Lawrence Bommer

TASTING YOUR MORTALITY In the bleak midwinter ’” appropriately ’” comes this dour drama. A Chicago premiere from Steppenwolf Theatre Company, this 2014 Obie winner will  not  let you warm your hands by its fire. Like Raven Theatre’s current  Nice Girl  or Shattered Globe Theatre’s  Five Mile Lake, Clare Barron’s  You Got Older  marinates in the failures of trapped characters. Their every…

SAVED BY YOUR SERVANT Like manna from the heavens, it comes when we’ve never needed to laugh more: The invaluable comic master P.G. Wodehouse returns from the Roaring Twenties to the rescue of the Troubled Teens: That delightfully co-dependent duo’”Jeeves and Bertie–are up to no boredom again: In ShawChicago’s delightful concert reading of Wodehouse’s  Jeeves in…

THE DIS-ASSEMBLY LINE Some stories can’t stand on their own and for very good reason: They tell so many others. Much as  The Wire  dealt with Baltimore’s failing institutions and August Wilson chronicled the decades washing over Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Dominique Morisseau’s “Detroit Trilogy” pays tribute to the builders of a broken burg. In Chicago, TimeLine Theatre…

THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS “No one will ever love you as much as I do — so shut up and stop looking for more.” A harsher hope-killing “reassurance” should not be imagined. That’s the curse/challenge facing Josephine Rosen, the 37-year-old anti-heroine in Melissa Ross’s ironically titled  Nice Girl, a tender-headed character study. This sweetly knowing,…

REHABILITATING REAGAN Putting us backstage as history happens, Goodman Theatre’s world premiere  Blind Date  generously or doggedly tells audiences more than they knew (or perhaps want to) about a nearly forgotten meeting of the minds. Drawing heavily from the somewhat fictionalized memoirs of Edmund Morris, a Ronald Reagan biographer who had constant access to the Great Communicator,…

AMERICA’S COARSE ‘CORRECTION’ A huge reason that theater counts is that it can carry a club (or, as the situation warrants, a stiletto). Both an agitprop assault on the 45th  President’s betrayal of America’s dreams and a pep rally for the resistance,  WE THE PEOPLE: The Anti-Trump Musical  is a world premiere from Flying Elephant Productions, a new…

A RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN STYLED MUSICAL THAT ASKS AND TELLS Call it the new nostalgia. In most ways,  Yank! A WWII Love Story  is an unashamedly conventional book musical, as predictable as pleasant. These fast-paced 140 minutes burst with peppy tap-dancing, torch songs, production numbers, solo turns, and feel-good storytelling. This is World War II set to…

THE LOST–AND FOUND–BOY What resonates in each of the 90 minutes of TimeLine Theatre Company’s  Boy  is the play’s total absence of rage or recrimination. As compassionately told by Anne Ziegler, this deeply moving one-act recounts a true-life/true-love tale of what was once called in Louisiana a “crime against nature.”  Boy  could have degenerated into a feeding frenzy of…

MY LITTLE (PARANOID) PONY If you believe  The Antelope Party, a Theater Wit two-act world premiere, fascism could soon be coming to a neighborhood near you. The “party” reference is political, not social. The blatant thrust of Eric John Meyer’s new work is that purity is no defense against paranoia. Indeed, one kind of role-playing can…

YOU  STILL  CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN Plays about what  doesn’t  happen feel a lot trickier than the action models: Exhibit A (through Z) is Rachel Bonds’  Five Mile Lake, a group portrait of five twenty-somethings held back even in motion. (One calls it “treading water,” which of course fits the title.) It’s no accident that in Shattered Globe Theatre’s Chicago…

GET THE LEAD OUT “The majority is always wrong.” Norwegian disrupter Henrik Ibsen practically carved that credo into his 1882 potboiler  An Enemy of the People. In his still-seminal protest play, Ibsen lambastes the captious critics of his earlier sensation, Ghosts:  He forges a plot in which Dr. Peter Stockman, a village doctor, discovers that the mineral…

GOOFBALL GAMBLERS IN SIN CITY A troupe from Fayetteville, Arkansas has come to Chicago’s Theater Wit to showcase a new play about Las Vegas. That’s the download on  Flamingo & Decatur, a sporadically fascinating character study about low rollers in a mean town. At his best, playwright Todd Taylor—and director Kevin Christopher Fox—share with us their…

TERROR IN TRUTH In  For the Loyal  headlines become humans. A short but stirring piece of theatrical speculation, this new work by topical playwright Lee (A Walk in the Woods) Blessing condenses the recent Penn State sex scandal into a corrosive choice, a moral crisis impacting a “loyal” college couple. As with Arthur Miller, Blessing knows how…

BLKS  — IT’S ABOUT WHTS TOO Nowadays it takes very little “disruption” to make a play a provocation. As Steppenwolf Theatre’s press release tersely puts it, “F**ked up sh*t happens.” Indeed it does — for over two hours in the tersely titled  BLKS, a comedy of character crises by Aziza Barnes. Set in Brooklyn and Manhattan in…

WHAT KIND OF STAR AM I? Mr. Wonderful, the Rat Packer, Mr. Bojangles, the Candy Man — there was nothing “junior” about Sammy Davis. The latest retro reclamation by Black Ensemble Theater,  Sammy: A Tribute to Sammy Davis Jr.  is a pep-filled, song-packed, two-hour salute to an irrepressible entertainer. This pizzazz-packed phenom could sing, dance, act on…

I SAW  TREE  SHIPS! Anchors aweigh! Twenty-two years after its advent, this show has become as essential to Chicago’s Christmas as the LEDs on the Magnificent Mile, the parade on State Street, the “Zoolites” of Lincoln Park, the skating rink by the Park Café, or the Joffrey Ballet’s  Nutcracker  at the Auditorium Theatre. (I’d include  A Christmas Carol  at Goodman Theatre,…

BURNT BY THE TRAIL HE BLAZED What in theater is ever off limits? And, above all, who? Besides the probability of the part, are there bounds to the roles an actor can play? Believing that merit mattered more than credentials or cachet, Napoleon promised careers open only to talent. Color-blind casting is the logical extension…