Lawrence Bommer

OSCAR PLEADS FOR MERCY “We are all of us lying in the gutter–but some of us are staring at the stars.” This fusion of original sin and the saving power of grace fuels the artful ambivalences in Lady Windermere’s Fan. A well-made play with an untidy moral, Oscar Wilde’s four-act 1892 comedy traces the fault…

CHICAGO’S CIVIL WAR A grand dream is now completed. Over the last five years City Lit has delivered five old and new works to mark the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, now finished with the 150th anniversary of the Appomattox surrender. Ending the reckoning is the series’ most documentary-like drama: Set in Illinois in the…

MUSICAL MEASURES Grandstine, the beloved Mississippi matriarch of the Harris clan, has died and gone to her reward. Her many loved ones return to their roots for a “going to heaven” sendoff for the founder of the feast. That’s the premise–and it’s excuse enough–for Sounds So Sweet, a fulsome tribute to one family’s values and…

THE CONTINUUM OF LOVE Ethan Lipton is a magic maker who’s mastered the art of intertwining characters. The five lost and found souls in his 2012 offering  Red Handed Otter  are security-guard colleagues at an unnamed facility. They come together or fall apart as naturally as any rival representations from real life. The hilarious anecdotes they share,…

HIPSTER HUMOR ON A ROLL The title  of Second City e.t.c.’s 39th revue, Soul Brother, Where Art Thou?,  is more wordplay than revelation. They know very well where to find their very specific “soul brothers.” Their generational sketch humor (targeted mainly to folks under 40) wants to invalidate 2015’s absurdities and expose our place in the idiocy…

SHTICK ON A SHIP R.M.S. Titanic was not unsinkable but the S.S. American really is. It’s been sailing strong since 1934 as Cole Porter’s biggest hit before  Kiss Me Kate. It may have jettisoned its original ballast-heavy book by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, and taken on an equally cornball script by Timothy Crouse and John…

MAKING HEAVY OF LIFE “Can you see magic?” That’s both process and purpose in Jordan Harrison’s deliberately dazzling 75-minute bravura piece  The Grown-Up, now strutting its precious stuff in a Chicago premiere by Shattered Globe Theatre. The troupe’s last offering,  The Rose Tattoo, was Tennessee Williams’ painstaking and heartbreaking travelogue through broken hearts in the deep South….

CONDITIONAL LOVE AND EARLY DEATH The perils of parenting are center stage in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s truth-teller. British  playwright Rory Kinnear’s strangely named  The Herd  (a title that could indict the characters or the audience) exposes a curse as searing as any the House of Atreus endured. It measures a suburban London family beyond all clichés about what…

BEFORE IT WAS TOO LATE Six symbolic lives get ruthlessly entangled in this blast from the past. The world is pre-independent Virginia circa 1676 and the outcome is today in Marcus Gardley’s  An Issue of Blood: An Historical Parable. Of course the real issue isn’t blood as much as race in this passionate Victory Gardens premiere….

ENERGY IS NEVER ENOUGH Nothing is sadder than a forced farce. Or phonier than chases without consequences. Famed for his frenetic  The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity  (a comedy about wrestling that reduced sophisticated audiences to howling W.W.F. partisans), Kristoffer Diaz has penned a much lamer world premiere for Goodman Theatre than his sensational triumph at Victory…

ON THE HORNS OF HISTORY Imagine history as a roller coaster–more specifically, Oscar Wide’s masterpiece  The Importance of Being Earnest  transmogrified into cerebral vaudeville. Erupting for nearly three hours of whimsical exuberance, Tom Stoppard’s 1974  Travesties  (here enhanced with later rewrites) is a deliberately dazzling, ostentatiously intellectual tour de talk. Its entire comic apparatus is built on one curious…

IN DEED HE DOESN’T Will Eno’s 2012 solo script, now in a Midwest premiere, represents quite a departure (almost a repudiation) of Lookingglass Theatre Company’s vintage style. Here be no flying trapezes, dangling performers, sudden trap doors, harnesses and stilts, rabbits pulled out of a hole. Lasting a bit over an hour,  Title and Deed  (a, well,…

MALE DISBONDING Friendship tests us in ways we never signed up for: Plays about it task us by making us measure what  we  would do when the characters’ choices come too close for comfort. Reviving its 2008 production of  Our Bad Magnet,  Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co. has retained the original actors and, I assume, recreated the confederate mystery of Douglas…

HEALING BY THE NUMBERS It cost over a million dollars to launch the Windy City Playhouse, a beautiful new 149-seat theater on Chicago’s Northwest Side (3014 W. Irving Park Road). Designed by Chicago theater architect John Morris, it opened March 23, the first new Equity house of the century, graced with an art-rich lobby and…

THEATER’S TALKING CURE AT WORK AND PLAY The first theater to perform all ten dramas of the late August Wilson’s 20th  century chronicle, Goodman Theatre just staked a new claim to a lasting legacy. 22  years after its 1993 local premiere,  Two Trains Running  returns, a time capsule that entangles today. As much a warning as a matter of…

STRIPPING DOWN TO BASICS Charged with unforced sympathy and unpolemical solidarity for plucky underdogs,  The Full Monty, like the Fox movie that inspired this musical make-over, fits the pattern of consolation shows triggered by recent recessions: Heavy on grand gestures that “cock a snoot” at hard times and bad bosses, this sweet-tempered protest play joins other…

LITERAL LEVITY On display through this weekend at Millennium Park’s Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the  Spring Series  from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago consists of five offerings that blend the intimate with the frenetic. They’re both supercharged and subtle, sometimes at the same time. Three pieces are repertory favorites by Jiří­ Kylián  and Alejandro Cerrudo, one a…

ANOTHER SCHOOL FOR WIVES It’s a huge reversal. For generations the sole route for a successful show was from Broadway to Hollywood–from musical to movie. For young theatergoers today that must seem a wrong-way turn: The smart transformation is screen to stage, the foregone familiarity of cinema blazing a trail for theater’s intimacy and third…