Omar Sangare

August 27, 2005

Chicago Sun-Times
Entertainment

Critic Fires Pinpoint Barbs at Artistic Pretension

By Hady Weiss

Omar Sangare arrives onstage in a frenzy -- like one of those obsessive-compulsive madmen who populate the plays of Samuel Beckett. His meticulously controlled neurotic behavior instantly makes you laugh. It also immediately signals that you are in the presence of a superb artist -- one whose gorgeously precise body language and highly expressive face (he resembles a young Yul Brynner with his egg-smooth shaved head and high cheekbones) are as articulate as the words in his caustic one-man show "True Theater Critic."

The son of a Polish mother and a father from Mali, Sangare -- a prize-winning writer and actor -- performs in the perfectly honed absurdist style of the Polish masters. He has studied with Oscar-winning film director Andrzej Wajda in Warsaw, as well as in England (his speech is accented but clear and cutting). And he crosses borders easily.

By all rights, Sangare's play should make it virtually impossible for a critic to write a single word. A scathing and hilarious indictment of playwrights, actors, acting teachers and critics -- the whole "park-and-bark" aspect of contemporary theater that can be so codified and anti-creative -- it would be paralyzing but for the fact that it so cleverly turns the joke on itself. It ends up satirizing the cynics and debunkers as well as the pretentious "creative types."

Just to watch Sangare lift an old-fashioned typewriter from its case is to see a great clown at work. To hear him mouth the beginning of a sentence that can go nowhere ("The performance ...) is to see writer's block in action. To follow his rants and raves and watch him in a mock performance of Hamlet (which he could surely play to perfection) is to be ideally teased.

"True Theater Critic" plays mind games with every creative type as it poses the question: Do you have anything of value to say and any talent for expressing it?