Chicago

A STUDY IN SPITE BECOMES A PUERILE HISSY FIT The joke’s on us in Thomas Bradshaw’s 75-minute Carlyle. Goodman Theatre’s premiere is agit-prop theater, a trifle that contains  more guts and nerve than wit or heart. Purportedly a kick-off rally for the title character’s bid to be a Republican senator from Illinois, it opens with a…

CAN A CLONE HAVE AN IDENTITY CRISIS? We share 99% of our genetic material with every other human, 90% with each chimpanzee, and 30% with any bunch of lettuce. (Talk about “six degrees of separation.”)   Now playing the Royal George Gallery Theatre, Caryl Churchill’s two-person drama A Number wonders whether that’s too close for comfort….

PUZZLE PIECES OF A PERSON Snapshots from a family album, jump cuts from a movie, scattered entries from a constant journal’”it’s hard to get a fix on Mary Page Marlowe, a very different offering from Tracy (August: Osage County) Letts. It’s enthralling too–because this new memory play from Steppenwolf Theatre Company, captivatingly captured by Artistic…

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL, DON’T GO Lucas Hnath, a disconcertingly popular scribe, writes playful, pseudo-historical, and narrative-heavy dramas crammed with deliberately stilted, primer-prose language. Composed of simple sentences, Hnath’s almost childlike dialogue teems with shock-effect revelations and marinates in methodical sentimentality. He’s “repurposed” Walt Disney, Isaac Newton and Anna Nichole Smith, trivializing them for our…

NOT IN MY DOWNTOWN Mosque Alert, an explosive world premiere, is seen’”and felt’”from all sides. Jamil Khoury’s culture-clashing creation depicts a suburban showdown, a battle over whether to replace a beloved old library with a state-of-the-art (Islamic) community center and mosque. The locale for Silk Road Rising’s invaluable offering is the huge village of Naperville,…

DISRUPTION 1633 It’s intriguing but frustrating that Bertolt Brecht refuses to dramatize the most potentially powerful moment in The Life of Galileo. (It’s like presenting Romeo and Juliet without a love scene.) That’s the setup and depiction of the Italian physicist/astronomer’s most infamous defeat’”when, in 1633, under threat of torture from the Inquisition, the great…

BOYS WILL BE PIGS Stop the presses for a late-breaking alert: Men can be crude, drunk, womanizing wretches. This astonishing revelation fuels the bottom-feeding 75 minutes of Caroline M. McGraw’s utterly unedifying exposé. The Bachelors, a Midwest-premiere black comedy from Cole Theatre at the Greenhouse Theater Center, would only be news on Uranus. Erica Weiss’s…

BEATEN UP FOR COMING OUT Awesomely authentic, Chelsea M. Warren’s setting for after all the terrible things i do isn’t just a character in itself’”it’s a cast. This designer has perfectly constructed the cluttered interior of an independent bookstore in a small Midwestern town. Comfortable chairs are set out for browsing. There’s a green banker’s…

MISS MATCH MISMATCH Though it’s usually the other way around, sometimes musicals actually improve on the sources that inspire them. Arguably, West Side Story is stronger stuff than Romeo and Juliet, She Loves Me a warmer show than Parfumerie, The Boys from Syracuse a fresher take on folly than A Comedy of Errors, and, most…

THE WIZARD OF NOTES For half a century Harold Arlen did to notes what Monet made with colors: He found ways to make them make us very happy, equally sad, and never bored. A warm new offering from City Lit Theater, I’ve Got the World on a String:  Harold Arlen’s Songs of Love and Loss is,…

LORCA’S RUNAWAY BRIDE Elemental, darkly poetic, driven by death, Federico Garcia Lorca’s domestic tragedy Blood Wedding is the 1932 installment of his peasant-primitive “Rural Trilogy.” (The others are Yerma,  about a woman’s desperation to be fecund, and The House of Bernarda Alba,  a claustrophobic saga of sexual repression.) An open homosexual later murdered by Franco’s goons, Lorca…

TAKE-OUT THEATER “This is not how I thought my future would be.” Bittersweet, broken-spirited, resigned to mediocrity, that lament fits all the characters in David Jacobi’s inexplicably named Mai Dang Lao, a world premiere from Sideshow Theatre Company. What Steppenwolf Theatre’s The Flick did for low-wage popcorn sweepers at a cineplex, this much shorter (85…

A TOO-CASUAL CRUELTY Macbeth, Claudius, Goneril, and Iago were monsters–horrible but not actual. Richard III, however, is Shakespeare’s vilest historical villain. In his short, ugly reign the last of the Plantagenets bathed in blood, offing all obstacles to the throne, including his two young cousins slaughtered in the Tower. He died in battle in 1485,…

SHAW FRACTURES A FAMILY In 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote You Never Can Tell (the title suggests a plot packed with surprise), his answer to the recently successful The Importance of Being Earnest. He’d beat Oscar Wilde at his own playful plotting and acerbic wit. Well, we know how well that went, considering how often…

NEW ON NEW The debut of a quartet of new dance pieces was not without some unanticipated excitement. A patron managed to sneak two non-service dogs into the Museum of Contemporary Art’s theater; one growled his approval–before the work was over. The video promoting the dance pieces accidentally came on five times–but the young dancers…

THE PRICE OF POPULARITY Westerberg High is pretty low. This Reagan-era preparatory school in Sherwood, Ohio is a cesspool of snobbish belittlement. The Buckeye hellhole includes a witches’ trio of mean girls named Heather (Duke, Chandler and McNamara) and Ram and Kurt, disposably dumb jocks swimming at the bottom of the gene pool. Then there…

BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE Grim gray barracks, fortress walls topped with razor wire, smart salutes from sentry towers, cut-away trailers deployed as offices and housing, fluorescent lights draining the colors from mess camps, cold apartment facades–all plunged in a techno-industrial rock mix. That’s the button-down, by-the-numbers, and very militarized backdrop for this authoritarian…