Lawrence Bommer

DOUBLE VISION, OR LOST IN THE LAFFS Can a forced farce make a theater audience howl with laughter, never realizing until the very end that  the joke is on them? That’s almost a rhetorical question with Steppenwolf Theatre’s world premiere. It’s a clumsy/clever comedy whose final scene, arriving after two hours of relentless burlesque, attacks the…

MY FAIR SIGNORA, OR DONIZETTI, SOUP TO NUTS He didn’t just write  Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, L’Elisir d’Amore, Poliuto, The Daughter of the Regiment, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereux, Anna Bolena  and much more. Gaetano Donizetti could write small and he started early: A fascinating, brilliantly mounted double bill, Chicago Opera Theater’s third and last Studebaker Theater…

A CON IS NEVER “EX” The nickname Lettie comes from the Greek term “Letitia” or “joy.” That’s one of many bleak ironies that stalk the anti-heroine of Boo Killebrew’s survival saga, a world premiere from Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. In 100 troubling minutes, her one-act chronicles the fall and fall of an ex-con and single…

SCATTERSHOT SATIRE AIMS AT MOVING TARGETS It’s easy to think that humor is subjective — until an entire audience’s spontaneous guffaw undermines any such abstraction. Often enough, thats the situation in Second City e.t.c.’s 42nd  revue. In the bilious realm known as  Gaslight District, a customer can humiliatingly get the wrong kind of coffee roast; an Office…

SWEET BIRD OF TRUTH The Gentleman Caller  was the original name for a breakthrough “memory play” that, opening at Chicago’s Civic Theatre in late 1944, made Tom “Tennessee” Williams famous at 33. It was, of course,  The Glass Menagerie, his most personal labor of love. That character — “James O’Connor” — represented the mysterious stranger who, like…

A VICTIM’S IMPACT STATEMENT Critics always worry about giving away too much — in spoilers and such. And, yes, at first that fear seemed real with  hang  by U.K. playwright debbie tucker green. By the end, however, it was clear that this one-act, coiled and coy, wasn’t giving anything away. It leaves it to the audience’s fear…

CAGE-MATCH COMBAT: IBSEN VS. TRUMP Right now, the biggest prize fight in Chicago is at Randolph and Dearborn. More polemically urgent than psychologically penetrating, a new treatment of Henrik Ibsen’sAn Enemy of the People —  adapted and directed by Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls — is a powder keg that ignites a munitions factory. In…

DIFFICULT TO PICTURE The Picture of Dorian Gray  is its author’s self-portrait — perversely paradoxical, sardonically aesthetic, and (necessarily) obsessed with concealment. First published in 1890, ten years before the author’s death in exile, Oscar Wilde’s only novel is a curiously ambivalent embrace of and attack on decadence and depravity. Yes, it’s inevitably Victorian in its…

WHO NOSE BEST? Edmond Rostand’s timeless love story celebrates the one-sided love between the famous 17th-century swordsman and poet — disfigured with a humongous schnoz — and his beautiful cousin, Roxane, who is infatuated with Christian, a hot-blooded, handsome and bashfully inarticulate Gascon warrior, a suitor who can’t win her without Cyrano’s hidden eloquence. In…

UNLOCKING WHAT WAS NEVER HIDDEN At least  Time Is On Our Side  is more sex-affirmative and upbeat than  Significant Other, About Face Theatre’s last offering. A Midwest premiere devotedly staged by artistic director Megan Carney, this overlong 140-minute drama by R. Eric Thomas is, like Lookingglass Theatre’s equally unfortunate  Plantation!, beautifully meant and (more) mature. Billed as a “gleeful…

RIDICULOUS REVENGE It’s so well-intentioned that the results are doubly deplorable. Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Plantation!, a world premiere by ensemble member Kevin Douglas staged by their own David Schwimmer, might have mattered. That’s the saddest thing about this clumsy comedy. Its goal is golden — to explore the painful payback of retroactive justice. Its worthy…

A ROYAL CATFIGHT GETS A ROYAL PRODUCTION Coulda, woulda, shoulda: It’s the greatest confrontation between rival monarchs that never happened — the 1586 face-off between the “Virgin” Queen Elizabeth and the younger, thrice-wed Mary Queen of Scots (whose son, ironically, would inherit the disputed throne). In hindsight it seems a no-brainer: The cousins  should have had  a…

JOHNNY BE BAD: A CHUCK ROAST Once more it’s homage time on Clark Street. The latest musical reclamation from Black Ensemble Theater, L. Maceo Ferris’s  Hail, Hail Chuck: A Tribute to Chuck Berry  is a very conditional salute to an early pioneer of rock and roll. As always with the company’s memory revues, we learn the price…

MESSING UP MURDER The cops may be blue, the victims black, but in  Six Corners  the predominant color is gray. Marinating in moral relativism, this independent installment in Chicago playwright Keith Huff’s “cop trilogy” (also  A Steady Rain  and  The Detective’s Wife) is an inside job in the best way. Huff, who married into a cop family and knows the…

AN EVERGREEN PARABLE OF RESISTANCE It’s a two-act tonic, this  Madwoman of Chaillot. Life, Jean Giraudoux knew, is never safe from our constant “fever of destruction.” When decency gets beaten down, it’s good to know that it can be saved by the sewers of Paris, the final focus of  this 1945 rampant satire from the French playwright….

IN CYBER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM On the Internet or just IRL, there’s joy in striking back — turning the tables and trolling the bullies. But what’s rotten one way is no better when reversed. That’s one of many toxic lessons in  The Burn, a useful and even redemptive cautionary parable from Philip…