Chicago

PUPS ‘N’ STUFF MAKES A DOGGONE DRAMA “Love me, love my dog. [Then I’ll love you:}” That’s the operating assumption between Dex & Abby, a cross-species comedy/love play. At 130 minutes of industrial-strength sentimentality, this Chicago premiere from Pride Films and Plays will test your tolerance for anthropomorphized antics. It’s the feel-good story of comfort…

POSTHUMOUS EMANCIPATION The painful premise behind Kill Move Paradise is that there’s no justice on this side of the grave. So author James Ijames goes to the other side. He creates a kind of Elysian Fields for four young black men cut down wrongly and early. It’s up to this 2017 valedictory, inspired by the…

APPROXIMATING AN ATROCITY It’s an evil not to be exorcised. As the excellent HBO documentary My Name Is Sandra Bland showed, a tragedy resonates — Bland was found hanged in a prison cell in Prairie View, Texas, the dump-of-a-city to which she returned for an exciting administrative teaching position. A popular poster of videos (“Good…

EMMA PLOTS, THIS TIME IN SONG Nobody knew better than Jane Austen how love could get lost in the social maze of Regency England, where social distinctions quickly become psychological barriers. Any successful matrimony required sexual politics and emotional intrigue. There were too many artful simulations of actual affection for the real deal to compete…

BUG GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN Nineteen years ago, A Red Orchid Theatre launched the Midwest premiere of  Bug by Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts. It unleashed a ferocious Michael Shannon and a self-destructing Kate Buddeke in the title roles. Back then I thought the play just an excuse for excess — the shock effects of wacko lovers dissolving…

I DON’T FEEL YOUR PAIN Lately a chronic lack of empathy–sensitivity to the feelings of others–threatens to become a liability as great as any budget deficit. Compassion has never felt less contagious. So maybe it’s time for Do You Feel Anger? No indignant expose of sociopathic alienation, this 2019 drama by Mara Nelson-Greenberg, now in…

SOPHISTICATED SWING FROM KING  ELLINGTON Some shows are just pure pleasure, delivering unpretentious delight with no plot to process or points to proclaim. Much like  Ain’t Misbehavin’, an infectious romp that salutes the music and mirth of Fats Waller,  Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies  is a 1981 confection conceived by Donald McKayle that enthralls audiences with two dozen hit numbers…

MANY FORKS IN MANY ROADS “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” John Greenleaf Whittier’s bittersweet couplet is echoed in If/Then, a 2014 chamber musical. This sprawling, 160-minute speculation of a show wonders whether there are any accidents in life. Is chance just “probabilities playing…

LONELY HUBRIS “I want it all.” “The sky’s [not] the limit.” “You only live once.” “You can’t take it with you.”: We’re fascinated by all the pride that precedes a fall. We can conditionally identify with hyper self-assertion — then strategically withdraw our sympathies when it comes a cropper. That’s what still works, almost 40…

ROCKING THE BOAT When we enter the theater, we see two women in a small fishing boat. It’s surrounded by huge buckets depicting the shallows of an inlet in the Alabama delta. Overhead netting seems to catch the stars. For nearly ninety minutes, this seemingly static situation becomes the engrossing story-setting for  The Gulf, Audrey Cefaly’s…

TOUCHING BUT TRAPPED IN A TIME WARP Stop Kiss was a big 1998 hit at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. In 2000 it arrived in Chicago in a tepid local premiere by the Naked Eye Theatre Company. That misfire aside, Diana Son’s 95-minute one-act — a tale of two women who only discover they’re…

A LIGHTHOUSE SPILLS ITS SECRETS Isolation forces intimacy on its inhabitants, if only by its process of elimination. It can also foster secrets: Scattered souls protect their privacy by keeping stuff to themselves. In  The Secret Garden  or  The Turn of the Screw  what’s hidden must out — to respectively good and evil ends. This strategic formula works in  Whisper…

DANCING AROUND ADOLESCENCE It happened with  You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, that peculiar, often cloying, problem of adult actors playing unfledged kids. There’s an unavoidable condescension that’s not lost on grown-ups — even less so with young folks — when performers stoop to be small. But sometimes, as with Clare Barron’s 2017  Dance Nation (a Pulitzer…

ASHES TO THEATER It’s the spectacle that keeps on giving: No longer sprawling the width of the Neo Futurarium’s stretched-out stage or concentrated in Theater Wit’s proscenium hall, The Ruffians’ superb 100-minute Burning Bluebeard has now taken its glorious, dream-like make-believe and contagious magic realism to the Ruth Page Center for the Arts — in…