Lawrence Bommer

SINKING INTO THE STEPPES Running invisible endurance feats, the characters of Anton Chekhov expose what Henry David Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” When the good doctor’s creations, compassionately but uncompromisingly presented, break loose from boredom and emotional paralysis, it’s only to crash into unrequited love. Like T.S. Eliot’s forlorn J. Alfred Prufrock, they measure…

THIS BROTHERS  IS A KEEPER This winner really is a blast from the past. Celebrating America’s most explosive and enthralling tap-dancing team, My Brother’s Keeper’”The Story of the Nicholas Brothers is Black Ensemble Theater’s latest reclamation jamboree, a loving tribute to two brothers who made it big and kept it fun. It’s also a tour de…

A SOUTH SIDE WEAVE The setting is a beloved beauty parlor on Chicago’s South Side. It’s seen better times and may soon see none. Hanging over the storefront is a gallery of famous female African-American singers and pioneers from Rosa Parks to Beyoncé. Instantly we’re more at home than at shop. Playwright Marcus Gardley (The…

NO ADO ABOUT LITTLE Never has a lesser comedy enjoyed a lovelier setting: Embraced by a Rococo balustrade, staircase, and pastoral backdrop worthy of Watteau or Boucher, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Courtyard Stage is dwarfed by a huge oak tree in autumnal glory, discretely dropping selected leaves. It’s an apt backdrop for a Mozart opera; indeed…

URINE FOR A GOOD TIME I fondly recall the infectiously brilliant Cardiff Giant shows that Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann perpetrated in the 80s and 90s. After so much success in Chicago, it’s doubly disconcerting that their Big Break came from a show the Windy City never saw, a smash “underground” hit that, in its…

THE URGE TO BE USEFUL Steppenwolf Theatre is great at stirring things up’”on stage and in the minds of its crowds. Nobody does it so well. Exhibit A is their latest offering: There’s good cause for the subversive disruption of Straight White Men. Employing a very generic title to set things apart, hot new playwright…

THE SONGS AND THE FURY Sardonic, ironic, cheeky, subversive’”hip epithets can’t convey the excruciating call-and-response fusion of humor and horror, laughter and tears, that you feel seeing The Scottsboro Boys. It was nervy enough in 2010 for Broadway legends John Kander and Fred Ebb and bookwriter Fred Thompson to create a musical about a travesty…

TAKING OUT THE (WHITE) TRASH Ever since 1981, small-town souls, Dixie doodles and atavistic Red State rednecks have fueled the fun in the Tuna trilogy. It’s a hilarious perpetration by adapter Ed Howard and original author-performers Joe Sears and Jaston Williams: Greater Tuna, A Tuna Christmas, and Red, White, and Tuna delivered laundry-line cross-dressing and…

ANATEVKA COMES HOME In this world premiere of a newly commissioned and instantly topical new work, Chicago Shakespeare Theater makes it clear: Karen Hartman’s The Book of Joseph is not just another play about the Holocaust (not that that’s a bad thing). Yes, that once and future horror re-erupts, with painful “new” details confirming a…

HE FOUND HIS HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO  (AND MORE) I Left My Heart: A Salute to the Music of Tony Bennett totally earns its title. Created in 2005 by David Grapes and Todd Olson, this warmly wrought and richly arranged tribute to a terrific troubadour chronicles a career that, at 90, is far from over. (Bennett…

THE DEAD WEIGHT OF RANDOM TALK Richard Greenberg’s better works’”Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain, The Violet Hour’”stand out by putting enough in play to make us care. Raven Theatre’s distressingly languorous Midwest premiere, Greenberg’s 2013 The Assembled Parties (the title a social and legal pun) spreads, circuitously and discursively, across two decades. Its…

FINDING NETHER-LAND Cryptic and fascinating, Jennifer Haley’s 85-minute one-act The Nether takes its name, if not its inspiration, from an allusion to the afterlife. But, persuasively presented by director Karen Kessler, “The Nether” is in the here and now. It more than rivals reality. A Red Orchid Theatre’s techno-parable reveals the malleability of identity when…

SPOILER ALERT: THE PLAYWRIGHT DID IT Here’s the warning issued to the press on Monday night. It’s about critiquing Goodman Theatre’s imported New York staging of Gloria: “In the hopes of maintaining the integrity of the experience of Gloria for our patrons, the playwright [MacArthur “genius” winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins] and the director [Evan Cabnet] respectfully…

ANOTHER BAND OF BROTHERS At a certain “tipping point” in the mid-20th century, passing for straight became one lie too many. A generation before the Stonewall riots, a generation after Henry Gerber started the first gay rights organization in roaring ‘20s Chicago, and over two generations after Oscar Wilde paid a terrible price for a…

THE PURITY OF INFINITY Mathematics can be maddening. Unless reflected in music (as in Bach), the “numbers game” feels stuck in a seemingly sterile realm of abstract entities, perfect in their predictability and infinite in range and scope. Math seems inhuman’”if not, as in its wartime applications, anti-human. It takes a rare play, like Proof…

THE HERO JOURNEY OF A  DRAG QUEEN Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is, of course, a much-loved 1994 “staying out” film from seemingly straight Australia. It spins the peripatetic tale of three Sydney drag queens who stuff their sequins and silicone onto the title vehicle (a “wayward bus” worthy of Steinbeck) and cross the Australian Outback….

LEARNING TO BE DEAD Orpheus usually gets top billing in the classical Greek legend. He is of course the master of music who literally goes to Hell to retrieve his beloved Eurydice, abducted by Hades, king of the underworld. In Sarah Ruhl’s deeply personal 90-minute one-act the emphasis is on the kidnap victim, not the…