Lawrence Bommer

OUR LOST DREAM CITY It’s possible to think that it never happened, that we imagined its splendor to exalt our past. It was the most transient of treasures, with only the Museum of Science and Industry and photos to suggest the Beaux Arts, alabaster magnificence of marvels that bejeweled Jackson Park and the South Side…

THE UNCIVIL WAR Goodman Theatre’s current epic won’t be confused with other dramas. It explores the Civil War as seen and suffered by the slaves. Not the usual perspective but it delivers a very broad canvas for Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks. Running over three hours and requiring two intermissions, Father Comes Home from the…

A LEAGUES OF THEIR OWN You can’t keep a bad man down. Especially when he’s Captain Nemo, the scourge of the sea. Returning to the watery roots of Moby Dick, Lookingglass Theatre Company launches 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. This 140-minute adventure on the low seas navigates the psyche of a world-wide terrorist in a…

STRINDBERG SET IN SOUTH AFRICA Yes, it’s Mies Julie, not Miss Julie, and it’s by Yaël Farber, not August Strindberg. And that makes a monstrous difference. Repurposed to depict a different divergence between two star-crossed and mismatched lovers, reset in an uprooted country torn between the curse of apartheid and the uncertainty of nationhood, Strindberg’s…

A POWER COUPLE WORTH RECLAIMING Lest we forget two women who long ago shaped their future into our present, witness Bull in a China Shop. Written by Mount Holyoke alumna Bryna Turner, this concentrated one-act pays a conditional tribute to Mary Wooley and Jeanette Marks, radical academics and long-time lovers. The former was President of…

EINE KLEINE SWEDISH SOLSTICE Some 40 years after its birth, A Little Night Music feels like it’s always been here. Wisely and warmly, composer Stephen Sondheim and writer Hugh Wheeler, borrowing from one of Ingmar Bergman’s finest films (Smiles of a Summer Night), compassionately anatomize three mismatched turn-of-the-century couples. They’re midsummer fools of love caught…

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF CENTENARIANS “Life is short. It’s up to you to make it sweet.” No cliché in Emily Mann’s moving 1993 play, this is one of many hard-earned pearls of wisdom in her generous portrait of centenarian sisters. Based on the oral history provided by Sadie and Bessie Delany before their much-protracted…

PATTI QUAKES, PATTI SHAKES. PATTI GETS HER CAKES You can only listen and love: The former Patricia Louise Holt-Edwards oozes energy on stage. She kicks off her shoes in sheer delight. Loving jazz from the outside in, she sets style standards with each new wardrobe. An entrepreneur, she sells her own “Fancy Cakes” on the…

PROMETHEUS  SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It’s a term you can’t always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It’s in full force in City Lit’s revival of  Prometheus Bound, the surviving drama from Aeschylus’s trilogy dating back to the fifth century BC. A labor of love spanning 20 years, this eye-popping,…

YOUR FLIES! IS OPEN The running joke behind this unauthorized musical based on a 1954 novel and a 1963 film is how it hides its homage: To avoid copyright infringement, we never hear “Flies” and “Lord” in the same sentence. Critics, happily, needn’t be so coy: A world premiere from Pride Films & Plays,  Flies! The…

NOT A TENNESSEE WALTZ The strangest thing about  Suddenly Last Summer  is that the main character is never seen. But, talked about for 90 minutes by two dangerously partisan women, he’s fully felt. So is the play’s dark discovery: “We all use each other –and that’s what we think of as love.” Jason Gerace’s taut Raven Theatre…

A LOT OF BLOOD WILL OUT Blood will have blood. It also sells tickets. And the theater’s thirstiest sanguinary spectacle remains the unspeakable Scottish tragedy. The darkest doings the Bard could imagine infest  Macbeth —  regicide, betrayal, the slaughter of innocents. Restraint is lost on his tale of sound and fury. But, unlike life, it does  not  signify nothing….

A ROTTEN KIND OF GUN CONTROL It’s an inhuman term, “collateral damage.” Usually it’s reserved for supposedly dispensable victims, necessary sacrifices for a nobler cause. But what if the bigger picture ain’t noble? Then, as Arthur Miller hauntingly says in the passive voice, “Attention must be paid.” In  the inaugural offering from TimeLine Theatre Company’s Playwright…

A PLAY THAT POOPS ON ITSELF The animal realm (we won’t say kingdom) fairly teems with same-sex survival. In all, over 1,500 species experiment with  alternative lifestyles: Sapphic seagulls, flaming flamingos, bisexual bottle-nosed dolphins, gender-bending giraffes, white whales, and — in  Birds of a Feather  — two gay birds. This Chicago premiere from Greenhouse Theater Center both celebrates…

A GLOBAL FLASHPOINT BECOMES A THEATRICAL FLASHFLOOD Until the Flood  lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour, this 2016 one-act is the creation of actor, poet and oral historian Dael Orlandersmith. She becomes the partisans, witnesses, survivors and, above all, inhabitants of a…

“KICK ME” CHARACTERS Born to be bad, Nicky Silver is an acerbic gay playwright who has employed his outsider status to skewer the American family (Pterodactyls), relationships (The Food Chain), and stereotypes (Fat Men in Skirts). His works aren’t done that often anymore, maybe because even bitterness has a shelf life. But it’s a worthy…

REVOLVING FATES — AIN’T IT GRAND? Like the chandelier in  Phantom of the Opera  or the helicopter in  Miss Saigon, a revolving door is the all-purpose metaphor for Berlin’s premiere hotel and the stories it spins. This fateful hostelry is the fertile setting for Maury Yeston’s 1986 musical version of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel  Menschen im Hotel  (People in a…

CHRISTMAS CAN BE CRUEL More than most, life’s victims need their storytellers. William Inge (1913-1973) wrote his characters from the inside out — theirs and his. A heart surgeon without a scalpel, Inge, like his mentor Tennessee Williams, was a town crier against the meanness and pettiness — in both anonymous    cities and rural backwaters —…