Lawrence Bommer

MELTING JIGS INTO DIRGES Whether it’s a Jewish family in  Awake and Sing!  or a black one in  A Raisin in the Sun,  poverty grinds down its unloved ones and prejudice finishes the kill. As steeped in the details of deprivation as the later Irish clan in  Angela’s Ashes, Sean O’Casey’s 1922 masterpiece uses the Irish Civil War (which killed…

PROKOFIEV GETS POLITICAL This is not your usual Romeo and Juliet. Truncated and concentrated, Joffrey Ballet’s U.S. premiere of Krzysztof Pastor’s two-act treatment of Prokofiev’s celebrated ballet carries no Renaissance finery, just real-world immediacy. Premiered by the Scottish Ballet in 2008, this muscular treatment of ancient Verona isolates the lovers all the more against a…

WHEN THE MIDDLE CLASS MATTERED The best thing about this well-earned, state-of-the-art revival of Frank Loesser’s Pulitzer-winning masterwork is this:   No one dared to update what must now be a vintage Eisenhower-Era period piece, as much as AMC’S Mad Men or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It wouldn’t take anyway. Though fast-moving and…

CHARLES DARWIN AND NATURAL AFFECTION With its intentionally contradictory title, In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story  is not about the Garden of Eden; it is an earnest but unengrossing world premiere at Lookingglass Theatre Company, a study in amorous opposites that attract. Lookingglass artistic associate Sara Gmitter delivers a warmly written but ponderously circular chronicle…

PREHISTORIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE PRESENT Extended until mid-May, Theater Wit’s Midwest debut of Madeleine George’s sharp new show has clearly touched hearts and nerves. It’s no secret: Full of the quirky, zany, and daffy characters that constitute the “new normal,” it’s a relationship drama with enough metaphor-mongering and symbol-serving to reflect whatever the viewer may…

MATCHMAKERS GET BURNED In the social maze of Regency England, where any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue, novelist Jane Austen understood how love gets lost. There were too many artful simulations of actual affection for the real deal to compete. Hard as it is to find love for oneself, 21-year-old Emma Woodhouse,…

RECRUITING FOR THE 1% Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár  is much better known for the spindrift, gossamer pleasures of his Liliom (which inspired Carousel) and The Good Fairy (which gave us Make a Wish), musicals drawn from quicksilver dramas of artful delicacy and effortless charm. Written in the dangerous year of 1929, Molnár’s The President (originally entitled…

A WILD(E) ADAPTATION A spectacle that swirls and thrills, The House Theatre of Chicago’s Dorian has updated Oscar Wilde’s classic cautionary tale from Victorian music halls to today’s club scene. Their “promenade” production also transforms an ambulatory audience into vintage voyeurs, even stalkers. As they perambulate around the capacious Chopin stage (a seating area is…

THE CONDITIONAL KINDNESS OF STRANGERS An episodic evening set in and around a hotel near O’Hare Airport, Marisa Wegrzyn’s  itinerant one-act both celebrates and red-flags those encounters, seemingly causeless and effectless, that in fact change and define us–at the time, more than we know or need to. It promises to be wild but, better, ends up…

WATCHING LOSERS LOSE IS A LOSE/LOSE SITUATION After a brief show of compassion for life’s casualties and some welcome sympathy for the underdog in Good People and The Motherfucker with the Hat, Steppenwolf Theatre Company is back to a bad habit’”amusing an audience by mugging poor slobs. An unwelcome world premiere, Mona Monsour’s two-act downer…

THE BANALITY OF SURVIVAL A crowded creation, Our Class remembers the Holocaust by forgetting nothing. Intent on conscience-keeping, burning to reclaim a slice of history, this dogged docudrama, a generous-to-onerous Midwest premiere by Remy Bumppo, is Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s painstaking and pains-giving depiction of genocide in a microcosm (this is no Shoah, the 9-hour, 23-minute 1985…

FREED FROM A CELLAR The inception of this 2006 work from Chicago’s neighborhood-based Albany Park Theater Project is a remark made by a 14-year-old member of their youth ensemble: “I learned to love when I was 10 years old.” Her true-life story is the basis of APTP’s 80-minute cri de coeur, the fourth offering by…

BLING BRINGS CLOSURE Now playing at Chicago’s downtown Storefront Theatre, The Jewels, TUTA Theatre’s world premiere adaptation of a story by Guy de Maupassant, is not to be confused with The Necklace, the masterpiece by this “French Chekhov” (or “French O. Henry” for that matter). That gem from 1884, with its bittersweet twist of an…

FUR A GOOD TIME, CALL  MASOCHISM ON PARADE David Ives’ two-person fetish comedy, Venus in Fur, is a  sexy crowd pleaser  and an actors’ tour de force  exercise. The play casts a spell of “delicious cruelty,” but beyond the sado-masochism that it both celebrates and exploits, it’s even more manipulative than it pretends to be. The joke, such as…

(SOCIAL) MEDIA MADNESS Gay playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (contributor to Glee and Big Love) may have stumbled with his over-the-top dark comedy Say You Love Satan–produced in Chicago by About Face Theatre–but this Raven Theatre revival of the burning drama that Steppenwolf debuted seven years ago proves a rare skill: Aguirre-Sacasa can create solid stagecraft with…

LIES ARE HARD TO LIMIT Are some lies lighter than others and thus lesser? Charles Van Doren will always be tainted for knowing the answers in advance in the 1959 Geritol quiz show scandal. Serial liar Stephen Glass manufactured article after article from whole cloth in the National Review. Whatever truth he might have told,…