why don't we have the ladies do it, see what they bring to it, and then we'll work it out together." cast | press | photos | background | tickets
Highlights from the Copley News Service review by Dan Zeff
Jane Martin is the most mysterious figure in modern American drama. Nobody knows whether Martin is the playwright's real name, or whether Martin is a male or female or even a playwriting team. Whoever Martin is, he/she/they have created a niche in contemporary American drama reserved for oddball female characters at war with abusive men.
Martin has been providing plays for regional American theaters for more tan 25 years, many of them originating at the annual Humana Festival in Louisville. The Apple Tree Theatre is currently presenting Martin's 1992 comedy, though a comedy with a sting, called "Criminal Hearts."
For much of the evening "Criminal Hearts" plays out at the sitcom level, most of the laughs provided by the contrast between the street-smart Bo and the desperate upper class woman at the end of her tether. The fourth character in the story is Robbie, pretty much a secondary figure injected to enhance the playwright's cynicism toward male conduct against the two ladies.
The success of the play rises or falls on the skills of the actress who plays Ata, and the Apple Tree has come up a winner by casting Martie Sanders in the role. Only Sanders knows how exhausting the role is. Ata is on stage virtually the entire play, her mood rarely less than frantic. The character has her motor running for almost two straight hours and an actress has to pace herself to ensure she has something left at the end of the evening. Sanders keeps the adreneline pumping relentlessly but she stays in control of the role. It¹s a pretty amazing performance when you think about it.
Although she had a few first night glitches, Candace Taylor is excellent as Bo. You can believe that this woman is a survivor in a murderously tough environment, cool and calculating but with enough human feeling left to connect with Ata, a woman she would never encounter in real life in equal circumstances in a million years.
Jonathan Wagner gets some laughs out of the role of Robbie, a cold-blooded young criminal who gets furious when the Chicago Cubs lose. Kurt Johns is the cool and detestable Wib. Ray Frewen, an old hand with this kind of farcical comedy, is the director. Jacqueline and Richard Penrod designed he set, Dave Ferguson the lighting, Erin Fast the costumes, Scott Miller the sound, and Dan Pellant the properties.
The show gets a rating of three stars.
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Highlights from the North Shore Magazine feature by Penelope Mesic
When audiences attend Apple Tree Theatre's production of "Criminal Hearts" this summer they will be initiated into a tatalizing mystery. Although the play's author, Jane Martin, has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and has twice received the American Theatre Critics award for best new play, she has never appeared publicly.
She could be a frail old lady living on a farm. She could be a 300-pound garage mechanic. She could be a third-grade teacher or a strip-tease artist or an ex-Marine. The only one who is said to have a clue is Jon Jory, founder of the Humana Theatre Festival and director of the premieres of most of Jane Martin's plays.
Killjoys suggest that Jory himself is Jane Martin, which he steadfastly denies. Ray Frewen, director of Apple Tree's production, is inclined to believe him.
"These plays are written by someone with a strong female viewpoint," he says. "But all I really care about is that when I read the script I laughed and laughed. The one small frustration is that there's no one I can ask about the main character's name, Ata. How is that supposed to be pronounced?"
The character herself (played by Marti Sanders) has far greater worries. As the play opens, she is crumbling like a sand castle at high tide. Paraliyzed with self-doubt, she refuses to leave her expensive apartment in Chicago, which is empty of furniture but littered with pizza cartons, cans of Dr. Pepper and the countless pencils she sharpend to sooth her nerves. Her husband, who is described in the stage directions as "a man in the worst sense of the word," goes by the wonderfully strange name of Wib - a syllable suitable for an extraterrestrial or a kitchen gadget.
Prior to the action, Ata has finally caught him cheating flagrantly with a series of women. Attempting to make sense of his behavior, Ata meets with Wib's law partner and is too indecisive to avoid being seduced by him.
Outraged that Ata has dared venture into conduct similar to his own, Wib empties out the apartment and leaves. "Ata is struggling to find an identity," says Marti Sanders. "In the past, she identitifed herself with her husband, but since he isn't who he says he is, who is she? She couldn't be in a worse place, emotionally, to encounter her polar opposite - economically, racially, psychologically."
That would be Bo, a streetwise burglar and con artist - black, poor and dependent on no one - who breaks into Ata's apartment in the dark, falls cursing over the Dr. Pepper cans and is dismayed to discover that the rich pickings she expected to find have disappeared. Candace Taylor, a Northwestern graduate who now teaches in the theater department of Roosevelt University, has taken the role, although she is careful to distinguish herself from the woman-from-the-projects that Bo seems to be.
"I don't really know anyone like Bo," she exclaims. "I stay at arm's length from people like her. She's a thief and a liar." She laughs, adding, "Honesty is one of my big things, so I expect to have fun with that devious quality of hers."
"I've played a lot of street toughs in my time," she continues "and while it's not exactly a stretch, it means dialect work and remembering to drop my word endings. I grew up an Army brat on bases around the world. I spent my childhood in Germany. I was a Girl Scout, a candy striper. I sure wasn't Bo. But I don't have any experience being lady MacBeth either, and I've played her. It's all imagination and technique. Bo's going to have to be grounded, self-confident, outspoken and a little dangerous."
At the moment of confrontation, Bo is also coldly incredulous, while Ata, talking a blue streak, is hysterical. "Women shouldn't shoot each other," she protests. "Men shoot each other. Women relate."
Then realizing that Bo was there earlier on the pretext of checking the smoke alarms, she seems genuinely wounded. "I confided in you. You admired my decor. We exchanged."
Bo responds with an alternate view of their previous encounter. "I cased you out. Right. Now I'm back for the stuff, OK?"
From this unpromising beginning, thanks to some unlikely but irresistible events that Marti Sanders describes as "absurd, but in a way we can identify with," the two women form an alliance. "These are two powerless people who, by uniting, become powerful," Sanders explains.
Ray Frewen is more equivocal. "There's no doubt they're going into business together here, and I want to believe that they're friends of some kind." But neither character is what you'd call reliable. "With Bo you never know if what's coming out of her mouth is the truth or not."
In Ata's case, who she is and what she feels are equally unpredictable because she's disregarded her own nature for so long. For an audience, there is pleasure in the fast-paced dialogue, in a dramatic situation that splashes over into farce, and in the satisfaction of seeing Wib squirm like a bug on a pin when he gets what's coming to him.
But the real allure is the chance to weigh the evidence and make a minute-by-minute evaluation of the two women's motives. Has Bo simply developed a trickier scam? Is Ata gaining self-confidence, or will she fall prey to her habitual weakness and trust the untrustworthy? Or have these two women, against all likelihood, come to admire one another?
The audience will have to decide for themselves. Fittingly, the play demonstrates that there are more ways of withholdng one's identity than with a pen name.
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Highlights from the Pioneer Press review by Robert Loerzel
Jane Martin's "Criminal Hearts" is outlandish -- not believable enough to seem real, not weird enough to seem surreal -- but the play's cast at Apple Tree Theatre brings out its wit and intensity.
Taylor and Sanders establish the strong identities of their characters within the play's first few minutes. Sanders captures Ata's hysterical reaction to the burglary with a palpable sense of nervousness and fright, but she also injects quite a bit of humor into these moments. As fragile as Ata is, she's a character who can make you laugh even when you're feeling pretty worried about her emotional state and Sanders brings sharp comic timing to the role.
Taylor excels at portraying Bo as a charlatan. She's always a little enigmatic, like the grifters in classic stories about stings and confidence games. How much of the story she tells about her personal life is true, and how much is a ruse? Is she committing crimes because she's desperate for money or just because she enjoys the game? Taylor keeps us guessing. And despite the fact that Bo's breaking the law and doing bad things, Taylor plays the part with tons of charisma, making her a likable rogue.
Along the way, both women bemoan the way they've been treated by the men in their lives. At a recent performance, Sanders prompted applause after delivering a passionate and stinging rant to her husband, Wib (Kurt Johns).
The fascinating dynamic between Sanders and Taylor makes "Criminal Hearts" worth seeing.
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Photos
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Background
While there is some confusion as to whether Jane Martin is a pseudonym for a male playwright, “her” plays speak to women's frustrations with male-dominated society. They are darkly humorous and biting. All but one tells the story of sometimes bizarre women in hard circumstances striving to overcome and survive. Writing theatre for people who thought they didn't like theater, Jane Martin is a rare non-pretentious yet artistically challenging playwright.
There is some question as to the identity of this mysterious writer. She has been referred to as " America 's best known, unknown playwright". The name Jane Martin is widely believed to be a pseudonym. She has never made any public appearances or spoken about any of her works. Nor has she ever given an interview. No biographical details are known about her. No photographs of Ms. Martin have ever been published.
Jon Jory, Artistic Director of the Actors' Theatre of Louisville is the spokesperson for the playwright and some believe the playwright behind the pen name. This is, however, something that he has repeatedly denied. In an interview published on July 13, 1994 in the Seattle Weekly, Jory reportedly said, "that Martin feels she could not write plays if people knew who she was, regardless of her identity or gender." Jory proffers that: "The point in the end is the plays themselves. . . But if Jane's anonymity is a P.T. Barnum publicity stunt, it's one of the longest circus acts going." Despite his protestations, the most prominent theory still remains that Jane Martin is actually a pseudonym for Jory, who just happened to direct all of "Martin's" Louisville premieres.
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