Chicago

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF CENTENARIANS “Life is short. It’s up to you to make it sweet.” No cliché in Emily Mann’s moving 1993 play, this is one of many hard-earned pearls of wisdom in her generous portrait of centenarian sisters. Based on the oral history provided by Sadie and Bessie Delany before their much-protracted…

PATTI QUAKES, PATTI SHAKES. PATTI GETS HER CAKES You can only listen and love: The former Patricia Louise Holt-Edwards oozes energy on stage. She kicks off her shoes in sheer delight. Loving jazz from the outside in, she sets style standards with each new wardrobe. An entrepreneur, she sells her own “Fancy Cakes” on the…

PROMETHEUS  SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It’s a term you can’t always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It’s in full force in City Lit’s revival of  Prometheus Bound, the surviving drama from Aeschylus’s trilogy dating back to the fifth century BC. A labor of love spanning 20 years, this eye-popping,…

YOUR FLIES! IS OPEN The running joke behind this unauthorized musical based on a 1954 novel and a 1963 film is how it hides its homage: To avoid copyright infringement, we never hear “Flies” and “Lord” in the same sentence. Critics, happily, needn’t be so coy: A world premiere from Pride Films & Plays,  Flies! The…

NOT A TENNESSEE WALTZ The strangest thing about  Suddenly Last Summer  is that the main character is never seen. But, talked about for 90 minutes by two dangerously partisan women, he’s fully felt. So is the play’s dark discovery: “We all use each other –and that’s what we think of as love.” Jason Gerace’s taut Raven Theatre…

A LOT OF BLOOD WILL OUT Blood will have blood. It also sells tickets. And the theater’s thirstiest sanguinary spectacle remains the unspeakable Scottish tragedy. The darkest doings the Bard could imagine infest  Macbeth —  regicide, betrayal, the slaughter of innocents. Restraint is lost on his tale of sound and fury. But, unlike life, it does  not  signify nothing….

A ROTTEN KIND OF GUN CONTROL It’s an inhuman term, “collateral damage.” Usually it’s reserved for supposedly dispensable victims, necessary sacrifices for a nobler cause. But what if the bigger picture ain’t noble? Then, as Arthur Miller hauntingly says in the passive voice, “Attention must be paid.” In  the inaugural offering from TimeLine Theatre Company’s Playwright…

A PLAY THAT POOPS ON ITSELF The animal realm (we won’t say kingdom) fairly teems with same-sex survival. In all, over 1,500 species experiment with  alternative lifestyles: Sapphic seagulls, flaming flamingos, bisexual bottle-nosed dolphins, gender-bending giraffes, white whales, and — in  Birds of a Feather  — two gay birds. This Chicago premiere from Greenhouse Theater Center both celebrates…

A GLOBAL FLASHPOINT BECOMES A THEATRICAL FLASHFLOOD Until the Flood  lasts only 70 minutes. But its concentrated running time delivers a devastating drama. A ton of truth-telling now on tour, this 2016 one-act is the creation of actor, poet and oral historian Dael Orlandersmith. She becomes the partisans, witnesses, survivors and, above all, inhabitants of a…

“KICK ME” CHARACTERS Born to be bad, Nicky Silver is an acerbic gay playwright who has employed his outsider status to skewer the American family (Pterodactyls), relationships (The Food Chain), and stereotypes (Fat Men in Skirts). His works aren’t done that often anymore, maybe because even bitterness has a shelf life. But it’s a worthy…

REVOLVING FATES — AIN’T IT GRAND? Like the chandelier in  Phantom of the Opera  or the helicopter in  Miss Saigon, a revolving door is the all-purpose metaphor for Berlin’s premiere hotel and the stories it spins. This fateful hostelry is the fertile setting for Maury Yeston’s 1986 musical version of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel  Menschen im Hotel  (People in a…

CHRISTMAS CAN BE CRUEL More than most, life’s victims need their storytellers. William Inge (1913-1973) wrote his characters from the inside out — theirs and his. A heart surgeon without a scalpel, Inge, like his mentor Tennessee Williams, was a town crier against the meanness and pettiness — in both anonymous    cities and rural backwaters —…

DOUBLE VISION, OR LOST IN THE LAFFS Can a forced farce make a theater audience howl with laughter, never realizing until the very end that  the joke is on them? That’s almost a rhetorical question with Steppenwolf Theatre’s world premiere. It’s a clumsy/clever comedy whose final scene, arriving after two hours of relentless burlesque, attacks the…

MY FAIR SIGNORA, OR DONIZETTI, SOUP TO NUTS He didn’t just write  Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale, L’Elisir d’Amore, Poliuto, The Daughter of the Regiment, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereux, Anna Bolena  and much more. Gaetano Donizetti could write small and he started early: A fascinating, brilliantly mounted double bill, Chicago Opera Theater’s third and last Studebaker Theater…

A CON IS NEVER “EX” The nickname Lettie comes from the Greek term “Letitia” or “joy.” That’s one of many bleak ironies that stalk the anti-heroine of Boo Killebrew’s survival saga, a world premiere from Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. In 100 troubling minutes, her one-act chronicles the fall and fall of an ex-con and single…

SCATTERSHOT SATIRE AIMS AT MOVING TARGETS It’s easy to think that humor is subjective — until an entire audience’s spontaneous guffaw undermines any such abstraction. Often enough, thats the situation in Second City e.t.c.’s 42nd  revue. In the bilious realm known as  Gaslight District, a customer can humiliatingly get the wrong kind of coffee roast; an Office…

SWEET BIRD OF TRUTH The Gentleman Caller  was the original name for a breakthrough “memory play” that, opening at Chicago’s Civic Theatre in late 1944, made Tom “Tennessee” Williams famous at 33. It was, of course,  The Glass Menagerie, his most personal labor of love. That character — “James O’Connor” — represented the mysterious stranger who, like…

A VICTIM’S IMPACT STATEMENT Critics always worry about giving away too much — in spoilers and such. And, yes, at first that fear seemed real with  hang  by U.K. playwright debbie tucker green. By the end, however, it was clear that this one-act, coiled and coy, wasn’t giving anything away. It leaves it to the audience’s fear…